Sam’s random musings

Man just took a survey for my kids school related to the use of technology in schools and the classroom, and here are my comments to you

• ugly
• poor understanding of standard controls (if you want people to be able to select more then one thing, the control is a CHECKBOX not a set of RADIO buttons
• questions are hard to respond to in the negative
• try giving shortcut urls having a url in a handout that I have to type in that is TWO LINES long is dumb
• makes you look totally rookie

Fantastic New Google Spreadsheet Feature: Forms

Create a form in a Google Docs spreadsheet and send it out to anyone with an email address. They won’t need to sign in, and they can respond directly from the email message or from an automatically generated web page. Creating the form is easy: start with a spreadsheet to get the form, or start by creating the form and you’ll get the spreadsheet automatically. Responses are automatically added to your spreadsheet.

Wow this is cool and simple for quick feedback, check it out works really well….

(Via Daring Fireball.)

Is Your Client a Certified Orifice?

Bob Sutton continues to fight the good fight against certified orifices. He started by literally writing the book about it. This time, he’s created a test for you to determine if you have the client from hell. Click here to take the ACHE (Ass**** Client from Hell Exam). Luckily, he provides a path out of this predicament. The point is: Life is too short to deal with orifices. Of course, it could be you that’s the orifice. Click here to determine if that’s the case. Incidentally, he just wrote a great post about why you should hire female superstars but not male superstars.

This is a good read and a good document is hidden in here for new hires

(Via Let the Good Times Roll by Guy Kawasaki.)

Best Practices for Personal Backups

If you value your data, you must have a reliable backup strategy in place, because, sooner or later, you will lose data. It’s ‘when,’ not ‘if.’ With Time Machine, Apple has included backup software with Mac OS X 10.5 that is both easy to use and reliable, so there is no more excuse for not backing up your data. How ’bout sharing some best practices for personal backups, then.

So there are good simple lessons in here. I for one now use a collection of tools to back things up * source code: in subversion repositories that have a daily checkout to another remote location. At this point I do not have any projects where the history is absolutely vital (ok one and it gets a svn dump stored on a local machine that has backup) * critical data: rsync to at least 2 offsite locations * local machines: Retrospect Remote to a local ’server’ with rotating hard drives * my main machine: time machine, and a pair of super duper duplicated drives that are rotated and one in safe * some other things but that is the main plan for now

Another good lesson, a backup is only good if you can recover from it, ever tested yours?

(Via O’Reilly Weblogs.)

20 minutes or so on why I am 4Barack (Lessig Blog): “I wasn’t going to do this, but then someone ask me to do it, and someone else told me (to my horror — not that it would be insane for anyone, but insane for her) that she was for Clinton. So consider this my precinct captain duty for the lessig blog.”

This is a great presentation on one mans beliefs on who he will select. Take the time to watch the video, good points, well made.

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p>The Economics of Online Backup: “

James Duncan Davidson on online mass storage backup options.

This is a good read, there is some good insight for anyone who is starting to look (and I think wisely) at offsite backup for crucial data. Good information on how the costs and software stack up for backing up a 1 Terabyte collection of data.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

Easier Static Pages for CakePHP 1.2

>Traditionally in a CakePHP application, to do static pages you have two options:

1. Use the built-in Pages controller and either have all static pages reside in /pages/pagename or set up custom routes.
2. Set up an empty action in a controller.

I didn’t like either of those options.

So what with Nate’s help J. Snook makes a custom ErrorHandler to handle the missing controller actions and gets it to look for views in the /views/controllers folder that match and renders them otherwise it does the normal error thing that cake does. I’m working on an extension to this to replace the default route method that I used to serve items from my ContentsController. I’ll keep you informed of the progress but check out. So my plan will to do a quick check in here for things in Contents that might match the path first (or in the cache ) some small corrections, thanks to JS

(Via snook.ca - a collection of tips, tricks and bookmarks in web development.)

You Suck at Photoshop, Hilarious Tutorials by Donnie Hoyle | Laughing Squid: “”

A funny non-kid safe set of little photoshop tutorials