Surf 11 » Archives for August, 2005

I use GoDaddy for domain registration. Their system isn't elegant, but it's cheap, and provides lots of features such as DNS hosting, and now Free email hosting.

My brother just pointed out that you can get some coupon codes for GoDaddy here.

Komodo Media has the scoop on creating a 5 star rating system like Netflix, or Amazon using CSS.

Here is a list of 25 SQL optimization tips, mostly for oracle.

Google AdSense now allows publishers to tell adsense which parts of page content are more important than others by inserting HTML comments.

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
this is important
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->
this is not important
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

Via: JenSense

Found this one via Snapple real fact #462: The King Ranch in Kingsville Texas is bigger than the state of Rhode Island, and over 23 countries. The 825,000 acre ranch even has a web site, and according to it:

Based on the national average of 70 pounds of beef consumed per person per year, the 60,000 head of cattle on the King Ranch could feed a city of almost 5 million people for a year.

and

It is a shorter drive between New York and Philadelphia; or Pittsburgh and Cleveland than it is from one end of the Ranch to the other.

and

If you extended the fencing on the Ranch end-to-end, it would stretch all the way to Boston.

Looking for a place to run, try Run the Planet:

From Antarctica to Zimbabwe, Run The Planet offers 3846 descriptions of where to run and walk in 2973 cities around the world presenting running information told by the locals.

URL 123 is a url shortening service much like tinyurl.com but has some nice improvements:

• change destination of the link
• track clicks on the link
• link nicknames
• your own subdomain

Via: svn.

I just got this error message on one of my mysql databases. It sounds kind of bad, but to fix it I just ran the following SQL statement, and all was well:

REPAIR TABLE tablename

The error might look like on MyISAM tables:

ERROR 1016 (HY000): Can't open file: 'tablename.myi' (errno: 1)

Or like this on InnoDB tables:

ERROR 1016 (HY000): Can't open file: 'tablename.InnoDB' (errno: 1)

When using multi column layouts with css, its often the case that the content in one of the columns overflows into the footer. You can use this trick to avoid it.

A recent article on CNN, having the obvious title Study: Web site's appearance matters, is actually quite interesting. It points out that there are gender differences in web design taste. Although not suprising, but important to think about the study found that Men preferred pages designed by men, and women preferred pages designed by women.

Women seemed to like pages with more color in the background and typeface. Women also favored informal rather than posed pictures.
Men responded better to dark colors and straight, horizontal lines across a page.

MacTips shows you how to change the colors in Terminal on Mac OS X.

Joshua Schachter (del.icio.us), Stewart Butterfield (Flickr), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) and Clay Shirky discuss several topics important to folksonomies in the IT Conversations podcast titled How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mess.

Lots of posts going on right now about the downsides to tags, or folksonomys:

• Clay Shirky's Viewpoints are Overrated
• The Dark Side of Technorati Tags
• Why is tagging so frickin' hard?
• A VC: Why is tagging so Hard?
• Trouble with tags
• Dowdell: Hurst on Tags

Several FAQ's about venture capital.

via: bizz bang buzz

Jared Tarbell writes algorithms that generate beautiful artwork.

I offer limited edition, archival quality prints of select algorithms. Uniquely generated, as well as personal favorites and frequently requested images are printed. The prints are available for private collection. The programs used to generate the images have been opened to the public domain, some rights reserved.

Macromedia has released Studio 8, including new versions of dreamweaver, flash professional, contribute and fireworks.

You can preorder from the macromedia online store, and get a free studio 8 backpack.

The Lifehut is a new web site with the tagline When life throws you a problem the Hut has the answer. Chris J Davis says: If you are a fan of lifehacker then this will be right up your alley.

I want LifeHut to come off as a "guidebook" that may help answer some questions or lead my visitors in a direction they didn't think of taking before. Maybe the content will make sense, maybe you will think I am full of "you know what".

The frozen north has a good blog entry about NDA's or non disclosure agreements.

Do the math. If you had an idea, odds are that a sizable fraction of the people with the required expertise and who worry about similar problems have had the same idea at some point. For the vast majority, it will just be a passing thought, but a few will take the time to do their homework, and maybe even put together a business plan.

Good venture capitalists understand this, and many will refuse to sign an NDA before looking at a business plan. Few entrepreneurs understand it, and many get wrapped up in "protecting their idea" so someone else doesn't steal it.

Via Bizz Bang Buzz

Chris Anderson's most quoted figure from his long tail article on wired was that 57% of Amazon's book sales are in the Long Tail. After talkign to Jeff Bezos (Amazon Founder), he said that the figure was probably closer to the 20% industry standard, but was not sure. Anderson is now saying its probably more like 36%.

The article also has some assertations by Morris Rosenthal:

• Amazon has sold approximately 2,000,000 unique titles in the last 8 months.
• Amazon sells somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 unique titles on any give day.
• The top 30,000 titles sell over 1 copy a day.
• Around 11 copies are sold a day on titles with a sales rank of 1,000

The folks at del.icio.us are testing a new feature called LinkRolls. It can be used to easily display your links in a sidebar on your blog, or web site by embeding some javascript.

New York Magazine has published an article with new york city's best inexpensive restaurants to eat at.

Via Subzero blue Novell's SuSE linux product will become open source, and be called OpenSuse.

this seems like a great idea for companies because they get some R&D work done for free for them. But it's not easy to get a plan like this going. RedHat has been trying for over 2 years with Fedora, and it's not really going as they wish.
I think the reason why might be that open source developers actually perceive themselves as rebels against the corporate system. They wouldn't really back a project they feel is onesided and totally for the benefit of a certain company.

Use Lulu to self publish books, and calendars on the cheap. You can publish one 6x9" black and white 50 page book for $5.53! They also allow you to sell it, cafepress style.

Via SmartMobs

Here's a listing of over 100 simple and fast recipes.

Bob Artner has 5 things to keep in mind in order to write a successful business, or professional blog. They can be remembered with the acyronym TAFFY:

• Tone
• Audience
• Focus
• Freqency
• Yourself - Be it

Via Venturus

Venturus has posted some tips for building a successful (profitable, and popular) discussion forum community. Some of the tips include:

• Start Small and Focused
• You need to constantly post to your forum
• You can even post using aliases
• Recruit friends

Via WebKEW.

Need to flush the DNS cache on your Mac OS X computer? Run the following command:

sudo lookupd -flushcache

Via MacTips

More about lookupd

The lookupd daemon acts as an information broker and cache. It is called by various routines in the System framework to find information about user accounts, groups, printers, e-mail aliases and distribution lists, computer names, Internet addresses, and several other kinds of informa-information. tion.

lookupd keeps a cache of recently requested items to improve system per-performance. formance. It also implements a search strategy used to find information from the many information sources that are potentially available to a computer. These include the Domain Name System (DNS), Sun Microsystem's Network Information Services (NIS), Apple's NetInfo system, and a set of files found in the /etc directory. lookupd also has a channel to query Directory Services, allowing access to data from LDAP and other directory systems.

Digital Web Magazine has an article with some color, and web design tips tips for color blind web developers.

The blog change bot will send you an IM when a blog your subscribed to changes.

Here is a good article from eMarketer on the top annoyances reported by web users. The top annoyances include:

• Popups
• Required Login
• Requiring plugins, or other software (flash, or other plugins)
• Waiting for pages to load
• Broken Links

If you run for 20 minutes or walk for 50 minutes, you will end up burning about the same number of calories. So in other words, on average, you have to walk for 2.5 times longer than you have to run to burn the same number of calories.

Hello Dollar does the math, and you can save about $80 a month by bringing your lunch to work, which if, invested could be worth a half million by the time you retire.

To perform a grep search that ignores case, or is case insensitive, use the -i option (or --ignore-case). The grep command is case sensitive by default.

grep -i bob file.txt

FredFlare has 8 day weekly planners, the eighth day is labled someday.

Via design sponge.

J Wynia has posted his method for optimized grocery shopping.

The reason that we often have lots of food, but nothing that goes together is that most of us buy our groceries either with an arbitrary list of things we usually get or worse, just wander the store, filling the cart with things that appeal to us.

He recommends creating cards with meals, and then buying only what you need for the meals.

Tim Yang has observed that truncating your RSS feeds to increase your click through ratio probably doesn't work that well, because of ad blindness.

One of the main arguments for truncated RSS feeds is that excerpted feeds drive traffic to your blog where your ads are displayed and will increase your adclick ratio. But these visitors, according to Google Adsense, are less likely to click on the ads. In fact, they probably lower your adclick ratio by driving up your adviews and not clicking on the ads.

Version 3.4 of the icu4j internationalization library has been released.

Via Globalizing ColdFusionMX

Brandon Harper has posted a link to a handy method for displaying or dumping the contents of a java object. This does much more than a toString method call, it will loop through arrays, and print fields.

This page has a lot of good information on copyright law, specifically with regard to fair use.