I was checking out The Tyee, a BC-based online mag, and noticed an ad in the sidebar for “Hammer Drop. One Product. One Deal. Every Day.” It turns out that Hammer Drop is a product of Home Depot, but is virtually identical to the offbeat one-deal-a-day site and (I think) the originator of the idea, Woot.com. Woot.com has more interactivity — for instance, a comment board for each product, where insta-reviews and commentary on the product, previous products, your dog, etc. are posted.
I also recently found Jellyfish, which offers a Smack of the Day, a pretty slick Flash-based variant of the deal-a-day concept, modelled on a game show concept. I know, I know, it’s Flash. But it’s one of the first examples of useful flash I’ve seen in a while. The interactivity is cool. Their idea is that the price of the item keeps dropping until enough people have purchased to exhaust the supply. It’s mostly gamer-focused, but cool nonetheless.
Archive for the Category » Tech Bytes «
My source for most that is intellectual and not computer-related is, of course, CBC Radio, one of the few non-Christian-rock stations available in the Rainy River District. This morning, the day after the Tragically Hip played in Thunder Bay, there was a brief piece on their sponsor for the Ontario leg of their tour
I just finished watching Ghost in the Shell, a film that many said was a significant influence on the Wachowski brothers in their creation of the Matrix trilogy.
I’m a geek. I get geek stuff. I don’t get this film.
I see the references as noted in the wikipedia article on the film, and their impact on the development of the Matrix trilogy. What I don’t get is the “massive significance” that has been noted by many in the manga/cyberpunk/tech groups who revere this film.
It’s kind of embarassing for me as someone who, if given the opportunity, would wholeheartedly support the embedding of camera and recording equipment in my body
I’m on a new path to get better at PHP/MySQL, now that we’ve got a new programmer on staff, and I can abuse him as a resource. A cool snipped for poor-man’s content management is what I came up with today. If you have a text file that a user wants to edit, but also wants to strip the pesky slashes from, and interpret carriage returns when writing the file, here’s what I came up with. It also prints the file’s modification date as an “Updated last” line:
<?
//Declare the session variable value
session_start();
//declare the report variable
if(isset($_POST[‘report’]))
{
$report = str_replace("\r\n", "<br>", $_POST[‘report’]);
//declare and open the file for writing
$myfile = "myfile.txt";
$fh = fopen($myfile, ‘w’) or die("can’t open file");
//write the form data to the report
fwrite($fh, (stripslashes($report)));
fclose($fh);
}
?>
Then we have the printed text, as well as the form, rolled into one file:
<html>
<body>
<p>
<? echo date( "F d\, Y", filemtime(‘myfile.txt’) )." – Last updated"; ?>
</p>
<p>
<? include(‘myfile.txt’); ?>
</p>
<p>Write the daily report:<br>
<form action="<? echo $PHP_SELF ?>" method="post" name="report">
<textarea name="report" rows="9" cols="94"></textarea><br>
<input type="submit" name="submitButtonName">
</form>
</body>
|</html>
PHP kicks bum.
2.5 miles, 6.5 mph, 2.5 degree incline
A few friends and I have been working on a point-to-multipoint wireless network since (feels like forever) April. We’ve run into a number of bumps in the road, which have resulted in spending of cash, pulling of hair, yelling at each other, climbing on rooftops in the dark, and cutting down large trees.
Tonight, we had major success — three-player Halo 2 via xbox with voice mics, and no lag. (yes, we’ve been testing with something other than game consoles. We’re not *completely* stupid