A multi-lingual project I’m currently working on requires a lot of converting foreign language characters into their HTML entities. After half an hour of doing this manually, I got fed up and created this little utility to do it automatically. Hopefully it comes in handy for someone else too.
Wow. Since I started my little Geekout.ca initiative my perception of the Toronto web community has been radically altered. In short, there are a lot of us! Events like #hohoto brought a lot of web industry people out of the woodwork, and if you’ve been following any Toronto webbies on Twitter in the last week or so you know that there’s a movement afoot to establish an open community of like-minded web industry folk.
In my opinion, this emphasizes the need for an online place for all of us to network and collaborate. The fact that all these people live and work within a few kilometres of me, and that I, someone who tries to put a lot of effort into staying tuned in, didn’t know anything about them, is a pretty strong indication that we all need to start communicating.
If you’re on Twitter, start paying attention to #tsTO, I think this may be the beginning of something great.
I’ve recently started reading Wired Magazine more and more, and finally decided it might be worth getting a subscription. When I went to the Wired site, I noticed they currently had a deal on 12 issues for $10. How could anyone pass that up?!? Then as I started filling out the subscription form, I realized it was for U.S. citizens only, so I clicked over to the Canadian form. I suspected it would be a little more expensive for exchange rates, and a little extra shipping cost, but to my surprise, the same 12 issues cost $40 here in Canada. What the hell? Why the extra cost? Shipping to Canada is not THAT expensive, and the exchange rate is more or less moot at this point..it’s like sales tax. Needless to say, I suddenly became less interested in a subscription, and will pick and choose my issues at the newsstand.
Last night I was putting some brain power into finding ways to better collaborate with clients, team members, and anyone else is do tasks for.
I’ve recently started to use Things, which I’ve fallen in love with, but there’s currently no way for others to add to my list. Basecamp, and Backpack allow for shared to-do lists, but they don’t let me organize all my to-dos in one master list in the way that I want to digest them.
We have syndication for blogs (rss), calendars (ics), etc. but, as far as I know, there’s no universal format for porting to-do lists from one application to another.
WHY NOT!?
If there were, anyone could make me a to-do list, send me the subscription link, and I could pull it into the to-do list reader of my choice (Things). No more entering and re-entering to-dos.
I really don’t see it even being that complicated. This is stripped down a bit of course, but a to-do feed could look something like this:
<list title="My To-Do List">
<item>
<status>incomplete</status></span>
<description>Mail out invitations</description>
</item>
<item>
<status>incomplete</status>
<description>Throw killer party</description>
</item>
<item>
<status>complete</status>
<description>Make invitations</description>
</item>
</list>
If anyone’s interested I say we look into this further and solve our to-do list woes.
On a fairly regular basis I need to clear my DNS cache when I move a site from one server to another for example. In the past, I always did this in terminal with lookupd -flushcache. However, today when I tried this I received a “command not found” error.
I don’t know when it disappeared, as I seem to recall using it recently, but none the less, lookupd was gone. As it turns out, lookupd was replaced with dscacheutil. So, now when you want to flush your cache simply enter dscacheutil -flushcache in terminal and Bob’s your uncle.
» You really should follow me on Twitter.
