September 05, 2008
Website tries getting groups organized
Anyone who's ever tried to organize a group purchase, event or boycott knows it can be like herding cats. A Chicago company is taking on that challenge with a Web-based tool for organizing the masses. LinkSeptember 04, 2008
FileMerge for Mac: Diff Tool
FileMerge is one of the old NeXT Developer applications that survived into the days of Mac OS X, and with good reason: It kicks the pants off anything else when it comes to quickly going through file changes, marking them on the scrollba, allowing you to breeze through them with parallax scrolling, and merging them with a single clickRelated
- Using FileMerge with Subversion
- Guiffy Compare
- Versions SVN Client without Merge
- Subcommander
September 03, 2008
Displaying div on top of flash object
I need to display a div that may overlap or float on top of a flash object and Im having some real problems with this. The floating div displays beneath the flash object. Its like the old problem with displaying an iframe over a select element.Related
LinkRussia On Alaskan Oil Drilling
Palin’s nomination for vice president and her desire to allow drilling in the Alaskan wilderness “reminded me of a lunch I had three and half years ago with one of the Russian trade attachés,” global trade consultant Edward Goldberg said to me. “After much wine, this gentleman told me that his country was very pleased that the Bush administration wanted to drill in the Alaskan wilderness. In his opinion, the amount of product one could actually derive from there was negligible in terms of needs. However, it signified that the Bush administration was not planning to do anything to create alternative energy, which of course would threaten the economic growth of Russia.” LinkSeptember 02, 2008
Proposed: Treat Stop Signs like Yield Signs
As a follow up to my post the other day [Why Bicyclists Hate Stop Signs], I wanted to point out that the SF Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission is currently looking at the feasibility of a “stop and roll” law for California cyclists, similar to the one in Idaho. If it eventually goes through, cyclists would be able to treat stop signs as yield signs, and red lights as stop signs.
Related
LinkWorldmapper: World Map Cartograms
Worldmapper is a collection of world maps, using equal area cartograms where territories are re-sized on each map according to a particular variable.
The process of creating an equal area cartogram is not a trivial one, and has occupied researchers for decades.
LinkBrooks: What the Palin Pick Says
My worry about Palin is that she shares McCain’s primary weakness — that she has a tendency to substitute a moral philosophy for a political philosophy.
There are some issues where the most important job is to rally the armies of decency against the armies of corruption: Confronting Putin, tackling earmarks and reforming the process of government.
But most issues are not confrontations between virtue and vice. Most problems — the ones Barack Obama is sure to focus on like health care reform and economic anxiety — are the product of complex conditions. They require trade-offs and policy expertise. They are not solvable through the mere assertion of sterling character.
LinkAugust 31, 2008
Adirondack Loj at Heart Lake
Because it provides the closest and easiest access to the highest of the High Peaks and some of the loveliest of Adirondack lakes, Heart Lake is the most heavily used trailhead in the Adirondacks. Just 2.3 miles into the interior from Adirondak Loj, connected to it by a section of the best known and most trodden of Adirondack trailsRelated
- The 46 Adirondack High Peaks (Rated)
August 30, 2008
JQuery: Superfish Dropdown Menu
Creates enhanced Suckerfish-style dropdown menus from existing pure CSS dropdown menus. Features it adds to your menus include: LinkJQuery: Mac-Style Drop Down Menu
This plugin dynamically skin default form's drop down menu, i.e.
In a general sense, the plugin serves as a foundation for further customization (new skin, animation, etc.). This is particularly useful when you want to create a drop down menu that has consistent look across different browsers.
LinkFlying with Empty Camping Fuel Containers
I have only flown twice with a stove and a fuel bottle since 11 Sep 01. Both times, I filled the Svea and the bottle with vinegar and placed a note around the stove with a rubber band stating "THIS STOVE IS FILLED WITH VINEGAR," with a similar note wrapped around the 0.3 liter Sigg fuel bottle. I then put the stove in a pot, wrapped in a plastic bag, and put it near the top of the pack with the fuel bottle nearby, with a note stating: "THE STOVE IS FILLED WITH VINEGAR" and I also include a hard copy of the Empty Packages FAA notice that is attached, with section 2, part iii highlighted. And I carry another copy of this notice on my person so I can show it to whoever might make a fuss.Related
- 8 oz Fuel bottle
- Methylated Spirits is Ethanol with a methyl alcohol additive to discourage drinking
Trulia Heat Map: Avg Home Price by Zip Code
Statistics and Maps about local housing prices LinkWorld Leaders: Ages
Here are some other interesting tidbits:- The average age of the leaders of the developed countries listed above is 56.5.
- Of these 29 leaders, nearly three quarters are younger than 60.
- A quarter are 50 or younger.
- Half are in their 50’s.
August 29, 2008
Movable Type: Adding images or files to entries and pages
Movable Type has long supported uploading images to your blog's server, automatically generating thumbnails of those images, and inserting those images into your entries. Movable Type 4 provides an updated set of tools for uploading, managing and inserting photos and other files into your entries and pages. The key difference is that you can now easily (a) manage the assets (images, files, etc.) you upload to Movable Type and (b) reuse them across your blog. LinkAugust 28, 2008
How to Convert a Word Document to HTML With Dreamweaver
Although Microsoft Word can automatically convert documents to HTML, it's not always the best way. Dreamweaver will remove unneeded tags and change Word font and size attributes to HTML codes. This tutorial uses Dreamweaver 3.0. LinkMozilla Ubiquity: Mashup Tool
You’re writing an email to invite a friend to meet at a local San Francisco restaurant that neither of you has been to. You’d like to include a map. Today, this involves the disjointed tasks of message composition on a web-mail service, mapping the address on a map site, searching for reviews on the restaurant on a search engine, and finally copying all links into the message being composed. This familiar sequence is an awful lot of clicking, typing, searching, copying, and pasting in order to do a very simple task. And you haven’t even really sent a map or useful reviews—only links to them. LinkAugust 27, 2008
Free Range Kids: Unsupervised Play
Reader, if you're much over 30, you probably remember what it used to be like for the typical American kid. Remember how there used to be this thing called "going out to play"?
For younger readers, I'll explain this archaic concept. It worked like this: The child or children in the house -- as long as they were over age 4 or so -- went to the door, opened it, and ... went outside. They braved the neighborhood pedophile just waiting to pounce, the rusty nails just waiting to be stepped on, the trees just waiting to be fallen out of, and they "played."
"Play," incidentally, is a mysterious activity children engage in when not compelled to spend every hour under adult supervision, taking soccer or piano lessons or practicing vocabulary words with computerized flashcards.
LinkAugust 26, 2008
Django Custom Management Command Extensions
This is a repository for collecting global custom management extensions for the Django Framework. LinkAugust 24, 2008
Nudge: Libertarian Paternalism
Whether it’s a restaurant laying out food or a business offering its employees a list of mutual funds in its 401(k) plan or the government presenting different Medicare options, whoever presents choices must frame them in some way. And the framing will affect the decisions. Even “small and apparently insignificant details can have major impacts on people’s behavior,” the authors write. Some ways of presenting the choices may give a gentler “nudge” than others, and we may think some settings are neutral only because we’re so used to them.
As a result, Thaler and Sunstein argue, many of the familiar arguments for why people should simply be left to make choices on their own, and especially for why government should stay strictly out of the way, have little practical force. In many important areas of choice that matter both to the individual and to the rest of us (for example, when overuse of medical care drives up our insurance premiums and our taxes), the operative question is not whether to bias people’s decisions, but in which direction.
If all this sounds paternalistic, that’s because it is. Thaler and Sunstein adopt the deliberately oxymoronic label “libertarian paternalism” to describe their general approach. It’s libertarian in that people retain the right to make their own choices: they’re free to select the savings plan with the lowest projected return if that’s what they really want. But the govern ment — or an employer, or the person in charge of laying out the food in the cafeteria — is nonetheless nudging people in the direction that somebody thinks will make them better off.
LinkAugust 23, 2008
Vi Macro Video Tutorial
How to record a vi macro and replay it.Related
LinkAugust 22, 2008
How to Launch Software: the Gmail model
The basic idea behind the Hollywood Launch is simple: you release a few hints about your product to build buzz, slowly revealing more and more until the big day, when you throw open the doors and people flood your site, sent there by all the blog coverage and email alerts.
I'll call this technique the Gmail Launch, since it's based on what Gmail did. Gmail is probably one of the biggest Web 2.0 success stories, so there's an argument in its favor right there. Here's how it works:
Have users from day one. Obviously at the very beginning it'll just be yourself and your co-workers, but as soon as you have something that you don't cringe while using, you give it to your friends and family. Keep improving it based on their feedback and once you have something that's tolerable, let them invite their friends to use it too.
LinkAugust 21, 2008
Django Audit Trail
As raised in a recent discussion on django-developers, this code is one solution for creating an audit trail for a given model. LinkConnecting PgAdmin to a Remote Database through a SSL tunnel
You can connect to a PostgreSQL database from your home machine using an SSH tunnel. Here is how it is done using Putty and pgAdmin. The first thing to do is to open an SSH tunnel using Putty:
(If you're using Mac OS X or Linux, you can just open a terminal window and run 'ssh -L 5432:web1.webfaction.com:5432 your_username@web1.webfaction.com')
LinkAugust 19, 2008
How clean is the electricity I use: By Zipcode
- Determine your power grid region based on your ZIP code and electric utility
- Compare the fuel mix and air emissions rates of the electricity in your region to the national average
- Determine the air emissions impacts of electricity use in your home or business
