Back online
Kevin Day, December 27th, 2008Had some extended downtime due to server troubles that I didn’t have time to fix. Now I’m running this blog on a Slicehost slice instead of my previous “self-hosted” setup. Should be much more reliable and headache-free from now on.
Safari Reading
Kevin Day, October 30th, 2008If you haven’t heard about O’Reilly’s online book program, Safari, you really should give it a try. I wrote about it once before when I was doing a lot of Javascript development. I was able to read Crockford’s great Javascript book within a day of it’s publication.
Some of the most useful reading can be found in their “short cut” articles. One article counts for half of a book on my 10-book limit bookshelf, and it’s about 20 pages long on a very specific topic. I used the short cut article on Google Analytics to find the correct way to configure my Google Analytics account (there are a lot of options I didn’t know about).
They have a decent selection of business books as well. I got to read Eric Sink’s well-known Business of Software the other day.
I swear I’m not an O’Reilly schill though. I just think it’s fun to read on-demand.
The Effect of Inspirational Quotes
Kevin Day, October 21st, 2008I’m sitting here reading my notes from a Toastmasters conference I went to on Saturday. It was a fun event with great speakers and informational sessions on how to improve my public speaking.
Tonight though, I’m less inspired by the great quotes from the speakers as I was when they delivered them. I guess that’s understandable, but it would be nice if I could also be inspired by a quote at 10:00 at night. I think I need inspiration the most when I’m not surrounded by other ambitious people and have to make the tough decisions myself.
Marketing trick from 1936: House of coats
Kevin Day, October 14th, 2008I was in the local used book store today and saw that they have old copies of National Geographic bound in yearly volumes. I picked up the 1940 edition and saw this picture they had taken from 1936 in Denmark:
The picture is of a store that the salesman covered in extra coats he had in inventory. It was such a site that everyone walking by stopped to look. The police were called to control the crowd that had gathered outside the store.
The caption reads:
By the time the harassed policemen had convinced the storekeeper that his coats must come down they had all been sold!
Sounds like the stunt paid off well.
The Power of Labeling Images
Kevin Day, October 6th, 2008In my Google Analytics account, I noticed a few visitors arriving via Google Image searches. It turns out that this picture got a lot of Google juice and is the first image search result for the term “smiley pumpkin“.
What’s surprising is that that term doesn’t appear anywhere in the page or this site except for within the image tag:
<img src=“http://codeswimming.com/images/smiley_pumpkin.jpg”
title=“Smiley Pumpkin” alt=“Smiley Pumpkin” width=“500″ height=“375″/>
This blog only has a page rank of 1, yet by including the same search term in the file name, image title, and alt text, it got to the top of Google, albeit for a low-volume search term. There also don’t seem to be any links to that image from any other site that I can find.
This only has limited SEO use, however, because that post and my blog are not in the general web search results for the same term. Google seems to keep the two sets of results completely separate.
Ohio Chamber of Commerce has a sense of humor
Kevin Day, September 19th, 2008From the business name availability guide on the Ohio Chamber of Commerce website:
Unacceptable Words
If a name contains profanity or words or phrases that are generally considered a slur against an ethnic group, religion, gender or heredity, it is considered unacceptable. Even if the word is the correct technical name for something or someone, such as the technical name for a female canine, it is not acceptable for filing.
and
Using different phonetic spellings or spelling variations does distinguish one name from another. “Quickie Mart” is distinguishable from “Kwikee Mart” or “Kwik-E-Mart.”
and
Dentists
The Ohio Dental Board requires dentists who are in the business of practicing dentistry or dental surgery to include in their business name at least the last name(s) of the owner dentist(s). This rule applies to all types of businesses, trade names and fictitious names. For example, if Dr. Becky Smith, DDS, wishes to register the name “House of Payne Dentistry”, she will have to include at least her last name in the business name. For example, “Dr. Smith, House of Payne Dentistry, Inc.” would be an acceptable business name.
PHP Best Practices
Kevin Day, September 19th, 2008Here are some great slides on PHP developer best practices. I learned a couple things, and I think my development procedure will improve because of these slides. Required reading for any PHP developer.
The Monk and the Mirror
Kevin Day, September 15th, 2008I saw this story in a comment by Reg Braithwaite on Hacker News. I don’t know why there are so many stories about monks (I’ve never met one), but the moral has helped me several times.
There was once a monk who would carry a mirror where ever he went. A priest noticed this one day and thought to himself “This monk must be so preoccupied with the way he looks that he has to carry that mirror all the time. He should not worry about the way he looks on the outside, it’s what’s inside that counts.” So the priest went up to the monk and asked “Why do you always carry that mirror?” thinking for sure this would prove his guilt.
The monk pulled the mirror from his bag and pointed it at the priest. Then he said “I use it in times of trouble. I look into it and it shows me the source of my problems as well as the solution to my problems.”
Unfortunately, this story conflicts with Homer Simpson’s message:
To alcohol! The cause of… and solution to… all of life’s problems.
Thank God! Amazon persistent storage is here
Kevin Day, August 21st, 2008I just stayed up late last night working on backup scripts for my EC2 instances, so it was great to wake up this morning to see Amazon’s latest update. With Amazon’s Elastic Block Store (EBS), ECS users can now mount persistent volumes directly to the file system. That should translate into more sleep for me.
I don’t know how many I/O requests I make in a month though, and that seems to be how they’re charging for this service. I’ll have to test it out first before I do anything serious with it.
