Airlines are quickly learning that social media tools, particularly Twitter, can act as an excellent customer service channel. Source: Twitter is handy tool for airline passengers – CNN.com.
Here is a list of major passenger airline Twitter names:
Alaska Airlines: @AlaskaAir
American Airlines: @AmericanAir
Continental: @Continental
Delta: @DeltaAssist
Frontier: @flyfrontier
JetBlue: @JetBlue
Southwest: @SouthwestAir
United: @United
US Airways: @USAirways
Virgin America: @VirginAmerica
June 8, 2011, is World IPv6 Day (source: Nerdiest Holiday Ever: World IPv6 Day). It might be frivolous to celebrate now, but wait a couple years (or months) and see what happens to IPv4. Here’s a clue, we’ve run out of IPv4 addresses – they’re all taken/owned by companies.
You can think of IPv6 in a couple ways. It’s like making the other 8 planets (yes I maintain Pluto is a planet) inhabitable when Earth runs out of livable space.
With IPv6 every IPv4 address could have it’s own IPv4 address.
While IPv4 allows 32 bits for an Internet Protocol address, and can therefore support 232 (4,294,967,296) addresses, IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, so the new address space supports 2128 (approximately 340 undecillion or 3.4×1038
) addresses. Source: wikipedia | IPv6
Show off your <body> on April 9, 2011. This year they’re calling it Naked CSS Day and there’s more plugins, tools, and code than ever before to help web designers strip their sites of CSS – down to bare HTML.
This is not an April Fools joke. It’s real. Web geeks have been doing this since 2006. Look for the hashtag #cssnakedday on Twitter and make plans to go CSS-Naked on April 9.
Here’s the text from the Naked CSS Day website:
The website you just came from is not broken, the owner of it has decided to participate in Naked CSS Day 2011! Naked CSS Day is a event that is held once per year to celebrate good & well planned design. The website you arrived from will be back to its normal styled state tomorrow. Keep calm and carry on.
The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good ‘ol play on words. It’s time to show off your <body> for what it really is.
Enter your email address to be alerted before April 9th of Naked CSS Day, this will give you time to get your name in our official list of participants.
Then on April 9th, simply remove all CSS from your website, stripping it entirely of its design.
Also, Developers, Some have suggested codes & scripts have been put together into a nice list.
“This is a fun idea, fully in line with the reasons for creating CSS in the first place.
While most designers are attracted by the extra presentational capabilities, saving HTML from becoming a presentational language
was probably a more important motivation for most people who participated in the beginning.” – Håkon Wium Lie
UPDATE:
It seems the site where I got the content for Naked CSS Day 2011 isn’t participating – ironic I know. But, there are a few around the world Tweeting about Naked CSS day.
I’m putting this post on my site because I’m tired of search for the commands.
There are plugins that will clean up your WordPress wp_posts table, but if you have access to the database you can do this yourself.
You should always make a backup copy of your database just in case something goes wrong. This is a “duh” but it happens and things can go wrong. You’ll be deleting records from a table so before you do, make a backup.
Run the following command on your database. If you have a shared host with a cPanel you probably have phpmyadmin which is your user interface to your MySQL database. WordPress usually installs in MySQL as wrdp. You want click on the right database for your WordPress install. Once you are in the right database you can run this query:
DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = "revision";
This will delete all the revisions from WordPress. Just out of curiousity you might take a note of how much space the wp_posts table was taking up before and after running this query. That will tell you how much room you recovered.
This step is optional. If you are sweating bullets right now after deleting 20,000 revision posts, you can skip this step.
Optimization “releases” the data you deleted from memory thus freeing memory. Its like delete puts data in the trashcan and optimize empties the trash. To optimize the wp_posts table run the following query:
OPTIMIZE TABLE wp_posts;
Check to see the size of this table. In the YIW database, the “wp_posts” is only 3,4 Mb in size, as you can see in the photo below. It’s a lot of space saved, don’t you think?
I’ve run this query several times over the years. It’s like cleaning up your computer’s hard drive – the more you use it the more you should clean it up. There were my numbers.
Start 407 rows | 792.1 KB
Deleted 61 rows | 96.1 KB
Finish 346 rows | 695.4 KB
Hope this works for you. I know it works for me and I use it about once a year or so.
(This incident occurred on March 3, 2011. OpenDNS released its block of Gravatar within a week.)
This is huge: OpenDNS is denying access to gravatar.com. When I saw that avatars on my blog were broken I tried to look at the image on gravatar.com and got the following message page:
This site was blocked by OpenDNS in response to either the Conficker virus, the Microsoft IE zero-day vulnerability, or some equally serious vulnerability.
If you think this shouldn’t be blocked, please email us at contact@opendns.com.
This is huge because WordPress has avatars built in to the code. They link to images from gravatar.com. So every blog that uses avatar just got a lot of broken images. According to WordPress they have encouraged the use of Gravatars since WordPress 2.5:
WordPress 2.5 marries theme authors and casual WordPress users together with support for Gravatars in the WordPress Administration Panels. Theme authors have an option to include Gravatars in their designs, and are recommended to do so. WordPress users can easily control their Gravatar usage in the Settings > Discussion Administration Panel. via Using Gravatars « WordPress Codex.
My personal experience with OpenDNS is not a good one. They’ve basically hijacked my “broken” Google search results at home. Let me explain. I have suddenlink internet service (no trolls please). I used to have Google as my default search-in-the-url-box search engine. Back then – about three years ago – if I typed in a URL that didn’t exist, Google would return search results for what I typed. NOW, OpenDNS takes over the search from Google and displays their results which are not the same as Google. It’s basically hijacking and extortion. OpenDNS is paid or sells links to paying customers to display their results were Google gets paid to display a few results at the top but everything else (free) is displayed below.
I did a check of forums, and OpenDNS doesn’t have a clear cut or openly viewable documentation on it’s practices. It appears as though they deny domains at random on a daily basis. In that way – read the above message – it appears they are extorting domain owners to contact them (and possibly pay) to get removed from their blacklist. If that’s the case, that’s bad. How could one company hold that much control of the Internet?
UPDATE:
OpenDNS Twitter reply
After I wrote this and posted a couple tweets I guess I got noticed. I got a comment on this blog and OpenDNS responded with a tweet.
Thanks. I guess all of us can turn on avatars in WordPress again.
Three weeks ago I wrote about using a little technology to help me keep on track with reading the Bible in a year. Well, I went one step further and made a mashup of a PHP calendar with a daily verse list (it was XML), linked each verse to its mobile version of the NIV Bible, and voilà – a calendar with links to Bible verses.
Guide to #MBteamS Victory
Full text available at http://mbteams.com/participate/
#MBtweetrace Prototype Test 2: Parking next to SLS AMG
#MBtweetrace Prototype Test 2 “That’s Close”
Official Site: http://www.mbtweetrace.com/mercedes/prototype/
This effort needs to be coordinated for us to move this vehicle. That said, there are a few details that our supporters, both Twitter ninjas and Twitter newbies, need to know. This is still a draft. Please use the comments below to ask for questions, clarification, etc.
1. What You Need
You need a Twitter account. http://twitter.com.
You need to follow @tsand on Twitter. http://twitter.com/tsand.
If you don’t, can’t, won’t do the Twitter thing, skip down to “Following #MBteamS Online” below. We understand. There are other ways to play.
2. Tweet Fuel
We receive 1 unit of Tweet Fuel each time #MBteamS shows up on Twitter during race hours.
Example: I am cheering for #MBteamS.
We receive 3 units of Tweet Fuel if you re-tweet something that @tsand puts on Twitter during race hours.
Example: RT @tsand I may hire my Co-Driver to be my life coach after this trip. #MBteamS
*IMPORTANT NOTE*
Many Twitter applications, including the Twitter website itself, have a handy “Retweet” button. This “Retweet” button is poison. Unless you know what you are doing, it’s always better to manually retweet by typing in…
RT @tsand I may hire my Co-Driver to by my life coach after this trip. #MBteamS
*UNDERSTANDING HOW TO RETWEET PROPERLY IS A HUGE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE*
3. Challenges
A. Our primary challenge is to keep the car filled with Tweet Fuel. This requires you, the Pit Crew, to be typing #MBteamS into Twitter (1 point) and re-tweeting @tsand (3 points). It’s our job to do fun things along the way in order to keep things interesting.
B. Mercedes-Benz will be issuing challenges to both Todd and I in the car as well as challenges for our Pit Crew to participate in. We won’t know what these are until we hit the road. Follow @tsand at http://twitter.com/tsand for the latest on the challenges and how you can help.
4. Timing
Understanding timing is key. We only accumulate Tweet Fuel during race hours. There is a 30 minute “Fuel Up” period each morning that will be critical as we start each day with no fuel. Note: We also “burn” Tweet Fuel on our travel, meaning that we’ll need a nice stream of tweets throughout the day to keep us moving. We will be stopped if we run out of Tweet Fuel.
Wednesday, February 2
Fuel Up: 7:30am – 8:00am PST. (8:30 MST, 9:30 CST, 10:30 EST)
Race: 8:00am PST. (9:00 MST, 10:00 CST, 11:00 EST)
Thursday, February 3
Fuel Up: 7:30 – 8:00am MST. (6:30 PST, 8:30 CST, 9:30 EST)
Race: 8:00am MST. (7:00 PST, 9:00 CST, 10:00 EST)
Friday, February 4
Fuel Up: 6:30am – 7:00am MST. (5:30 PST, 7:30 CST, 8:30 EST)
Race: 7:00am MST. (6:00 PST, 8:00 CST, 9:00 EST)
5. Following #MBteamS Online
Twitter: http://twitter.com/tsand
Follow Todd Sanders on Twitter. Twitter #MBteamS: http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23MBteamS
See everything that everybody is saying about #MBteamS on Twitter.
Facebook: http://facebook.com/mbteams
We are pushing fun pre-race stuff here for people to play with.
Website: http://mbteams.com
This is a place to tie together many different pieces and parts associated with this adventure.
St. Jude: http://fundraising.stjude.org
We have a site with St. Jude where we are trying to raise an additional $5,000 for our charity. St. Jude received $25,000 for our participation and another $20,000 if we win this thing.
Spread it. Include #MBteamS in your Tweets
We are officially past the first week of 2011. Are you reading the Bible this year? With the help of a little technology I can stay on schedule to read the New International Version (NIV) Bible in a year.
Reposted at http://teamsiems.wordpress.com/2011/01/08/daily-bible/
From xkcd store : QR Code Shirt
I think this will lead to securing transmission – or at least make point-to-point carriers responsible for the transmission of emails. To continue their analogy: the feds can’t roll up on a mail-carrier and raid your grandma’s Christmas card; they can’t wiretap your phone lines or cell towers (unless the president says they can under ‘national security’). They shouldn’t be allowed to spy on the Internet and grab email transmissions (but it says email storage).
In a landmark decision issued today in the criminal appeal of U.S. v. Warshak, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the government must have a search warrant before it can secretly seize and search emails stored by email service providers. Closely tracking arguments made by EFF in its amicus brief, the court found that email users have the same reasonable expectation of privacy in their stored email as they do in their phone calls and postal mail. Source: eff.org | Breaking News on EFF Victory: Appeals Court Holds that Email Privacy Protected by Fourth Amendment