iSawToday – The Coolest Thing I Saw Today on the Web

I took the plunge and installed Windows 7 Ultimate RTM from MSDN last week.  For the most part I’m loving the new OS aside from Outlook 2007hanging occassionally and my sound dying after hibernation.  One annoyance that remains is that Windows enjoys rebooting after installing updates which for someone like me who rarely ever shuts down his computer is not a good thing.  So here is a modified version of a registry hack for xp and vista to prevent Windows update from rebooting your computer.

1. Press Windows Key and type regedit to launch the registry editor.

2. Locate HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Polices\Microsoft\Windows

3. In Windows 7 you will need to right click on the Windows folder and choose New -> Key

4. Name it WindowsUpdate

5. Now right-click on your newly created WindowsUpdate key and  choose new key again.

6. Name this new key AU

7. Look to the right-hand side of the registry editor and right-click and choose New-> 32bit Dword and name it NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers

8. Right-click on this new value and choose Modify, set the value to 1 and you’re all set!

Popularity: 5% [?]

Over the past couple years I’ve created hundreds of website comps using my trusty Macromedia Fireworks 8 software.  I always take my comps and manually create layouts for the various platforms I’m designing on: Wordpress, Joomla, Expression Engine in Dreamweaver and away we go.  I’ve tried using Rentacoder’s before and typically get what I pay for, but I’m curious about a new service I found called http://xhtml.pixelcrayons.com/ for a flat fee they promise validated, CSS layouts in straight html or in Joomla or Wordpress format.  Has anyone out there used this or another similar service?  Comments?

Popularity: 2% [?]

I’m pleased to announce the official launch of the world’s largest recipe search engine; www.recipebridge.com

Recipebridge helps anyone who uses the Internet as a source of cooking knowledge to more efficiently find quality recipes.  Today, cooks using the Internet use general search engines or specific cooking websites to find recipes.  RecipeBridge eliminates the inefficiency of visiting multiple websites by providing one search engine that allows a user to search all recipes on the Internet in a simple and easy manner.

Please feel free to send me any feedback on the site that you may have or partnership inquires for that matter.  In all I hope that this site helps other people quickly and easily use the Internet to find great recipes!

Sincerely, 

Andy Theimer

Popularity: 12% [?]

Last night while having an entrepreneurial drink with a good friend I met a very attractive woman who works as a color chemist. After several minutes of rousing discussion on topics such as:

• “If I get Blue #2 in my blond hair will my hair turn green”?
• “Which Peruvian beetle makes the best natural red coloring for M&M’s? (for the British only)

I decided to investigate what other exciting contributions color chemists are responsible for and the answer: bubbles. Or more accurately Zubbles; colored bubbles. It looks like this small company out of MN has been trying to bring this product to market for almost 3 years now and can’t seem to make it. Is there a conspiracy among the bubble industry to keep this mum? Surely the arrival of a mainstream colored bubble would spell an end for your average bubble toys.

Popularity: 3% [?]

As the title implies I was doing some database cleansing this morning and was trying to craft a cleaver regular expression to remove junk works and characters from my mysql database.  I ended up writing a quick PHP script to do the cleanup for me.  The actual regex I use removes line feeds, line breaks, and tabs from the database field.

The point is that I found this really handy online regular expression(regex) tool which let’s you test the expression quickly and easily.

here’s that database php code if anyones interested.

for ($i=0; $i<$row_count; $i++)
{
$row = mysql_fetch_row($result);
$row[0] = trim(StripSlashes($row[0]));
$res = preg_replace(”/[[\r\n\t]]/”, “”, $row[0]);
$query2 = “UPDATE `search` SET `text`=\”".AddSlashes($res).”\” WHERE `text`=\”".AddSlashes($row[0]).”\”;”;
$result2 = mysql_query($query2);
}

Popularity: 1% [?]

I remember coming across this site earlier in the year but had so much fun putting phrases from a contract I am currently writing into it this morning I thought I would post it.

Aye, if ye accept dem terms, sign and return a copy o’ this agreement t’ me at the address at the bottom o’ this agreement. Aye.

Try It Here

Popularity: 2% [?]

I was looking for cool ajax interfaces for a new website this morning and found myself created attack ads for John McCain.
http://attackadgenerator.com/a/editor

Popularity: 1% [?]

Definition: Intel’s next mobile platform which is said to promote ultra-thin, touchscreen, wireless, devices with extensive battery life.

Popularity: 1% [?]

I just found these great new demonstrations of Google’s Andriod OS. Some of the functionality looks great and although not earth-shattering more productive than the IPhone. Still no examples yet of how Android might accept user input which IMO is what will determine how this fairs in the market. Will the OS support tactile feedback? Will it function with and w/o the Blackberry-ish keyboard?

Popularity: 2% [?]

Although this is NOT the coolest thing I saw today, I wrote up a summarization of CRM’s for a friend and thought I would post it for everyone’s benefit.

I use Highrise in both of my startups companies and have found it to be a great way to communicate sales and biz dev progress to my 10 person teams. Simple, quick, and relatively painless. I do use Salesforce when I need to create multi-step email campaigns or am selling products with a $5k-10k price tag. In an organization where you have more than 30-40 transactions a month you will probably NEED something like a SF for invoice and product reporting.

And that brings us to Sugar, a product that I implemented back in ‘04 at a 20 person software company. In fact, I know several of the Sugar team members and had several products featured in their product exchange. I probably wouldn’t recommend Sugar these days because the price point between SF and Sugar has shrunk quite a bit and the manpower to maintain the open-source version is very costly.

Pricing (last I checked):
Highrise: $50/mo <=15 users
Salesforce: $100/mo <=5 users
Sugar: Free -> $40/mo/user

Popularity: 1% [?]