Category: "Fun"

How to Bring Great Ideas to Life

  • First, check to see if someone’s already done it. Look closely enough to see if they did it well, or if your idea is better. Inventing a better mousetrap can take alot of time, so be sure it is worth the investment, even if it is ‘only’ time. Time is money.
  • In all likelihood, you will have to start pursuing the idea with less than what you need. The lack may be time, money, knowledge. Don’t be deterred. Take stock of your assets and find ways to make the most of them.
  • Pick a very simple starting goal and focus on it. Implement basic functionality, or a sophisiticated architecture, but remain on track. You won’t be able to do everything well, at once. Ensure you plan to address issues in a logical order and follow your plan.
  • Consider lead time for some tasks. Publicity and presence can take time. Start finding marketing or connection opportunities as early as possible.
  • Don’t just chase money. Unfortunately, many good ideas aren’t profitable. If your goal is to make money, find a new goal. Choose a passion, something you really believe in and follow it.
  • Persist. Don’t give up. Keep trying, accept that it will take time. Understand there will be iterations, some work will be discarded, some assumptions will be wrong.

md5 just a test ... echo


echo md5('just a test');

yields the following string:

<!--c6db3524fe71d6c576098805a07e79e4-->

Therefore, if you have an HTML page, and would like to provide an interesting response to queries that are attempting to execute the echo md5 just a test command - you can hard-code the string, as above, in comments.

Any page can deliver the string.

:)

Management by Chocolate

I needed an email forwarder created, definitely a trivial task. The type of task that is easily lost in the “I’ll get to it later” collection and forgotten, both by the requestor and the person responsible.

Instead of the usual mundane email, I took 5 pieces of chocolate with me. I started in one cube and explained why I wanted the forwarder. The cube resident agreed it was a valid request, accepted a chocolate, and sent me to the person that could create the forwarder.

I took the 4 remaining pieces of chocolate to another cube and explained what I wanted, handing the chocolate to the guy with the privileges.

2 hours later, I had my forwarder.

I replied to the email with a thank you, and an image of an ice cold beer.

Management principles - why this was more successful than some of my other requests -

  • emails are easy to read and close. A person, with chocolate, is more memorable

  • A reward or incentive (chocolate), regardless of how trivial or small, is of value in that it represents appreciation.

  • There was cooperation. Although I knew what I wanted, I did take the time to ensure it was a valid request with a good application.

  • The request was clear. Even though it was verbal, it was easy to understand what I wanted, so that’s what I got.

  • Finally, it is important to say thank you. After all, as Horton might say, “a request is a request, no matter how small.”

* Horton credits to Dr. Seuss

Change

Fast CSS skin map idea

*** This post and link superseded by the ‘color map’ blog (see above) ***

The link provides a set of instructions and code which allow you to read the CSS files from a target application, then read CSS files from an existing site, and map the colors from the existing site into the target application, using sed.

This is brute force design, it would be very valuable for rapidly skinning an application to help a potential client visualize your application delivering their site.

The success of the approach is affected by the colors of both designs, this is a very simple method, the number of colors will impact how well they map.

The basic idea is to convert the colors from RGB into HSV, then reorder the HSV code into VSH - so the brightness takes precedence. In this case, it is assumed that the lightest colors will map to each other. Hue is virtually disregarded by its position.

The mechanics of the process are functioning as I wanted them to, although I haven’t tested it with live sites.

It also creates a shell script to generate image files of the colors, using ImageMagick, which is interesting but not actually used.

Requisite knowledge: Linux, PHP, bash, sed, regular expressions helpful.

I tried to put the text from the above link in the blog, but it didn’t work. Too many bizarre character strings.

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