Posts from — February 2009

Check out his awesome Multi-Touch display from Stantum!

Now, this is a screen that I would use!

Did you see how smooth that was!?  Can’t wait for that screen to come to a phone!  Eat your heart out Apple…

Yay!  The State budget has been approved!

Disclaimer.  I’m going to swear a few times in this article, so if you don’t want to hear that, ya’ll can SHOO.

Go read this article at the LA Times. Yes, I’m serious.

Ok.  Did you notice how now that we have the budget passed, everyone is talking about how we can stop this from happening again?  There are a lot of ideas out there:  Maybe we can dock lawmaker’s pay, maybe we can change it so that only 55% of lawmakers have to approve a budget, maybe we can lower the amount of votes required for new taxes, etc. just to name a few.

But, what’s the ONE thing they AREN’T talking about doing?

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Check out this news about Limp Bizkit!

To be honest, I didn’t follow their music much previously, but I had the pleasure of meeting Fred a few months ago and he’s a really nice guy.  Very down to earth.  You can chat with some of the guys directly on their website, and follow their progress on several Twitter feeds as well.  I’m excited they are back together and am looking forward to seeing their new work…

The original line-up of Limp Bizkit is back, do you believe in miracles? If so, then you can believe Limp Bizkit is back to do it ALL again! Album! Tour! Worldwide!

(New York, NY) February 12, 2009 – The original line-up of Fred Durst, Wes Borland, Sam Rivers, John Otto, and DJ Lethal are back from an eight year hiatus to bring their world back to ours. Fred Durst and Wes Borland said in a joint statement:

“We decided we were more disgusted and bored with the state of heavy popular music than we were with each other. Regardless of where our separate paths have taken us, we recognize there is a powerful and unique energy with this particular group of people we have not found anywhere else. This is why Limp Bizkit is back.”

The guys will kick off a world tour in the Spring on the overseas festival circuit with headline shows sprinkled in throughout Eastern Europe and Europe, selected dates include, in late May, Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic countries where Limp Bizkit has never played before despite huge demand, along with major festivals like Rock Am Ring and Rock Im Park in Germany, more dates to be announced shortly. A new album, which would be the original group’s first full-length effort since 2000, is also planned. Limp Bizkit’s first three albums have sold over 20 million copies in the U.S. alone, and another 13 million in the rest of the world.

And, it could have close to a Billion in Gold! Dang, I really did choose the wrong career…

To alleviate any confusion, this is NOT the HMS Victory upon which Admiral Nelson was killed in the Battle of Trafalgar.

To get information on this ship, check: HMS Victory.

For Admiral Nelson’s ship: HMS Victory.

Your Second Amendment Rights: Under Fire?

While Lou Dobbs is not your average CNN Libtard, when the network allows a story like this to run, its time to take notice.

Like RegEx, but dislike its complexity?

Never fear!  RegExr is here!  This is a great, must-have tool that allows you to remove the typical iterative guess-work loop that happens when writting Regular Expressions.  I don’t know about you, but normally, this is my RegEx process:

1. Write what I think will work for a RegEx match.
2. Upload and test.
3. Crap, I’m wrong.
4. Write it again.
5. If you haven’t done this 5-7 times yet, Go To Step 2, otherwise Exit.

Know what I mean?  RegEx is one of those things that I’ve used quite a bit over the years, but not enough to actually remember the syntax off-hand, like some can.  In fact, each time I use RegEx, I kinda have to relearn it a bit.  Thus, the iterative process above.

Well, RegExr ends all that, as it allows you to see what your expressions are matching in real time!  To quote Mr. Frank: “Genius!!”

A great tool to debug Regular Expressions

Its simple to use too.  All you have to do is enter some sample text that you’d like to match in the big text box provided, and then use the top entry area to start writing an expression.  Bits of the sample text that are matched by your expression will be highlighted, as you can see in the pic below.

First, type in text that you want to match. Second, start writing your expression and watch for highlights below.

RegExr also has a Replace mode, that allows you to watch the replacements happen in real time.  This is particularly helpful when writing preg_replace PHP statements, or when you are using something like RedirectMatch for 301 URL redirects.

Replace mode is particularly helpful.

RegExr also has helpful light weight RegEx documentation and examples available right in the tool.  Even better, this great tool has a desktop version for download as well.  Just look in the lower right hand corner, under the docs section, for the current desktop download URL.  As of this writing, you can find the desktop tool here.

Using the built in RegEx documentation. You can also see the Desktop Version link.

Best of all, this awesome tool is FREE!

There is a lot of information available on the net for how to use a 301 redirect in a .htaccess file.

But, largely it all tells you how to do the same 4 or 5 things.  What if I needed something different?  SOL, baby.

Recently I worked on migrating an old ASP based website to a new WordPress installation.  Everything went pretty well, except that the old site was pretty darn popular and there are literally thousands of links to it all over the net.  We didn’t want to lose those links and dump them all into an ugly 404 not-found error page, but yet given the fairly sweeping changes that were made, there was no real way to do a one-to-one mapping from the old pages to the new.

As a result, we wanted to take any ASP page call and simply redirect it to the root of the site.  There is an added challenge in that the site actually has multiple domains pointing to it, which added a bit of complexity.  I had tried modrewrite changes, but they didn’t seem to be working very well.  It also seemed a bit heavy handed, when what I really wanted to do was a “simple” redirect.

As you may know, there is a mechanism to do that, and it is simply called Redirect, and it works as follows:

Redirect 301 oldfile newfile


Unfortunately, the syntax only works for explicit matches, meaning that you have to specify EVERY .asp page and explicitly point it to another location. UGH. Not good for a site with well over a hundred pages of content. Even if I was willing to type them all in, since we wanted to redirect everything to the root anyway, adding all of these redirects would be huge waste of processing overhead.

What to do? After reading way too much information online and slogging through the Apache docs for a few hours, I stumbled across RedirectMatch, a great way to add a little regular expression logic to your redirect calls.

Using this simple tool, I was easily able to redirect ANY .asp file to the root.

RedirectMatch 301 (.*).asp /

Simple. Elegant. No modrewrite.

Of course, now that I know what I’m looking for, finding it again would be pretty easy.    Googling 301 redirect regex match gives me the right answer on the second hit.  Go figure!

Unfortunately, that’s actually NOT where I found the info.  That was a much more convoluted process.  A shout out to WebWeaver for introducing me to RedirectMatch!