Nerd Archives - Page 13 of 16 - Scrollin' On Dubs

Feb 04

Converting a linux box to windows

Nerd 2 Comments »

I know I know, “why would you want to go and do this?” Assuming you have your reasons though, it’s not as straightforward as it might seem. I don’t fully understand the details but the crux of the problem has to do with the fact that linux blows away the master boot record. There are other sites that can explain the details but this one had the winning solution which finally worked. And here is the key set of instructions:

Boot with a DOS floppy that has “debug” on it; run “debug”. At the ‘-‘ prompt, “block-fill” a 512-byte chunk of memory with zeroes:

f 9000:0 200 0

Start assembly mode with the ‘a’ command, and enter the following code:

mov dx,9000
mov es,dx
xor bx,bx
mov cx,0001
mov dx,0080
mov ax,0301
int 13
int 20

Press <Enter> to exit assembly mode, take a deep breath – and press “g” to execute, then “q” to quit “debug”. Your HD is now in a virgin state, and ready for partitioning and installation.

Kudos to this person whoever it was for figuring this out. Assembly language is no joke. We found a dos boot disk with debug.exe here. File this under "priceless gems" if you ever need to convert a linux box back to windows someday.

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Jan 19

Extract contact and event info from text blocks with Anagram

Nerd No Comments »

Anagram is a must-have commercial mini-app that runs in the systray of Windows (sorry no version exists for Mac yet). It functions at an OS level and is invoked via a keyboard shortcut you setup (I mapped mine to ctrl-cc). You highlight a block of text on a web page, pdf, word doc, whatever… invoke anagram and it intelligently parses the text to determine whether it’s a contact or an event. It will pop open your Outlook or Palm Desktop and populate a new record with all the appropriate fields filled out. I’m assuming it uses some kind of regex on the backend but it’s very intelligent. For instance, if I were to use it on this phrase:

Meet me at the park on Washington and 1st in Phoenix, AZ next Thursday at noon.

Anagram would recognize it as an event, apply whatever the date is next thursday and put “Washington and 1st” in the notes field. Likewise, if I run it on someone’s sig file:

John Doe
Blah Corporation
Assistant middle manager of nothing
1234 Main St.
Anywhere, Anytown USA
phone (555)555-5555
fax (555)455-5555
john@blahcorp.com

It will intelligently parse all that into the correct fields of a new contact record. I know, it almost passes the “indistinguishable from magic” test which is why it’s so cool. I use this app every day with Outlook and I have found it to be the “tipping point” for storing useful info that I might have otherwise just skipped out of laziness. It works with Palm Desktop, Outlook and Salesforce.com. I could see it being even more useful for salespeople that deal with many leads and appointments scoured from emails and web pages. It’s the little timesavers like this applied over many uses that simplify life and for $30 this is definitely one of them.

Dec 12

Essential Firefox Extension Roundup

Nerd 5 Comments »

The top news headline today on Wired is The Firefox Hacks You Must Have. While they have good suggestions, there are a bunch of essentials that are conspicuously absent. Rather than write up descriptions of each, I’ve screenshotted my extension manager and linked each one directly to its download file. enjoy. If there’s more essentials that are missing, please post below. *Note- you’ll have to authorize installation from this site only once.

Dec 02

Using Gmail’s contact export feature to mine correspondence for LinkedIn connections

Google, Nerd, Tutorials 1 Comment »

If you use Gmail and are on LinkedIn, here’s a neat trick you can use to “excavate” your gmail correspondence for LinkedIn connections. LinkedIn already has an Outlook toolbar that will scour your sent folder in Outlook to do this (which is great if you use outlook as your email client but unfortunately there has been no equivalent for Gmailers that only use the web interface). Well now there is.

You may not be aware that Gmail automatically records the name and email address of anyone to whom you send a message in your contacts. There’s now a feature that allows you to export these contacts in an Outlook CSV file which you can then upload to your LinkedIn account. It will then show you who of those contacts is already on LinkedIn and allow you to invite those people to your network. Here’s the exact steps to make it work:

In Gmail, click the “Contacts” folder on the left. Then click “Export” on the upper right. Choose the Outlook CSV option.
Now go to your LinkedIn account and click on the “My Contacts” tab. Choose the “Other Contacts” sub tab and then click on “upload contacts” in the upper right.
Follow the instructions to verify the contacts are correct. Now when looking at your contacts you should see something like this:
Follow that link and you should see a list of all your contacts that are currently on LinkedIn. Now you just invite them to join your network.

Depending on how you use your LinkedIn account, you may want to be more or less stringent with who you invite. I treat mine fairly sacredly and only connect with the people that I personally know well enough where I would feel comfortable vouching for their capabilities.

This method boosted my contacts ten-fold and I discovered a bunch of people that I deal with daily who are already on LinkedIn. HTH

-sean

Nov 30

Mambo presentation for students at SCC

Arizona, Nerd, Speaking 1 Comment »

Big thanks to Rob Loy for the opportunity to present to his class tonight at Scottsdale Community College on the Mambo content management system. Mambo is an opensource CMS that rides ontop of PHP and MySQL and runs cross-platform. As promised, here is the powerpoint from tonight’s talk. There were some great questions asked tonight, some to which I could not give a solid answer. I’ll try and clarifiy some things below but if you have any questions regarding the framework itself or any of the other stuff we discussed tonight, feel free to use the comments section here as a forum.

To the gentleman that asked about which to choose going forward- Mambo or the new re-branded Joomla after further reading I would say it’s a safe bet that either will be supported but that I really like what I see on the Joomla Roadmap. They claim it’s not a true development fork but rather a simple re-branding of an existing product which is true, but they’re diverging codebases from this point and that’s the definition of a development fork so, call it whatever you want. I would say Mambo has a much larger base of existing sites but it looks like the inertia of the development community is behind Joomla and all the features of the latest Mambo release should be compatible so you don’t lose anything in terms of components and template designs. I would probably start a new project on Joomla rather than Mambo at this point.

Regarding the question about the recent security exploit I mentioned, apparently the official patch took a few days before it was posted but manual fixes to the code were immediately available in the forums the same day the problem was discovered (just meant you had to edit the PHP code by hand). Someone had asked about how to stay notified of security announcements and that link is here.

Lastly, to the woman with the animal shelter site and the question about how to turn off certain navigational elements on an index of content items- I know it can be done because I’ve done it on my sites but I’m not seeing the option at the moment. I’ll post a comment when I find it- it’s buried somewhere in one of the tabbed menus on like a section or category- i don’t remember which.

Anyhow, great questions tonight and it really was a pleasure getting to speak with the students in Rob’s class. Don’t hesitate to ask questions if you have them- Mambo’s developer community is perhaps one of its strongest assets.

-sean

Oct 16

Using PhoneSpell.org to find a memorable acroymn for your phone number

Nerd, Ponderings, Psychology 2 Comments »

It’s a fact that we humans can remember a catchy phrase better than we can remember a sequence of random numbers. There is actually a magical limit that was discovered as to how many discrete pieces of information we can hold in short-term memory at any given time and it’s 7+-2. There have been tons of studies in the field of Information Processing Theory that show how we naturally use “chunking” techniques to combine bits of info so we can store more stuff in memory. The effectiveness of these mnemonic devices are the reason why companies advertise with vanity toll-free numbers like 1-800-BuyOurCrap. Lately, I’ve been tinkering with the idea for a pet project of creating a little free web app that would allow the user to enter a phone number and view the possible permutations of english words and phrases that it could spell. I started thinking through what would be involved in constructing such an application making calls to the Google API and using their dictionary but then I realized someone may have already built this app so I checked around and sure enough, PhoneSpell.org does this very thing. It also has the additional feature of supporting wildcards so you can enter a partial number and have it suggest the missing digit to spell a memorable word.

So you ask,”beyond being a nifty party trick, how does this app help me and my business?” Well, when you sign up for phone service, depending on the carrier you use you are generally presented with a bank of available numbers in your area from which to choose. The tendency is for people to pick a number that _looks_ memorable by sight having few, repetitive digits. But mnemonic studies indicate that if our goal is easy recall of our phone number by our clients, we would be wiser to use an app like PhoneSpell and pick a number that spells a catchy phrase instead. The service is freely available – give it a shot on your own number.