All things tech

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.

I was revising the tutorial on Mark The Dark and decided I needed some graphics.  Seeing that I’m cheap, I looked for free stock photo sites.  I compiled a list of the best sites I found.  These photos are great for using on websites when you want to fill up an empty space or even if you’re printing something.  Make sure you read the terms of use–their licenses differ depending on the site and the photographer.  Here’s the list (in rough order of usefulness):

Stock Exchange
Free Photos Bank
photocase
OpenPhoto
Morguefile
BigFoto
Pixel Perfect Digital
FreeImages
FreeFoto
Aarin Free Photo
NASA
NOAA
National Park Service
gimp savvy (Index of other free stock photo sites)

Two things about RyanAir, an Irish airline, came out on the news this week that are particularly appalling.  Both their rude response to a blogger and a potential new pay to pee policy tell me that RyanAir hates their customers.

RyanAir’s and the blogger

Jason Roe wrote in his blog about what he thinks is a bug in RyanAir’s website.  Some RyanAir employees saw it and left some pretty rude (IMHO) comments.  Among them are:

• “…you are so stupid you dont even know how you did it!…what self respecting developer uses a crappy CMS such as word press anyway ND puts they’re mobile ph number online, i suppose even a prank call is better than nothing on a lonely sat evening!!”
• “If you would work in your pathetic life on a such big project in a such busy environment with so little resources, you would know that the most important is to have usual user behavior scenarios working rather than spending time on improbable and harmless things…”

The response of RyanAir PR is equally rude.  I would have expected them to refute (if necessary) and apologize for the event.  Here’s what they said:

“Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion.

“It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again.

“Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel”.

Pay to pee

I saw on the news that RyanAir CEO Michael O’Leary announced “One thing we have looked at in the past and are looking at again is the possibility of maybe putting a coin slot on the toilet door so that people might actually have to spend a pound (about $1.43) to spend a penny in future.”

There’s a weird, undescriptive error you might come across if you use the CMS editor in PrestaShop.  It will say “an error occurred while updating object cms ()”.  That isn’t very helpful.  It turns out that there are some “taboo” words that aren’t allowed to be used.  It looks like it’s there to prevent sql hacking.  If you get this error, check your content for the following words and replace them with something different: union, load_file, outfile, dumpfile, escaped, terminated, cascade, infile, x509, trigger, revoke