Surf 11 » Archives for July, 2005

If you want to your grep results to only show lines not matching the pattern use the -v switch. You can also use --invert-match

fgrep -v 127.0.0.1 file.log

The above prints lines from file.log that do not contain 127.0.0.1

Attorney Burt Krages, and author of the Legal Handbook for Photographers, has a PDF on his site outlining the rights of a photographer in the US. Some of these include:

• You can take a picture of whatever you want when your in a public place. There are a few exceptions, depending on what your taking a picture of (like a nuclear facility)
• If your on private property the owner can ask you not to take photos.
• Private parties have no right to confiscate your film or memory card, without a court order. Cops, on the other hand, can in some cases.

If you ever get harassed by someone when your taking photos in public, you can print out this flyer, and show them your rights as a photographer.

If your in the UK, there is a guide for you here.

I'm not an attorney, so you might want to verify my interpretation with your attorney, or read Burts interpretation of the Law.

Rasmus has posted a 30 second no fuss AJAX tutorial.

I find a lot of this AJAX stuff a bit of a hype. Lots of people have been using similar things long before it became "AJAX". And it really isn't as complicated as a lot of people make it out to be. Here is a simple example from one of my apps...

David Sifry has posted some things about how the deal with the growth they are going through. They have over 200 servers now, and are indexing blog posts very fast, within a few minutes at a rate of nearly one million new posts a day.

Chris J Davis has a good tutorial on setting up subversion (svn) on Mac OS X.

The folks at google have created a new distributed programming language called Sawzall for interpreting super large amounts of data in parallel.

Although it has been deployed only for about 18 months, Sawzall has become one of the most widely used programming languages at Google.

Via Geeking with Greg Linden

To-Done lists some public speaking tips:

• prepare mentally
• talk to people in the crowd
• speak slowly
• think before you speak.
• get a good nights sleep
• talk with other speakers
• keep slides concise
• tell stories
• use pictures

Scoble on what it takes to get your product noticed:

Getting on an A-list blogger might have been good enough two years ago to generate some buzz. ... You gotta get 10 bloggers to talk about you now to get noticed. In a year it might be 20 or even 50.

D'Andrew Thompson has outlined the steps required to do ruby on rails development with Eclipse.

Mike sent me a link to some backcountry skiing and snowboarding in New York, and New Hampshire.

Here are 36 tips for speeding up your Mac. For Mac OS X 10.2 and up.

According to this article on Active.com sports drinks hydrate you better than water, for three reasons:

1. Fluids are absorbed into the bloodstream faster when their composition closely matches that of body fluids such as blood. Sports drinks do this.
2. Sports drinks contain sodium, and other nutritents which help your body regulate fluid balance.
3. The sodium in the sports drinks simulates thirst, which makes it easier to drink more of it, than water.

Basically the sodium does a lot, and they recommend sports drinks with high amounts of sodium (at least 15 mg of sodium per ounce).

The article was written by the author of The Cutting-Edge Runner : How to Use the Latest Science and Technology to Run Longer, Stronger, and Faster.

There is a story on wired about how google started, when Larry met Sergey.

"We both found each other obnoxious,"

Via Oloop

Squidfingers has some nice patterns, including the one currently used as the background on this site.

Here is a list of resources, links, and tips for writing case studies. Also from Thinking and Making.

Thinking and Making have posted some best practices for building rich internet applications (RIA's) with JavaScript (aka AJAX).

While the excitement has fueled inspired innovations, the race has left behind several emerging best practices for using javascript.

Via: newsight

ToDone has posted some tips for getting the most out of blog reading.

Adam Howitt has created a slick running distance finder using AJAX, and the Google Maps API. Adam actually created this a while ago, but updated it to use google maps.

Seth Goldstein on the business of attention.

Forbes Magazine has released a list of the best blogs on the web, in their best of the web guide. Topics include art, automibiles, blog tools, careers, cities, economics, health, fitness, literature, marketing, media, medical, music, politics, shopping, small business, sports, technology, video, and video games.

Anil Dash has a piece called how do we judge our tools. He makes a good observation that a lot of sites are getting buzz these days simply because they are using the latest buzz word. The usefulness, or utility of the web app should be what we judge.

A lot of the links to the service say things like "full of AJAXy goodness!" or "guess how small the dev team was?" or "it's Ruby on Rails!". People, this is a tool for helping your business make more money. The criteria for success include things like "It made my client pay faster.", "It reminded me to collect from someone that hadn't paid." or "It reduced overhead in creating an invoice.". I'm disheartened that so many people, especially those in the design community who are (ideally) focused on creating a good experience for users, don't judge an application by the goals it's supposed to accomplish.

Here's a handy page called I like your colors, enter a URL, and it will extract color information. Probably more useful if it had a bookmarklet.

You can find a good list of menubar items for OSX on that page.

Here is an article on how to improve your boot or startup time in linux. He uses Fedora, and boots his Athlon63 3000+, with 1GB of RAM in around 25 seconds.

Here is a good tutorial to point to beginners learning unix. Starts off talking about file systems, and ends with compiling software.

The ruby on rails book, Agile Web Development with Rails is doing pretty well on amazon. According to the ror web log it is in the top 2000-3000 range in its category.

The O'Reilly radar has a roundup of the newest implementations of the google maps api. They include, space shuttle mapping, hotel mapping, servers, weather, and more.

Tim Yang shows how you can fake a pagerank of 10. The trick doesn't have any positive effect on your actual search engine rankings, just gives the appearance of a 10 to people using Google Toolbar, or PageRank Status firefox extension.

The folks at Surfin' Safari have a two part primer on hashtables. Part 1, Part 2

Jakob Nielsen's latest article points out some design, and usability problems in Amazon's web site design, and recommends that people no longer use amazon as a role model for ecommerce design.

Joel Spolsky on software companies "most people are wrong in thinking you need an idea to make a successful software company." Joel says that these four things are the key to a successful software company:

1. Best Working Conditions
2. Best Programmers
3. Best Software
4. Profit!

Digital Web has a good article called 11 ways to improve landing pages.

Jason has a good post about building software for tiny business (1-10 people, small business software is usually for 10-100 people).

When you think small business, think 1-10 people not 50-100. There?s an endless supply of 1-10 person companies. Who cares about the Fortune 500? It?s time to care about the Fortune 5,000,000.

Welcome to the Surf 11 blog. It will be the link blog of Pete Freitag, and possibly some other people as well.

This blog will provide you with the daily surf, basically some cool links.