All things tech

It was my birthday this week and I got a coupon in my email from Red Robin for a free burger. Since I never lose emails but tend to misplace papers, I kept the coupon in my email until the day that we were supposed to go use it. Half an hour before we were to go out, I fired up my email to print off the coupon and was dismayed to find this:

Apparently I was over my viewing limit.  Yes, I know I should have read the text at the top that says that I can only view the offer twice.  But I have a multi-pass system of sorting through emails since I get hundreds per day.

So we didn’t have a coupon and we didn’t go to Red Robin for dinner.  I know that Red Robin is under no obligation to give birthday coupons.  I was frustrated that their system was designed so poorly and I’d imagine hundreds of other people are experiencing this same issue.  Red Robin probably implemented this to stop coupons from being redeemed multiple times.

Here are the weaknesses in this process:
-People who (like me) load their email several times and will therefore be prevented from legitimately loading the coupon when they need it
-Somebody who actually wants to “beat the system” could easily print the coupon to pdf (on the first viewing) and send that to friends. Or merely print several copies of the coupon.
-It’s not very user-friendly. What about people who aren’t connected to a printer the first time they try to load it and whose printer doesn’t work when they try to print it on the second view?

Update: I emailed customer service about the issue. They responded by resetting the counter and re-emailing the coupon. We used the coupon and had some great hamburgers. Props to Red Robin! If only it didn’t have to be an issue in the first place…

The WebFaction install script for CakePHP (at http://wiki.webfaction.com/wiki/InstallScripts) was a bit outdated so I modified it for CakePHP 1.2.3.8166. Enjoy!

Update: Apparently WordPress wasn’t displaying the code correctly. I’ve saved the file locally so you can install it just by clicking here.

#!/usr/local/bin/python2.5

locals()[action](app_name, server, session_id)

A number of weeks ago, I was ecstatic when I found out about the Adsweep plugin for Google Chrome. From the homepage, it looked promising. I installed it and found that it worked pretty okay. It’d get better over time, right? Apparently not.

My biggest problem with the plugin was that there were so many false positives. When I went to do an advanced search on eBay, I found that the Adsweep plugin had removed the search box! I emailed the creator of Adsweep and was surprised that he emailed back saying he added the exception to the plugin. Woot! Impressive!

It happened again to me on another webpage so I went back to the Adsweep website, only to find the notice that the developer was discontinuing work on Adsweep. Sad day! Apparently too many people were asking for exceptions to be programmed into the plugin and not enough people were volunteering their time. I admit, I’m guilty of this. But I didn’t know–I wasn’t subscribed to the list. I’d contribute a bit of my time if there were others that could help get this going again. Any takers?

Have you ever started a document thinking “Man, tons of other people must have done this same document or something similar. I wish there was something I could use as a sample or template”? That’s exactly what I was thinking today. And then I found .docstoc. This website is a huge repository (over 3 million documents!) where tons of people share their professional documents. Anybody can view the documents for free, but if you want to download them you’ll need to create an account (which is free).

To give you a feel for what they have to offer: I was looking for a document to help me lay out Skill Capture’s financial projections. My search for “financial projection” gave me 250 resulting documents. I didn’t even bother looking at any of the documents past the first page because I found several really useful ones right at the top of the search. I downloaded the xls files and was ecstatic to find that they were full-fledged spreadsheets with formulas to calculate lots of things automatically.

I did several other searches for documents on the service and found that each of my searches had an equal abundance of quality results. This is something I’ve wanted for a long time and I’m extremely excited that I found it.

I have to say: I’ve loved Chrome from the minute I started using it.  What do I like about it?  Mostly the speed.  Throughout the day, I have racing thoughts–things I want to look up, news I want to read, friends’ statuses I want to check.  Firefox was much too slow (even though I keep my plugins to a minimum), finally opening a browser window in 5-10 seconds.  Chrome on the other hand, happily gives me a window in half a second (maybe even less!).

Since Chrome came out, I’ve changed my usage to about 90% Chrome.  I use Firefox every now and then for some occasional debugging.  And Safari sometimes when I want to register for free stuff online but have already used Chrome and Firefox and I’m too lazy to go locate and clear the cookie.

With the somewhat recent advent of Adsweep, there are only three features that are keeping Chrome from being my 100% perfect browser:

Print Preview
I’m so cheap!  Even though my printer has automatic duplexing (that means it automatically prints to both sides of the paper), I like to make sure what I print is still in my budget.  I’ll even tweak the margins and zoom to make sure it’s cheap enough.  Give me Print Preview so I know what I’m getting!

Smooth Scrolling
This has irritated me ever since I made the move from Internet Explorer to Firefox back in 2006.  It hurts my eyes–I do tons of scrolling and it’d be a lot nicer to have the pages gently gliding across my screen rather than jumping a line at a time.

Right-click Properties
A lot of times I’ll see a graphic and think “I wonder what they named that” or “I wonder if there’s more where that came from”.  In Firefox or IE, I would just right-click on the element and then “properties”.  Bam!  I would see what the file is named and the dimensions.  Having this feature would be pretty useful on websites that don’t include a caption or don’t tell where the photo was taken.

So if any Chromium developers are reading this: please develop these features!!  Then my life will be complete!

Saw this on Craigslist:

i need a job wear i dont haf to do anything but play all the time or do wahtever i want to. i am 34 and a hi scool dropout but my dad is trying to get me kick out of the hous. i hav nevr had a job so i don have any espearyense. i no how to play all kinds a computer games tho.

My first hint that there was something seriously popular going around was yesterday when I got several emails telling me about KFC’s free 2-piece grilled chicken promotional.  I checked the top Google keywords and found that it was ridiculously popular.  From the top 100 queries, 24 of them dealt with the KFC promotional.  Check the screenshot.

I saw a Subaru commerical the other day that caught my interest.  In it, they showed several boys in uniforms competing in what appeared to be a Pinewood Derby.  Since I was a Cub Scout for several years and have fond memories of building Pinewood Derby cars, I wanted to see what their message was.  But I was distracted because at the end they show the boys in their “uniforms,” which are really just vests–not button-up shirts like I’m used to.  Doing some research, I found out that these boys were actually wearing Girl Scout uniforms.  According to a commenter on motherproof.com, the Boy Scouts of America would not allow them to use their trademarks.

Note: I couldn’t find a video of this commercial online.  If anybody could post it in the comments, that would be great!

I just saw in the Gmail blog that they added an Undo Send feature.  Seems like a pretty cool feature, but not as useful as the Outlook (Exchange) feature.  This Gmail Undo Send only gives you 5 seconds.  It does not, however, let you suck back an email a day later after you’ve had time to sleep on it.  I’m sure some people will find this pretty useful (I’m definitely keeping this enabled on mine), but I think having a larger undo window would be more useful.

For some reason, when I clicked links in TweetDeck, they would open in FireFox even though my default browser is Chrome.  Here’s how to change that on XP.

1. Click “Start”->”Settings”->”Control Panel”->”Add or Remove Programs”
2. Click the “Set Program Access and Defaults” button on the left
3. Expand the selected configuration
4. Set Chrome (or whatever browser you want to use) as the default Web browser

I don’t know why TweetDeck doesn’t automatically direct it to the default browser (maybe it’s an Adobe AIR problem), but that’s how to fix it.