I spent some time reminiscing after hearing Mr. Miyagi passed away last week. Looks like I wasn’t the only one.
Sports Guy on the Karate Kid Trilogy
As for that Joe Esposito song, “You’re the Best Around,” I have an admission to make. It’s in my iPod.
November 29th, 2005
This isn’t even the first email I’ve gotten about bats from UT. Crazy ass Austin bats.
If you touched a box with a bat inside, or a bat near the service drive/walkway that runs between Painter (PAI) and Welch (WEL) on Monday, November 21, 2005, Environmental Health & Safety, Animal Make Safe needs to talk to you. Please call Environmental Health & Safety, Animal Make Safe at 471-5776. Thank You.
Carin Peterson
Safety Specialist
University of Texas at Austin
Environmental Health & Safety
512.471.5776 office / 512.471.3511 main
cpeterson@austin.utexas.edu
November 28th, 2005
Stores are out of the new XBox, on purpose, thanks to you. How do you reward the throngs of people that still want your product and are willing to shell out full price?
That’s right, you let the market deal with it!
Kind of sucks to see Microsoft go that route. I understand the whole publicity angle, but even Apple will give you a lead time when you buy the latest iPod. There’s a difference between “sold out” and “ships in 6 weeks.” Is the free pub really worth putting your early adopters through the ringer?
Then there’s the matter of the actual sellers. To me there’s a tough of scumbaggery in flipping, whether it’s $700 Longhorn football tickets, $1200 World Series tickets, or a freaking $786 XBox. Buying something in short supply just to take money from someone with an emotional attachment to it? Sounds like you’ve got to have your scruples in check.
November 23rd, 2005
So my friend Charles Ferraro from gat5 studios is being showcased on the East Austin Studio Tour this Saturday and Sunday, 11/19-11/20. The website has all the details, except for this nugget: FREE TITO’S. Booyakasha! So check it out and enlighten yourself.
Incidentally, Charles is a former manager at Antone’s, who left around the same time as the Direct Events purge of 2002. He was on my mind when I learned Clifford Antone is back at the club.
November 17th, 2005
Sometimes, I come across naming conventions in software that are just too good to be true.
November 17th, 2005
UPDATE [5/13/06]: a new version of this plugin supports Wordpress 2.
Check it out it here.
As part of a still-underground project of mine, I am putting together a site using Wordpress 1.5. Something struck me pretty quickly though: there is no way for a user to upload a photo and paste it into a new or current post, not all in the same step.
Curent steps?
Barf.
Problem #1: that code may not be in the in the clipboard by the time you click through.
Problem #2: if you chose to create a thumbnail? Wordpress won’t say where it is, or what it named it.
Problem #3: no preview.
I like Wordpress exactly because it’s modular enough to add functionality with a plugin. Seems like this is the perfect opportunity for one, so I set about creating a plugin to solve all three problems.
First step was to create the page to handle it. That didn’t turn out to be a problem, as I copied and hacked the original upload page.
My other problem was addding a button to the post screen for uploads. Googling around, I found a lot of the work had been done on this. Awesome.
Long story short, here it is. Download at your own risk.
Post, Upload, and Paste Plugin for Wordpress 1.5
INSTRUCTIONS:
/wp-content/plugins directory.pup folder contents (upload_popup.php to the /wp-admin directory.Big thanks to the Tech Wench for solving half my problem (how to add the button to the post screen). The only downside is that the button there only works on IE and Firefox. (Ironic, since I’m a Mac junkie.) If someone’s got a better solution out there feel free to let me know here (comments below), via email (rem at alum daught mit daught edu), or steal my code and hack away. Whichever.
12 comments November 15th, 2005
I came across an excellent piece on product management today. The Haas School invited a few distinguished product managers to deliver a presentation on the PM space. One of them comes from Ken Norton, who’s posted the presentation on his website.
Product management has been a curiosity of mine, so much so that it’s one of the reasons I enrolled at McCombs. I always admired the skills needed to build a great product, despite not having much authority or oversight.
To date, I’ve learned quite a bit about project management in my Operations course (thanks to Goldratt’s Critical Chain). Of course, there’s a big difference between project and product management. I could anticipate the subject coming up when my marketing course kicks in next semester. Still, it’s cool to see similarities cropping up between the two. Check out Ken’s PDF presentation…there’s an equation that he uses to estimate time. His breakdown assumes a 1/6 chance of a project not being delivered on time. Not coincidentally, that’s one standard deviation from the normal distribution curve. That’s pure Goldratt.
November 12th, 2005
Skip the article and click here for the Austin Chronicle feeds.
I’ve taken an active interest in RSS. I’ve used it to revamp my (other) home page from a 3-link dud into a dynamic portal of my online world. I use an RSS client on my Mac to follow dozens of site feeds (Bill Simmons articles, Astros.com news, the usual blogs, etc). It’s been an invaluable way to follow my interests or publish information online, since it’s less time spent reloading bookmarks or updating HTML. RSS does the work for me.
I wish every content-driven site on the Internet had an RSS feed. That’s starting to be the case, but not yet. Two of my favorite sites, for example, do not use RSS to publish their content: the Austin Chronicle and Orange Whoopass (an Astros fan site). Within each site, there are particular sections I check daily.
Hooey to that. I want RSS feeds for them dammit.
After spending some time online searching out tutorials on how I’d go about doing this, eventually I came across a concept called screen scraping. Seems pretty simple, so I spent a little bit of time trying to put feeds together for each of the aforementioned sections.
Lo and behold, it worked! Here they are in their infantile glory…for music and Astros lovers alike.
Austin Chronicle
Orange Whoopass
(all feeds are in RSS 2.0 format)
I call it an experiment because I really don’t know what’s going to happen. Scraping these sites from my own website, then listing it with FeedBurner. I don’t know if or how Feedburner handles caching. I don’t know if these sites will see a traffic spike, or even if my own site’s bandwidth will go belly up. I didn’t really think that far ahead to be honest. I really just wanted to find out what would happen.
But we shall see.
[UPDATE] Please leave comments below if you have problems with the feed. Thanks.
2 comments November 11th, 2005
I had a little bit of free time (a rarity!), so I decided to use it to spruce up my default website.
Quick history: I own 3 websites. One is our main domain, which hosts our email and some online photo galleries, while the other two host our respective blogs. My plan was to use our main account (i.e., mirandafamily.org) to link to all three. For many months, if you typed
www.mirandafamily.org
in your browser, you got a very boring page with 3 links: one to each of the blogs, and one to the family photos. Bleh.
Being a software developer, I knew I could do much better, but kept putting it off until I knew what I wanted. Yesterday, I finally got a few ideas in my head, and in a span of an hour or so I whipped up the brand new, data-driven landing page on mirandafamily.org. Check it out.
What’s nice with the new page is that the content stays relatively fresh. If we make changes on any one of the 3 sites, the main page there is automatically updated. It was designed with some minimalism in mind, since all of the contect is really located elsewhere. All I really wanted was a page that points the user in the right direction, then gets the hell out of the way.
Ironically, I had considered some really large content management systems to do the job, but in doing this project I realized I only needed a small subset of what they delivered. So it was nice to be able to identify the needs and deliver a solution that didn’t constitute overkill. Since I expect to be delivering software projects as a career in the near future, it’s great to be able to practice like this.
November 9th, 2005
If Nebraska was a dog, my father-in-law would shoot it.
Kansas Ends 36-Game Skid Against Nebraska
November 5th, 2005
