redconfetti

Here are some political cartoons I found regarding the Iranian Election and protest of 2009.

I watched the story about this on Dateline NBC tonight. I’d like to hear David’s side of the story, which they reported has varied the 16 times he recounted the events to police. I wonder, does he have an official record which is public?

KFC made a coupon available for a free meal which features their new Kentucky Grilled Chicken recently, which got me thinking about fried chicken…and their new product of course.

Strange enough, I noticed that after I got my coupon, it was just a plain old PDF with a very generic bar code printed inside the coupon. Code: 0012 3456 7890 1234. I assumed KFC restaurants would just have a system once you get there to register yourself, because I couldn’t imagine them just giving away an infinite number of meals. I asked myself “Do they expect that people who buy the meal will likely buy a drink, and this will generate a slight profit and at the same time act as a great marketing idea?” You would expect this wouldn’t you?

Well, it appears that the uproar that ensued was due to some sort of error in their system. I asked my friend about his coupon, and he said that his barcode was the same. I joked about printing out a bunch of copied and distributing them to homeless people.

Since the coupon had in small print on it: “RETAILER: Authenticate at www.veri-fi.com”, I expected some sort of registration or something at the store since the coupon given to everyone had the same barcode. That doesn’t seem to be the case. The lady at the counter when I went to redeem my coupon told me that it’s not valid but they would still honor the coupon.

We can see that who ever implemented the system to provide these coupons, didn’t design the promotion to run smoothly. They should have made it required that you identify yourself or something which would limit the number of coupons to one per a customer. Who ever decided to just put a PDF coupon on there, they made a grave mistake. Perhaps they had a dynamic coupon PDF setup, but somehow a bug made this generic one become served to the public. Who knows? I’m sure KFC wants to put this behind them.

It sure does make the name of their promotion ironic however. ‘UnThink’

I did happen to think that their grilled chicken still tasted fried. I happened to ask an employee at my local KFC if it was actually put in a fryer. She told me that they do grill it, and that the fat in the chicken itself gets on the outside and gives it that burned oil film on the surface of the meat. Eh…

But anyway, what was my point of posting this? Oh yeah! Speaking of fried chicken…

Anyone who happens to be in the South Eastern United States, I highly recommend Maryland Fried Chicken

You’ll probably think it’s better than KFC.

It turns out that scientists in South Korea have somehow inserted fluorescent genes into a dog egg, and implanted the eggs into some mix breed dog. What was born was puppies with somehow glowing faces and bellies.

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-as-skorea-cloned-dogs,0,4002700.story

Doesn’t this cause some sort of problem for the dogs to sleep properly? I wonder if this is the case, or if the dog isn’t able to detect the light it emits.

One of the most popular Web 2.0 practices is rounded corners. How do you get them without uploading images, and nesting DIV’s, and worrying about other complications that can break your precious rounded corners?

Answer! jQuery Corners

jQuery Corners is compatible with Firefox, Internet Explorer 6+, Safari (including iPhone), Google Chrome, and Opera 9.0. All it takes is a simple jQuery style selector call such as the following:

<script>
$(document).ready( function(){
$('.rounded').corners();
});
</script>

<div style=”background-color:#acc; padding:5px” class=”rounded”>
Simple Example
</div>

You can also experiment further with documented options to change the radius (amount of curve) for the rounded corners, and will even show properly if there is a background image specified inside of the object with rounded corners.

Available for download at http://plugins.jquery.com/project/corners

Documentation provided at http://www.atblabs.com/jquery.corners.html

Mmmmm…. Brownies!!!

I just installed the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin, because it seems like everyone is doing it now and I’m missing out on something.

After installing and configuring this plugin, I went through my site and refreshed a couple pages, only to find out that the javascript needed for the analytics was not being included in the HTML as I expected. I tried to briefly search for help on this, but I didn’t find anything.

It turns out that you have to be logged out of Wordpress for this to display within the code. It makes sense, you don’t want your statistics to tell you about your traffic on your own website, you want to know the stats on REAL visitors. I hope this tip helps save someone some time.

It can be very useful to have the database table schema information available to you when you are working on a model in a Ruby on Rails application. There is a plugin available which provides the schema information in comments at the top of each model called Annotate Models Plugin.


# == Schema Information
# Schema version: 20090215021706
#
# Table name: orders
#
# id :integer(11) not null, primary key
# order_number :integer(11) default(0), not null
# created_on :datetime
# shipped_on :datetime
# order_user_id :integer(11)
# order_status_code_id :integer(11) default(1), not null
# notes :text
# referer :string(255)
# order_shipping_type_id :integer(11) default(1), not null
# product_cost :float default(0.0)
# shipping_cost :float default(0.0)
# tax :float default(0.0), not null
# auth_transaction_id :string(255)
# promotion_id :integer(11) default(0), not null
# shipping_address_id :integer(11) default(0), not null
# billing_address_id :integer(11) default(0), not null
# order_account_id :integer(11) default(0), not null
# subscription_id :integer(11)


You can install the plugin using the following command from the root of your Rails application.

script/plugin install http://repo.pragprog.com/svn/Public/plugins/annotate_models

After you are done installing the plugin, simply run the rake task by using this command:

rake annotate_models

Okay. I’m not going to claim to be a super go-getter developer, but I like the notion of being cutting edge and able to provide the best to new clients. I also like it when the tasks I have to perform to not look too overwhelming. It appears that cutting edge developers are following a set of guidelines for project planning and execution called Scrum which is simple, flexible (or agile), and gets the job done faster and with the fastest return on investment.

Check it out and do the math in your own head. It will make sense how simple and concise this project planning technique is.

ok. Again I’m starting over with a fresh new blog. I hope to keep this one going, never take it down, yada yada. I’ll make sure I take a database backup in the future, along with the data.

Anyway, I’m back. I’ll be blogging about anything: web development, spirituality, life in California, food, whatever.