Have you ever met someone who can manage to make you laugh with almost every sentence they speak? Someone with a natural talent for wit? Well, I have found a site whose author has the gift of humor. The site is called The Deep Friar, and I don’t know what took me so long to find it. Friar has a spot on my links list now thanks to the laughter his articles have given me today, a day when I sorely needed some smiling medicine. ...

I’ve written about Merlin Mann in the past. His Inbox Zero talk is still as relevant today as when he first gave it – possibly more relevant with the information overload that some of us deal with daily. While he may post in fits and starts (with good reason), it is always a pleasure when he comes roaring back with both guns blazing. Imagine then my delight today when my RSS reader showed not one, not two, but four updates to the 5ives web site. If you’ve never visited the site, here’s a little background. ...

While watching coverage of the 2008 Olympic games this summer, I have noticed a trend in the reporting of medal counts. When the reporters speak about individuals who are competing in the Olympics, a lot of weight is given to the fact that they are earning gold medals and not just silver or bronze. Take the Michael Phelps story, for example. On Sunday morning, Phelps swam the butterfly leg on the 4x100-meter U.S. medley relay that held off Australia in a world record-setting victory, giving Phelps his eighth gold medal of these Games and his 14th over all.He had previously come close to the record, but as far as the count of Olympic medals go, this would not have been quite as impressive had he not won all 8 gold medals. Don’t get me wrong. I am not playing down his accomplishment. Rather I am setting a basis for my argument that follows. [caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“458.0”][ ](https://Ian W. Parker.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/medal_front.gif) Medals - Beijing 2008 (front)[/caption] ...

(via Smashing Magazine) Edison Morais over at Smashing Magazine has authored a post discussing horizontal navigation layouts in modern web sites and web applications. This was of interest to me as I had toyed with the idea of presenting my site in a horizontal layout several years ago. I managed to cobble together a working prototype and was ironing out some final details when I decided to scrap it. ...

Windows Live, that is. Microsoft has found an interesting way to leverage the screen real estate behind the search box on their Live Search site. Similar to Ask.com, they have placed skins on the search page… with a twist. As shown in the screen shot below, when the page loads, four boxes appear on the picture and then fade away. Mousing over those “hot spots” provides a tool tip with information related to the activity in the picture shown. Clicking on the box will take you to web pages with further research on the topic, or to search results on the topic. I have heard several opinions on this feature and all have been critical claiming that it is useless, distracting, and will not generate many, if any, clicks. I beg to differ. While Ask.com’s skins do nothing more than place a picture behind your search box – the feature is fluff and does not work if you turn on AskEraser to search privately – Live Search at least does something with that picture and makes it functional. This functionality is not required, but at least gives some meaning to the picture shown. It adds context to some beautiful photographs. I think it is intriguing, and I like learning more about what is going on in a picture that catches my attention. It’s like having your own personal tour guide. Even better, I can choose to ignore it and search as usual if I don’t have time to dilly-dally. It is unobtrusive. It looks like the feature has disappeared from Live Search, unfortunately. It has been replaced with a static photo showing highlights from the Olympics with a standard caption. Not that highlights from the Olympics are a bad thing. Quite the opposite. I just hope the aforementioned feature comes back once the games are over. There are still times when I simply prefer the plain, blank, minimalist simplicity of Google, too. It all depends on my mood. Microsoft may have received a lot of feedback that the hot spots were not well received, or perhaps traffic numbers indicated that the feature went largely unused. Whatever the case may be, we may never see the hot spot feature on Live Search again, and I think that’s a shame. ...

Perform a Google search for “sed” and the top result will be “Sed - An Introduction and Tutorial”. Bruce Barnett has written an excellent document that will help you quickly get up to speed using sed. It’s a must read for systems administrators who want to learn it. Sed is short for Stream EDitor. It is an application that allows you to write a script to edit a file and provide a file name to be modified ((More about sed can be found on the Sed FAQ )). It is frequently used for quick global substitutions. Along with sed, awk is another tool that should be in your Unix tool box. Lucky for us, Bruce has also written a a guide to awk. He has written several other tutorials on Unix shell programming which can be found on his site ...

(via allovertheInternet) Consumption is a way of life in the United States of America. Whether it be food, drink, or the latest gadget to splash across the wide-screen, plasma, high-definition television screen, people of all walks of life are called upon to open their wallets to keep the economy strong. It is a lifestyle. In the midst of this lifestyle, the iPhone has risen to the top of the heap as the gadget icon of the year for 2008. If you’re anybody, then you’ve got an iPhone and you flaunt it. The problem is that almost anyone can afford an iPhone thanks to the price drop that accompanied the release of the 3G version earlier this summer. So how do you stand out in the crowd if the entire crowd has an iPhone? Well, if you aren’t fabulously wealthy, but just mildly rich, Armin Heinrich has just the application for you. It’s called “I Am Rich”, and it will cost you a paltry $999.99 USD. The author describes his application. ...

So far, this has been a great week for finding useful Unix/Linux reference on the Internet. The Unix Toolbox is a very lengthy, yet concise reference. This document is a collection of Unix/Linux/BSD commands and tasks which are useful for IT work or for advanced users. This is a practical guide with concise explanations, however the reader is supposed to know what s/he is doing. [caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“458.0”] cb.vu[/caption] ...

It is quite possible that We missed a lot of interesting online articles before the advent of RSS. Either that, or We spent large amounts of time perusing web sites and online magazines and newspapers to the detriment of productivity and our eyes. I honestly cannot remember what i did before RSS. Whatever the case may be, the simple syndication pointed me to the On Language column in the New York Times Magazine online for this week. The column is usually written by William Safire, but this week a guest columnist took over while he was on vacation. In the article titled “Me, Myself and I”, Caroline Winter discusses the capitalization of the pronoun “i” and how it has come to be common practice to use the “all-purpose capital” in written English. The article is an interesting read and a quick one, too, coming in at just under 800 words. What compelled me to mention it was this statement from Caroline. ...

Today, i happened upon a really extensive and well-written article on URL Rewriting for Beginners. Here’s a little snippet from the introduction. URL rewriting can be one of the best and quickest ways to improve the usability and search friendliness of your site. It can also be the source of near-unending misery and suffering. Definitely worth playing carefully with it - lots of testing is recommended. With great power comes great responsibility, and all that. ...