68 Classifieds v4.1 beta 2 is now released and available for download. It was actually released yesterday. From the first beta to this a lot of small little changes was added. Most notable is the module system is now totally reworked and a lot of work went into the new system. I also left the ability for modules to be backwards compatible so the same module that works with v4.1 can also work with v4.0. The bad news is all modules released will have to be updated or they will not work with v4.1.
I have spent the last week rebuilding all the modules I have personally developed and released and will be posting them for download when beta 3 is released. In the meantime if you are a 68 Classifieds customer please download the beta and give it a try. The more testers the better.
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Another effective technique is to explain your code to someone else. This will often cause you to explain the bug to yourself. Sometimes it takes no more than a few sentences, followed by an embarrassed “Never mind, I see what’s wrong. Sorry to bother you.” This works remarkably well; you can even use non-programmers as listeners. One university computer center kept a teddy bear near the help desk. Students with mysterious bugs were required to explain them to the bear before they could speak to a human counselor.
— Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike
This is something I do a lot and never really realized it.
I found this interesting blog post today: Whatever you write today will become legacy
That post is so true and really hits home. This past week we upgraded our server and had some sites that was running a php script I developed back in 2002. Boy was it a headache to get it back up and running to today’s standards. The whole time I was saying to myself WTF who in their right mind would have created this. 
It just goes to show you how code you develop today royally sucks in a few years.
On Monday I found out 1Password included a new iPhone app to sync the passwords with your iPhone and I decided this would be a cool app for my phone. It is something I use constantly now on my mac.
In order to use the iPhone app I had to upgrade 1Password to a beta release which is not a big deal and something I do regularly. However this upgrade had a bug in it and caused all my passwords to disappear. Lets just say I was about to have a major freak out moment. So I contacted them and within the hour they responded with how to fix it. That is fantastic work for a beta version of a product.
Within this time I had one of those holy crap moments and realized just how much I use that little app. I want to send my thanks to the guys over at 1password for getting me up and running again so quick.
So how about you? Do you have any apps that you always use that you can’t live without?