Lastnight, Apple decided to activate the “Find My iPhone” feature that was announced yesterday at Apples WWDC keynote speech. The “Find My iPhone” feature is a iPhone locate service that works through Mobile Me & GPS.

Say I misplace my iPhone, and someone who works at the establishment I left it at finds it, well most people would just look in the phone book and try to call someone like Home, Mom or Dad, well I lock my iPhone so they can’t do that.

This is where the new “Find My iPhone” feature comes in handy. I login to Mobile Me, and locate my iPhone on a Google Map. I have left my iPhone inside Lenox Mall in Atlanta, Georgia. Well it is inside  a steal building so it can’t get a exact location, just with in a hundred feet. Well that doesn’t help much because I visited like 20 stores while I was there.

Some of you might not know this about me, but I am a successful web developer outside of this blog. I currently host and run 9 sites on my Media Temple (dv) server. One of my biggest concerns was how I can keep safe, up-to-date, and secure backups of my website files outside of my home. After turning to my good friend Google, I came across a couple of great articles from two local Atlanta bloggers about this topic. My friend Paul Stamatiou and Christina Warren both have written in depth articles on how they used Amazon S3 to securely backup their websites daily, which is where I learned to do the following.

While Paul and Christina’s guides are great, I wanted to further explore S3sync and give my experience using S3sync to backup my Media Temple (dv) server to Amazon S3. The steps I am going to walk you through are based on S3sync, a open source Ruby application, that will allow you to transfer files to Amazon S3 using secure SSL encryption. Let me start by warning you, that you need to know a bit about the UNIX commands. You will need a application like Terminal for OS X, Linux, or PuTTy for Windows to SSH into your web server. If you don’t know what SSH is, then this tutorial might not be for you. I will be using Terminal which is built into Apple OS X.

**It is very important that you use absolute paths through out this tutorial. If you are not sure what your absolute path is, enter “pwd” in the terminal window after you have logged into you server. For this tutorial, I am going to work directly from the root level.**

A couple of months ago, I was reading about Amazon S3 a developer geared online storage solution at Paul Stamatiou’s blog. Amazon S3 is a very cheap internet based storage facility that can be used in a wide variety of ways. While I have not tapped into all that the S3 service has to offer, I wanted to spread the word a bit on how I use it as an online backup/storage service.

Why I Choose Amazon S3

Online backup services are really starting to become a big business opportunity, there are a wide range of online backup services that charge flat monthly fee’s, and provide both Windows and Mac support. I did a good bit of research on these other companies, and finally decided to sign up for a service called Mozy. This is a online backup service that provides a very user-friendly cross platform application to allow people to control their auto backups.

While Mozy is a nice, and easy to use, I found it to not be very useful. Mozy only allows you to store files that currently exist on your computer. This means that if you want to backup a large archive of pictures to your Mozy account, you can do this. The problem is though, you have to still keep these file on your computer locally. If you delete the files from your computer it will be deleted from the Mozy server. While this is fine for some stuff like my websites development directory, I also want the option to store files on the server and remove them from my hard drive.

Google has added a new Gmail labs component that allows users to “Undo Send” an email for a few seconds after the message sends.

Once the feature is activated, a new “Undo” link will appear next to every sent email confirmation notice. When clicked, the “Undo” will take you back to the composing window confirm the retrieval of the email and allow you to edit it further.

However, “Undo Send” doesn’t really recall a message that has been already sent. The feature only holds emails in a queue for five seconds, giving you time for second thoughts. I personally wish it was available to more like 1 minute after you click send.

To enable it, log in to your Google Gmail account. At the very top of your Gmail Inbox, you will see a green chemical flask (). This will bring up the Google Gmail Labs experimental area. About 3 quarters of the way down the page you will “Undo Send.”

I am trying to refine my development skills by increasing cross-browser compatibility and W3C standard compliance in my code. While this is possible to do using free resources on the internet, I personally find it easier and quicker to refer back to an actual book. In light of this, I am going to do a whole series of web development book reviews over the course of the next few months.

I want to start with Sitepoint’s The Ultimate CSS Reference. Sitepoint is a great resource for all kinds of information, they have a large amount of online web development content, but I still prefer to use physical books. This book is hardcover, which is rare to see in a tech book. I like the hard cover, because it doesn’t show wear and tear as easy as softcover books. For those that don’t know, CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, which is a web based language that allows you to attach style to other web languages. I currently code CSS at a 2.1 level which is the version of CSS that is most widely accepted by web browsers today.

Yesterday, March 17th, Apple premiered the iPhone 3.0 OS software. They have really stepped it up in this release, with over 100 new features for consumers. While no exact release date is set, Apple noted that it will be released sometime this summer. A beta version is available to developers immediately.

Cut, Copy, and Paste

I am very excited about this, many times I have needed to cut, copy, and paste content. This is something that was really hurting the reputation of the iPhone. It works like the magnifying glass, you double tap on a word, then a menu pops up asking you if you want to select, or unselect, from there, you can stretch the highlighted area to a larger selection, and cut, copy, and paste.

For a couple of weeks now I have been browsing the internet looking for some good examples of beautiful yet simple professional web designs. My hope is that some of these designs will help to inspire you when you design your next site. I will try to give my 2 cents on some of these designs as I go.

31Three

I love how 31Three uses the image of a butterfly to add some complexity to its simple design. The image really makes the design pop.

http://31three.com/

A local radio station here in Atlanta, played the “HD” version of the Obama speech to congress this morning. If you didn’t here this version, your TV is not ready for the digital transition.

For more great stuff like this, browse over to http://www.Q100Atlanta.com/

Again, I did not make this, I just wanted to repost it because it is F**king awesome! Credit goes to The Bert Show of Q100 on 99.7 FM here in Atlanta. You can listen to them live online for 5 to 10am M-F! They are awesome!

SKIP TO 1:20!

Yes, it is true proper GPS navigation is available for the iPhone. xRoad’s G-Map is a navigation application for the iPhone that suffered from a very crappy v1.0 which received bad reviews and caused the application to slip away from the spotlight. Well, they have updated to 1.2 and it is awesome. I have been waiting for a solid GPS navigation application for my iPhone for sometime, and was starting to get worried that it might never come. As with every application, there are positives and negatives. I am going to address these after the jump.

I recently switched over from Panic’s Coda to TextMate as my main development/script editing tool and I am very happy I did. Don’t get me wrong, Coda is Great, but TextMate is better! On the surface TextMate seems like a very basic text editor, but don’t let the UI fool you, this application is loaded with a tone of advanced and very helpful features.

It wasn’t until I purchased TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac, a very thorough guide to TextMate. This guide runs about $20.00, but is more than worth it. The keyboard shortcuts this book introduced me to covered the cost of books alone. I have saved so much time using the skills I learned in this book.