So you went through the extensive interview process, landed the job, and now you are looking for you work station. Maybe you are a fresh grad stuck in the cubicle oasis or possibly a higher level candidate with a plush office with some extra cash to spend from that signing bonus. What better way to make an impression on your first day of the job then to provide your own state of the art workstation.

I am pleased to announce the discovery of the mother of all Workstations, The Emperor 1510 will set you back about $5,000 not including shipping , but oh God is it worth every penny. Emporior Scorpion shape, adjustable keyboard tray, LED lighting, adjustable foot rest, steel frame, tilting capability, the list goes on...

If you are going to work some long hours, then do it in this and make a statement.

I could make the case that something like this would pay for itself!

Seriously, $5k could be made up pretty quickly if you account for all the work that'd get done as well as employee retention. I'd also say there is plenty of money to be earned in having employees enjoying getting to their desk and not wanting to leave it at the end of the day.

The easiest method for multiple dynamic and dependant drop down lists, period.
The following tutorial was designed to be a very easy and quick way to set up dynamic drop down lists (a.k.a. select lists) that are also dependant?meaning that the second drop down list is populated based on the option that is selected from the first drop down list. I?ve looked all over for tutorials on this subject, and there are quite a few. But in my opinion, they are often far more complicated than they really need to be. Not to mention that someone new to the world of web development or programming couldn?t possibly figure out how to implement those examples for his or her own needs.

an hour or more of searching and I found the solution I needed, finally. Bookmarking it here for future reference.

If FriendFeed wants to offer full-service conversation tracking, though, it is going to need to go beyond the early-adopter crowd that has opted in to having their activities imported into the site. FriendFeed is going to need to proactively discover and import feeds from users of Twitter, Delicious, SlideShare, BrightKite, etc., and bloggers who have not set up FriendFeed accounts. This will increase the usefulness of the site's search function by an order of magnitude.

There's a missing product

Wednesday, July 01, 2009 by Dave Winer.

There's a missing product in the social networking space. I'm going to try to describe it, but I think it may be hard. But I'm willing to give it a go. 

A little over a week ago I got an email from a very good friend in Europe asking if it was true that I was going to Reboot. I replied with an email saying it was. And I thought to myself, I thought by posting that fact to Twitter four or five times that I would have informed him of this. It is not his fault. There's a missing product. 

Yesterday, I was trying to figure out what to do with the four hours downtime between flights in CPH, so I posted a note to Twitter hoping someone with some time to spare that was interesting would respond. I got two responses to my blog post, when it was two hours into the downtime. It's not their fault. There's a missing product. 

Here's what I think the missing product would do. 

It would allow me to make announcements the way companies make announcements. The announcements would have good metadata attached, and would be stored in a database. People who follow me in this system are saying "I want to know everything Dave announces." Key words in that sentence: Know and Dave. I don't just want these facts to stream by in a river. I want Dave's name to go bold in a short list of people I choose to follow. Unlike a river, where I want volume and don't care about missing an item, in this product the oppositie is true. I place high value on not missing anything. I want to know literally everything Dave announces. (Or Paolo or Karin or you get the idea.) 

I started to get a clue that such a product was needed when I started the FOD feed on Twitter. It monitors the blogs of people who are so important to me that I never want to miss one of their posts. People like NakedJen, Jay Rosen, Sylvia Paull, Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, Fred Wilson and Michael Gartenberg, and people I don't even know personally like Paul Krugman and Nate Silver. It was a success. It has kept me in these people's loops, and it required them to do nothing special. Now I'm thinking about what comes next when I want other people to do something similar with me.  

It may be that just monitoring blog posts is enough. Tweets are too cheap, but keeping track of people through blogs may be just right.  

Still thinking about it.  

There is more than one missing product :) But that's one that's true. It'd be nice if people had the ability to label their outbound news (blogs, tweets, etc) as important so we don't bother tracking back across their posts about Airport landings when trying to learn what their latest life news may be.

I'm doing a code review for a client (which I've been doing a lot lately and boy is it fun to find bugs in someone else's code for once ;) and noticed his home page was using CFFEED to put CNN's latest articles. However, he wasn't doing any caching at all. I whipped up a quick mod for him to show a simple example of caching. It doesn't have any fancy way to force a refresh, but quickly sped up his home page. So here is a quick code snippet showing simple caching of CFFEED:

<cfset feedurl = "http://www.mugglenet.com/feeds/news.xml">
<cfset cacheMinutes = 60>

<!--- check if cached, and not too old --->
<cfif not structKeyExists(application,"rsscache") or dateDiff("n", application.rsscache.created, now()) gt cacheMinutes>
   <cffeed source="#feedurl#" query="entries">
   <cfset application.rsscache = structNew()>
   <cfset application.rsscache.data = entries>
   <cfset application.rsscache.created = now()>
</cfif>

<cfdump var="#application.rsscache#">

All I do is check for an application variable. If it doesn't exist, or the 'created' value for the cache is more than cacheMinutes old, I reload from cffeed. While not as fancy as a conditional get, it is certainly a lot simpler.

Caching a CFFEED