jon anhold

Even as I was reading this email, my mind was racing, subconsciously piecing together the implementation details. The Bourne shell, it turns out, is quite well suited for this type of task…much more so, I dare say, than Java or C. The solution turned out to be both simple and elegant.

This document chronicles my foray into the not-so-fascinating world of ${YOUR_LANGUAGE_HERE} Server Pages technology. All of the code I developed is available for free download, so you can use Bourne Shell Server Pages to build your very own killer Web application.

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Anyone who’s spent more than 5 minutes on the MySQL documentation will realise it leaves a lot to be desired. The same goes for many of the 3rd party apps latched onto this platform which offer mediocre functionality and anything beyind the basic comes at a huge premium.

Well here’s a set of 20 resources, tools, articles that hope to break that and bring it all under one roof. Enjoy.

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As rewarding as web development is, it can also be a pain sometimes, especially if you spend half your time looking for the right tools and resources. Well, we’ve done the work for you with this one, and have compiled a list of over 120 web development resources to make your life easier.

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As you probably already know, the Myers-Briggs Personality Sorter is intended to be a general, universal personality ID that divides people into one of sixteen distinct personality types, along axes if introverted I or extroverted E, Sensing S or Intuitive N, Thinking T or Feeling F, and Judging J or Perceiving P.

Now, there are many places which will tell you what this all means, but none of them are quite as…relevant to todays modern civilization as this one…

ENTJ: The Evil Overlord

The ENTJ is best characterized by his charisma, his ability to grasp complex situations and to think flexibly and creatively, his keen and active intelligence, and his overwhelming desire to crush the world beneath his boot. ENTJs are naturally outgoing and love the company of other people, particulalry minions, henchmen, slaves, and the others they rule with ruthless efficiency.

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In an internal blogpost inside Atlassian, I described a certain problem as being ‘very hard’, to explain why our efforts were better spent elsewhere. Later, as I was walking across the bridge into work I had a moment to look at that statement through the eyes of a non-engineer. Atlassian prides itself on hiring really smart people. What use are they if they cant solve hard problems?

To that end, heres a quick lexicon of what computer programmers generally mean when theyre talking about how hard some problem is, starting with the most extreme:

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Bottled water manufacturers’ encourage the perception that their products are purer and safer than tap water. Bottled water can cost up to 10,000 times more per gallon than tap water. But the reality is that tap water is actually held to more stringent quality standards than bottled water, and some brands of bottled water are just tap water in disguise. What’s more, our increasing consumption of bottled water—more than 22 gallons per U.S. citizen in 2004 according to the Earth Policy Institute—fuels an unsustainable industry that takes a heavy toll on the environment.

Approximately 1.5 million barrels of oil—enough to run 100,000 cars for a whole year—are used to make plastic water bottles, while transporting these bottles burns even more oil.

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Dear Mr. Prime,

We have received your accident-claim reports for the month of June—they total 27. I regret to inform you that GEICO will not be able to reimburse you for any of those repairs. I feel that I have sent the same letter to you once a month for the last six months, and I am now sending it again.

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Windows Grep is a tool for searching files for text strings that you specify.

Although Windows and many other programs have file searching capabilities built-in, none can match the power and versatility of Windows Grep.

The program combines the power and flexibility of traditional command line grep utilities available on DOS, UNIX and other platforms with the ease of use of Microsoft Windows.

In addition to searching, Windows Grep also performs global replacing in your files, with complete safety.

Windows Grep is designed for searching plain-ASCII text files, such as program source, HTML, RTF and batch files, but it can also search binary files such as word processor documents, databases, spreadsheets and executables.

Windows Grep runs on Windows 98, 2000, XP and Vista.

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Find user-generated cell phone signals by major service providers. Find dead spots, and compare signal strengths.

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Grocery shopping seems like a harmless enough activity. It’s a chore, but it’s one that most of us do at least once a week, without giving much thought to what’s going on behind the scenes at the supermarket.

How we shop has become a science that’s studied endlessly. “Market researchers have worked for years to come up with ways to make sure shoppers see as many products as possible, because the more they see, the more they buy,� says Marion Nestle, author of What to Eat: An Aisle-by-Aisle Guide to Savvy Food Choices and Good Eating.

So to make yourself a smarter shopper, learn about the top tricks and other secrets lurking at the supermarket.

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TV Episode Guide. Just search for “list of ____ episodes� with the name of the show, and you will see every episode catalogued and summarized, often with trivia and other factoids.

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jQuery is a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.

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A chilled plastic bottle of water in the convenience-store cooler is the perfect symbol of this moment in American commerce and culture. It acknowledges our demand for instant gratification, our vanity, our token concern for health. Its packaging and transport depend entirely on cheap fossil fuel. Yes, it’s just a bottle of water–modest compared with the indulgence of driving a Hummer. But when a whole industry grows up around supplying us with something we don’t need–when a whole industry is built on the packaging and the presentation–it’s worth asking how that happened, and what the impact is. And if you do ask, if you trace both the water and the business back to where they came from, you find a story more complicated, more bemusing, and ultimately more sobering than the bottles we tote everywhere suggest.

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Why do you need these Latin phrases? Well, like Latin teachers always say, Latin lives on in plenty of English words and phrases. But mostly, it’s worth learning a bit of Latin because omnia dicta fortiori, si dicta Latina: everything sounds more impressive when said in Latin.

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