literary history

While looking for books from our past, we came across a great guide on the Google Answers pages. Someone asked for recommendations for a young child and got back a world of information. Here is the great answer, and it’s broken down by age group. Scroll down past the disclosure part and begin at “The Preschool Part”. Great books.

A different part of our past is the music of a people. Recently,  PBS ran a “Great Performances” show called From Shtetl to Swing. It an excellent compendium of the history of the influence of first-generation Jews on popular music, using Irving Berlin as its main frame.

Who stole the email?

No, today’s header is not a snarky re-working of Public Enemy’s masterpiece, “Who Stole the Soul”. Today, we talk about selling email addresses.

We have long been jealous (a wee bit, anyway) of our friends with their fancy domains and multiple email addresses. Why? Because they can set up email addresses for wherever they have to enter one (say, “yahoo@mydomain.com”). Then, when they get email to “yahoo@mydomain.com”, they know it’s yahoo BS spam.

Ah, but be jealous no longer, my boychicks! Gmail (oh, we love gmail), has got your back. Keen user Kevin Gunn figured out a very nice little hack for your gmail account. When you enter an email address, use “username+yahoo@gmail.com”. All your email–for those we-just-want-to-make-sure-this-is-a-real-address emails– will still get to you. However, they are also tagged with “+yahoo”. Set up a filter for those emails with “username+” in the “to” header, and bingo: instant spam filter.

Plus you know who stole your email address.

Once again, this is it
Turn it up
Here we go
But this time the rhyme
Gonna ask who did the crime
Then let’s get down to the nitty-gritty….

Nisht geshtoygn un nisht gefloygn

Ah, denial. Where would we be without it? Jeff Goldblum famously said in The Big Chill that a rationalization (a form of denial in our books, in most cases) is more important than sex. “Ever gone a week without a rationalization?” Ya know, Cleopatra wasn’t the only queen of Da Nile.

Today’s header comes from the Yiddish phrase which means “utter nonsense”. Michael Wex tells us, though, that its literal translation means, “It didn’t climb out and it didn’t fly up.” (Here he is on Fresh Air, so you can hear him.) Us? We love Yiddish, a language based on denial, on rebellion, on fighting back. Here are some handy Yiddish phrases, my little boychicks.

But back to denial. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently denied that the Holocaust–you know, that little PR problem Germany has with the extermination of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, intellectuals and non-“Aryans”– ever happened. What chutzpah. Oh, if only he spoke Yiddish so he could hit us with a good Nisht geshtoygn! Oh, if only it didn’t happen! Of course, then “that shitty little country Israel” (to quote the French ambassador to London) wouldn’t exist. And we love that shitty little country.

In fact, we love it so much that we built a special compass to find it. Behold, the “Incredible Jerusalem Compass“. Anywhere you are in the world, if you get a little ferblunjit, open this badboy up and find your way home. Now your bubbe will kvell with noches.

geek to live: underwear rotation and google’s rules

We’ve borrowed one of our favorite blog’s slogan (lifehacker) for today’s entry.

Firstly, underwear rotation. Here’s a topic near and dear to our hearts. When Mrs. Taco found us rotating our t-shirts (of which we have many), she laughed. Lo, how lonely we felt! As if we were the lone taquito left in a 3-rolled-with-guac combo from ‘Bertos. Because we not only rotate our shirts, but the underwear, and, in their own way, the socks as well. We’re not fanatics about it, but it helps keep everything worn at least somewhat evenly. So it was with great joy in our hearts that we read about ChangeLog’s wife rotating his underwear. We’re not alone!

Newsweek recently published Google’s 10 ten rules for employing IT workers. We can find no fault in these.

1. Hire by committee
2. Cater to every need
3. Pack them in. Almost every project at Google is a team project, and teams have to communicate. The best way to make communication easy is to put team members within a few feet of each other
4. Make coordination easy
5. Eat your own dog food
6. Encourage creativity
7. Strive to reach consensus
8. Don’t be evil
9. Data drive decisions
10. Communicate effectively.

Almost every good working environment I have had–where people are genuinely happy and look forward to coming to work–has focussed on most of these in some way or another. But some days, we would be happy enough with just some good communication.

Web animation that kicks your ass

Earlier this year, we were turned on to a great animated video done for an acoustic version of Radiohead’s “Creep”. We already loved that song, but man, that video was just fantastic! We couldn;t get enough of it. Here it is, animated Creep.

We hadn’t heard much from the animator nor seen any of his work, until we saw the JCB Song animated video he did. Holy crap. It has made several people in our affiliated offices weep like the little girls we knew they were. Just kidding. But damn, that is a great and wonderful combination of video and song.

The instigator behind this wonderful stuff is Lait Bahrani, and his site–where all his animations are available–is Monkeehub (awh, he’s playing on our love for monkeys, the cheeky boy!).

2 more fun things to watch: Here is this guy doing a silly dance all over the world. This has a special place in our hearts, as we love to dance silly dances when we are bored or want to entertain others. And then then is the “Chronic(-les) of Narnia” video (properly called “Lazy Sunday”) from Saturday Night Live. If we remember correctly, this is the 2nd Andy Samberg video that we’ve enjoyed. Keep up the good work.

EDIT: Oh! check that out! Previous Andy Samberg videos are available at Channel101.com, where we found the great series Kicked in the Nuts last year. Very nice.

some CSS references for project X

Sadly, we don’t use PHP and CSS every day, nor do we have people to talk with about them, so we scamper around the Internets a lot looking for information, help, and code examples.

One of the things we had to do with project X is make a pleasing design for end users. We consulted out books, but were uninspired. Besides, our books were “too fancy” for the project at hand. But happily, we found some inspiration in a british site that has downloadable web templates. We actually didn’t end up using any of their templates, but they were enough of a spark to get us focused on our end design.

We misplaced our facts about using images and links in CSS this project (our minds are growing fuzzy in the winter months–if only someone turned on the heat in this place!), so HTMLSource’s tips on using images with CSS helped a bit.

Also, there is the trickiness of making things appear and disappear in CSS. display: none and display:block to the rescue.

We really hate IE. Sure, we’ve been told that we will love IE7, but once bitten, twice shy and all of that. Still, we have to code with IE’s float errors and such. We love Position is Everything, and their page on magins, floats, and IE was a lifesaver. The problem is largely with varying box models. Thankfully, tantek has some nice box model hacks at the WaSP project that are nifty and helpful.

EDIT: Hey Mac users, Microsoft no longer has your back. Seems that after years of proprietary coding standards and forcing people to code especially for IE, MS is pulling the rug out from under Mac users. As of January 2006, they will no longer offer up downloads of IE, nor will they support it. The irony is that they recommend better, more standards-based browsers such as Safari and Opera. Which is exactly what we, as web developers, have been telling people to use for years.

php grab bag: more stepping stones for project X

Here’s one that we’ve come across before, and used before, and yet we had to learn this little business again: addslashes(). Use addslashes when you want your forms to take in whatever a user inputs to your forms. We used this previously to help thwart hacker attacks — using addslashes prevents users from inputting SQL code into your forms and screwing up your databases. Anyway, Harry Feucks makes a strong point about using addslashes vs. magic quotes.

We used a handy bit of a hack from A List Apart for aligning a form without tables, aligning a form with CSS using cross-floats and such.

We found some offhand PHP tutorials at tizag helpful this time around. They have an interesting argument for ASP v. PHP, though we have used both and find PHP to be perfectly great and robust for any size project. We also found their MySQL tutorials helpful as well.

Lastly, we have had some code examples from PHP freaks on our desktop for a while. We haven;t tried any of them, but we wanted to make sure they were noted before the links went away. There is their PHP hit counter. Their expanding and collapsing menus look interested (and might be helpful in another project where Eric Meyer’s menus don;t seem to be cutting the muster). And then there is their PHP calendar, though we have been loving PHP iCalendar (except for a few small bits we’d rather not get into right now).

Game night at the Taco house part 2

Turns out that Dragon’s Lair here in Austin has a great many of the games suggested by Stephen Baldwin (as described earlier). We were greatly and pleasently surprised to see the famed Setlers of Catan there, in addition to the many variants on it.

However, and this saddened us greatly, a minimum of three players are required. And the same went for the also highly touted Niagara. So very sad. Sometimes we can only round up a few tacos for games. So we asked a very helpful person there, (was his name Mike?), and he showed us — after lamenting that there is a great scarcity of 2-player games — a few that were good.

Lunch Money looked like fun — “A beer and pretzels sort of game”, said our guide — but 20 bucks for a throw-away card game seemed a bit much for us. The Lord of the Rings game looked interesting — “a collaborative game where the players work together against the game” — but we ultimately passed on it. And finally, we landed on Carcassonne (the original). Lots of fun, easy to learn, and takes about a half-hour to play.

The deal is you lay down tiles strategically and make a land-grab, all the while competing with your opponent(s) to make cities, roads, and cloisters. We appear to be King of the Clositers (picking up 4-5 of the 6 cloister tiles a game), thus creating Taco University on a regular basis. The Tacos played 4 games of it last night, and it was fun and different at every turn.

Btw, we asked Mike for his ultimate game recommendation (which, alas, was a minimum three player game, we think), and it is Betrayal at House on the Hill.

Game Night at the Taco House

We Tacos love games. Though, admittedly, we have tended to stick to a few favorties aver the years: Scrabble, Monopoly, Trival Pursuit, and Cranium (when we can get enough willing people about).

But the holidays are upon us, and that means family, so we went searching around for new and fun games. First, we got Matthew Baldwin’s 2005 list of Good Gift Games off The Morning News. And then we found Baldwin’s supplemental list of Good Gift Games at his website. We think his “all time Goog Gift Game (G3), The Settlers of Catan sounds intriguing.

But we also asked our friends, and they gave us an eyeful:

funkaliciouslj: Trivial Pursuit, Taboo, Dominoes, Uno, Pictionary, Chutes and Ladders

twosnoos: SET [which we love] and Wise or Otherwise

doctortina: confirmed SET, Clue, UNO, Pit, Balderdash, Taboo (Celebrity Edition), and Boggle

vintagehandbag: Map Tangle and Fact or Crap

just_jeff: Boggle!

stefan11: Chess

mojodragonfly: Risk

wretchmuffin: Stratego

noromdiam: Shift Tac Toe

kangaroosequins: Apples to Apples

Taboo, SET, Boggle, and Apples to Apples were recommended twice (A to A was on Baldwin’s list).

MySQL / PHP handy reference

We work a lot with MySQL and PHP. WEll, not as much as we’d like, but we are learning. And we are getting better. But in the mean time, we use a lot of references, including many online ones. Here are some handy things we recently came across to help us with a trouble ticket application we are building, some of which is embarrasingly simple and basic, but it helps to write it out:

MySQL manual on INSERT.

A very nicely laid out set of things you can do with your records from the Institute for Information Systems and and Computer Media. Includes some easy examples.

FAQTS has some good PHP FAQs going, including this nice reminder on how to access the last record in a table. Note: the queries on this page have a type. It should read “mysql_query” instead of what’s lsited.

Computing dot net helped clarify that  one should use mysql_num_rows, and not mysql_numrows.

We learned a bit about the necessity of using mysql_fetch_row for this early part of the project. PHP Addict helped us crack through the maddness in their help forum. The good folks at Zend (the PHP folks themselves) had many good examples for it. But it was Larry Ullman (whose PeachPit books are nice) who empahsized that it (or something like it) is always needed: “What you are printing is just a resource ID. You ALWAYS have to use mysql_fetch_array() to access the actual returned information“. For good measure, here is the PHP manual entry on mysql_fetch_array().