I always enjoy innovative stocking stuffers and was able to put one to work today. It’s called the GrabBag and makes it simple to carry multiple plastic bags without killing your fingers. If you’re like me you try to get every plastic bag within a single trip. Now the GrabBag (two would [...]

I ran into a problem this evening when inserting data in MySQL. Some of the data had single quotes and I needed to escape them. One easy one to do this is using the following regular expression:
gsub(/[']/, ‘\\\\\”)
A simple example to run is:
puts “My name’s Dennis”.gsub(/[']/, ‘\\\\\”)
I know there are a couple [...]

I was recently working on a project where I had the need to use pure Ruby (not Rails) to insert information into a MySQL database. My Ruby installation did not have the necessary MySQL module installed so I had to install it manually. With Linux I’m generally used to doing things the hard [...]

Our neighbor’s dogs are of the most annoying type, they never stop barking and bark at everything. There are times where I feel like grabbing my Red Ryder and letting loose. Just a single pump and maybe I can tag them on the tail. So Merry Christmas to Frank and Frannie, I [...]

We had early Christmas this evening with my extended family since we’re heading out of town for the weekend. Danny and Cooter (pretty much my younger brothers), to my complete suprise, bought me a pair of freeline skates. These things are INSANE. I grew up skateboarding and rollerblading, but have never experienced [...]

Most of my friends and family know that I don’t dance. It’s something I could probably work on, but I’ve never put much time and energy into it. OfficeMax has put together an incredibly viral marketing campaign that has me dancing all over the place. I love this type of creativity and [...]

A good friend of mine called this evening asking about FFmpeg for Windows. It’s been well over a year since I’ve downloaded a Windows version and was able to find a link here:
http://download.videohelp.com/download/ffmpeggui03c.zip
It’s a GUI version of FFmpeg and looks fairly straightforward to use. It definitely abstracts you from having to enter a [...]

USAT has a very creative press release around enabling Santa’s workforce with LBS. I will let you make the judgement call on whether or not this is real, but it’s highly entertaining and has some great quotes. My favorite piece of the press release is the network topology diagram:

I think it’s very effective [...]

A reader named Rich recently asked if I’d had any success exporting FLV to 3GPP format. I’ve exported QuickTime movies (.mov) to 3GPP in the past, but have never tried converting from FLV. I did a post last year showing how to convert MOV to 3GPP.
Luckily the syntax for converting FLV to 3GPP [...]

My father-in-law recently submitted Ella’s photo to the Austin American-Statesman paper for their “Scared of Santa” section. This photo was taken last Christmas (2005) and was her first encounter with Santa. She landed the front page and you can see a thumbnail and full photo below. Both Santa’s and Ella’s expressions are [...]