From the Tools menu, select Options > TextEditor > All Languages > General…… then check the box beside Line Numbers.

You can also turn on line numbers for specific languages too – just select the target language instead of “All Languages.”

If you’re on the right screen and you still don’t see it, make sure the “Show all settings” option in the bottom left corner of the Options windows is checked.

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1. Creating Visual Studio projects from Parallels

Oy vey.

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Not a problem – I had backed up my hard drive en toto, so recovering my addresses and calendars wasn’t difficult… but since a quick google search didn’t return any suggestions, I thought I’d share what I did in case you find yourself with the same need.

note:

~/ = /Users/soychicka/ = my user home directory, just like ~/ = /Users/yourHomeDir/ = your home directory.

Sadly, it appears that although they now have much nicer names, all of my screenshots in Snow Leopard are no more than black boxes of appropriate dimensions…. so that means you’ll actually have to *gasp* read directions (just for the time being).

To recover your Address Book contacts:

Open up two finder windows, one for your backup drive and one for your regular old hard drive that you’ll be using on a daily basis… and go to ~/yourHomeDir/Library, then find

~/Library/Application Support

in both windows.

You should see a folder called

AddressBook

in both windows. Drag the copy of AddressBook on the backup drive into

~/Library/Application Support.

If you dragged the folder into the right location, you’ll see a dialog that asks if you want to Keep the original, Keep Both, or Replace. Go ahead and click Keep both – it’ll keep a backup copy of the original for you in case something goes dreadfully wrong.

Then launch Address Book: you should see all of your contacts happily coexisting once again…well, at least as happily as they co-existed before, as sadly, Snow Leopard was not shipped with the power to resolve family quarrels or workplace personality conflicts.

To recover your iCal calendars:

Open up two finder windows, one for your backup drive and one for your regular old hard drive that you’ll be using on a daily basis… and go to ~/yourHomeDir/Library.

You should see a folder called

Calendars

in both windows. Drag the copy of Calendars from the backup drive into

~/Library/

on your regular hard drive.  If you dragged the folder into the right location, you’ll see a dialog that asks if you want to Keep the original, Keep Both, or Replace. Go ahead and click Keep both – it’ll keep a backup copy of the original for you in case something goes dreadfully wrong.

Then launch iCal : you should see all of your calendars happily coexisting once again…again, at least as happily as work and your personal life existed before, as Snow Leopard was not shipped with the power to add hours to the day and give you a raise.

Unless there was some new setting I forgot to enable…..

Random fact: One of Snow leopard’s new spots is pretty nice: if you are attempting to copy a file that has the same name as an existing one, instead of offering the option of replacing or canceling, it gives you the option of keeping both, and renames the original

Filename (original).
 Although it still doesn't allow you to merge the contents of two directories (hint hint), it's a step in the right direction.   Thanks, friendly apple UX team!

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I was looking for a new backup hard drive today, and after becoming frustrated with the lack of usability on the ShopLocal.com, I reverted to switching back to viewing the weekly ads of individual retailers, where I happened to stumble across this perfect example – a weekly ad from Best Buy.

We’ll leave aside the fact that this opened in a pop-up, cosmetic issues and the use of flash for the time being…. What’s key here is that the majority of advertisement content that is of interest to the consumer is below the fold, requiring that the user scrolls down the page to see the content that is of interest to them. And if you look at the next image, you’ll see why.

The layout of the ad is intended to reflects the dimensions of a page in those the traditional weekly newspaper advertisments… the ones that were so unwieldy, where you had to either clear a 3′x5′ space to read on, or make a real effort to keep the paper from flopping over on itself… the ones that have been largely replaced in print by a more manageable tabloid format.

Perhaps the old-style ad layout was selected by the designer to reinforce metaphor of a print ad by as a way to make users comfortable with the notion of viewing an ad online. Or perhaps they are simply unwilling to put their ads in a more usable format in order to force more user interaction with their content in hopes of increasing conversions.

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This tutorial assumes that you have already installed and configured the following:
- Rails (2.3.4)
-  Git (1.6.4.1)
- Heroku gem (1.3.0)

Specifically, it also assumes that you either a) have configured an ssh keys for use with git, or b) know how to deal with it if you haven’t.

If you don’t meet all of the above criteria,  get crackin’… but once you’re ready, read on.

Install gems:

You’ll need, at bare minimum, the radiant (v0.8.1), taps (v0.2.19), and rspec (v1.2.9) gems.

Create your app

This step automagically creates your Radiant app, and spits out the names of the files it creates followed by a set of instructions for completing installation. Ignore what you see there and follow these instructions instead.

Create your database

This will set up the necessary database structure in your local install. There are a few options you’ll need to select:

Get git

Initializes your new git repository.  If you don’t get git, get it here

Make caching Heroku-Friendly

In your environment config file (config/environment.rb), you need to update the cache configuration. Heroku’s file system is read-only, so all cache must be written in the tmp directory.

replace config.middleware.use ::Radiant::Cache:

Let Heroku know what gems you need.

Since direct access to the command line is not available on the heroku server, create a .gems file to let Heroku know what gems (and what versions of the gems!) are required for your app. When you push your project, the required gems will automagically be installed for you.

Check in

Deploy!

The returned lines will include the url for your new app, and the address of the git repository pushed to heroku.

is what you should see if all goes well.  You can see that the server was started, so you’re almost ready to go.  But first, you need to…

Push your database to Heroku

is what you should see if all goes well here.

At this point, your app should be live at the url you received when deploying.  Make sure to check it out before tinkering with anything…  and then you know that you have a safe starting point to return to when you have caused what otherwise would have been irreparable damage to your app.

On that note, I’d recommend taking advantage of Heroku’s new Bundles feature that lets you create an archive (tarball) of your application code repository and a dump of the database. By default, the bundle is stored on the Heroku servers, but you can download the bundle to your local machine, keep one  or more on Heroku (, upload bundles from your local machine and re-animate a bundle with the “heroku bundles” commands.  You can get one bundle for free, or unlimited bundles for $20/month.  The re-animation process seems a little wonky for the time being, but it’s a good option if you want to unabashedly tinker with abandon (and without fear).

So there’s a simple installation path for deploying a standard Radiant application on Heroku.  Play around with your install and see if it suits your needs.

Heads up, though: if you want to install extensions in your Heroku-deployed app,  there is a custom path for that too!  Using the built-in ./script/extension install extensionName doesn’t play nicely with heroku – it installs the extensions as submodules, which are not supported by Heroku at this time.

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While some sites continue to grow organically, attracting users by word-of-mouth and link-of-google for the limited content they already have, a new practice has been spreading like the plague for sites that seek to obtain user-contributed content (UCC): ‘data’ scraping.

My personal opinion: the only time it’s okay to scrape data is when it’s actually “data” – e.g., addresses, events, etc. Scraping conversations or articles – content that people took the time and energy to craft – even though it may be legal, just isn’t right. But I’ve come across this practice with increasing frequency over the past few months… and every site I’ve come across that engages in this practice or -even worse – uses it as their business model – has been put on my blacklist (e.g., BigResource, etc.).

Reasoning? It takes 10 sec. for a page to load. After I’ve seen 6 pages in a row that have the same exact content, I’ve wasted over a minute of my life, and want to throttle someone. And when the first 3 pages of results on google are all links to the same two pieces of content, it makes me want to run down to the Googleplex, and defeated, drop to my knees, and bang my fists on the ground, while crying “Why, Sergei, Why?????”

Okay, it’s not quite that bad… but it wastes my time, and chances are, will frustrate your user. And since first impressions are the ones that last, if the first impression a user gets of your site is one that makes them vow not to use your site again, you’ll end up far less successful than if you were to wait and allow your content to grow organically.

A better option: look for topics that haven’t been covered elsewhere (or at least topics that aren’t easily found through google), and ask and answer the questions yourself (maybe even using a different account so it looks ‘real’) with a mind towards SEO. Because if you don’t have any value to add to the space other than aggregating or snagging content from other sites, why would a user return to your site instead of the originator?

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According to Pablo Livardo’s blog, Dreamweaver will always try connecting to the svn repository when booting up before allowing you to do anything… and it might hang for 10 minutes or so before it gives up and completes loading.

While you could try to figure out what the problem is, sometimes you just don’t care. In my case, I hadn’t made any changes to my svn repository, and I discovered my svn host was simply down.

Easy solution: disconnect from the network, then launch dreamweaver again. If, like me, you only rely on subversion for checking in major changes, you should be on the road again in a couple of minutes.

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Call it what you will: a natural history of a species ubiquitous in the marine realm; a clever way to force the retention of random facts into the knowledge bank of oversexed, overstimulated college students; a skillful juxtaposition of knowledge, music and imagery that would be quite at home in a burlesque show.

But once you hear the line at 3 mins and 22 seconds, you will never be at a loss to remember why barnacles need tell no lies.

RANDOM FACTS:
Yes, relative to their size, the barnacle penis is the largest in the animal kingdom. Sure, they might be only a few centimeters long… but that’s 40x the size of the barnacle itself. In comparison, were a 6 foot tall man to be comparatively endowed, he’d need a pretty loose-fitting pair of pants to hold all 240 feet of his manhood. (Yup, I calculated that right. Feet. Not inches. Think about it.)

But not only is length impressive in the barnacle’s case: it also has the ability to adapt it’s length and girth in response to its environment. In calm waters, the length is more important, while length is traded off for girth in rough seas, where a long schlong might be more of a liability. Yup, those crazy marine biologists have actually tested the difference in reproductive success for different lengths and girths of the barnacle penis. And since they grow a new penis every year, they can be fairly flexible (pun intended).

RANDOM FACTS:
In case you’re wondering why this tradeoff might be made, put yourself in the place of a barnacle. Once you hatch, you’re a little larva swimming around in a big old ocean, where lots of hungry sea creatures are looking for a meal, so as soon as you can, you start looking for a place to take shelter. Once you find a good spot, you attach yourself to a rock and build your home to protect yourself from the big bad world. But a good spot isn’t always necessarily going to available be right next to another barnacle, let alone a barnacle of the opposite sex… so as a marvel of evolutionary luck, the barnacle developed the ability to not only go long, but to get new equipment if the environment requires. Brilliant!

So ladies, the next time you run into someone telling you he’s ‘got what you need’, put him in his place by telling him with a raised eyebrow, a bit of latina attitude, and one finger pointing to the sky “Honey, a tiny little barnacle got more of what I need than you do.” Because no matter if you’re talking about personality or masculine prowess, you’ll be speaking the truth.

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Letterman’s response: reasonable, heartfelt and honest.

But this response: hilarious.

caroline June 11th, 2009 10:42 am ET
I have one question for all the people bashing Pallin? Are you jealous? What is the reason for your hatred of her? Is she too good for you? Can’t you get past her looks and judge her on her character? She has opened her book on her life and her family’s life, finances, TAXES, etc. How about Obama and the rest of the democrats? How come it is ok to slam the right and yet when the comedians on the right make a joke, they are fired? DOUBLE STANDARD!!!!!

And ’she’ was so emphatic about it, she posted it twice! (no, although it would be a kick to work for an anti-Rovian think tank specializing in this type of material, I am not making this up. see the original here)

La la la lalala la la la la la….

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