That Other Guys’ Blog

24. 07.

Just a quick little funny - google “recursion” without the quotes and see if you can find the Easter Egg. =)

21. 06.

Social media sites and tools - most especially Twitter and YouTube have brought to the world and to the Iranian people the ability to share directly what the ruling powers of the nation most fear: the truth of the brutality of the regime and the illegitimate election results.

I’m no expert on Iranian or Middle Eastern affairs. I have no claim to expertise on the history of Iran or of the Iranian Revolution of 30 years ago. What I do have, however, is Twitter and YouTube and thankfully so do many of those risking their lives on the streets of Tehran in support of an end to the current regime.

The Iranian regime can cut television, own the radio waves and run the printing presses. This revolution - and others like it (Moldova just two months ago) - will be tweeted. I find this deeply hopeful.

I read a very interesting editorial by Thomas Friedman at the NY Times wherein he describes how Mr. Moussavi, a candidate approved to run by the regime, became the symbol for change in Iran even though he likely would espouse (as correctly pointed out by the White House) policies that are not much different from those of Ahmadineja.  I highly recommend it.

There are an increasing number of videos being made available on YouTube and elsewhere that show the chaos, bravery and tragedy in the streets of Iran. Mashable has a worthwhile collection. The video of the young woman shot  is deeply frightening and disturbing. It is the image of her last moments of life that is likely to fuel a continuation of the outrage on the streets.

I expect the right wing would have a talk-radio field day if Obama said it (and he didn’t) so I will instead: “Today we are all Iranians”.

Rest her soul.

12. 06.

I just today ran across this post on the Yahoo Developer Network and wanted to give this high marks. Combined with the YSlow Firebug extension for Firefox there is enormous opportunity to enhance the speed or perceived speed of wesbites. I ran tests on the Lebanon Opera House using a modified subselection of test criteria (skipping Content Delivery Network) and was pleased to discover that for the most part I was already ahead of the curve.

By doing a bit of image optimization and adding expires headers to non-image content (external javascript and css files) I expect to score an A.

What best practices do you use? What methodologies do you employ to ensure these practices make it through as part of your development cycle? What other tools do you use?

8. 04.

This is (so far) one of my favorite Daily Show clips. Enjoy!

31. 03.

There are lots of places to find old newspaper clippings that are humorous. I ran across a few gems today I wanted to share:

Ah, but if he’s done this once before hasn’t he done it an infinite number of times?

Now why can’t my kids’ school be on THIS lunch program? I’m pretty sure it would stop the complaining here at home.

29. 03.

Props going out this week:

Huge props to the over 10,000 people who have joined my facebook group Vermonters calling on Jim Douglas not to veto same sex marriage - I had not expected so many folks to sign up for this and am just blown away by the HUGE support from around the world in favor of same sex marriage - in favor of human and civil rights for ALL people.

Kudos to the fine folks at WolfromAlpha - eager to see what they come up with and curious to the response it will get. Even if the answers the serach engine provides are great I do wonder if people will trust it. Nonetheless, worthy of some props for getting the attention of Google which has now expanded their semantic search results at the bottom of every page. Are they worried?

Props going out to the people of Fargo, North Dakota and surrounding areas. The Red River threatened to massively flood the area, but the community got together in a BIG way to do all they could to prevent it. You all make us proud to be Americans. Here is a great collection of images showing the nature of these people - amazing.

Finally, props out to Tesla Motors for the Model S all electric sedan. Mass production won’t happen until sometime in 2010 (about the sme time Chevy and Nissan expect to roll out their entries), but it just goes to show that we are FINALLY on our way to a post-gasoline commuter society.

25. 03.

Recently I moved all my sites over to a Windows dedicated server. They had previously been on two different machines - one Windows and One Linux.

I discovered today that scripts that used the form enctype=”multipart/form-data” to upload images to the server no longer worked while running PHP under IIS (as an ISAPI).

Hopefully my friend Google will have brought you here for a possible answer to your problem:

For reason unknown to me your code MUST use the $_FILES method of accessing the file rather than the named form.

The following method will work for PHP on Windows:

<?php
if ( !empty($_FILES['file']['tmp_name']) ) {
move_uploaded_file($_FILES['file']['tmp_name'], ‘./’ . $_FILES['file']['name']);
header(’Location: http://www.mywebsite.com/dump/’);
exit;
}
?>

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd”>
<html>
<head>
<title>Dump Upload</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Upload a File</h1>
<form action=”upload.php” enctype=”multipart/form-data” method=”post”>
<input type=”hidden” name=”MAX_FILE_SIZE” value=”1000000000″ />
Select the File:<br /><input type=”file” name=”file” /><br />
<input type=”submit” value=”Upload” />
</form>
</body>

Thanks to the folks at Stack Overflow for the code

Do check your file system permissions as well, but referencing $file_name does not seem to work for PHP on Windows.

22. 03.

I recently made mention on my Facebook Profile that I intend to start a kitchen podcast. This will be to rework an existing domain I have: www.kitchenmatters.com. I wanted to quickly update as to the progress on this. We’ve recorded the first episode and need to patch together the pieces and otherwise edit it. I’d love to hear about suggested software for video editing.  If you have any ideas on what would be best please comment and share with me.

Adobe Premier is at the forefront of my considerations.

20. 03.

This is just too cool …

The video is from National Geographic. A good article on the fish can be found a FT.

I just wonder ifwhen order up one of these $29,000 bad boys if it comes with chips or not.