has_many => apps, :through => :ubuntu

Revolution OS : Documentary about Linux & Open Source

2011-08-13T04:39:00.003+08:00

Hackers, Programmers & Rebels UNITE!

Watch PPStream on Ubuntu with "totem-pps"

2011-08-08T06:23:00.001+08:00

This project provides a set of plugins for gstreamer and totem (gst-plugins-pps and totem-pps) for linux users. The gst-plugins-pps enables gstreamer powered media player to play ppstream streamings such as the url which has a prefix "tvod://" or "pps://" . And totem-pps adds a kan.pps.tv play list to totem. With both plugins installed, you can browser and play videos from kan.pps.tv with totem.

Add the Totem-PPS PPA in your Ubuntu source list using:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:portis25/cnav

Update Ubuntu source list using:

sudo apt-get update

Install Totem-PPS using:

sudo apt-get install totem-pps

Further information about Totem-PPS: http://code.google.com/p/totem-pps/

Finding A New Business Idea

2011-08-07T02:16:00.008+08:00

By: Brian Tracy

Look for Opportunities

How do you find a new product or service, recognizing that 80 percent or more will be new in five years? Here's a series of ideas. Number one, begin with yourself. Begin with your own talents, your abilities, your experience, knowledge, interest, background, education, and so on. Look carefully at your current work, your current business, your current position, or your current product or service. Seek for what is called your own acres of diamonds. Look under your own feet.

Look Into Yourself

Here's a question. What qualities account for your greatest successes in life so far? What personal qualities and abilities have gotten you to where you are? And how could you apply those qualities and abilities to starting and building a new business?

If you already have a company, ask what are your companies' talents, abilities, experience, knowledge, interest, background, and so on. What qualities and talents and abilities have enabled your company to succeed up to now? Where can you specialize? Where can you make a difference?

Identify What You Really Enjoy

Number two is look for a product or service about which you can really become enthusiastic. Sometimes people become wealthy by translating or transforming their hobbies into a business. You will be most successful doing something or marketing something that you really love.

Every product must have a champion. Every product or service must have someone in the business who really, really loves the product or service and is eager to get out and tell other people about it.

Improve On Something Else

Number three, look for something that is an improvement on an existing product or service, not something brand new. Look for something that's cheaper or better quality. Or that has additional features or functions. Look for something that's an improvement.

Remember improving an existing successful product or service is the fastest and surest way to build a successful business. An idea only needs to be ten percent new and better to capture substantial market share. Brand new products or services are very risky.

Be Willing to Work Hard

The fourth key to finding a new product or service is this. Don't look for easy money. Don't look for gimmicks or useless knickknacks. Don't look for get-rich-quick schemes or rewards without working, because they're aren't any.

More people have wasted more time and more life and more money trying to find quick ways to make easy money than you can possibly imagine. So be willing to put in a lot of hard work before you start making real money in a business.

Success Takes Time

It takes two years to break even in the average business. It takes four years to show a profit. It takes maybe eight to ten years before it starts to generate real cash flow. So you have to be patient. If you're impatient, what will happen is you'll end up setting yourself further back than you can imagine.

The Secret History of Hacking

2011-08-06T05:05:00.000+08:00

A hacker is a brilliantly devious criminal mind breaking the world's most secret IT systems for money or political espionage, if you believe many similarly hysterical press reports. In fact, the truth is a lot more intriguing. The Secret History of Hacking uncovered the real story of a counter culture that has corporate America on the run.

:calibre => "ebook management system"

2011-08-01T01:06:00.007+08:00

The one stop solution for all your e-book needs. Comprehensive e-book software.

Calibre is a free and open source e-book library management application developed by users of e-books for users of e-books. It has a cornucopia of features divided into the following main categories:

Library Management
E-book conversion
Syncing to e-book reader devices
Downloading news from the web and converting it into e-book form
Comprehensive e-book viewer
Content server for online access to your book collection

Add the Calibre PPA in your Ubuntu source list using:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:n-muench/calibre

Update your Ubuntu source list using:

sudo apt-get update

Install Calibre using:

sudo apt-get install calibre

Further information about Calibre: http://calibre-ebook.com/

Concentrate on Your Resources

2011-07-31T03:08:00.005+08:00

By: Brian Tracy

The Principle of Mass requires that you concentrate on your best people, your best energies, and your limited resources in those areas where the greatest victories are possible. Restructure and reorganize your activities so that your best talents are focused on those results that can get you out of the crunch faster than any others.

Stay Flexible

The Principle of Maneuver is one of the greatest battlefield successes; it requires that you out-maneuver your enemy by attacking from the flank or the rear. In business, the practice of this principle requires that you try something new, and if that doesn't work, try something else. Be flexible and creative in your approach. Think of doing exactly the opposite of what you have done up until now. Keep all your options open. Survival and victory are your only considerations.

Gather All Available Information

The Principle of Intelligence means that you must get the facts about the situation. Learn everything you can. Ask questions, phone people, go onto the Internet. The more and better information you have, the better and more effective decisions you will be able to make.

Get Everyone Working Together

Concerted Action makes sure that everyone on your team is working together with common goals, common values, and clearly understood work assignments. Everyone should know what is going on and what everyone else is doing. One of the rules for military victory is that you never trust to luck or wish that something will turn up. Hope is not a strategy. Look to yourself and don't expect an easy victory.

Napoleon

Napoleon was once asked if he believed in luck in warfare. He replied, “Yes, I believe in luck. I believe in bad luck, and I believe that I will always have it. I therefore plan accordingly.” You should do the same. If you do have a streak of good luck, consider yourself blessed. But don't count on it or hope for it to happen.

You're the Boss!

Unity of Command is a military strategy that means that everyone must know that you are completely in command. You are in charge of your financial future. You are calling the shots. Everyone reports to you and answers to you. You can go back to democratic consensus later, but during crunch time, it must be clear to everyone that you are the boss.

Total Commitment to Your Financial Success

Finally, in taking action to resolve a crisis, perhaps the most important quality you can have is a total commitment to your financial success, to winning, to overcoming your difficulties, no matter what they are. The key to financial victory is for you to go on the attack, relentlessly moving forward. It has been said that boldness and audacity will get you into a lot of problems, but more, boldness and audacity will get you out of your problems as well. Take action immediately, and keep on taking action until you win.

GNU/Linux: The Codebreakers -> Part 1

2011-07-30T06:50:00.000+08:00

The famous digital divide is getting wider. A two-part documentary, The Codebreakers aired on BBC World starting 10 May 2006 examines whether free/open source software (FOSS) might be the bridge?

GNU/Linux: The Codebreakers -> Part 2

2011-07-30T05:12:00.000+08:00

The famous digital divide is getting wider. A two-part documentary, The Codebreakers aired on BBC World starting 10 May 2006 examines whether free/open source software (FOSS) might be the bridge?

Setting Your Goals

2011-07-24T03:19:00.000+08:00

By: Brian Tracy

In my conversations with hundreds of top salespeople over the years, I have found that they all have one thing in common. They have taken the time to sit down and create a clear blueprint for themselves and their future lives. Even if they started the process of goal setting and personal strategic planning with a little skepticism, every one of them has become a true believer.

Becoming a True Believer

Every one of them has been amazed at the incredible power of goal setting and strategic planning. Every one of them has accomplished far more than they ever believed possible in selling and they ascribe their success to the deliberate process of thinking through every aspect of their work and their lives, and then developing a detailed, written road map to get them to where they wanted to go.

The Definition of Happiness

Happiness has been defined as, "The progressive achievement of a worthy ideal, or goal." When you are working progressively, step-by-step toward something that is important to you, you generate within yourself a continuous feeling of success and achievement.

You feel more positive and motivated. You feel more in control of your own life. You feel happier and more fulfilled. You feel like a winner, and you soon develop the psychological momentum that enables you to overcome obstacles and plough through adversity as you move toward achieving the goals that are most important to you.

Determine Your Values

Personal strategic planning begins with your determining what it is you believe in and stand for-your values. Your values lie at the very core of everything you are as a human being. Your values are the unifying principles and core beliefs of your personality and your character. The virtues and qualities that you stand for are what constitute the person you have become from the beginning of your life to this moment.

Your values, virtues and inner beliefs are the axle around which the wheel of your life turns. All improvement in your life begins with you clarifying your true values and then committing yourself to live consistent with them.

Fuzzy or Clear?

Successful people are successful because they are very clear about their values. Unsuccessful people are fuzzy or unsure. Complete failures have no real values at all.

Build Self-Confidence and Self-Esteem

Values clarification is the beginning exercise in building self-confidence, self-esteem and personal character. When you take the time to think through your fundamental values, and then commit yourself to living your life consistent with them, you feel a surge of mental strength and well-being. You feel stronger and more capable. You feel more centered in the universe and more competent of accomplishing the goals you set for yourself.

Say Happy Birthday to Internet

2010-10-29T22:15:00.002+08:00

Internet exact date is not confirmed, but it is assumed that, it was started on 29th of October 1969, so according to the theory of 29th October, Internet today is celebrating the 41st Birthday of the revolution of it own kind.

The advantages of Internet is known to every person reading this J. The technological marketing took a new shape on the arrival of Internet.

Samsung Introduces Nori SHW-A220 Touchscreen Phone

2010-08-10T20:07:00.008+08:00

Samsung introduces in Korea the new & latest Nori SHW-A220 touchscreen phone that allows customization. Designed for girls, users can personalize the phone with eight unique characters front plates.

The newest Nori features a 3-inch 240×400 touchscreen display, a 3.2 Megapixel main camera, a 1.3 Megapixel front camera for video call, included T-DMB tuner, GPS, Bluetooth & WiFi connectivity. It also offers a microSD card slot.
The Samsung Nori SHW-A220 is available in biege, pink & blue colors.
Source samsunghub

Selling to Today's Customers

2010-08-03T14:54:00.001+08:00

What is selling? In its simplest terms, selling is the process of helping a person to conclude that your product or service is of greater value to him than the price you are asking for.

How Markets Work

Our market society is based on the principles of freedom and mutual benefit. Each party to a transaction only enters into it when he feels that he will be better off as a result of the transaction than he would be without it.

The Three Options

In a free market, the customer always has three options with any purchase decision. First, the customer can buy your product or service. Second, the customer can buy the product or service from someone else. Third, the customer can decide to buy nothing at all.

Convincing the Customer

For the customer to buy your particular product or service, he or she must be convinced that it is not only the best choice available but he must also be persuaded that there is no better way for him to spend the equivalent amount of money. Your job as a salesperson is to convince the customer that all these conditions exist and then to elicit a commitment from him to take action on your offer.

Customize Your Sales Presentation

The field of professional selling has changed dramatically since World War II. In a way, selling methodologies are merely responses to customer requirements. At one time, customers were relatively unsophisticated and poorly informed about their choices. Salespeople catered to this customer with carefully planned and memorized sales presentations, loads of enthusiasm and a bag full of techniques designed to crush resistance and get the order at virtually any cost.

Treat Them With Respect

But the customer of the 1950s has matured into the customer of the 21st century. Customers are now more intelligent and knowledgeable than ever before. They are experienced buyers and they have interacted with hundreds of salespeople. They are extremely sophisticated and aware of the incredible variety of products and services that are available to them, as well as their relative strengths and weaknesses of those products. Many of them are smarter and better educated than most salespeople and they are far more careful about making a buying decision of any kind.

The Need For Speed

In addition, they are overwhelmed with work and under-supplied with time. Because of the rapidly increasing pace of change, down-sizing, restructuring and the competitive pressures surrounding them, customers today are harried and hassled. They are swamped with responsibilities, impatient, suspicious, critical, demanding, and spoiled. To sell to today's customer requires a higher caliber of sales professional than has ever before been required. And it is only going to become tougher and more complicated in the months and years ahead.

GoDaddy stopping registering domains in China

2010-03-27T21:28:00.005+08:00

Godaddy – one company is ready to follow Google’s stance on doing business in China.

During a congressional hearing later today to discuss Internet freedom and China, GoDaddy managerial plan to announce that they will stop registering domain names in China in response to a new government policy that requires extensive information about registrants. Starting last December, individuals and businesses that wished to register a .cn domain name were being asked to submit a photograph of themselves as well as a serial number identifying their business license in China .go

Google’s Alan Davidson, director of public policy, also plans to speak before the hearing, coming two days after Google announced its decision to move its Chinese-language search engine from mainland China to Hong Kong in order to bypass government laws on Internet censorship.

For the majority part, U.S. companies have repeated plans to stay in China and stick on to their laws following Google’s initial announcement in January and ensuing moves this week.

How to get a Free Domain Name & Free Web Hosting

2010-03-24T01:58:00.002+08:00

Get a Free Domain Name

Step 1: To register a free domain, please go to CO.CC website by clicking on the link http://www.co.cc/.
Step 2: Now when you are on http://www.co.cc/, find the domain name that you prefer. (In this case I use example.co.cc)
Step 3: If your preferred domain name is available, then proceed to the next page by clicking on the "Continue to registration" button.
Step 4: Now you are in the registration page. Since you are the new user, please click on the "Create new user" button, then feel in your details.
Step 5: Submit the registration form, and now your domain name are registered. To manage your domain name, just login to http://www.co.cc/. I will show how to manage the domain name later.

Get a Free Web & Email Hosting

Step 6: To get a free web hosting, please go to 000Webhost by clicking the link http://www.000webhost.com/.
Step 7: Now you are in 000Webhost package selection site. There are 2 option for you to choose; 1. Free Hosting 2. Paid Hosting. Just click the "Order" Button on the Free Hosting package to proceed to the ordering page.
Step 8: In the ordering page, the is a field that have a default value of "yourdomain.com". Change it to the domain name you just registered at CO.CC. In my case, I will replace it with example.co.cc as domain name.
Step 9: Completed the ordering form by feeling your details. Then submit the order. Please give the administrator 24 hours to consider and configure your web hosting.

After 24 Hours

Step 10: Within 24 hours, an e-mail will be send to you to confirm your ordering. Now your web hosting is ready but your domain name is not yet set to be pointing to your web hosting.

Manage the Domain Name

Step 11: First login to 000Webhost to get 2 set of DNS provided by 000Webhost. After login, you will see an alert message, and now copy down the 2 DNS sets (ns1.000webhost.com, ns2.ooowebhost.com).
Step 12: Go to CO.CC and login in into the domain management site. Now select on Manage Domain option.
Step 13: When you are in the Manage Domain area, choose to set the Name Server for your domain.
Step 14: Now feel in your Name Server with the 2 DNS sets, you just copied from step 11. Click on setup and all is done.
Step 15: Now you upload Worpress for blogging or HTML files for Website/Personal Profile.

Magento templates is more than HTML

2010-03-05T11:47:00.000+08:00

We get a lot of requests for Magento. Not only building a whole site, migrating an old one but also simply doing “PDS to Magento” jobs. And then we get back to the client and they’re always surprised at the time (and dineros) it takes. “But it’s just a PSD?”….Well, yes, but Magento is not just HTML. Really?!!

Here are the main differences:

Magento uses mostly blocks for its modules and components so you have to understand how they work and how they fit with your HTML and the overall code. It’s not plug and play and it takes time to figure out. Even after several projects.
You have to take into account in your evaluation and work all the pages beyond the home page and product pages, like account log in, checkout, shopping cart, wishlist and so forth….
Don’t forget the “communication” pages like transactional emails, newsletter templates, etc…
Finally you’ll probably be using javascript to make things a bit more user-friendly, like an accordion menu, or a gallery, so you need to take into account as well.

Overall, creating Magento templates are easily twice or triple the time it takes for a normal “PSD to HTML” job so be careful before you quote anything if you don’t want to lose your shirt. There a lot more pages and templates to play with than the home and product pages.

DiosCom System is lunching new Application Service Prodiving package

2010-02-23T16:06:00.001+08:00

Thanks for all the response we get from the previous posting on facebook. As a response to those comments. We (DiosCom System) feel is better to share the idea directly to you here.

As one branch of our business model, the Application Service Provider (ASP). We are providing a E-Commerce Hosted Platform to businesses which is willing to move in E-Commerce Edge. And the E-Commerce Software we used here is call Magento, the fastest growth open source software in the market of e-commerce.

We are charging RM2K per year to customers who subscribe to the service. What is the RM2K charged for since the software is open source.

1) Fees for Hosting expenses (at the moment we provide up to 10GB Web Storage)
2) Fees for Web Templates and Software Extensions3) Fees for Support & Consultancy:
    - Website Crawl and Indexing with Google Webmaster
    - Website Analysis with Google Analytic
    - Magento Setup and System Update
4) Expenses for our developers to improve the system and contribute back to magento.

As a pro-active actions, we are outsourcing the sales to anyone who are interested, either to do it seriously or just to get some extra income. We are paying 20% to sales person for each sales made (only successful count). Which mean 20% of RM2K, which is RM400. And for every renewal on the next continuous yearly, sales person also will be paid on the same amount as before.

For more, contact us at:

E-mail: dioscom.system@gmail.com
MSN: jk.cheng@live.com
GTalk: jinkang.cheng@gmail.com
Skype: jinkang.cheng

Run a C Program Directly

2010-02-05T03:32:00.004+08:00

For this short tip you'll need tcc, the Tiny C Compiler, which comes with most distributions out there, including Debian and Ubuntu. tcc is a small ANSI C compiler which offers the ability to run the program after compiling it, unlike GCC, which (as far as I know) doesn't offer this option. To install tcc in Debian and Ubuntu:

In Debian, as root:

apt-get install tcc

In Ubuntu, use:

sudo apt-get install tcc

Now let's test this. First, create your C source file, e.g.:

Now, save this file as example.c or some other name and make it executable:

chmod 755 example.c # or chmod +x example.c

And the next step is just to run it!

./example.c

"tcc" will compile the source and run it automatically.

[HD] Avril Lavigne Best Damn Tour Live in Toronto 2008

2010-02-03T13:53:00.004+08:00

Pop-punk princess Avril Lavigne plays the hits that earned her legions of screaming fans (and launched a thousand ringtones) on THE BEST DAMN TOUR, a full-length presentation of her 2008 concert in Toronto. Opening with monster hit "Girlfriend," Lavigne rocks through every one of her major singles, including "Complicated," "My Happy Ending," and the ubiquitous "Sk8R BOI."

Substitute Strings in Files with Ruby

2010-01-29T20:12:00.000+08:00

Uses a list of regular expressions and replacement strings to make changes in text files.

Put in file "edit-all.rb" and run with

ruby edit-all.rb *.txt

Now accepts the target and the replacement from the command line or from the keyboard.

Easy Crock Pot Chicken Recipes

2010-01-24T15:44:00.001+08:00

With the temptation of fast food, processed meals, and eating out, it's difficult to spend time to prepare good, healthy, home-cooked meals. If you're like many, the last thing you want to do after coming home from work is prepare a gourmet dinner. By using your crock pot and spending 5-10 minutes each morning, you can come home to delicious home-cooked meals without hours of preparation right before dinnertime. Below are three quick and easy chicken crock pot recipes you're sure to enjoy, and each with 7 ingredients or less!

Salsa Chicken

Ingredients:

6 boneless skinless chicken breasts
1 ½ cups salsa
1 tsp ground cumin
3 tbsp lime juice

Spray crock pot with non-stick cooking spray. Place chicken in slow cooker, pour salsa over chicken. Cover and cook on low 6-7 hours or high 3 hours, until chicken is tender and no longer pink. Stir in cumin and lime juice, cover and cook an additional 15 minutes.

Note: For an extra spicy kick, add a pinch of ground red chili powder with the cumin and lime juice.

Lemon Chicken

Ingredients:

4 boneless skinless chicken breasts
¼ lemon juice
1/3 cup water
2 cloves minced garlic
1 tsp thyme

Spray crock pot with non-stick cooking spray. Place chicken in crock pot. Combine juice, water, garlic, and thyme in a small bowl, pour over chicken. Cover and cook on low 8 hours or high 4 hours.

Ranch Chicken

Ingredients:

6 boneless skinless chicken breasts
1 can condensed cream of chicken soup
1 envelope ranch dressing mix
½ cup water
½ cup sour cream
2 tbsp ranch dressing
2 tbsp flour

Spray crock pot with non-stick cooking spray. Place chicken breasts in crock pot. In a small bowl, combine soup, ranch dressing mix, and water; pour over chicken. Cover and cook on low 8 hours or high 4 hours. Remove chicken from crock pot. Stir in sour cream, ranch dressing, and flour; replace chicken. Cover and cook on high 20 minutes.

The Laws of Money

2010-01-23T14:14:00.000+08:00

One of your major goals in life should be financial independence. You must aim to reach the point where you have enough money so that you never have to worry about money again. The good news is that financial independence is easier to achieve today than it has ever been before.

The Law of Abundance

We live in an abundant universe in which there is sufficient money for all who really want it and are willing to obey the laws governing its acquisition. People become wealthy because they decide to become wealthy. People are poor because they have not yet decided to become rich.

The world is full of thousands of people who have had far more difficulties to overcome than you could ever imagine, and they've gone on to be successful anyway. So can you.

The Law of Exchange

Money is the medium through which people exchange their labor in the production of goods and services for the goods and services of others. The amount of money you earn is the measure of the value that others place on your contribution. To increase the amount of money you are getting out, you must increase the value of the work that you are putting in.

The Law of Capital

Your most valuable assets, in terms of cash flow, are your physical and mental capital—your earning ability. How much time you put in and how much of yourself you put into that time largely determine your earning ability. Time and money can be either spent or invested. If you invest your time or money in becoming more knowledgeable and better skilled, you can increase your value.

The Law of Time Perspective

The most successful people in any society are those who take the longest time period into consideration when making their day-to-day decisions. Your ability to practice self-mastery, self-control, and self-denial, to sacrifice in the short term so you can enjoy greater rewards in the long term, is the starting point of developing a long time perspective.

The Law of Saving

Financial freedom comes to people who save 10 percent or more of their income throughout their lifetime. Savings today are what guarantee the security and the possibilities of tomorrow.

The Law of Conservation

It's not how much you make but how much you keep that determines your financial future. The true measure of how well you are really doing is how much you keep out of the amount that you earn.

The Law of Three

There are three legs to the stool of financial freedom: savings, insurance, and investment. One of your major responsibilities, to yourself and to the people who depend on you, is to build a financial fortress around yourself over the course of your working lifetime. To be fully protected against the unexpected, you require liquid savings equal to two to six months of normal expenses.

The Law of Investing

Investigate before you invest. This is one of the most important of all the laws of money. You should spend at least as much time studying a particular investment as you do earning the money to put into that particular investment. The only thing easy about money is losing it. If you think you can afford to lose a little, you're going to end up losing a lot. Invest only with experts who have a proven track record of success with their own money.

The Law of Magnetism

The more money you save and accumulate, the more money you attract into your life. The Law of Magnetism has been written about for more than 5,000 years. It explains much about success and failure in every area of life, especially in the financial arena. The more positive emotion you associate with your money, the more opportunities you will attract to acquire even more.

Ruby CSV to XML Converter

2010-01-22T19:43:00.000+08:00

This code will take an input CSV file and output XML. IT was easy to write, but I haven't found anything out there to do this. The first line of the CSV file should contain the element names.

GDM2 Setup Gets A New Look And An Ubuntu PPA

2010-01-20T17:22:00.000+08:00

GDM2 Setup is a GUI configuration tool for the new GDM (2) something that was missed by a lot of people. It doesn't have as many options as the old GDM setup tool, but that's because the new GDM2 doesn't support too many customizations.

Add the GDM2 Setup PPA in your source list using:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gdm2setup/gdm2setup

Update source list using:

sudo apt-get update

Install GDM2 Setup using:

sudo apt-get install python-gdm2setup

Acronis Mac OS X iDeneb 10.5.5 for Acer Aspire One

2010-01-18T17:27:00.000+08:00

The Seven P Formula for Marketing Success

2010-01-17T14:36:00.000+08:00

Once you have developed your marketing strategy, there is a seven P formula you should continually use to evaluate and reevaluate your business activities. These seven are: product, price, promotion, place, packaging, positioning, and people. As products, markets, customers, and needs change rapidly, you must continually revisit these seven P's to make sure you are on track and achieving the maximum results possible for you in today's Market.

Product

To begin, develop the habit of looking at your product as though you were an outside marketing consultant having been brought in to help your company decide whether or not it is in the right business at this time. Ask critical questions such as: Is your current product or service, or mix of products or services appropriate and suitable for the market and the customers of today?

Prices Deserve Attention

The second P in the formula has to do with price. Develop the habit of continually examining and reexamining the prices of the products and services that you sell to make sure they are still appropriate to the realities of the current market. Sometimes you need to lower your prices. At other times, it may be appropriate to raise your prices. Many companies have found that the profitability of certain products or services does not justify the amount of effort and resources that go into producing them. By raising their prices, they may lose a percentage of their customers, but the remaining percentage generates a profit on every sale. Could this be appropriate for you?

Promotion

The third habit in marketing and sales is for you to develop the habit of thinking in terms of promotion all the time. Promotion includes all the ways you tell your customers about products or services and how you then market and sell to them. Small changes in the way you promote and sell your products can lead to dramatic changes in your results. Experienced copywriters can often increase the response rate from advertising by 500 percent by simply changing the headline on the advertisement.

Place

The fourth P in the marketing mix is the place where your product or service is actually sold. Develop the habit of reviewing and reflecting upon the exact location where the customer meets the salesperson. Sometimes a change in place can lead to a rapid increase in sales.

Packaging

The fifth element in the marketing mix is packaging. Develop the habit of standing back and looking at every visual element in the packaging of your product or service through the eyes of a critical prospect. Remember, people form their first impression about you within 30 seconds of seeing you or some element of your company. Small improvements in the packaging or external appearance of your product or service can often lead to completely different reactions from your customers.

Positioning

The next P is positioning. You should develop the habit of thinking continually about how you are positioned in the hearts and minds of your customers. How do people think about you and talk about you when you are not present? How do people think and talk about your company? What positioning do you have in your market, in terms of the specific words that people use when they describe you and your offerings to others?

People are Everything

The final P is people. Develop the habit of thinking in terms of the people inside and outside of your business who are responsible for every element of your sales and marketing strategy and activities. Your ability to select, recruit, hire, and retain the proper people, with the skills and abilities to do the job you need to have done, is more important than everything else put together.

Rails: How to use a custom RDoc template from a rake task

2010-01-16T00:26:00.000+08:00

I just need to do that, use a custom rdoc template to generate a documentation for a Rails project.

My main concern, regarding the different solutions I found on the web, was I didn’t want to have a template in the ruby installation directory but one that resides in a subdirectory of my rails application.

In fact it’s not a problem … when you find the good command. Here’s my rake task to generate the documentation (I put the Jamis Buck customized template in RAILS_ROOT/doc/rdoc_template/jamis.rb)

The important part is :

rdoc.template = "doc/rdoc_template/jamis.rb"

I tried to use the—template= and -T options in rdoc.options but it didn’t work… then I found that the RDocTask appends its template variable to the options passed to RDoc bypassing mine.

RSS Twitter Bot with Ruby

2010-01-15T19:51:00.000+08:00

A short Ruby script that will read an RSS feed and republish it to your Twitter account. This could be useful for livestreaming or getting some sort of commercial presence on there.

Cheese-Pumpkin Soup

2010-01-14T00:44:00.000+08:00

Ingredients

1/2 cup sliced green onions with tops
2 Tbs. butter or margarine
2 Tbs. all-purpose flour
1 tsp. seasoned salt
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
1/4 tsp. cinnamon
2 cups milk
1 can (10-3/4 oz) chicken broth
1 can (16 oz.) pumpkin
1 1/2 cups shredded Cheddar cheese

Directions

In large, heavy saucepan, lightly saute green onions in the butter.
Stir in flour, seasoned salt, nutmeg and cinnamon. Remove from heat. Add milk and chicken broth. Cook, stirring, about 15 minutes until thickened.
Blend in pumpkin. Simmer 5 minutes longer, stirring frequently. Add cheese, Stir until melted.
Ladle into soup bowls. Top each serving, if desired, with a slice of tomato, sprinkled with cheese and green onions.

Install GNOME Activity Journal in Ubuntu Karmic

2010-01-13T14:10:00.000+08:00

The GNOME Activity Journal is a tool for easily browsing and finding files, contacts and other resources on your computer. Using Zeitgeist, it keeps a chronological journal of your activity and supports tagging and bookmarking (using the new Tracker 0.7) and establishing relationships between resources.

While this first release only supports basic browsing of file activities, the underlying infrastructure can do much more and you can expect the missing functionality to become available in future releases.

Open the terminal and run the following commands:

Add the GNOME Activity Journal ppa

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:zeitgeist/ppa

Update the source list

sudo aptitude update

Install GNOME Activity Journal

sudo aptitude install gnome-activity-journal

You can open from Applications -> Utility -> Activity Journal

Rails: Minor annoyances in Rails

2010-01-11T00:35:00.000+08:00

Here's one "surprise" and one annoyance I've found while working with Rails.

Using PostGreSQL as the DB works beautifully in the development environment, but often fails in the test environment; however it only fails on rake test and only on the unit test portion of the full suite. Integration and functional tests run fine. One fix, was to change the database.rake file, in the db:prepare task to always use db:test_clone_structure instead of db:test:clone.

The annoyance is that controller modules appear to be bolted on without much consider for how they interact with the rest of the system — they greatly constrain your routes; most test tools seem unaware of them (rcov's rails task doesn’t know to look for subdirectories in the functional tests, etc) Some of these are easy to fix, some aren't, but it definitely feels like controller modules aren’t considered truly part of Rails.

The Law of Time Perspective

2010-01-10T14:40:00.000+08:00

The most successful people in any society are those who take the longest time period into consideration when making their day-to-day decisions. This insight comes from the pioneering work on upward financial mobility in America conducted by Dr. Edward Banfield of Harvard University in the late 1950's and early 1960's. After studying many of the factors that were thought to contribute to individual financial success over the course of a person's lifetime, he concluded that there was one primary factor that took precedence over all the others. He called it “time perspective.”

Plant Trees

What Banfield found was that the higher a person rises in any society, the longer the time perspective or time horizon of that person. People at the highest social and economic levels make decisions and sacrifices that may not pay off for many years, sometimes not even in their own lifetimes. They “plant trees under which they will never sit.”

Doctors

An obvious example of someone with a long time perspective is the man or women who spends ten or twelve years studying and interning to become a doctor. This person takes extraordinarily long time to lay down the foundation for a lifetime career. And partially because we know how long it takes to become a doctor, we hold doctors in the highest esteem of any professional group. We appreciate and admire the sacrifices that they have made in order to be able to practice a profession that is so important to so many of us. We recognize their long time perspectives.

Long Time Perspectives

People with long term perspectives are willing to pay the price of success for a long, long time before they achieve it. They think about the consequences of their choices and decisions in terms of what they might mean in five, ten, fifteen, and even twenty years from now.

Short Time Perspectives

People at the lowest levels of society have the shortest time perspectives. They focus primarily on immediate gratification and often engage in behaviors that are virtually guaranteed to lead to negative consequences in the long term. At the very bottom of the social ladder, you find hopeless alcoholics and drug addicts. These people think in terms of the next drink or the next fix. Their time perspective is often less than one hour.

Delayed Gratification is the Key to Financial Success

Your ability to practice self-mastery, self-control, and self-denial, to sacrifice in the short term so you can enjoy greater rewards in the long term, is the starting point of developing a long time perspective. This attitude is essential to financial achievement of any kind.

Ruby: Pronounceable Random Password Generator

2010-01-09T06:40:00.000+08:00

This piece of code generates a random password of the specified length, but mixes the two sets of letters so that a pronouncable password is being generated.

Ubuntu: More Popular than Britney Spears in 2009

2010-01-04T16:12:00.000+08:00

Apt-Get Me, Baby… One more Time!

Ubuntu was more popular than Britney Spears in 2009 - at least in terms of searches.

When you consider than she's shifted more than 83 million records and commands publicity like no-other, it's a curious footnote in itself.

Create Your Daily Personal Growth Schedule

2010-01-03T14:43:00.000+08:00

There are seven disciplines you must develop if you want to achieve all that is possible for you. You can learn these disciplines through practice and repetition until they become automatic.

Goal Setting

Every morning, take three to five minutes to write out your top goals in the present tense. Get a spiral notebook for this purpose. By writing out your ten goals at the beginning of each day, you will program them deep into your subconscious mind.

This daily goal writing will activate your mental powers. It will stimulate your mind and make you more alert. Throughout the day, you will see opportunities and possibilities to move more rapidly toward your goals.

Planning and Organizing

Take a few minutes, preferably the night before, to plan out every activity of the coming day. Always work from a list. Always think on paper. This is one of the most powerful and important disciplines of all for high performance.

Concentration on your Highest-Value Activities

Your ability to work single-mindedly on your most important task will contribute as much to your success as any other discipline you can develop.

Exercise and Proper Nutrition

Your health is more important than anything else. By disciplining yourself to exercise regularly and to eat carefully, you will promote the highest possible levels of health and fitness throughout your life.

Learning and Growth

Your mind is like a muscle. If you don't use it, you lose it. Continuous learning is the minimum requirement for success in any field.

Time for Important People in Your Life

Relationships are everything. Be sure that in climbing the ladder of success, you do not find it leaning against the wrong building. Build time for your relationships into every day, no matter how busy you get.

Time for Important People in Your Life

These seven disciplines will ensure that you perform at the highest level and get the greatest satisfaction and results from everything you do. Study these seven disciplines and then make a plan for how you can incorporate each of them into your daily life.

Ruby: Extract Age from Birth Date

2010-01-02T02:02:00.000+08:00

A Ruby function for extracting one's age by passing in the birth date as a parameter.

Blooming With Happiness ~ Happy New Year

2010-01-01T18:15:00.000+08:00

MySQL: MySQL Password Reset

2009-12-30T22:38:00.000+08:00

Problem

Are you looking at this page because you cannot access the mysql server installed on your pc/server when you were trying to see if it works well? Or do you receive error messages like the following?

ERROR 1045: Access denied for user: 'root@localhost' (Using password: YES)

To resolve this problem ,a fast and always working way is the "Password Resetting".

Solution

Following this procedure, you will disable access control on the MySQL server. All connexions will have a root access. It is a good thing to unplug your server from the network or at least disable remote access.

To reset your mysqld password just follow these instructions :

Stop the mysql demon process using this command:

sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop

Start the mysqld demon process using the --skip-grant-tables option with this command:

sudo /usr/sbin/mysqld --skip-grant-tables --skip-networking &

start the mysql client process using this command:

mysql -u root

from the mysql prompt execute this command to reset/update your password:

SET PASSWORD FOR root@'localhost' = PASSWORD('password');

Linux: "dstat" Tool of the day

2009-12-27T17:44:00.000+08:00

What is dstat? dstat is a versatile replacement for vmstat, iostat and ifstat.

Dstat allows you to view all of your system resources instantly. Eg, You can compare disk usage in combination with interrupts from your HDD controller, or compare the network bandwidth numbers directly with the disk throughput (in the same interval).

No blog post pimping a cool tool would be complete without the obligatory screen shot.

Customers for Life

2009-12-27T14:46:00.000+08:00

Never Worry About Money Again

What is the purpose of a business? Every time I ask this question during a business seminar, the immediate answer that I get back is, "To make a profit."

The Real Purpose of A Business

But this answer is wrong. The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer. If a business successfully creates and keeps customers in a cost-effective way, it will make a profit while continuing to survive and thrive. If, for any reason, a business fails to attract or sustain a sufficient number of customers, it will experience losses. Too many losses will lead to the demise of the enterprise.

Why Businesses Fail

According to Dun and Bradstreet, the single, most important reason for the failure of businesses in America is lack of sales. And, of course, this refers to resales as well as initial sales.

So your company's job is to create and keep a customer, and your job is exactly the same. Remember, no matter what your official title is, you are a salesperson for yourself and your company. And the best way to increase your value as a salesperson is to build your customer base.

Why Businesses Succeed

The two most important words to keep in mind in developing a successful customer base are Positioning and Differentiation.

Positioning refers to the way your customers think and talk about you and your company when you are not there. The position that you hold in the customer's mind determines all of his reactions and interactions with you. Your position determines whether or not your customer buys, whether he buys again and whether he refers others to you. Everything that you do with regard to your customer affects the way your customer thinks about you.

The Key to Competitive Advantage

Differentiation refers to your ability to separate yourself and your product or service from that of your competitors. And it is the key to building and maintaining a competitive advantage. This is the advantage that you and your company have over your competitors in the same marketplace - the unique and special benefits that no one else can give your customer.

Select Your Customers Carefully

When you begin to think about acquiring and keeping customers for life, you need to think about the particular types of customers for whom your competitive advantage is so important that they would be poorly served by using anyone else's product. You need to then emphasize again and again that the special features and benefits you offer are so important that they should not even think of going somewhere else. If, for any reason, you fail to do this, you may lose the customer and all the work you've done in building that relationship in the first place.

Warm Christmas Wishes

2009-12-26T00:05:00.000+08:00

SEO: Tips is about Metatags understanding

2009-12-21T01:46:00.000+08:00

Build a website or blog is not just posting article and leave it, in fact you need some help from search engine to make it famous and being rank well.

Today, most webmaster and blog owner is trying to learn as much as they can about SEO (Search engine optimization). It's difficult do deal with seo?

According to the new SEO blog that focus on learn SEO for beginner, explain that optimizing a website is about meta tags or html code structure.

The objective is manage the site to get index in major search engine lick yahoo, google and msn. beside meta tags we need to play around keyword and the most important is content for sure.

Unix: Filesystem hierarchy in Unix/Linux/OS X

2009-12-20T23:09:00.000+08:00

Although it is one of the first chapters one read when starting with Linux/Unix, it is always confusing where should we put what when it comes to installing stuff on Linux/OS X computers.

I found a detailed reference Filesystem Hierarchy standard website.

It is also worth knowing, why is it important to store any new customized apps in /usr/local.

Rails: Clearing Out Old Sessions

2009-12-20T15:20:00.000+08:00

I got into the habit a while ago of setting up my websites to use ActiveRecord as a session store, this means that the session information for all the visitors to my website is placed in a table in my database. This may or may not be the best way to store sessions but it’s certainly faster than the filesystem and my VPS doesn’t really have the memory capacity for an ‘in memory’ store.

Anyway, one day I decided to perform some DB maintenance, check tables where okay etc, upon logging into the DB however I noticed that my sessions table had grown quite large as was coming up to 125,000 records, little did I realize that the sessions are persisted forever in the DB.

I didn’t think it was the best idea to keep all the session data so wrote the following script and put it in 'lib/tasks/session.rake':

This gave me a ‘session:prune’ rake task. The task removes all sessions older than 1 day from the sessions table. I then added a CRON job for in the following format:

0 0 * * * cd /home/user/railsapp && rake RAILS_ENV=production session:prune > /dev/null 2>&1

The job above basically calls the ‘session:prune’ rake task at midnight every night.

The code in the task in MySQL specific but without a model representing the session table I couldn’t (or at least couldn’t think of a way) to make the code any more ruby-fied. In the event that you do have, or decide to create a session model the following code may work in your task (warning: untested);

Session.destroy_all("created_at" < (Time.now - 1.day))

Hope the above snippet solves at least one of your ActiveRecord session woes.

Pump Up Your Profits

2009-12-20T14:53:00.000+08:00

There is a truism that 50 percent of advertising is wasted, but no one ever knows for sure which 50 percent it is. As a result, advertising budgets always seem higher than necessary. This problem persists in many areas of business today. Money is being wasted, but no one is exactly sure where and how it is happening.

Low Profits or No Profits

Many companies today are earning low profits or no profits because their costs of doing business are not coordinated with their sales. Many products and services are priced by people who are completely unaware of the real costs involved in bringing these products or services to the market. These mistakes in pricing are then buried in the overall operations and general revenues of the business.

Conduct a Profit Analysis on Every Product

One of the most important parts of the Turbostrategy process is for you to conduct a complete profit analysis on each product or service you sell. Very few companies have ever done this. But when you begin applying profit analysis in your company, you can often increase your profits dramatically.

High-Volume vs. High Profit Customers

As you examine these numbers, you will find that, in many cases, your biggest customers are not your most profitable customers, and your biggest selling products or services are not your most profitable ones either. You may find that your costs of doing business with some customers and with some products are so high that it is hardly worth the investment of people are resources. This can only be determined by taking a hard look at the numbers.

Focus on Cash Flow

You need to be your own turnaround specialist all the time, and most especially when business slows for any reason. To pump up your profits, you do a complete profit analysis on your business and move immediately to focus the energies of the company on those areas that represent the very best sources of net cash. This process requires that you continually analyze your business so that you know exactly the profitability of every product or service you sell in comparison with every other product or service you sell, right down to the penny.

From Most to Least Profitable

The fact is that with a little effort, every single product or service can be organized on a scale from the most profitable to the least profitable, both on a per item or per hour basis, and in net dollar amounts. There is always one that is more profitable than any other.

Determine Profitability

You begin your profit analysis by determining the exact gross sales revenues that you receive from a product or service after all subtractions for defects, returns, breakage, loss, wastage, and bad debts. Take every single deduction so that your gross dollar amount is completely accurate, and you are crystal-clear about the exact amount you are netting from sales.

Face the Bitter Truth

You will probably find that fully half of your product and service offerings are generating very little profit or even causing you to lose money with every sale. A turnaround specialist would immediately either raise the prices of the low-profit items or discontinue them altogether. You must do the same.

Cocktail: Strawberry Margarita

2009-12-19T20:28:00.000+08:00

The Strawberry Margarita is possibly the most popular of the flavored Margarita varieties. This is understandable because it is delicious frozen cocktail. Given that it is blended, many people choose to go with frozen strawberries. While they do make a fine drink, a far superior cocktail can be find by starting with fresh strawberries, especially when they are in the prime season. Plus when you go with fresh you have leftovers for a quick and tasty garnish.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 oz tequila
1 oz triple sec
1 oz lime juice
1/2 cup strawberries
1 cup ice
fresh strawberry for garnish

Preparation:

Pour the ingredients into a blender.
Blend until smooth.
Pour the contents into a chilled margarita glass.
Garnish with a strawberry.

MySQL: Check If Table Exists

2009-12-19T07:20:00.000+08:00

How to check if a table exists in the current MySQL database, through running a simple query.

SHOW TABLES LIKE 'Articles'

Python: Check Credit Card "checksum"

2009-12-19T07:13:00.000+08:00

The CardChecksum function returns 1 for valid cards and 0 for invalid cards, after performing a check using the Luhn algorithm which validates all major credit cards.

Python: Find the Greatest Common Divisor

2009-12-19T07:06:00.000+08:00

Implement the Euclidean algorithm into a Python function in order to calculate the largest common divisor of two numbers.

Ubuntu: Install Thunderbird 3.0 on Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic)

2009-12-18T01:32:00.000+08:00

Mozilla’s email client Thunderbird 3 was released just a few days back. In the release page, however only the .tar file was available for Linux. In this post we will show you how to install Thunderbird 3 in Ubuntu 9.10 from the Mozilla PPA.

Add the Mozilla PPA in your source list using:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa

Update source list using:

sudo apt-get update

Install Thunderbird 3 using:

sudo apt-get install thunderbird-3.0

Ruby: Write A PDF File Using Ruby

2009-12-16T06:33:00.000+08:00

Using the open source PDF::Writer library for Ruby to create PDF documents on the fly and save them on the server.

Ubuntu: Install Openshot on Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic)

2009-12-16T02:45:00.000+08:00

Openshot is a video editor for linux, is one of the best ones existing actually for linux. The news is that now has a PPA this mean easy install for Ubuntu users, but the big news is that the new version come with 30 new effects.

Add the OpenShot PPA in your source list using:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:openshot.devellopers/ppa

Update source list using:

sudo apt-get update

Install OpenShot using:

sudo apt-get install openshot

Rails: Passenger versus safe_erb

2009-12-15T15:24:00.000+08:00

Today I had some fun tracking down a weird problem with safe_erb. While everything worked fine running Mongrel in development mode, safe_erb complained about outputting tainted strings for every link generated by Rails’ link_to and URL helpers running on mod_rails in production mode.

Some digging around led me to the root of the problem - in production my app needs to live inside a subdirectory and so I used Passengers RailsBaseURI directive to tell it so. The value configured this way ends up tainted in AbstractRequest’s relative_url_root for some reason, which in turn makes every URL generated by Rails tainted.

Solution

This untaints the relative_url_root value if it matches the regexp. Place into application.rb or some file that is required during application startup to fix the problem. I’m still not sure whether this is a bug and if so, whose bug it is - should (if possible at all) mod_rails untaint this value in the first place, or is it a bug with Rails not escaping something somewhere?

The fact that URLs used with Rails’ form helpers didn’t yield safe_erb errors, but those supplied to link_to did makes me think that there’s at least some inconsistency in the way URLs are treated by Rails’ helpers.

Review Your Flight Options

2009-12-13T14:56:00.000+08:00

Once you have become clear about who you are, what you want, and what your true goals are in each area of your life, you can begin to evaluate all the different routes by which you can reach your destination. Now you can determine the strategies and tactics that you can use to achieve your goals and arrive at your destination on schedule.

Develop Options Continually

One of the most important rules that I have ever learned is this: You are only as free as your well-developed options. Before you can plan your time and your life, you must be absolutely clear about both the hourly rate that you are earning today and the hourly rate that you want to earn in the future. Every hour that you spend on a low-value or no-value activity is costing you $25, $50, or more.

Determine the Highest and Best Use of Your Time

Whatever job you choose to take, company you choose to make with your money, or time you choose to spend on a particular activity, think it through carefully in advance and be certain that you are making the highest and best use of your time and resources.

Refuse to Settle

Abraham Maslow once wrote, "The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short." Many people, because of fear and timidity, settle for far less than they are truly capable of achieving. They stay in jobs they don't like. They stay in relationships that don't make them happy. They invest their money in things they don't understand and leave their money there long after they realize they've made a mistake. If you are not satisfied with any part of your life, with your current seat selection, remember that you can always pay a price to be free.

Ask for What You Want

In business and in your personal life, remember that every term or condition that you are ever offered has been decided by someone and can be changed by someone else. Whether this involves the pay and conditions of a job, the terms of a contract, the costs of products or services, rental or lease rates of offices or equipment, or bank terms for loans of credit, if you are not happy for any reason, don't be reluctant to ask for something different.

Cast a Wide Net

The rule with ideas is this: Quality is a function of quantity. This means that the more ways you achieve your goal that you consider before you embark on your journey, the better will be the quality of the choice you make. Cast a wide net. Don't fall in love with the first idea that occurs to you. You must continually remind yourself that emotions distort evaluations. This means that the more emotional you become about a course of action at the beginning, the less able you will be to make the best decisions and determine the best way to reach your destination.

Cocktail: Tequila Fuego

2009-12-13T07:34:00.000+08:00

Traditional Mexican flavors highlight your favorite premium tequila in this spicy shot. Serves one.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 oz premium tequila
1 teaspoon hot chile sauce
1 teaspoon lime juice
1 dash onion powder
1 lime wedge
kosher salt
1 jalapeno ring

Preparation:

Use lime wedge to moisten 1/2 the brim of the shooter glass. Dip the moistened brim in salt. In a shaker or a glass, mix the lime juice, tequila, onion powder and hot chile sauce. Blend well. Pour the mixture into the shot glass and garnish the edge with a jalapeno ring.

Follow the shot with the lime wedge.

Ruby: Extended Euclidean Algorithm Function

2009-12-09T06:21:00.000+08:00

A function for finding the modular multiplicative inverse, based on an extended version of the Euclidean algorithm.

Mounting an ISO Image as a Filesystem

2009-12-07T01:13:00.000+08:00

This is great, if you don’t have the DVD hardware, but need to get the data.
The following show an example of mounting the Fedora core 7 DVD as a file.


# mkdir /iso
# mount -o loop -t iso9660 /FC7-i386-DVD.iso /iso

Or to mount automatically at boot, add the following to “/etc/fstab”


/FC7-i386-DVD.iso /iso iso9660 ro,loop 0 0

Become Everything You Are Capable of Becoming

2009-12-06T14:59:00.000+08:00

The turning point in my life came when I discovered the law of cause and effect, the great law of the universe, and human destiny. I learned that everything happens for a reason. I discovered that success is not an accident. Failure is not an accident, either. I also discovered that people who are successful in any area usually are those who have learned the cause-and-effect relationship between what they want and how to get it.

Determine Your Personal Growth and Development Values

To realize your full potential for personal and professional growth and development, begin with your values as they apply to your own abilities. As you know, your values are expressed in your words and actions.

You can tell what your values are by looking at what you do and how you respond to the world around you. Your values are the root causes of your motivations and your behaviors.

Clarify Your Personal Growth and Development Vision

Create a long-term vision for yourself in the area of personal growth. Project forward five or ten years and imagine that you are developed fully in every important part of your life. Idealize and see yourself as outstanding in every respect. Refuse to compromise on your personal dreams.

Set Goals for Your Personal Growth and Development

Now take your vision and crystallize it into specific goals. Here is a good way to start. Take out a piece of paper and write down ten goals that you would like to achieve in the area of personal and professional development in the months and years ahead. Write in the present tense, exactly as if you were already the person you intend to be.

Determine exactly what you want to be able to do. Decide who you want to become. Describe exactly what you will look like when you become truly excellent in your field and in your personal life.

Upgrade Your Personal Knowledge and Skills

Set specific measures for each of your goals. If your goal is to excel in your field, determine how you will know when you have achieved it. Decide how you can measure your progress and evaluate your success.

Perhaps you can use as a measure the number of hours you study in your field each week. Perhaps you can measure the number of books you read or the number of audio programs you listen to. Perhaps you could measure your progress by the number of sales you make as the result of your growing skills.

Develop Winning Personal Growth and Development Habits

Select the specific habits and behaviors you will need to practice every day to become the person you want to become. These could be the habits of clarity, planning, thoroughness, studiousness, hard work, determination, and persistence.

Cocktail: Refreshing Lime Margaritas

2009-12-06T07:39:00.000+08:00

Perfect on a hot summer day or an evening with friends. You’ll make this recipe over and over again!

Ingredients:

1 oz tequila
1/2 oz Triple Sec
1 oz lime juice, fresh squeezed
1/2 teaspoon Sugar
kosher Salt (optional)
lime wedge (optional)
crushed ice or ice cubes

Preparation:

If you’re going to salt the glass, take your lime wedge or a bit of triple sec and rub around edge of glass. Turn upside down and press rim into salt.

For the drink- Shake the tequila, triple sec, lime juice and sugar in a shaker (or stir vigorously with a spoon) and pour over ice. Or you can blend it in a blender if you prefer it. Garnish with lime wedge and enjoy!

Ruby: Strip HTML tags using Ruby

2009-12-02T06:54:00.000+08:00

The StripHtml function strips all the HTML tags in the passed string but preserves the ones specified in the PreserveTags array.

The Need to Lead

2009-11-29T15:09:00.000+08:00

The greatest need we have today, in every area, is for men and women to practice the values of integrity, discipline, responsibility, courage, and long time perspective, both as individuals and in their families. These are the key qualities of leadership.

Our society needs leaders at all levels who practice the principles that lead to long-term success. Especially, we need people in positions of authority and political power to support and encourage others, whose lives and work they influence, to develop character and resist the tendency to act expediently in ways that are harmful to themselves and others.

Everyone needs to take "The Values Pledge," to live by it, and then encourage others to live by it. It is only the solid bulwark of character, based on values, virtues, long-term thinking, and the accurate assessment of secondary consequences that can curb and mitigate the destructive influences and behavior of the Expediency Factor (the E-Factor)

Live In Truth

The philosopher Immanuel Kant postulated what he called "The Universal Maxim." He suggested that "you should live your life as though your every act were to become universal law for all people." The very best judge of truth for you is to ask, "Is it true for me?" If everyone was to be encouraged to live their life as though your every act were to become universal principle for all others, most government policies and programs would be abolished overnight. The fact is, that the only way that many "something for nothing" ideas in government and society can be put forward is with the hope that most people will not take advantage of them.

Think about it. What if everyone were to go on welfare? What if everyone were to apply for every government program that was available to them? What if everyone dedicated themselves to doing the very least amount of work that they could get away with? What if everyone began spending all their time trying to get free money from anywhere that it might be available?

Four Questions to Stay on Track

There are four questions that you can ask and answer every day to keep yourself on track in each part of your life. First, ask yourself; "What kind of a world would this be if everyone in it was just like me?"

When you ask and answer this question honestly, you will admit that if everyone in the world was just like you, this would probably not be the best of all possible worlds. Look inside yourself and think about some of the things that you could change or do differently to become a better "citizen of the world."

The second question you can ask is, "What kind of a country would America be, if everyone in it was just like me?"

This is perhaps the most important question that we can ask and answer for ourselves. If everyone in America did the same thing that you did, every single day, would America be better, happier, healthier, and a more prosperous democracy? If not, what are some of the changes that you could make in your behaviors that would make America a better place?

The third question you can ask is, "What kind of a company would my company be if everyone in it was just like me?"

If you are honest with yourself, you will see different things that you could do to become a more valuable and important contributor to your company. Perhaps you should start a little earlier, work a little harder or stay a little later. Perhaps you could volunteer for more assignments, or upgrade your knowledge and skills as they relate to your job. How could you become the very best person you could possibly become at your work?

The final question, and perhaps the more important, is, "What kind of family would my family be if everyone in it was just like me?"

If everyone in your family behaved the way you do, and treated everyone else the way you treat them, would your family be a warmer, happier, and more loving group of people? What could you do, starting today, to be a better family member?

Take the High Road

The true mark of the superior person is that he sets high standards for himself, and refuses to compromise those standards for any reason. He sees himself as a role model for others. He behaves at all times as if everyone was watching, even when no one is watching.

The truly superior person does not give into forces of expediency. He does not seek something for nothing. He refuses to take anything to which he is not entitled. He insists upon earning everything he gets. He practices the Golden Rule and treats everyone the way he would like to be treated himself. He sets high standards for himself and continually strives to meet those standards. If everyone in America were to take the pledge below, this would be a better country in every way.

Rails: 301 Redirects

2009-11-29T09:38:00.000+08:00

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect, which tells the search engines to index the redirected to URL rather than the current URL.

You can use this when migrating from legacy content management systems, or to make sure that you only have 1 URL per page.

With the folloing code in your controller, Rails makes it easy:

Ruby: Check if an URL is available

2009-11-25T07:00:00.000+08:00

This little Ruby function will check if an URL is available (response code 200). It will return true if the return code is 200 (success), false if any other code is returned, such as 404 (not found.)

Where to Put Your Money Conservatively

2009-11-22T15:11:00.000+08:00

There are three places (besides savings accounts) where you can park your savings that will give you high degrees of safety and liquidity: money market accounts, certificates of deposit (CDs), and government saving bonds.

Money Market Accounts

Money market accounts are available at your bank and pay a higher rate of interest than savings accounts. They are also quite competitive, so you should shop around and look at what different banks offer. As soon as your savings account balance exceeds $1,000, move that money into a money market account at a higher rate of interest.

Certificates of Deposit

Another savings instrument that you may consider is a certificate of deposit (CD). These are issued by banks, savings and loans, and other financial institutions for periods of time ranging from 30 days up to 10 years. The longer you lock up your money in a CD, the higher the interest rate you will receive.

The weakness with CDs is that if you need your money back before the date of maturity there are often severe penalties. You should find out what they are before you purchase a CD in the first place. CDs pay higher interest rates than money market accounts, and are safe places to put your savings. Nonetheless, they are not as flexible as the third option, which is a government savings bond.

Government Savings Bond

Government savings bonds are the most conservative of investments. They are safe and secure, and they pay reasonable rates of interest. They are easily negotiable into cash if you need the money back at any time. They're backed by the full credit of the issuing government. In other words, you cannot lose money on a government savings bond unless the entire country goes broke.

Invest your Savings

These three types of investments are perfect places for you to invest your three to six months of savings. You will get the highest return possible with absolute security and safety principle.

Ruby: Mask all Credit Card Digits but Last Four

2009-11-18T06:48:00.000+08:00

Mask all the credit card number digits with asterisks except the last 4, for security purposes. The function works for all types of cards (Visa, MasterCard, Amex, Discovery, etc.)

The Power of Leverage

2009-11-15T15:15:00.000+08:00

Studying and practicing the principles of effective delegation have given you the foundation necessary to exploit the power of leverage. We will now examine other forms of this key tool of professional and business success. Each of the seven forms of leverage can help you expand the reach of your own talents and strengths. Each involves building on the work, talents, experiences, and contacts of other people.

Leveraging Other People's Energy

The most productive people make sure they have time for the few things that give them the highest payoff by routinely seeking to delegate or outsource their lower-value activities.

Leveraging Other People's Knowledge

Applying one simple piece of key knowledge to your situation can make a world of difference in the result you achieve. Finding and applying knowledge from another source can spare you tremendous amounts of money and labor. Follow the lead of successful people and scan books, magazines, tapes, articles, and conferences for ideas and insights you can use to help you achieve your goals faster.

Leveraging Other People's Money

Knowing how and when to take advantage of other people's money—by borrowing or otherwise tapping into other people's financial resources—empowers you to achieve things that would be beyond your reach if you relied solely on your own resources. Seek out opportunities to borrow and invest, achieving returns in excess of the cost of the borrowed funds. Among the many sources for funds, consider, for example, chartered banks, savings and loan associations, venture capitalists, and public and private offerings of securities.

Leveraging Other People's Successes

Study the successes that other people and companies have achieved to gain insights into their challenges and solutions. Most successful people have paid their dues in terms of money, energy, commitment, and even failure to arrive at the top of their fields. Learn from their experiences.

Leveraging Other People's Failures

As Benjamin Franklin said, "Man can either buy his wisdom or borrow it. By buying it, he pays full price in personal time and treasure. By borrowing it, he capitalizes on the lessons learned from the failures of others." Listen carefully to the stories of truly successful people. Those who genuinely wish to support you will share with you their failures as well as their successes.

Leveraging Other People's Ideas

A single good idea, developed with passion and commitment, can give birth to a fortune. The greater your exposure to a range of ideas—gained through reading, studying, interaction, and experimentation—the greater the chance you will come across one that will lead you to enduring success.

Leveraging Other People's Contacts of Other People's Credibility

Everyone you know has friends, acquaintances, and professional contacts. Many of these people can make a positive impact on your career or business. Among all the people you know or are connected to in some way, who might open doors for you?

Keeping Your Sales Funnel Full

2009-11-08T15:17:00.000+08:00

Professional selling has three stages, which have been the same throughout history. They are prospect, present, and follow up. These three phases constitute the three parts of the "sales funnel." If your sales and income are down, it is because you are not prospecting enough, presenting enough, or following up and closing enough. The way to increase your sales is usually for you to increase the quality or quantity of your activities in one or more of these areas.

Imagine Your Funnel

Imagine the basic sales model as a funnel. At the top of the funnel, you put in prospects. You have to call on a certain number of people, or suspects, to get a certain number of prospects. This number varies depending on the market, your product or service, your individual skills in prospecting, advertising, and many other factors.

Presenting

The second part of the sales funnel is presenting. There is a direct ratio between the number of people you call on initially and the number of people who will agree to meet with you. Let us say, for example, that you have to call on twenty prospects to get five presentations. This would give you a ratio of 20 to 5 for your prospecting activities. Selling is very much a numbers game.

Follow Up and Close

In the third part of the sales funnel you have following up and closing. Let us say that you have to follow up with two prospects to get one sale. What this means is that you have to put twenty prospects in the top of the funnel to get one sale out of the bottom of the funnel, a ratio of 20 to 1. The rule therefore is this "keep your funnel full."

Prospecting Power

The definition of a good prospect is "Someone who can and will buy and pay within a reasonable period of time." Do not waste your precious selling time with nice people who do not have the authority, money, or ability to buy from you. Think continually about your personal income, and always be sure that the person you are talking to can contribute to that income soon enough to justify the time you are investing in him or her.

Qualities of a Good Prospect

The prospect has a genuine need that your product/service can fill.
The prospect is friendly toward you and have a favorable impression of your company and industry.
The prospect is willing and able to make a buying decision in the near future.
The prospect is a good potential source of further sales and referrals.

Qualities of Poor Prospects

The prospect has no money or need for your product or service.
The prospect is critical of you, your company, or your product.
The prospect immediately haggles and complains about your price.
The prospect is indecisive about purchasing from you or anyone.

The Law of Planning

2009-11-01T14:21:00.000+08:00

Every minute spent in planning saves ten minutes in execution. The purpose of strategic planning in a corporation is to reorganize and restructure the activities and resources of the company so as to increase the “return on equity,” or return on the money invested and working in the company. The purpose of “personal strategic planning” is for you to increase your “return on energy,” the return on the mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual capital you have invested in your life and career.

Every Minute

Every minute that you spend planning your goals, your activities, and your time in advance saves ten minutes of work in the execution of those plans. Therefore, careful advance planning gives you a return of ten times, or 1,000 percent, on your investment of mental, emotional, and physical energy.

10-12 Minutes

It takes only about 10-12 minutes for you to make up a plan for your day. This investment of 10-12 minutes will save you time of approximately two hours per day, or a 25 percent increase in productivity and performance, in ROE, from the first day that you begin planning your day in advance.

Time Planner

The key to personal efficiency is for you to use a good time planner. Virtually any planner will work if you will discipline yourself to use it as the core of your time management system. Today, Palm Pilots and personal digital assistants (PDA), in combination with personal computers, can enable you to plan your time with greater efficiency than has ever been possible.

Master List

Begin with a master list as the foundation of your time planning system. Write down everything that you can think of that you will need to do for the indefinite future. As new ideas, goals, tasks, and responsibilities arise; write them down on your master list. Don't trust them to memory. Plan each month in advance by transferring the appropriate items from your master list to your monthly list. This is best done the last week of each month. Plan each week in advance by transferring items from your monthly list to your weekly list. This is best done the weekend before.

Plan Everything in Detail

Plan every project, meeting, and goal in detail, before you begin. The very act of planning forces you to think better and more accurately about everything you do. The more you think about and plan something on paper, the faster and more efficiently you will accomplish it when you start work.

Regular Planning

Regular planning assures that you spend more time on activities of higher value. This increases effectiveness and your efficiency in everything you do. Perhaps, the most important rule of all if for you to "think on paper!"

As Within, So Without

2009-10-25T14:23:00.000+08:00

Aristotle said that the ultimate aim or purpose or human life is to achieve your own happiness. You are the very happiest when what you are doing on the outside is congruent with your values on the inside. When you are living in complete alignment with that which you consider to be good, right, and true, you will automatically feel happy and positive about yourself and your world.

Know What You Really Want

Stephen Covey once said, "Be sure that, as you scramble up the ladder of success, it is leaning against the right building." Many people work hard to achieve goals that they think they want only to find, at the end of the day, they get no joy or satisfaction from their accomplishments. They ask, "Is this all there is?" This occurs when the outer accomplishment is not in harmony with your inner values. Don't let this happen to you.

Trust Your Intuition

Self-trust is the foundation of greatness. Self-trust comes from listening to your intuition, to your "still, small voice" within. Men and women begin to become great when they begin to listen to their inner voices and absolutely trust that they are being guided to a higher power each step of the way. Living in alignment with your true values is the royal road to self-confidence, self-respect, and personal pride. In fact, almost every human problem can be resolved by returning to values.

Watch Your Behavior

How can you tell what your values really are? The answer is simple. You always demonstrate your true values in your actions and especially your actions under pressure. Whenever you are forced to choose between one behavior and another you will always act consistent with what is most important and valuable to you at that moment. Values, in fact, are organized in a hierarchy. You have a series of values, some of them very intense and important and some of them weaker and less important. One of the most important exercises you can engage in to determine who you really are and what you really want is to organize your values by priority. Once you are clear about the relative important of your values, you can then organize your outer life so that it is in alignment with them.

Determine Your Hearts Desire

The spiritual teacher Emmet Fox wrote about the importance of discovering your "hearts desire." What is your hearts desire? As a friend of mine asks, "What do you want to be famous for?" What words would you like people to use to describe you when you are not there? What would you like someone to say about you at your funeral? What kind of reputation do you have today? What kind of reputation would you like to have sometime in the future?

Your Past is Not Your Future

Many people had difficult experiences growing up. They fell on hard times and became associated with the wrong people. Some were convicted and sent to prison for crimes. But at a certain point in life, they decided to change. They thought seriously about what kind of person they wanted to be known as, and thought of, in the future. They decided to change their lives by changing the values that they lived by. By making these decisions and sticking to them, they changed their lives. Remember, it doesn't matter where you're coming from; all that really matters is where you're going.

How to Charm Anyone

2009-10-18T14:25:00.000+08:00

Psychologists tell us that the core of personality is self-esteem. This has best been defined as "how much you like yourself." Your self-esteem is the sum total of how important and valuable you feel you are at any moment.

The Secret of Charm

The deepest craving of human nature is the need to feel valued and valuable. The secret of charm is therefore simple: make others feel important.

Five Ways to be Charming

Acceptance. The greatest gift you can give other people is the attitude of "unconditional positive regard." That is you accept them in their entirety, without limitation. You never criticize or find fault. You are totally accepting of everything about them. This is the starting point of being charming.
Appreciation. Whenever you express appreciation to others for something they have done, small or large, their self-esteem increases. They feel more competent and capable. Their self-image improves and their self-respect soars. And how do you trigger this wonderful feeling in others? It is simple. You say "thank you" on every occasion, for any large or small reason.
Approval. It is said that "babies cry for it, men die for it." Throughout life, all humans have a deep subconscious need for approval of their actions and accomplishments. No amount of approval ever satisfies for long. The need is ongoing, like the need for food and rest. People who continually seek opportunities to express approval are welcome wherever they go. Perhaps the best definition of approval is "praise." Just remember, whenever you praise other people for something they have done, their self-esteem is elevated.
Admiration. As Abraham Lincoln said, "Everybody likes a compliment." When you give people a genuine, sincere compliment about a trait, possession, or accomplishment, they automatically feel better about themselves. They feel acknowledged and recognized. They feel valuable and important. They like themselves more, and they like you more. Compliment a person on an article of clothing. Compliment someone on a trait, like punctuality or persistence. Compliment for small things as well as large.
Attention. This is perhaps the most important quality of all. It is the most powerful behavior for building self-esteem and is the key to instant charm. The more closely you pay attention to other people, the more valuable and important they will feel they are, and the more they will like you.

Five Factors That Banks Look For

2009-10-11T14:27:00.000+08:00

There are five factors that banks look for before making a loan to you, or any businessperson. These are called the "five C's" of lending or borrowing. You must be prepared to demonstrate all five when you approach a bank for a loan.

1. Collateral.

First, banks look for collateral. What assets are you going to put up to cover the loan? Collateral is something that can be sold for cash fairly quickly to repay the bank in case your business is not successful.

2. Character.

Banks look for character. What is your previous track record with regard to loans? What kind of character do you have, in terms of honesty and dependability? Who knows you? Who will vouch for you?

3. Credit Rating.

Banks look at your current credit rating. How much money have you borrowed and repaid in the past? How good is your credit history today? Your credit rating is a very precious thing that follows you wherever you go. I have known many people whose entire adult lives have been ruined because they have been sloppy or indifferent with their credit. They have failed to make credit card payments, utility payments, or rent payments when they were due. In one or more of these cases, they have been reported to a national credit bureau. This negative credit rating has then dogged them for as long as 10 years, wherever they went, anywhere in the country. Don't let this happen to you.

4. Capital.

Banks want to know the amount of capital you have. How much of your own money are you willing to invest? This is a measure of how deeply committed you are to the success of the enterprise.

5. Confidence.

The last factor that banks use to determine whether to lend you money is their level of confidence in you. In the final analysis, the individual banker must have confidence that you are the kind of person who is going to succeed in the business that he or she is lending you money to start of build.

Banking Relationships Mature over Time

Borrowing money from banks is a progressive series of financial transactions that develop over time. When you first attempt to borrow money, most banks will want $5 worth of collateral, personal investments, and other assets for every $1 that they will lend you. They will also want personal guarantees that extend beyond bankruptcy, should you declare it. But after a bank has several years of experience with you and comes to know and trust you, its lending requirements decline, step by step.

The Four Principles of Marketing Strategy

2009-10-04T14:30:00.000+08:00

There are four principles to effective marketing strategy. Each of these principles must be thought through carefully and then continually revisited as the business grows and changes. Any changes in any one of these areas can have an enormous impact on the sales of profitability of the business.

Principle One: Specialization

You must decide in exactly which area of your product or service market you are going to specialize. You cannot be all things to all customers. Too many businesses make the mistake of trying to offer too many products or services to too many types of customers at too many prices in too many ways. This is not the way to wealth.

Principle Two: Differentiation

This is perhaps the most important strategic marketing principle of all. All business success requires a differentiation of some kind. All business success requires that you be both different from and better than you competitors in some clear, distinct way.

Who is your competition? Why doesn't your ideal customer buy from you? Why does your ideal customer buy from your competitor? What value does your ideal customer see in buying from your competitor that he or she does not see in buying from you? What could you do to offset this perception?

The only hope you have in acquiring customers is to focus most of your time and attention on determining exactly who they are, where they are, and what you have to do to get them to buy from you rather than from someone else.

Principle Three: Segment Your Market

If you offer more than one product or service, you will have to divide your potential customers into separate market segments.

You will then have to identify the characteristics and qualities of prospective customers in each of these segments in order to advertise and sell to them effectively.

Principle Four: Concentration

Once you have applied the principles of specialization, differentiation, and segmentation to your products and services, and to your customers and markets, you now have to concentrate your limited resources.

You have to focus your time, energy, and money on those prospective customers that you have identified who are the most likely to buy from you the soonest.

Win-Win or No Deal

2009-09-27T14:32:00.000+08:00

In successful negotiation, both parties should be fully satisfied with the result and feel that they have each "won" or no deal should be made at all. Consistent with your determination to enter into agreements that preserve long-term relations between the parties, you should always seek an outcome that satisfies both. Remember, you always reap what you sow. Any settlement or agreement that leaves one party dissatisfied will come back to hurt you later, sometimes in ways that you cannot predict.

Tough Negotiating

A very tough negotiator told me proudly about a hard deal he had wrung out of a national organization for the distribution of his company's products. He had demanded and threatened and negotiated an agreement that paid him considerably more, both in up-front payments and in percentages of sales, than any of the other clients for which his company distributed.

Win-Lose

The businessman had negotiated a deal that was a "win-lose," with him winning and the other losing. But those on the losing side had no incentive to fulfill the implied commitment to market the products. They had no real incentive to go forward with this person again, you should be clear in advance that you are committed to reach a solution that is satisfactory to both. If it does no entail a win for both parties, you should simply refuse to make any deal at all.

Win-Win

When you are determined to achieve a win-win solution to a negotiation, and you are open, receptive, and flexible in your discussions, you will often discover a third alternative that neither party had considered initially but that is superior to what either of you might have thought of on your own.

Make Yourself Clear

Once you have decided that you are only going to agree to a settlement that is satisfactory to both parties, this doesn't mean that you have to accept any arrangement that you consider best. With your values and your intentions clear, you are now in a position to utilize every strategy and tactic available to you to get the very best deal for both of you—one that assures that you both end up happy with the arrangement.

How RAID 6 works?

2009-09-22T02:31:00.000+08:00

RAID 6 is designed for tolerating two simultaneous HDD failures by storing two sets of distributed parities. Apparently the complex mechanism is likely to compromise data rate in and out of the system. With direct support from Intel IOP, Enhance has enabled RAlD 6 in both DAS series and iSCSI series with minimal performance hit. RAlD 6 significantly enhances the reliability of the new EnhanceRAID family even both are built upon low-cost high capacity SATA drives.

Brief
RAID 6 is designed for tolerating two simultaneous HDD failures by storing two sets of distributed parities. Apparently the complex mechanism is likely to compromise data rate in and out of the system. With direct support from Intel IOP, Enhance has enabled RAlD 6 in both DAS series and iSCSI series with minimal performance hit. RAlD 6 significantly enhances the reliability of the new EnhanceRAID family even both are built upon low-cost high capacity SATA drives.

Pro

Designed for tolerating two simultaneous HDD failures by storing two sets of distributed parities.

Con

For RAID 6, one needs a more complex system with a method for encoding, as well as XOR calculations. For that, one really needs hardware acceleration, otherwise the performance suffers.
Uses 2 drives for parity

Recommended Configuration

Disk array consists of 12 disks or more

Manage Your Time Well

2009-09-20T14:36:00.000+08:00

To achieve all your goals and become everything you are capable of becoming you must get your time under control. Psychologists generally agree that a "sense of control" is the key to feelings of happiness, confidence, power, and personal well-being. And a sense of control is only possible when you practice excellent time management skills.

Choices and Decisions

If the front side of the coin of success is the ability to set clear goals for yourself, then the flip side of the same coin is the ability to get yourself organized and work on your most valuable tasks, every minute of every day. Your choices and decisions have combined to create your entire life to this moment. To change or improve your life in any way, you have to make new choices and new decisions that are more in alignment with who you really are and what you really want.

The Right Thing to Do

The only way that you can determine that is right or wrong, more or less important, high or low priority is by first determining your aim or goal at that particular moment. From that point forward, you can divide all your activities in to "A" activities or "B" activities. An "A" activity is something that moves you toward your goal, the faster and more directly the better. A "B" activity is an activity that does not move you toward a goal that is important to you.

Begin with a List

The basic tool of time management is a list, organized by priority, and used as a constant tool for personal management. The fact is that you can't manage time; you can only manage yourself. That is why time management requires self-discipline, self-control, and self-mastery. Time management requires that you make the best choices and decisions necessary to enhance the quality of your life and work. Then you follow through on your decisions.

Use Advance Planning

Begin today to plan every week in advance, preferably the Sunday before the workweek begins. Plan every day in advance, preferably the night before. When you make a list of everything you have to do the following day, your subconscious mind works on that list all night long. When you wake up in the morning, you will often have ideas and insights to help you accomplish the items on your list.

Separate the Urgent from the Important

In the process of managing your time, you must separate the urgent tasks from the important ones. Urgent tasks are determined by external pressures and requirements. You must do them immediately.

Achieving Personal Excellence

2009-09-13T14:38:00.000+08:00

Personal excellence is perhaps the most important of all invisible and intangible assets that you can acquire. Achieving personal excellence in your business or industry requires lifelong dedication. But once you get into the top 10 percent of your field, you will be one of the highest paid people in the country. You will enjoy the respect and esteem of the people around you. You will be able to live your life the way you want to live it. You will enjoy high levels of self-esteem, self-respect, and personal pride.

Build Your Intellectual Assets

Each person has or can acquire three forms of intellectual capital. These require an investment of study and hard work, but they pay off in higher income for the rest of your life. The first type of intellectual capital you can acquire consists of your core knowledge, skills, and abilities. These are the result of education, experience, and training. They determine how well you do your job and the value of your contribution to your business.

Build Your Internal Knowledge

The second form of intellectual capital that you posses is your knowledge of how your business operates internally, in comparison to that of your competitors or any other business. Each business develops a series or systems, procedures, methods, techniques, and strategies to market, sell, produce, deliver products and services, and satisfy customers. Each business has internal systems for accounting, administration, and financial controls. These systems take many years to develop and considerable time for a new person to learn. A person who knows and understands these systems intimately has a form of intellectual capital that is difficult for the company to replace.

Build Your Ability to Get Results

The third form of intellectual capital that you possess, and that is perhaps the key determinant of your earning ability, is your knowledge and understanding of how you can get financial results in a competitive market. This includes your knowledge of your products and services and how to sell them. It includes your knowledge of customers and suppliers and how to deal with them. It embraces your familiarity with bankers, lawyers, accountants, and government officials and how to interact with them effectively. This form of intellectual capital may take years to build, and it is extremely valuable to your organization. You first responsibility to yourself is to develop your earning ability to a high level. You do this by continually increasing your intellectual capital, by upgrading your ability to do your job, by becoming a valuable part of your organization, and by getting more and better financial results for your organization.

The Law of Superb Execution

2009-09-06T14:39:00.000+08:00

Leaders are committed to excellent performance of the business task at hand, and to continuous improvement. A leader is the person who chooses the area of excellence for his or her team. A leader knows that excellence is a journey, not a destination. Leaders are committed to being the best in everything they do. They constantly strive to be better in their key result areas. They compare themselves with people, organizations, and products or services that are better than they are, and they are continually improving.

Standards of Excellence

Leaders set standards of excellence for everyone who reports to them. They are ruthless about weeding out incompetence and poor performance. Leaders demand quality work and insist that people do their jobs well. The leader sets the standard of excellence. No one, or no part of the organization, can be any better than the standard that the leader represents and enforces. For this reason, leaders are committed to personal excellence in everything they do.

Leaders are Learners

Leaders are learners, continually striving to be better in their work and personal lives. They read, take additional courses and seminars, and listen to audio programs in their cars. They attend conventions and association meetings, go to the important sessions, and take good notes. They are committed to learning and growing in every area where they feel they can make an even more valuable contribution to their work.

Inspiring People

People are most inspired when they feel they are working for an organization in which excellence is expected. The very best way to motivate and inspire others is for you to announce your commitment to being the best in your field or industry. Then, continually benchmark your performance and the performance of your organization against the very "best in class" in your business.

Core Competencies

Leaders identify their core competencies, the vital tasks they do that are responsible for them being in business. They continually look for ways to upgrade these core competencies to assure that they maintain a competitive edge in the marketplace. Leaders think about the future and identify the core competencies that will be required for success in the years ahead. They then develop plans to acquire those core competencies well before they will be needed to compete effectively in the marketplace of tomorrow.

Wealth Creation Strategies

2009-08-30T14:42:00.000+08:00

What People Need

Wealth creation occurs when you produce a product or service that people want and need and are willing to pay for at a price that is in excess of your total cost of producing that product or service. The key to business success has always been the same, find a need and fill it. We all earn our livings by serving other people in some way. Your business goal is to find out what people really want and need, and then give it to them better and faster than anyone else.

Secrets of Market Leadership

Hundreds of companies have been studied to discover the secrets of market leadership. There are three secrets. The first one is Operational Excellence—the company has developed the ability to produce its products and services at a cost substantially lower than its competitors. The second is Customer Intimacy—the company develops a close relationship with its customers based on excellent knowledge of the customer's business. Thirdly, there is Technological Superiority—the company offers a product or service that is superior to that of its competitor.

Additional Value

There are several strategies that you can follow to create additional value for your customers and additional wealth for yourself. Improve your product or service in some way so that it is better than that of your competitors, at the same or at a lower price. Produce or deliver your product or service faster than your competitors. Produce your product or service cheaper than your competitors, maintaining or increasing your level of quality. Offer better follow-up and support services to go along with your product or service than your competitors. Make your product easier to acquire and more readily available than your competitors. Make your prices and terms more attractive and convenient than your competitors. Include additional products and services with your offerings, at the same price.

Reputation

Your reputation in the marketplace determines how much you can sell, and the prices you charge. The friendliness of your staff and the ease of doing business with you is a key part of your reputation. Your credibility with your customers, the degree to which they see you as trustworthy and dependable is a key value to your customers. Selling to an individual customer requires an impeccable reputation and a focus on the improvement your product or service makes in their lives. What does your product achieve for your customer? What does your product help your customer to avoid? What does your product help your customer to preserve? How does your product help your customer to get better results in his life?

Developing a Powerful Sales Personality

2009-08-23T14:56:00.000+08:00

Becoming excellent in closing sales is an inside job. It begins within you. In sales, your personality is more important than your product knowledge. It is more important than your sales skills. It is more important than the product or service that you are selling. In fact, your personality determines fully 80 percent of your sales success.

Take Charge of Your Life

The biggest mistake you can make is to ever think that you work for anyone but yourself. From the time you take your first job until the day you retire, you are self employed. You are the president of your own entrepreneurial corporation, selling your services into the marketplace at the highest price possible. You have only one employee—yourself. Your job is to sell the highest quality and quantity of your services throughout your working life.

View Yourself as Self-Employed

In a study done in New York some years ago, researchers found that the top 3 percent of people in every field looked upon themselves as self-employed. They treated the company as if it belonged to them personally. They saw themselves as being in charge of every aspect of their lives. They took everything that happened to their company personally, exactly as if they owned 100 percent of the stock.

Winners Versus Losers

The difference between winners and losers is quite clear. Winners always accept responsibility for their actions. Losers never do but instead always have some kind of explanation for why they are doing poorly.

Don't Waste Time

The average salesperson today wastes a fully 50 percent of his or her working time. According to research, he comes in a little later, works a little slower, and leaves a little earlier. He spends most of his working time in idle chitchat with coworkers, personal business, reading the paper, drinking coffee, and surfing the internet. Winners arrive a little earlier, work a little harder, and stay a little later.

Develop Empathy and Understanding

Top salespeople have high levels of empathy, i.e., they really care about their customers. Ambition, the desires to achieve, combined with empathy, the genuine caring for the well-being of your customers, are the twin keys to top sales performance. A person with empathy makes every effort to get inside the mind and heart of the customer and to understand his situation and needs.

Keep Your Word

Top-selling salespeople are impeccably honest with themselves and with others. There is no substitute for honesty in selling. Earl Nightingale once said, "If honesty did not exist, it would have to be invented as the surest way of getting rich."

Do What you Love to Do

One of the secrets of success in selling is for you to do what you love to do. Top salespeople love what they are selling. They believe in it passionately. They will defend it and argue over it. They will talk about it day and night. When they go to bed, they think about their product. When they wake up in the morning, they can hardly wait to talk to prospects about it. Look at the top salespeople in the very best companies, and you'll find that these people are fanatical, about their products and services.

How to Install Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope)

2009-08-18T04:40:00.000+08:00

Few of my friends have started to learn Ruby on Rails recently. According to my point of view, Windows is not a suitable and enjoyable environment for RoR development. So, I recommended them to start with Ubuntu. Most of them have installed Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04. So, I wish to write a small guide to setup the Ruby on Rails environment on Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04.

Ruby installation

First we need to update the repositories.

sudo apt-get update

It’s always a best practice to upgrade the system.

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

This installation will take few minutes and also require approximately 100 MB disk space.

Now that we are up to date. Let’s start install the RoR recipices. We need following Rails prerequisites.

ruby - An interpreter of object-oriented scripting language Ruby
ri - Ruby Interactive reference
rdoc - Generate documentation from ruby source files
irb - Interactive Ruby

sudo apt-get install ruby ri rdoc irb libopenssl-ruby ruby-dev

Ruby Gem installation

Next we need to install the Ruby gem package manager. You can download the latest Ruby gems by following link.

http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubygems/

Download and extract the files. (By the time I’m writing this tutorial the latest version is 1.3.5)

tar xvzf  rubygems-1.3.5.tgz
cd rubygems-1.3.5
sudo ruby setup.rb

Once it’s done you can delete the .tgz file and rubygems directory.

cd ..
rm -r rubygems-1.3.5 rubygems-1.3.5.tgz

Next we need to create a set of simlinks. Otherwise it will be a tedious task to type commands with the version (1.8). For an example if we need to call the gem command we’ve to type gem1.8. I don’t prefer that. Hope you too. So, let’s create the necessary simlinks.

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/local/bin/gem
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/ruby1.8 /usr/local/bin/ruby
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/rdoc1.8 /usr/local/bin/rdoc
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/ri1.8 /usr/local/bin/ri
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/irb1.8 /usr/local/bin/irb

Rails Installation

Now we can install Rails using gem.

sudo gem install rails

Server Installation

Rails by default comes with the WEBrick server. But most Rails developers prefer the Mongrel server. If you satisfied with WEBrick you can skip this step, else type the following command to install Mongrel server.

sudo gem install mongrel

Database Installation

Rails 2.3 shipped with SQLite3 as it’s default database instead of MySQL. You can install SQLite3 libraries by following commands.

sudo apt-get install sqlite3 swig libsqlite3-ruby libsqlite3-dev
sudo gem install sqlite3-ruby

If you prefer MySQL,

sudo apt-get install mysql-client libmysqlclient15-dev
sudo gem install mysql

Create Ruby on Rails App

Now that we have completed everything successfully. You can create your new Ruby on Rail applicaion by following command.

rails test_app

If you need MySQL supported applicaion you need to specify as follows

rails test-app -d mysql

Run the app

cd test_app
script/server

navigate you browser to http://localhost:3000

The Law of Competence

2009-08-16T14:58:00.000+08:00

You can increase your efficiency and your effectiveness by becoming better and better at your key tasks. One of the most powerful of all time management techniques is for you to get better at the most important things you do. Your core competencies, your key skill areas, the places where you are absolutely excellent at what you do, are the key determinants of your productivity, your standard of living, and the level of achievement you reach in your field.

Work Excellence

The market pays excellent rewards only for excellent work. You are therefore successful to the degree to which you do more things better than the average person. Your great responsibility in life is to determine what things you can and should do very well and then develop a plan to become very, very good in those vital areas.

Key Question

Here is the key question: What one skill, if you developed and did it in an excellent fashion, would have the greatest positive impact on your career? Your weakest important skill sets the height at which you can use all your other skills. Be honest with yourself. What is your limiting skill? What is the one skill that determines the speed at which you complete your major tasks and achieve your goals? What is the one skill, the lack of which may be holding you back?

Pareto Principle

The Pareto Principle, the 80/20 Rule, applies to those skills that are limiting to your success. Eighty percent of the reasons you are not moving ahead as fast as you want is explained by the 20 percent of skills and abilities that you lack. This rule also says that 80 percent of your limits in life are contained within yourself. Eighty percent of the reasons you are not achieving your goals as quickly as you want is because of the lack of a particular skill, ability, or quality within yourself.

Look Within Yourself

The underachiever always looks for the reasons for his or her problems in the outer world. The high achiever looks within. The high-achieving person always asks, what is it in me that is holding me back? Successful people look into themselves for the answers to their questions and for the solutions to their problems. Unsuccessful people always look outside. Who do you think finds the solutions first?

Ask Others to Evaluate

Ask people around you to evaluate you in your critical skill areas on a scale of one to ten. The more accurate you can be about this exercise, the easier it will be for you to focus on the one or two skill areas that help you the most.

Create Your Personal Strategic Plan

2009-08-08T15:04:00.000+08:00

Your success in life is determined, to a large extent by your ability to think, plan, decide, and take action. The stronger your skills are in each of these areas, the faster you will achieve your goals and the happier you will be with your life and career. Personal strategic planning is the tool that takes you from wherever you are to wherever you want to go.

Difference between Train and Plane

The difference between people who use strategic planning to organize and direct their lives and those who do not is like the difference between taking a train and taking a plane. Both will get you from point A to point B, but the plane—personal strategic planning—will get you there much faster and without frequent stops.

Systematic Way of Thinking

Skill in personal strategic planning is not something you are born with, like eye color or perfect pitch. It is a systematic way of thinking and acting and is, therefore, something you can learn, like riding a bike or changing a tire. With practice, you can master the many different elements that make up this key skill, and you will get into the rhythm of thinking and acting strategically for the rest of your life. When you do acquire rhythm, you will realize extraordinary results. Your life and career will take off, and the sky is truly the limit.

Save Time and Money

Why is strategic planning and thinking so helpful? The answer is simple: it saves you an enormous amount of time and money. When you review and analyze key strategic questions of concepts of your career or business, you find yourself focusing on the critical tasks necessary to achieve your goals. At the same time, you stop doing those things that keep you from achieving success. You do more of the right things and fewer things that get and keep you off track. You set performance goals for people and projects. You become skilled at measuring and tracking results. You move into the express lane in both work and life.

Design Your Life and Career

Your goals in personal strategic planning are similar. The key difference is that rather than improving your return on equity, your planning efforts will allow you to realize a greater return on energy. You might say that personal strategic planning will increase your return on life. A business measures its equity in terms of financial capital. On the other hand, you measure your personal equity in terms of your own human capital. Your personal equity consists of the physical, emotional, and mental energies you are able to invest in your career. Set a goal of achieving the very highest return possible on the investment of your energies.

Critical Question

Ask yourself this critical question: What is it that I do especially well? Examine the areas where you excel or are clearly superior to others in your field. You need to know what you can claim as your personal competitive advantage. This is the lifeblood of personal strategic planning. Your success is tied directly to how excellent you become at the most important part of your work.

Accessing the Python Help Facility from the Python Shell

2009-08-03T17:53:00.000+08:00

Python has a ton of useful modules, and the built-in help facility is extremely useful for gaining quick access to a description of methods in a given module. Once a module is imported with import:

You can run dir(MODULE_NAME) to view the list of methods in the module:

To get help on a specific method, you can pass the module and method name to the built-in help function:

Help on class spawn in module pexpect:

This is pretty sweet, and makes coding in Python super easy.

The Power of Word of Mouth

2009-08-01T15:06:00.000+08:00

One of the most powerful determinants of the future success of your business is the little understood phenomenon of word-of-mouth communication. Fully 90 percent of dissatisfied customers will not do business again with the company that fails to meet their expectations. The same study also concluded that, on average, each dissatisfied customer will share his dissatisfaction with at least nine other people. What this means is that the dissatisfaction of just one disgruntled customer ends up poisoning the minds of forty five other people.

Creating a “Golden Chain” of Referrals

A satisfied customer will share “delight” or “amazement” with nine of his friends and relatives and associates, who will in turn pass the good news on to five others. In his book Word-of-Mouth Marketing, Jerry Wilson claims that the number of customers who will tell a positive story of their experience with you, your company or your product is one-tenth of the number who will share a negative story. In other words, while excellent customer service is essential in reducing or even eliminating negative word of mouth, you cannot rely on positive word of mouth to produce a stream of referrals.

Asking for Referrals

Referrals do not just happen. Waiting for the phone to ring is a lousy marketing strategy! If you want to build a pipeline of referrals, you must create it yourself. This means you must ask for them. That's right—ask! And your most productive source of referrals to start with is your existing customer or prospect list. The closing of a sale is often accompanied by an emotional high for your new customer. This is a wonderful time to ask for referrals. With each step, your new customer becomes more and more involved in the process and, subconsciously, more committed to helping you. Your goal should be to leave with two or three referrals from each sale.

Asking for Referrals from a Satisfied Customer

If you have done a good job of servicing your customer after the sale, you can be confident you now have a satisfied customer—one who will buy from you again and who represents a potential source of excellent referrals. Contact your satisfied customer and begin the conversation by inquiring if they are happy with their purchase and if there is anything more you can do for them. If they make a request, then treat this as a customer service call. If not, say to them, “I'm so pleased you're enjoying your new (product or service). Can you put me in touch with anyone else who would appreciate the same experience that you are enjoying using it?” The wonderful thing about a highly satisfied customer is they often want their relatives, friends and associates to share their experience.

The Follow-Up

Within one day or receiving the referral, drop a quick note to your customer, thanking them for their recommendation and again reassuring them that you will treat their friend with respect. This is an important part of cementing your relationship and will pay dividends in the future in the form of repeat business and further referrals. After you have followed up with the referral, be sure to call your customer. Again, thank them for the introduction and report your results. Remember, the referral is someone who is meaningful to your customer, so they will naturally be interested in what happens. A further way you express your gratitude and to reinforce your relationship with your customer is to send them a gift after you have closed a sale with a referral they provided. Your gift should be appropriate to the size of the sale.

The RSpec Book: Behaviour Driven Development with RSpec, Cucumber, and Friends

2009-07-31T17:43:00.000+08:00

The RSpec Book: Behaviour Driven Development with RSpec, Cucumber, and Friends
Author: David Chelimsky, Dave Astels, Bryan Helmkamp, Dan North, Zach Dennis, Aslak Hellesoy
ISBN-10: 1934356379
ISBN-13: 978-1934356371

Book Description
Behaviour Driven Development is about writing software that matters. It is an approach to agile software development that takes cues from Test Driven Development, Domain Driven Design, and Acceptance Test Driven Planning.

RSpec and Cucumber are the leading Behaviour Driven Development tools in Ruby. RSpec supports Test Driven Development in Ruby through the BDD lens, keeping your focus on design and documentation while also supporting thorough testing and quick fault isolation. Cucumber, RSpec's steadfast companion, supports Acceptance Test Driven Planning with business-facing, executable requirements documentation that helps to ensure that you are writing relevant software targeted at real business needs.

The RSpec Book will introduce you to RSpec, Cucumber, and a number of other tools that make up the Ruby BDD family. Replete with tutorials and practical examples, the RSpec Book will help you get your BDD on, taking you from executable requirements to working software that is clean, well tested, well documented, flexible and highly maintainable.

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Practice Creative Procrastination

2009-07-25T15:44:00.000+08:00

Creative procrastination is one of the most effective of all personal performance techniques. It can change your life. The fact is that you can't do everything that you have to do. You have to procrastinate on something. Therefore, procrastinate on small tasks. Everyone procrastinates. The difference between high performers and low performers is largely determined by what they choose to procrastinate on.

Priorities versus Posteriorities

To set proper priorities, you must set posteriorities as well. A priority is something that you do more of and sooner, while a postieriority is something that you do less of and later, if at all. One of the most powerful of all words in time management in the word no! Say it politely. Say it clearly so that there are no misunderstandings. Say it regularly as a normal part of your time management vocabulary. For you to do something new, you must complete or stop doing something old.

Procrastinate on Purpose

Most people engage in unconscious procrastination. They procrastinate without thinking about it. As a result, they procrastinate on the big, valuable, important tasks that can have significant long-term consequences in their lives and careers. You must avoid this common tendency at all costs. Your job is to deliberately procrastinate on tasks that are of low value so that you have more time for tasks that can make a big difference in your life and work.

Set Posteriorities on Time-Consuming Activities

Continually review your life and work to find time- consuming tasks and activities that you can abandon. Cut down on television watching and instead spend the time with your family, read, exercise, or do something else that enhances the quality of your life. Look at your work activities and identify the tasks that you could delegate or eliminate to free up more time for the work that really counts.

Begin Today

Begin today to practice creative procrastination practices that will free up more time for the more important things in life. Set posteriorities wherever and whenever you can. This decision alone can enable you to get your time and your life under control.

Motivational Leadership

2009-07-18T15:45:00.000+08:00

Motivational leadership is based on The Law of Indirect Effort. According to this law, most things in life are achieved more easily by indirect means than they are by direct means. You more easily become a leader to others by demonstrating that you have the qualities of leadership than you do by ordering others to follow your directions. Instead of trying to get people to emulate you, you concentrate on living a life that is so admirable that others want to be like you without your saying a word.

The Most Powerful Motivational Leaders

Perhaps the most powerful motivational leader is the person who practices what is called "servant leadership." Confucius said, "He who would be master must be servant of all." The person who sees himself or herself as a servant to others and who does everything possible to help them perform at their best is practicing the highest form of servant leadership.

The Leader of Today

Today's leaders are the ones who ask questions, listen carefully, plan diligently, and then build consensus among all those who are necessary for achieving the goals. The leader does not try to do it all alone. The leader gets things done by helping others do them.

Qualities of Leaders

The following are important qualities of motivational leaders. These are qualities that you already have to a certain degree and that you can develop further to stand out from the people around you in a very short period of time.

Vision

The first quality is vision. This is the only single quality that, more than anything separates leaders from followers. Leaders have vision. Followers do not. Leaders have the ability to stand back and see the big picture. Leaders have developed the ability to fix their eyes on the horizon and see greater possibilities.

Motivate Others

The best way for you to motivate others is to be motivated yourself. The fastest way to get others excited about a project is to get excited yourself. The way to get others committed to achieving a goal or a result is to be totally committed yourself. The way to build loyalty to your organization, and to other people, is to be an example of loyalty in everything you say and do.

The Ability to Choose

One requirement of leaders is the ability to choose an area of excellence. Just as a good general chooses the terrain on which to do battle, an excellent leader chooses the area in which he and others are going to do an outstanding job. The commitment to excellence is one of the most powerful of all motivators. All leaders who effect change in people and organizations are enthusiastic about achieving excellence in a particular area.

Five Rules for Entrepreneurship

2009-07-11T15:48:00.000+08:00

Entrepreneurship is the art of finding profitable solutions to problems. Every successful entrepreneur or business person has been able to identify a problem and come up with a solution to it before someone else did. Here are the five rules for success.

1. Find a Need and Fill It

Human needs and wants are unlimited. Therefore, the opportunities for entrepreneurship and financial success are unlimited as well. The only constraint on the business opportunities available to you are the limits you place on your own imagination.

2. Find a Problem and Solve It

Wherever there is a widespread and unsolved customer problem, there is an opportunity for you to start and build a successful business.

Once upon a time, before photocopies, the only way to type multiple copies of a letter was with carbon paper places between sheets of stationary. But a single mistake would require the typist to go through and erase the mistakes on every single copy. This was enormously clumsy and time consuming.

Then a secretary working for small company in Minneapolis began mixing flour with nail varnish in order to white out the mistake she was making in her typing. Soon, people in other offices began asking for it. The demand became so great that she quit her job and began working full-time manufacturing what she called “Liquid Paper.” A few years later, the Gillette Corporation came along and bought her out for $47 million cash.

3. Unlimited Opportunities

There are problems everywhere. Your job is to find one of these problems and solve it better than it has been solved in the past. Find a problem that everyone has and see if you can't come up with a solution for it. Find a way to supply a product or service better, cheaper, faster, or easier. Use your imagination.

4. Focus on the Customer

The key to success in business is to focus on the customer. Become obsessed with your customer. Become fixated on your customer's wants, needs, and desires. Think of your customer all the time. Think of what your customer is willing to pay for. Think about your customer's problems. See yourself as if you were working for your customer.

5. Bootstrap Your Way to Success

Once you have come up with a problem or idea, resolve to invest your time, talent, and energy instead of your money to get started. Most great personal fortunes in the United States were started with an idea and with the sale of personal services.

Most great fortunes were started by people with no money, resources, or backing. They were started by individuals who came up with an idea and who then put their whole heart into producing a product or service that someone else would buy.

Dynamic Stat Graphs in Rails

2009-07-06T21:12:00.000+08:00

What started out as a ‘quick feature’ turned out to be a fun Ruby endeavor – below is a guide with some neat Ruby tricks to create dynamic stat graphs (sample above) with the help of Gruff library. In my visual database explorer article I talked about generating SVG graphs with the help of Scruffy. However, SVG is a nightmare when it comes to browser compatibility issues and inline support, hence in this instance we will settle for RMagick on the backend.

First off, if you haven’t already, take a look at the Gruff RDoc – there is a lot of features hidden under the covers! Assuming you have the gem and the plugin installed, let’s get right to it. First the code, then the explanations:

First few lines should be self-explanatory, we specify custom geometry, our theme colors, hide the title, and finally indicate the font we would like to use in the image. (Note: If RMagick complains about being unable to measure the font-sizes, make sure you have ‘freetype-fonts’ installed on your system) Next, is the SQL aggregation code, here we want to count the number of new users, votes and bookmarks on monthly basis:

There is one catch, if we have no new records in one of the intervals, than the count will be missing from the returned OrderedHash – we need to guard against this by injecting ‘0′ counts for the missing intervals:

Almost done. After assigning the x-axis labels we call send_data to stream the resulting PNG image directly to the browser. Now all we have to do is embed our image into a page, or call it directly:

After adding a quick CSS border and centering the image, you can feast your eyes on the latest trends of your paradigm-shifting application. For performance reasons, I would also recommend caching the action if you plan to display your results in a high-traffic area. For my personal use, I am only showing the trends in a private administration section (shown on the left) – I can afford to regenerate the image on every refresh. For more ideas and Ruby graphing tutorials take a look at: Visual Database Explorer and Dynamic Graphics in Rails 2.2.

The Law of Reciprocity

2009-07-04T15:51:00.000+08:00

People have a deep subconscious need to reciprocate for anything that is done to or for them. The Law of Reciprocity is one of the most powerful of all determinants of human behavior. This is because nobody likes to feel that he or she is obligated to someone else. When someone does something nice for us, we want to repay that person, to reciprocate. We want to be even. Because of this, we seek an opportunity to do something nice in return. This law is the basis of the law of contract, as well as the glue that hold most human relationships together.

Concessions

The first party to make a concession is the party who wants the deal the most. You must therefore avoid being the first one to make a concession, even a small concession. Instead, be friendly and interested, but remain silent. The first person to make a concession will usually be the person who makes additional concessions, even without reciprocal concessions. Most purchasers and sellers are aware of this. They recognize that early concessions are a sign of eagerness and are prepared to take advantage of it. Be careful.

Equal or Greater

Every concession you make in a negotiation should be matched by an equal or greater concession from the other party. If the other party asks for a concession, you may give it, but never without asking for something else in return. If you don't request a reciprocal concession, the concession that you give will be considered to have no value and will not help as the negotiation proceeds. If a person asks for a better price, suggest that it might be possible but you will have to either decrease the quantity or lengthen the delivery dates. Even if the concession is of no cost or value to you, you must make it appear valuable and important to the other party or it will not help you in the negotiation.

Small Concessions lead to Large Concessions

Small concessions on small issues enable you to ask for large concessions on large issues. One of the very best negotiating strategies is to be willing to give something in order to get something. When you make every effort to appear reasonable by conceding on issues that are unimportant to you, you put yourself in an excellent position to request an equal or greater concession later.

Use Reciprocity to your Advantage

Use the reciprocity principle to your advantage. Before negotiating make a list of the things the other party might want and decide upon what concessions you are willing to give to get what you want. This preparation strengthens your negotiating ability considerably.

Competition Brings Out The Best

2009-06-27T15:58:00.000+08:00

In a free market society like the U.S., there is a continuous competition for talent and skill. Every business knows that the critical constraint on its ability to grow is competent to people who can get results. Like cream rising to the top, people who can do a good job are hired sooner, paid more, and promoted faster. People who are not competent or motivated are not. No laws can change this. They can only mask it temporarily.

Compassion or Condescension

Compassion can quickly become condescension. Minority groups can become victims of what President George Bush called “the soft bigotry of reduced expectations.” People begin to judge them by lower standards and expect less of them in comparison with others. This is completely unacceptable in America. The way to bring the best out of people is by challenging them-by setting high standards, by demanding their “best game.”

A System Gone Astray

The U.S. education system, once the best in the world (and still the best at the University level), has become a tragedy and a trap for more young people caught in it and unable to escape. In 1947, 97 percent of Americans were literate, reading several books a year, and often each month. By 2004, fully 47 percent of Americans could not read above the seventh grade level. People who have not mastered the three R's by the time they leave school are destined to lifetimes of low income, under achievement, and wasted potential.

Failing Schools

Today, African American students test at four grade levels below white and Asian students in the same schools. Even worse, they are not allowed to escape their failing schools, especially in the inner cities. They are trapped into lifetimes of below-average incomes, insecurity, and eventually envy, resentment, and feelings of victim-hood.

Enter the Unions

The first teachers union was formed in the 1950's. In a few years, driven by expediency, the focus of teaching shifted from student achievement to teacher pay and benefits. As Albert Schanker, head of the American Teachers Federation, once said, “When the children start paying union dues, then we'll start caring about the children. ”

Competition is Key

The Economist magazine wrote on June 11, 2005, “The schools the poorest Americans attend have been getting worse rather than better.” This is partly a problem of resources, to be sure. But it is even more a problem of bad ideas. One poll of 900 professors of education found that 64 percent of them thought that schools should avoid competition. The only way to reverse the educational system is to change the structure of incentives in such a way that academic excellence is pursued and rewarded. Without competition, there is no motivation to improve.

Sales and Marketing Profitability

2009-06-20T16:01:00.000+08:00

Do you know the return on your sales and marketing expenditures? It is not unusual for companies to spend 25 to 35 percent of their revenues on sales and marketing, yet often they don't know the actual return on these initiatives. Before adopting a new marketing initiative, determine how you will measure, not only its impact on sales, but on profits as well. What is an acceptable rate of return? How will you measure the return? Establish a monitoring system whereby you can gauge the efficacy of the program throughout its implementation.

Product Profitability

Every product yields a specific profit of a specific amount. When you offer more than one product, each will have its own profit margin. One of the most important things you can do is to determine the return on the investment you have put into each of your products.

Marathon and Associates

Marathon and Associates, a niche consulting firm, receives enormous fees from Fortune 1000 companies to determine the exact cost of each of their products. This enables their clients to make product-offering decisions based on the profitability of each product, rather than simply relying on gross revenue figures. In today's highly competitive business climate, such an approach is critical in ensuring their overall profitability and even their survival. This is no less true of your own business or organization. Eliminating just one losing product can make the difference between robust growth and mediocre performance or even the demise of your business.

Product Mix

Examine your own product mix. In addition to the normal “cost of goods,” you must include all expense incurred in delivering the finished product to the consumer, including research and development, promotion, associated sales and marketing costs, installation, customer service, product service, returns, proportionate share of general and administrative costs (overhead), and so on. Again, be sure to include the cost of your own time; apply your hourly rate to the amount of time you invest in the development, design, creation/manufacture, sale, and servicing of each product.

Break Down Costs Accurately

Many individuals and businesses lump all their expenses together and then guess at how much is attributable to each product. Your job is to break down so accurately that you know within a few dollars exactly how much you net from the sale of each product. When you have completed your costing analysis, simply deduct the actual cost of developing, selling, and delivering each product from the price to determine its profitability. Which products yield the highest return? The lowest? Do any actually lose money?

Market Profitability

If you sell into more than one market, the same principle applies. Some markets will be more profitable than others. When dealing in foreign markets, for example, you may incur much higher advertising and marketing costs. Conversely, your manufacturing costs might be significantly lower. If you export your products into foreign countries, import duties or tariffs may apply. At times, unexpected costs in dealing in new markets may make the difference between a profitable venture and a financial disaster.

Create Your Personal Brand

2009-06-13T16:03:00.000+08:00

Just as surely as building a powerful brand is the key to differentiating a product in the marketplace and thus building a successful business, so creating a strong personal brand is the key to differentiating yourself from your competitors, thereby ensuring your own success as well as that of your business. Your personal brand determines how people respond to you, whether they listen to you, buy from you, how much they buy, what they are willing to pay, and so on.

Promises You Make

Your personal brand makes a promise: “If you buy from me, you will receive a specific value in return.” This promised value will be born from the values, virtues, qualities, and attributes by which you become known. For example, you may want to create a personal image—a brand—of a person who always operates at a high level of integrity, consistently walks the talk, is an exemplary leader, and goes the extra mile to ensure customer satisfaction. Who is your ideal customer? What values, virtues, qualities, and attributes will he be looking for in a supplier of your product? Do you match this profile? If not, do you have a burning desire to be this kind of person? These are the key questions you must ask yourself when beginning to build your personal brand.

Promises You Keep

Unmet expectations are the arch enemy of any relationship. This is no less true in the relationship between you and your customers. Your brand as a person is determined in large part by whether you consistently deliver on your promises. Do you keep your word? Do you follow up? Do your words and actions match with the image you want to create—that is, with the values, virtues, qualities, and attributes you claim as your own? Constantly examine your behavior. When you slip, resolve to get back on track. To build and sustain a powerful personal brand, your message must be an accurate reflection on you, the messenger.

The Whole Package

Pay close attention to your entire image. Of course, your character is of paramount importance. But you make an impact on people in other ways as well. Your appearance—the clothes you wear, your personal grooming, your posture—has an enormous emotional impact on how other people see you, think about you, and relate to you. Your attitude is vital. If you are genuinely pleasant and cheerful in your interaction with others, they will enjoy being with you. They will be more inclined to trust you and do business with you.

Overall Behavior

Your overall behavior strongly influences the impressions others have on you. Be punctual for meetings and appointments. Be absolutely reliable, always keeping your word and your commitments. Should you fail in this area, communicate with the other person as quickly as possible, offering your apology, explanation, and assurance that it will not happen again. Pay close attention to the quality of your work. In the long run, there is nothing that will so determine your success in building and sustaining a powerful personal brand as turning out high-quality work, over and over again, and over a long period of time.

The Law of Timing

2009-06-06T16:05:00.000+08:00

Timing is everything in negotiation. A negotiation can be made or unmade by the time at which it takes place. There is a "too soon" and a "too late" in every situation. Whenever possible, you must plan strategically and use the timing of the negotiation to your advantage. There is a better time to buy and a better time to sell in almost every case. And when your timing is right, you will always get a better deal than when it is not.

The More Urgent the Need, the Less Effective the Negotiator

If you are in a hurry to close a deal, your ability to negotiate well on your own behalf diminishes dramatically. If the other person is eager to make the deal, he or she is functioning under a disadvantage that you can exploit to your advantage. For example, every company has sales targets for each month, each quarter, and each year. Sales managers are tasked with hitting incomes, and their bonuses. Therefore when you are buying any large ticket item, you will almost always get the best deal if you wait until the end of the month when the pressure is on to hit the targets.

Don't Rush

The person who allows himself or herself to be rushed will get the worst of the bargain. Rushing or using time pressure is a common tactic in negotiation, and you must be alert to other people trying to use it on you. People will often tell you that you have to make up your mind quickly or it will be too late. Whenever you hear this, you should take a deep breath and patiently ask questions to find out just how urgent the situation really is. If someone insists that he or she needs an immediate decision, you can reply by saying, "If you must have an answer now, then the answer is no. But if I can take some time to think about it, the answer may be different."

Allocate your Time

You resolve 80 percent of the vital issues of any negotiation in the last 20 percent of the time allocated for the negotiation. Probably because of the prevalence of Parkinson's Law, which says, "Work expands to fill the time allotted for it," most of the key issues in a negotiation get jammed into the final phase of the discussions. Up to this part of the negotiation, there seems to be a natural human tendency to procrastinate on the resolution of the most important issues. What this means for you is that you must be patient in a negotiation. You must be prepared for the key issues to be resolved at the last minute.

Final Point

A final point with regard to timing. Whenever possible, you should delay making an important decision. At the very least, don't allow the other person or persons to rush you into a decision by suggesting that if you don't act now, it will be too late. Whenever the item under negotiation involves a great deal of money, a long life of a product, or long duration of the decision, or it is the first time that you negotiated in this area, buy time for yourself. Take at least twenty-four hours, if not an entire weekend, to think over your decision before acting. Use time as a weapon to strengthen your position and to improve your ability to make better decisions.

Deploying Rails Applications: A Step-by-Step Guide

2009-06-05T17:19:00.000+08:00

Deploying Rails Applications: A Step-by-Step Guide
Author: Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Bruce Tate, Clinton Begin
ISBN-10: 0978739205
ISBN-13: 978-0978739201

Book Description
First you'll learn how to build out your shared, virtual, or dedicated host. Then, you'll see how to build your applications for production and deploy them with one step, every time. Deploying Rails Applications will take you from a simple shared host through a highly scalable clustered and balanced setup with Nginx.

See how to tell whether you've bought enough firepower, and learn how to optimize your Rails projects applications in a systemic, rational way. Take advantage of advanced caching techniques, and become and expert with the latest servers in Nginx and Mongrel. Don't worry. You'll get a dose of Apache too.

Not only will you learn how to configure your production environment, you'll also see how to monitor it with free, automated tools that can restart your servers when the memory use gets too high for comfort. You'll see how to take a performance baseline, profile for bottlenecks, and solve the most common performance problems you're likely to see.

You'll learn:

Everything from source control and migrations to Capistrano, rake tasks and beyond.
Directly from authors who run EngineYard, one of the best Rails hosts in the business.
How to deploy your applications to multiple production servers with a single command using Capistrano.
How to setup a Rails/Nginx/Mongrel cluster for applications with high scalabilty needs.
...and more!

Download Mirror
http://...

OpenOffice.org Draw does DFDs

2009-05-31T14:38:00.000+08:00

I've been rather pleased to find out that I can use OpenOffice.org's Drawing module to generate DFDs (Data Flow Diagram)? the data model I use for planning web applications? I'd thought it didn't have this functionality, or at least that it wasn't very well implemented. After digging around a bit I find that it does, and actually somewhat better than Excel 97 did. The only problem I can see is that oval shapes only have 4 connectors points when I could really do with the 8 that Excel had. However, the ability to add labels to connector lines is a big bonus and being able to export direct to PNG, GIF, PDF and SWF (to name 4 of the 20 formats available) is brilliant. The drawing module is rock solid stable and very smooth to use, also an A2-sized version of the rather complex DFD shown below is only 25KB in size!

OpenOffice.org DFD Example

The Parthenon Principle

2009-05-30T16:15:00.000+08:00

During the Persian War, the building on the Acropolis of Athens was burned by the invading Persian forces. Following the war, which ended in 479 b.c., the Athenians began rebuilding their city, which culminated in the construction of the Parthenon, the greatest of all Greek temples of the Classical Age. Dedicated to Athena, goddess of wisdom and patron deity of the city of Athens, the Parthenon stood more or less intact for some 2,000 years until the middle of the seventeenth century, when it was partly destroyed in a war between the Turks and the Venetians.

The Metaphor

The career or business you are building is as important to you as was the Parthenon to the Greeks. It took many years of painstaking planning and excruciatingly hard work to affect this magnificent temple. The same is true of your own business. A level of commitment that was quite extraordinary was essential to the ultimate success of the Athenians' undertaking. No less is required of you. Like the Parthenon, your career or business is also supported by pillars, each of which is central to its integrity and its survival. The Parthenon was "built to last." So too, your career or business must be based on rock-solid principles.

The Principle

Imagine the result of a small increase in the strength of each of the supporting pillars of the Parthenon. As each is strengthened, it will affect the robustness—the durability—of the structure. Clearly, a small change in each pillar will give rise to a large change in the overall structure. The same is true of your career or business. This gives rise to what we call the Parthenon Principle.

Incremental Changes

Consider the human body. It has several systems—pillars, if you will—each of which supports the body. Improve one and the overall health of the person improves. Improve them all by just a small amount and the individual will experience a significant increase in health, energy, and vitality. Similarly, your business or organization consists of several foundational systems, all of which are interrelated. In our coaching program, we consider seven core systems or pillars: sales, services, pricing, promotion, referrals, productivity, and profitability (i.e. cost controls). As with the human body, an improvement in any of these systems will lead to an improvement in the overall health of the organization or your business.

7 Disciplines for High Performance

2009-05-23T16:17:00.000+08:00

There are seven disciplines you must develop if you want to achieve all that is possible for you. You can learn these disciplines through practice and repetition until they become automatic.

Goal Setting

Planning and Organizing

Priority Setting

The essence of all time management, personal management, and life management is contained in your ability to set the proper priorities on the use of your time. This is essential for high performance.

Concentration on your Highest-Value Activities

Your ability to work single-mindedly on your most important task will contribute as much to your success as any other discipline you can develop.

Exercise and Proper Nutrition

Learning and Growth

Your mind is like a muscle. If you don't use it, you lose it. Continuous learning is the minimum requirement for success in any field.

Time for Important People in your Life

Five Qualities of Top Teams

2009-05-16T16:19:00.000+08:00

Over the years, exhaustive research has been done on top teams. There seem to be given characteristics or qualities of peak-performance teams that you can incorporate into your own business. Here they are:

Shared Goals and Objectives

In a smoothly functioning team, everyone is clear about what the team is expected to accomplish. The goals of the team are shared and discussed by everyone. Each team member gives his or her ideas and input into how the goals and objectives can be best achieved. Each person feels like a part of a larger organization.

Shared Values and Principles

In excellent teams, there is regular discussion about the values, principles, and behaviors that guide the decisions of the team. The leader encourages values such as honesty, openness, punctuality, responsibility for completing assignments, quality work, and so on. Everyone discusses and agrees on what they are.

Shared Plans of Action

In this phase of team building, you go around the table and have each member of the team explain exactly what part of the work he or she is going to accept responsibility for completing. At the end of this discussion, each member knows what every other member is going to be doing and how his or her own work fits in with the work of the team.

Lead the Action

There must always be a clear boss or leader in any organization. Democracy is a fine concept, but it goes only so far in business. Someone must be in command and take charge. And that someone is probably you. On a good team, everyone knows who is in charge. The leader sets an example for the others. The leader becomes the role model.

Continuous Review and Evaluation

In this final phase, the team regularly evaluates its progress from two perspectives. First, is the team getting the results that are expected by its customers or other in the company? In dealing with customers, does the team set up mechanisms to continually ask customers, "how are we doing?"

Bringing the Team Together

One of the most important things you do in building a peak performance organization is to hold regular staff meetings. Bring your people together weekly, at a fixed time, to talk, discuss, catch up on progress, learn how the company is doing, and generally share ideas, opinions, and insights.

Money as a Motivator of Behavior

2009-05-09T16:21:00.000+08:00

It has been said that, “Money may not be the most important thing, but it's way up there with oxygen.” The fastest and easiest way to get the things you want as quickly as possible is almost always to have enough money to be able to buy them, whatever they cost. For this reason, the desire to acquire money, quickly and easily, and as much as possible, is a major motivator of human behavior. But it is not usually money that people really want.

Freedom

Sometimes I will ask my clients why they want to acquire a lot of money. After thinking about their answer for a couple of minutes, they finally conclude that what they want more than anything else is “freedom.” In reality, they see money as a means to achieving the freedom they really desire. They define freedom as having enough money so they can get everything they want. Having enough money will enable them to be completely free from worry about safety, security, leisure, love, respect and fulfillment. They see having lots of money as the fastest way to a good life.

Ten Million Dollars

In our Advanced Coaching and Mentoring Program, we do an exercise in Values Clarification. When everyone is seated, we hand out individual checks made out to each person in the amount of $10 million dollars. Of course, the checks are not cashable, but the idea of receiving $10 million dollars cash gives people an opportunity to fantasize about what they really want in their lives. We then have participants break into groups, discuss what they would do if they suddenly received $10 million, and then report back to the group. We go around the room and write down their answers on a white board or flip chart. Here is the most amazing discovery: almost everything that our clients would want to do, have, or acquire, does not cost any money!

The Lust for Power

The desire for power is one of the most destructive forces in the world today, and always has been. If the fastest and easiest way to get all the things you want is to have all the money you need, it then follows that the fastest and easiest way to get the money you need is to acquire power over people and resources, both in business and at the political level. Power can be defined as “the ability to control or influence money, people and resources.” It is the ability to force people to do what you want them to do, whether or not it is consistent with their own personal desires.

Money and Power Together

Money starts out as the motivation for an expedient person to fulfill his needs, for himself and his family. It can soon become an end in itself. Once a person has enough money so that he no longer worries about money, it becomes a form of measurement, a scorecard that he uses to compare himself against others. Megalomaniacs and dictators often become obsessed with power, to the exclusion of all other considerations. By the same token, many men in business become preoccupied with money, to the exclusion of other things, especially their families.

How Power is Acquired

There are different ways that power is acquired in our society. In business, power is acquired by getting results, by making decisions that lead to incremental gain in revenues and profits. The most powerful people in the business world are those with the best reputation for achieving financial goals in their areas of responsibility.

Ensuring Success at Work

2009-05-02T16:23:00.000+08:00

The very best times you will ever have at any job or company are when you are getting along wonderfully well with your boss. On the other hand, the very worst times you will ever have at any job are when you are not getting along well with your boss. And the major reason why employees have problems with their bosses is because of a lack of clarity about what exactly is to be done, and to what standard, and in what order of priority.

It is important to your boss that you are making the appropriate decisions for the company and completing your job. In order to make decisions effectively, you must know the three types of decisions.

Three Types of Decisions

There are three types of decisions in any organization or family. When decisions involve other people, it is important that everyone is clear about what kind of a decision is under consideration.

Command Decisions

These decisions have to be made by the boss or the person in charge. These decisions are so important that one person is solely responsible for making up his mind about what is to be done.

Hiring a key staff member, firing a poor performer, making an important investment decision, or even negotiating a new loan with the bank are all command decisions. They must be made by the person in charge.

Consultative Decisions

This is a decision where you, or the boss, ask for advice and take input from other people. You combine the opinions, ideas, and inputs of others, together with your own, and make a decision. Even though it invites the advice and participation of others, a consultative decision is not made based on that advice.

You may be thinking of hiring a new person, assigning someone a particular task, spending a certain amount of money on a business activity, or embarking on a new sales or marketing campaign. If you are the boss, you can ask for advice from everyone before you finally close the door and make your final decision.

Consensus Decisions

The third type of decision is one that is made on the basis of consensus. This is a democratic decision where everyone gets involved, discusses the pros and cons, and then agrees on what is to be done.

Sometimes, everyone is in agreement, and sometimes the decision is made by a democratic vote, where the majority rules. Once the decision has been made, everyone commits to making the decision successful, however they may have voted during the discussion phase.