OhRyan.ca

If you’re tired of websites resizing your browser window, rest your weary head. In Firefox, you can disable website’s abilities to do this with Javascript:

1. Tools-> Options (Firefox -> preferences or ⌘, on OS X)
2. Select the “Content” tab.
3. Click on the “Advanced” button across from “Enable JavaScript”.
4. Uncheck the “Move or resize existing windows” checkbox.

Thanks to reddit user libertao, another one of the many bits of knowledge I’ve learned from comments on reddit.

I found this post sitting in my drafts folder from earlier this year. Seeing as I haven’t updated the blog in awhile, I thought I’d finish off some of the sentences and hit the ‘publish’ button.

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The newspaper industry is facing the perfect storm of declining readership, declining print ad sales, lackluster online ad revenues, the ever-present threat of blogs and the real-time web.

I had a Eureka! moment earlier today when I originally started this post, it occurred to me – newspapers could learn a lot from the Nine Inch Nails distribution model. In a nutshell, the NIN model concedes that music is free, instead of trying to charge people for something that already free, they charge fans for limited edition tangible goods: things like special run vinyl, signed copies of things, tee-shirts, etc.

A couple of ways I think the newspaper industry could add value to their dead tree version:

1) NO ads
2) ONLY distribute coupon type ads in print, don’t make them available online. Encourage advertisers to pay extra for these premium coupons.
3) Free stuff – throw in some tickets to stuff, maybe a glossy photo of scantily clad firefighters. Whatever the audience would apprieciate.
4) Allow subscribers to opt-in to receiving an email copy of their favorite section of the newspaper. An emailed copy would be easy to take with you on a mobile device like an iPhone without having to lug around a fat wad of paper.

I have no idea how the finances work out for any of these ideas. I just really think that if the print newspaper needs to survive, then publishers need to inject some value.

UPDATE: Some visitors are reporting that this works for Hulu as well.

The relationship between Comedy Central and Canada’s Comedy Network is the worst example of what can happen when rights owners assert copyright on the internet, based on national borders. If you are not aware – like Hulu, TV.com and others – Comedy Central videos will not play in Canada, but it’s worse. ComedyCentral.com – the entire domain – is unavailable to Canadian IPs! When you try visit it, you are redirected to comedynetwork.ca.

I found a workaround to this buried in a comment thread on reddit. Firefox users only:

For Canadian viewers, if you are using firefox, install the following addon:
http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/967 then:

1) In Firefox, Go to tools->modify headers
2) From the drop down box on the left select add
3) Then enter: “X-Forwarded-For” in the first input box without the quotation marks
4) Enter: “12.13.14.15″ in the second input box without the quotation marks
5) Leave the last input box empty, and save the filter, and enable it

http://imgur.com/Feb4.png

6) Click the ‘Configuration’ tab on the right then proceed to check the ‘always on’ button.

Close the Modify Headers box and it should work.

[orginal post]

Works like a charm!

When ordering lists of names or titles it’s sometimes desirable to exclude articles or other words from the order clause (eg. you want “The Burning Hell” to show up before “Great Lake Swimmers” in a list ordered by name). Early on in my career I must have assumed it was not possible and never bothered to look into again because I don’t recall ever ordering a list like this.
Anyways. Here’s how you do it:

SELECT name FROM artists ORDER BY TRIM( LEADING "a " FROM TRIM( LEADING "an " FROM TRIM( LEADING "the " FROM LOWER( name ) ) ) )

[thanks metafilter]