I was reminded today of Office Max’s classic series of commercials set to the tune of Rubberband Man by the Spinners and starring Eddie Steeples who now stars on the television show My Name Is Earl. I absolutely loved these commercials when they came out; you can’t help but dance in your seat with that happy song and Steeples’ fantastic physical dexterity. A great advertisement is one that propagates itself. Make it funny, engaging, insightful, interesting, and people will willingly pass it along for you.
It’s a common problem with no single right answer: extract the top domain (e.g. example.com) from a given string, which may or may not be a valid URL. I had need of such functionality recently and found answers around the web lacking. So if you ever “just wanted the domain name” out of a string, give this a shot…
Any “decent” website is going to do the following:
look pleasant work in most browsers load in a timely fashion present approachable navigation layout These are all the base requirements, as far as I’m concerned. What distinguishes any site from any other is the information it provides, aka the copy (“copy” ~ “text” in the publishing world, for you non-logophiles). The words you put on every page determine who’s gonna find it, read it, share it, love it, hate it.
I’ve been keeping up with the release of presenter videos from the Future of Web Apps London 2009 event. If you never read it, or only caught my initial post, you may want to check back on it, as they’ve released 3 or 4 more presentations. Also since Twitter is sporting the fail whale again, I thought it a good time to rehash my previous complaints about the service.
I don’t watch professional sports, but I was really glad that I decided to watch NLCS game 4 last night. The Dodgers maintained a lead through the second half of the game, and got the Phillies down to their last out in the bottom of the 9th, with runners on first and second. Jimmy Rollins was the final at bat, and hadn’t been spectacular at the plate. To make matters worse, the umpire’s strike zone seemed to be a moving target, with pitchers and batters having a say on the matter throughout the night.
The Future of Web Apps conference is so right up my alley it’s almost stupid that I couldn’t attend. Web development with a focus on business: customer service, driving traffic, marketing, sales… It’s essentially the event for geeks who want to go from the basement to the corner office. Fortunately, Ryan Carson and the team at Carsonified are kind enough to freely distribute some the presentations made at this year’s London event.
As you probably heard, President Obama was awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. According to the Nobel Prize website, the award was granted to him “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” Forget the right/left politics for a second, and just look at the schedule here. Per the Nobel Peace Prize Committee’s selection process…
The Committee bases its assessment on nominations that must be postmarked **no later than 1 February each year**.
If you need to change the timezone of a Debian system, your searches will probably tell you to use the tzselect utility. That will only change the timezone for the server temporarily. Use that command and then run this:
cat /etc/timezone See how the timezone didn’t change? Left alone, the system will revert to the timezone stored in /etc/timezone at next reboot. Plus, tzselect does not offer the full compliment of possible timezones.
Say you’ve got two tables with the same structural layout but contain logically different information. A common example would be storing “deleted” records in a separate table to reduce table sizes, simplify queries, and improve performance. A record only exists in one of the two tables, either it’s deleted or it’s not. But sometimes you just need to find the information. “I don’t care where record #123 is, I just need to see it.
I wanted to post another post in the “for fun” category on Friday, but couldn’t come up with anything decent. Late-night stumbles to the rescue! Better late than never, right? Anyway, what kind of a beat would you throw down using the gun sound effects from Call of Duty 4? Serpento has one idea…
