Jeremy Tunnell User Experience | Project Management | SEO

I have just finished a wonderful book, Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read, which ostensibly is about the origins and the neural underpinnings of the human ability to read. Dehaene not only takes on the conventional wisdom that reading is a sequential, letter by letter process, but he unwittingly sheds light on the foundations of many universally accepted usability practices.

Watchparty.tv is a site that allows users to host or join “watch parties” of popular television shows. During a watch party, users visit a webpage that aggregates their thoughts (blips), along with an opinion tracker and polls. The benefit of the watch party approach is allowing disparate users to watch TV shows “together”.

123exchanges.com is an eBay type listing site based on the concept of selling through videos instead of written descriptions. The site provides a way for sellers to register and upload videos of things for sale, and it provides browsing and searching functionality for potential buyers. They are a startup based in the Washington DC area that is approximately 6 months old.

SELECT AddGeometryColumn(‘public’, ‘table’,'column’, 4269, ‘POINT’, 2) This will add a new column to the table and add an entry to the metadata table (the 4269 specifies my reference system, more on that below). It will also add a column to “table” and several constraint checks on the new column. Next, you’ll need to know about [...]

My OS is CentOS, so I used yum to handle installs from the rpm database. The thing with CentOS is that it is purposefully one step behind the cutting edge, so the most recent version of certain applications are not available (PHP, Postgres, etc). To get around this limitation, you have to instruct CentOS to [...]

Step 2 – Construct the query Yahoo offers a REST interface to handle the conversion so we can use either a plain HTTP GET request, or if you want to do it inside of a script that is doing many other things you can use CURL, a set of very useful functions for querying and [...]

Troubleshooting I isolated the process into three components: the email builder (my code), the mailer application, and the sending application (in this case, smtp through postfix). I followed the below process to troubleshoot: Changed the mailer application to use the built in PHP mail() function, and I also tried sending using a completely different SMTP [...]

Background I’ll just link to the best places i’ve found to read up on the background. Read these first if you want to understand whats going on: Excellent intro to character encodings Joel On Software, on Unicode The Details In order to get your website working harmoniously with one character set, you first have to [...]

The most confusing thing is when you use the perl script on the official apache site here it’s written for the NDBM format (which isn’t available on my box). Here’s the perl script: #!/path/to/bin/perl ## ## txt2dbm — convert txt map to dbm format ## use NDBM_File; use Fcntl; ($txtmap, $dbmmap) = @ARGV; open(TXT, “

RewriteEngine On RewriteMap redirects txt:/home/…/…/rewriterules.map RewriteRule ^(.*)$ ${redirects:$1|$1} [R,L,NC] How does it work? (See here for details.) The first line turns on mod_rewrite. The next line sets the location of the map file (the two column list of source/destinations). The third line sets a RewriteRule that says “take everything in the request uri” (.*), and [...]