I was having a conversation with a friend about what is post-worthy. Some people post everything that happens to them, or news they hear, or about their company and how cool it is.

So, what is post worthy?

I think one should post on things that are interesting to them, with the intent that others might be interested and can find the information if they want via a search engine. If you post enough that is interesting, maybe they'll even sign-up for your RSS feed.

So, I suppose this means I should post more since the more I post, the more likely I am to be found for any topic that I'm interested in. We'll see if that ever happens.

I recently went back from dual-booting linux and windows 7. When I installed Ubuntu I had it take over the Master Boot Record (MBR). To remove Ubuntu from the drive requires that the MBR gets replaced with the Windows 7 MBR. There are various ideas on how to do this online, but the way that worked for me was to boot off the Windows 7 DVD, go to recovery tools and command line. Then type bootsect /nt60 c: /mbr. I believe this is all I needed. I also did run bootsect /nt60 /ALL but I don't think this really did much since none of those drives were the bootable drives.

I'm working on a project that allows you to type in a keyword. If the search is case-insensitive, then the display should, IMO, show the next page with your search text in lower-case. This shows the user that the case-sensitivity doesn't matter. If you want to allow quotes to search for a specific string and use case-sensitivity, then keep the case as typed. Just my $0.02.

Looks like I had a bug that has made all messages sent through my contact form to fail. If you have sent a message in the past I wasn't meaning to ignore you. Please send again if it's important.

It seems that using ruby's mechanize library usually works best with other sites when you submit a form with the button included - most sites must look for the button's name as one of the POST parameters. Thanks to that bug for my losing a couple hours sleep. I'll likely not forget this in the future.

Let's go back to 1999. Ok, maybe just last week. You receive a forward from your Aunt Nellie about the latest Internet hoax or how Neiman Marcus has some great cookie recipe that you must have. You think to yourself, yeah, I guess should be "in the know" about that, but I really don't care. If I did, I would have already read up on it or I'll do a search when I have the urge.

Or imagine a blog where all that is posted are messages like "You gotta see this -link-", or "Look what some funny guy said on the Internet...". Yeah, you might have even posted something like that once - I know I have.

Enter scene, re-Tweet. "Oh, you just have to know about this thing that I saw someone say in 5 words or less". You just won't be the same without this knowledge that I'm imparting to you. And, what gets more FAIL about RT is that you might have already been following the user that is re-tweeted. Yeah - so now, you get to read the information twice or more and not come to any better understanding.

So, when you think about re-tweeting that article, ask yourself: Why would I send this on? How is this not repeating information? How will this person's life be different because they read this? If you didn't write it, don't re-tweet it. Find some way to augment what was originally said, or get out of the game.

Don't re-tweet this.

I got bored while I was paying bills so I decided that I wanted to automate a bill that doesn't have a very good automatic payment method. I decided to use Ruby and Mechanize to perform the task. Since I don't want the script just hanging around with my customer or my credit card information, I decided to pass those values into the script from the command line. To avoid leaving my password and credit card number in the history file, I learned about HISTIGNORE. This little gem is pretty easy to use but it basically ignores any line that matches the commands separated by a colon.

A default that I found on Using Bash's History Effectively was to use something like:

export HISTIGNORE="&:ls:[bf]g:exit"
      

He also suggested to add [ \t]* to allow for keeping any command starting with a space or tab out of the history. I'll definitely be using this and now I just have to remember to use a space.

This question is a slightly updated version of "Why did my computer crash?" In general people blame that question on Microsoft or the OS provider. And while there are bugs that are inherent in any application, especially an OS, the large percentage of the time, drivers are at fault that are not under the direct supervision of the OS.

So, the new update to this question is, "Why did Firefox/Safari/Chrome crash?" And, the answer could be the browser, but in my experience, more often than not it seems that plugins are to blame. Plugins like "Flash", and inline PDF readers. It seems that adding all those extras just makes the browser that much more unreliable. Maybe with the adoption of HTML 5 we'll notice crashing less as browsers implement a more streamlined browsing experience without the use of plugins.

I am thrilled that HTML 5 is being used to display youtube videos in the browser. I have noticed on my home computer that flash and shockwave have really been the cause of most of my browser's crashes. I usually know that if my browser is having problems (locking, stalling or slowness) it is because of a flash or shockwave component. I look forward to removing the single largest piece of flakiness in my browsing experience.

Just finished presenting on Web Sockets to a group of techies. We had a pretty good discussion and I think everyone went away with an understanding of web sockets.

You can check out my un-amazing powerpoint presentation or just read up on the topic. You'll either need the Chrome Dev release from the Chromium Dev Channel or you might be able to get things working with the flash web-socket-js bridge in other browsers.

I demoed an echo server that was modified from github/gimite. My modifications include opening the servers on a specified host instead of my VM's localhost. I also added two new servers called status_server.rb and date_server.rb. I think some other useful links are EM-websocket, ruby EventMachine and twitter-amqp-websocket-example. I also learned something more about how to use these at Google announces Web Sockets and jRoller.com. The definitive source of course is W3.org Web Sockets API.