| Here is the link to the Amazon.com Black Friday page. Beginning Monday, it will start offering limited time deals. |
Friday, November 20, 2009
Black Friday Comes Early To Amazon.com
Monday, November 02, 2009
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Unix Stream Editor
The Unix stream editor (sed) is useful for editing streams of text. You can either pipe the text into sed, or else give a file name - in which case, sed works on the file.
In all cases, sed does not change the original text, but sends the modified text to standard out.
Sure, I could just use awk but, for some tasks, its just easier to use sed.
Some examples:
sed 4q Prints the first 4 lines of the file.
sed 's/yes/no/' Substitute "no" for the first occurance of "yes" on each line.
sed 's/yes/no/g' In this case, substitute "no" for all occurances of "yes".
sed 's/yes/no/2' Substitute "no" for the second occurance of "yes" on each line.
In all cases, sed does not change the original text, but sends the modified text to standard out.
Sure, I could just use awk but, for some tasks, its just easier to use sed.
Some examples:
sed 4q Prints the first 4 lines of the file.
sed 's/yes/no/' Substitute "no" for the first occurance of "yes" on each line.
sed 's/yes/no/g' In this case, substitute "no" for all occurances of "yes".
sed 's/yes/no/2' Substitute "no" for the second occurance of "yes" on each line.
Email Management Software
Do your business need an email software solution for managing and marketing to lists of customers and/or prospects?
I recently became impressed while learning about iContact, which integrates different email marketing tools under one simple interface.
For example, they have very sophisticated autoresponders and an online survey tool.
iContact comes with lots of email templates, and is available with a 15 day free trial.
Using a service like this makes your life easier because they allow you to avoid the headaches associated with bulk email marketing, such as bounces, unsubscribes, and dealing with issues like ISP relations, feedback loops, and whitelists.
I recently became impressed while learning about iContact, which integrates different email marketing tools under one simple interface.
For example, they have very sophisticated autoresponders and an online survey tool.
iContact comes with lots of email templates, and is available with a 15 day free trial.
Using a service like this makes your life easier because they allow you to avoid the headaches associated with bulk email marketing, such as bounces, unsubscribes, and dealing with issues like ISP relations, feedback loops, and whitelists.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Utah Government's 4 Day Work Week Saved Money - But Not The Way They Thought
| Utah's State Government switched to a 4 day work week (four 10-hour days vs. five 8-hour days) when gas prices were at the peak. They thought they would save $3 million a year through less spending on energy (less gas for government vehicles, being able to shut down buildings, etc.) The program just finished its first year. Gas and energy costs dropped since then, and they only saved $502,000 from energy savings. About 1/6 of what they expected. They also saved $200,000 on janitorial expenses. But - as an unexpected surprise - they saved a whopping $4.1 million on overtime! It turns out that working 10 hours in a day allowed employees to get things done and, after 10 hours, they wanted to go home. From this data and feedback from employees, it looks like a four day work-week is very productive and a good work-life balance. |
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
FW: The frog and the programmer ..
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Thursday, October 01, 2009
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
New Resource For Making Money Through Blogging
I know that my readers are very technical, so a lot of them might have their own blog, and may even be interested in How to Make Money Blogging.
I recently learned about a website called YouSayToo.com that shows posts from different bloggers, and monetizes their site through programs like Google Adsense and Amazon affiliate links.
You can participate by either connecting your existing blog through its RSS feed, or else starting your own blog at their site. Either way, your posts will be displayed and you will participate in Revenue Sharing - getting 1/2 the revenue from ads displayed on your pages.
YouSayToo doesn't pay you directly. Instead, they have a simple, elegant solution. You provide your own Adsense and Amazon affiliate id's, and YouSayToo will rotate your links 50% of the time. For the other 50% of the time, either their id will be displayed, or those of your referrer.
Which brings up their other channel for Blogging for Money - you can refer other bloggers to YouSayToo. On the ads on their posts, their id's will be displayed 50% of the time, your id's 15% of the time, and YouSayToo's ids 35% of the time. This means that, if you refer a lot of people, you can make a lot of passive income from the site.
I recently learned about a website called YouSayToo.com that shows posts from different bloggers, and monetizes their site through programs like Google Adsense and Amazon affiliate links.
You can participate by either connecting your existing blog through its RSS feed, or else starting your own blog at their site. Either way, your posts will be displayed and you will participate in Revenue Sharing - getting 1/2 the revenue from ads displayed on your pages.
YouSayToo doesn't pay you directly. Instead, they have a simple, elegant solution. You provide your own Adsense and Amazon affiliate id's, and YouSayToo will rotate your links 50% of the time. For the other 50% of the time, either their id will be displayed, or those of your referrer.
Which brings up their other channel for Blogging for Money - you can refer other bloggers to YouSayToo. On the ads on their posts, their id's will be displayed 50% of the time, your id's 15% of the time, and YouSayToo's ids 35% of the time. This means that, if you refer a lot of people, you can make a lot of passive income from the site.
Hemingway vs. Unix
I read a good blog post on Writing Tips from Ernest Hemingway.
Hemingway could have been giving Unix advice:
Writing tips:
1. Use short sentences.
2. Use short paragraphs.
3. Use vigorous English - make your writing forceful.
4. Use positive words instead of negative ones - i.e. software is "stable" rather than "bug-free".
5. Write one page of masterpiece vs. 91 pages of garbage.
Unix Tips:
1. Create small subprograms that do one function.
2. Use subprograms to build a small program that does one task.
3. Make use of unix pipes and powerful command-line utilities.
4. Create programs that interface with other programs, instead of user interfaces.
5. A one page shell script vs. many pages of C or java.
Hemingway could have been giving Unix advice:
Writing tips:
1. Use short sentences.
2. Use short paragraphs.
3. Use vigorous English - make your writing forceful.
4. Use positive words instead of negative ones - i.e. software is "stable" rather than "bug-free".
5. Write one page of masterpiece vs. 91 pages of garbage.
Unix Tips:
1. Create small subprograms that do one function.
2. Use subprograms to build a small program that does one task.
3. Make use of unix pipes and powerful command-line utilities.
4. Create programs that interface with other programs, instead of user interfaces.
5. A one page shell script vs. many pages of C or java.
Understanding The Awk "Split" Command
Awk has a split command, which takes a string and splits it into an array, and returns the number of elements. The default separator is white space.
As an example, let us assume that a line in a logfile consists of:
4/2/2003 11:23:18 This is a log entry with timestamp.
and we have an awk program like this:
{
split($1,DATE,"/")
n = split($2,TIME,":")
print "Month is "DATE[1]
print "Minutes are "TIME[2]
print "Time has "n" parts"
}
Running the program against the logfile line would result in the following output:
Month is 4
Minutes are 23
Time has 3 parts
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