Eclecti.ca » m3talink

M3talinks for Jul 28th

Sean — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 15:00:00 +0000

Today’s M3talinks for Jul 28th

Using Keytool to Import SSL Certificates into Sun JDK – TalkingTree.com – 've recently seen a little discussion on CFTalk about importing SSL certificates into the JVM keystore used by the JVM under ColdFusion MX in order to connect to SSL enabled resources, such as LDAP servers or Web Servers while using either the tags CFLDAP, CFHTTP, or CFINVOKE. I've also found myself having to do this for the first time recently. During that process I stumbled on what turned out to be a bug in the JVM 1.4.2-b28 that ships with ColdFusion MX 6.1 by default.
Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8: Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson – It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society.

M3talinks for Jul 27th

Sean — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 15:00:00 +0000

Today’s M3talinks for Jul 27th

Terri Oda: About Terri – Who am I?

In no particular order:

* I'm a geek.

* I'm a Canadian.

* I'm a software developer.

* I'm a editor.

* I'm a muscian.

* I'm a bookworm.

* I'm an artist.

* I'm a hacker.

* I'm a cyclist.

* I'm a mailing-list maintainer.

* I'm an environmentalist.

* I'm a leader.

* I'm a naturalist.

* I'm a scientist.

* I'm a sysadmin.

* I'm a student.

* I'm whatever I feel like being. It's great to be free.
Stubbornella » Blog Archive » Woman in technology – Usually I avoid topics like women in technology because (1) it is a can of worms, and (2) I can really only speak for myself. For the most part, I’d rather be seen as a person in technology than a woman, but this weekend the twitterverse erupted with opinions about Google sponsoring female students to attend JSConf. As a woman who is often the only-woman-in-the-room, I want people to know it isn’t always easy. I was a bit shocked by the blatant failure to empathize.
How to import certificates into certificate stores (ColdFusion) – For secure connections to remote servers over SSL, all current versions of ColdFusion require the remote system's SSL certificate to exist in ColdFusion's certificate truststore. This includes any calls from , , , etc. The default truststore is the JRE's cacerts file. This file is typically located in the following places:
SEOmoz | The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet – When I first started at SEOmoz about 9 months ago, I was the web development intern. My experience prior to the internship was limited entirely to writing code. Since then, I have spent literally hundreds of hours expanding my knowledge into different areas. Specifically, I have focused on accepted SEO techniques and small business practices. My beginner SEO checklists of the last few weeks have been the tangible result of my newly acquired knowledge. In an effort to return to my roots, I spent the majority of the day compiling what I believe to be the mother of all technical SEO cheat sheets. The recommended viewing format of this cheat sheet is as a PDF rather than the traditional blog post (I found the blog posts inconvenient to print). Let me know if this new format works better for all of you. I also included snippets below so you can see what is on the cheat sheet before you download it. Enjoy!

M3talinks for Jul 26th

Sean — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:00:00 +0000

Today’s M3talinks for Jul 26th

Setting 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable headers with Apache .htaccess – When temporarily taking down a website to perform maintenance, it's a good idea to return a "503 Service Temporarily Unavailable" header so search engines know to come back later. This post shows how to set this header using an Apache .htaccess file, and also how to show a response page to users with PHP so they know to try again later.

M3talinks for Jul 23rd

Sean — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 15:00:00 +0000

Today’s M3talinks for Jul 23rd

Thawte – Knowledge Center – SSL Certificates Support – Once you have installed your Thawte SSL Certificate, you can verify that the installation was successful by using the SSL Certificate Installation Checker on this page. Please follow these steps to test your installation:

1. Enter your Domain Name into the Fully Qualified Domain Name field (e.g. type secure.thawte.com).

2. Enter the SSL port number for your Web server. (The default SSL port number for most servers is 443.)

3. Click Test this Web Server.

The SSL certificate checker uses a Java Applet and you might be prompted to accept the certificate. If you receive an error try using a different browser or check your Java Settings.

M3talinks for Jul 4th

Sean — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 15:00:00 +0000

Today’s M3talinks for Jul 4th

Candida Martinelli’s Italophile Site(Historicals set in Italy) – The books featured here are historical novels set in Italy. I've included some featuring:

* Famous works of art

* Ancient Roman warfare

* World War II in Italy

* 15th Century Italy

Each book is linked via a click on the book cover, to Amazon.com's page for the book. Some allow you to Search Inside the book.

There you can find excerpts, sometimes links to the first chapter, back cover text, reader comments, reviews, and prices for new and used copies.

Many of these books are available as paperbacks, so be sure to check before deciding one's too expensive.

M3talinks for Jun 25th

Sean — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 15:00:00 +0000

Today’s M3talinks for Jun 25th

Monkeybagel.com: Pumas on Hoverbikes – We've all heard the "herding cats" analogy with regard to managing programmers. Managing sysadmins is like leading a neighborhood gang of neurotic pumas on jet-powered hoverbikes with nasty smack habits and opposable thumbs. Oh, and as a manager you're a neurotic junkie puma too, only they cut your thumbs off and whereas all the other pumas get to drive around on their badass hoverbikes and fire chainguns at the marketing department, YOU have to drive a maroon AMC Gremlin behind them and hand out Band-Aids and smile a lot, when all you're REALLY thinking about is how to get one of them to let you borrow his hoverbike for a few minutes so you can show those fools how it's DONE. This is because managers are usually people who proved that they were handy with a chaingun and were thus rewarded by having their thumbs cut off and their weapons handed to some punk college hire.
jQuery Raty – A Star Rating Plugin –

M3talinks for Jun 24th through Jun 25th

Sean — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 15:00:00 +0000

M3talinks for Jun 24th through Jun 25th:

Giving Great Talks: A Mashup » Bolt | Peters – I had the privilege of Jared Spool attending and critiquing some of my recent talks, and in preparation for a UIE webinar I’m giving, he took time to rip me apart give me some awesome feedback. His advice reminded me of notes I took almost ten years ago at an Edward Tufte seminar about giving great talks, and so the next logical step was to make old-timey boxing photos of them both and write a mashup of their talking tips. RIGHT? Both Jared Spool and Edward Tufte are known to be kick-ass speakers in the technology field – Tufte is all up in the freaking white house, and Jared speaks roughly 400 days a year around the world. I think we can learn a lot from their advice, and despite the artificial conflict introduced with boxing pictures, their tips are mostly complimentary.

- by Nate Bolt
Less.js Will Obsolete CSS – If you design websites you may have heard of interesting tools called CSS pre-processors. A couple of great ones are LESS and SASS. I helped Alexis, the creator of LESS with the design of the language and built the public site.

It’s a tool I wanted to use myself, and even though SASS already existed I didn’t feel like using a different syntax to CSS—I wanted something to augment CSS and make it more powerful, while still retaining the same look and feel. That’s exactly what LESS does. It extends CSS with things like variables, nested rules, mixins and operations to name a few.
Less.js Will Obsolete CSS – If you design websites you may have heard of interesting tools called CSS pre-processors. A couple of great ones are LESS and SASS. I helped Alexis, the creator of LESS with the design of the language and built the public site.

It’s a tool I wanted to use myself, and even though SASS already existed I didn’t feel like using a different syntax to CSS—I wanted something to augment CSS and make it more powerful, while still retaining the same look and feel. That’s exactly what LESS does. It extends CSS with things like variables, nested rules, mixins and operations to name a few.
LESS – Leaner CSS – LESS extends CSS with: variables, mixins, operations and nested rules. Best of all, LESS uses existing CSS syntax. This means you can rename your current .css files to .less and they'll just work.
Argentina On Two Steaks A Day – The classic beginner's mistake in Argentina is to neglect the first steak of the day. You will be tempted to just peck at it or even skip it altogether, rationalizing that you need to save yourself for the much larger steak later that night. But this is a false economy, like refusing to drink water in the early parts of a marathon. That first steak has to get you through the afternoon and half the night, until the restaurants begin to open at ten; the first steak is what primes your system to digest large quantities of animal protein, and it's the first steak that buffers the sudden sugar rush of your afternoon ice cream cone. The midnight second steak might be more the glamorous one, standing as it does a good three inches off the plate, but all it has to do is get you up and out of the restaurant and into bed (for the love of God, don't forget to drink water).
ICT Graphics Lab – The Graphics Lab at the University of Southern California has designed an easily reproducible, low-cost 3D display system with a form factor that offers a number of advantages for displaying 3D objects in 3D. The display is:

* autostereoscopic – requires no special viewing glasses

* omnidirectional – generates simultaneous views accomodating large numbers of viewers

* interactive – can update content at 200Hz

The system works by projecting high-speed video onto a rapidly spinning mirror. As the mirror turns, it reflects a different and accurate image to each potential viewer. Our rendering algorithm can recreate both virtual and real scenes with correct occlusion, horizontal and vertical perspective, and shading.

M3talinks for Jun 22nd

Sean — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 15:00:00 +0000

Today’s M3talinks for Jun 22nd

Mensch — A coding font – The latest MacOS release (10.6, or “Snow Leopard”) comes with a new monospace font. It’s called “Menlo” and it’s a slightly modified form of the standard Linux font (with appropriately weightly Linux name) “DejaVu Sans Serif Mono”, which is itself an updated form of Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. Apple’s modifications are a definite improvement to my eyes, mostly because they thicken up some of the wispier glyphs from DejaVu, like the underline and period. There’s a great comparison over here.

One thing that bothered me, though, is that they turned the zero into a 1980s-style “slashed circle”. Unhip, daddy-o! I couldn’t limit my tweaking to the zero glyph, so in the end I made about a dozen changes. Bitstream released these fonts with a very open license that only requires that you change the name if you change anything about the font, so I'm releasing my changes with the same license, as the font “Mensch”.
Puppet Drupal recipes | Bitfield Consulting – Drupal, Puppet. Puppet, meet Drupal

Puppet and Drupal make a great combination. Drupal is an amazing tool for quickly constructing attractive, functional web sites. It lets you manage large numbers of web sites from a single installation, and (via add-on modules) provides almost any CMS or blog feature you could want.

However, like any powerful tool, Drupal takes some learning. It also needs a certain amount of discipline to manage Drupal servers without getting into a chaotic mess. The Drupal sysadmin can end up trying to navigate a spaghetti of ad-hoc symlinks and face problems upgrading, maintaining, monitoring and backing up a large Drupal installation. Aegir can help with this (I’ll look at Aegir vs. Puppet in a future article) but first we need to get Drupal itself under control.

Fortunately, Puppet can help you tame Drupal and use the power of configuration management to bring your Drupal sites under control.
Puppet Drupal recipes | Bitfield Consulting – Drupal, Puppet. Puppet, meet Drupal

Puppet and Drupal make a great combination. Drupal is an amazing tool for quickly constructing attractive, functional web sites. It lets you manage large numbers of web sites from a single installation, and (via add-on modules) provides almost any CMS or blog feature you could want.

However, like any powerful tool, Drupal takes some learning. It also needs a certain amount of discipline to manage Drupal servers without getting into a chaotic mess. The Drupal sysadmin can end up trying to navigate a spaghetti of ad-hoc symlinks and face problems upgrading, maintaining, monitoring and backing up a large Drupal installation. Aegir can help with this (I’ll look at Aegir vs. Puppet in a future article) but first we need to get Drupal itself under control.

Fortunately, Puppet can help you tame Drupal and use the power of configuration management to bring your Drupal sites under control.
Puppet Training – Mike McGrath's slidedeck and audio for his Intro to Puppet workshop.

M3talinks for Jun 21st

Sean — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 15:00:00 +0000

Today’s M3talinks for Jun 21st

startuptools / FrontPage – # Start-ups are always short on time. Here are some tools (products/frameworks/etc) that might avoid you reinventing the wheel and save you some valuable time.

# We (Songkick) have found that the most useful tools are introduced to us by other start-ups. This wiki is an attempt to collect some of that knowledge and experience in one place so that companies getting started on new problems have a useful reference.

# This list is focused on technical tools to save development time. For business focused resources, Seedcamp have created a useful wiki here.

# With each tool, we've added a list of start-ups known to be using that tool, so there's a sense of how well tested they are by the community. If no start-up can vouch for the tool it doesn't make it onto the list.

# This list is maintained by Ian at Songkick but will be a lot better for your additions!
— NoNotes.com — Premium Edition – What is NoNotes?

NoNotes is a high quality low cost transcription and translation provider. We take your audio files and turn them in to text and we can translate any document to more than 80 languages.

Who does it benefit?

Imagine being unable to attend a meeting or conference and having every word emailed to you for your review. Save time and money by having your meetings and conferences documented word-for-word.

How NoNotes helps you.

Record your meeting, upload the file and we will provide you with a word-for-word record which can then be distributed, searched and stored for your records.
The Reliability, Efficiency, and Affordability of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk – ProfHacker – The Chronicle of Higher Education – Recently I had reason to get some audio transcribed using Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk service. The results have been impressive, and in this post I describe my experience and consider ways besides transcription that this service might be useful.
— NoNotes.com — Premium Edition – What is NoNotes?

NoNotes is a high quality low cost transcription and translation provider. We take your audio files and turn them in to text and we can translate any document to more than 80 languages.

Who does it benefit?

Imagine being unable to attend a meeting or conference and having every word emailed to you for your review. Save time and money by having your meetings and conferences documented word-for-word.

How NoNotes helps you.

Record your meeting, upload the file and we will provide you with a word-for-word record which can then be distributed, searched and stored for your records.
The Reliability, Efficiency, and Affordability of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk – ProfHacker – The Chronicle of Higher Education – Recently I had reason to get some audio transcribed using Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk service. The results have been impressive, and in this post I describe my experience and consider ways besides transcription that this service might be useful.
Transcription services: Audio, Video, CD/DVDs… CastingWords – * All transcription is done by people, not machines.

* High quality transcription — we catch the difficult words.

* You get an RSS feed rss icon from fineicons.com of all of your transcripts.

* Transcripts are delivered in plain text, HTML, and MS Word formats.

* We spend lots of time on quality control, all transcription is inspected many times, using multiple workers.

* Transcripts are emailed to you – and can be picked up here at the site.

* Order tracking so you always know what is happening with your transcript.

Go to our Transcription Store to start your order. Or read more in our FAQ

M3talinks for Jun 3rd

Sean — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 15:00:00 +0000

Today’s M3talinks for Jun 3rd

"Transparency Is Not Enough." –