joho.se @ stockholm.sweden

Thursday, April 8. 2010

The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi

According to the chronicles of our past (i.e. "history"), Miyamoto Musashi was without a doubt a very successful Samurai warrior with a distinct style.

Whether or not he considered himself successful in the sense that he didn't die a warrior's death is up for discussion, but his book, The Book of Five Rings, and his teachings in the swordsmanship style The Art of War, many aspects of the Book of Five Rings can be applied in everyday life, in business, in your personal life, etc. Some of the writings aren't entirely clear in their meaning, in fact they sometimes sound like a fortune cookie (this may be a translation issue), but if you go back to them once or twice, it's somewhat easier to get a grasp of the meaning.

The thin red line throughout the entire book (my own interpretation) is "Stay focused and dedicated and you will develop and evolve, and possibly reach your goals, if they are true goals". The book is, however, much broader in the subjects covered than those in my personal reflection.

Read it!

Some other links:
musashi.altervista.org/pages_eng/
samuraiconsulting.ca/5rings/
feedbooks.com/book/3953.pdf (PDF)

Friday, March 19. 2010

Really Old Stable Joomla :-)

Thursday, March 18. 2010

Check link popularity based on ranking (Google PageRank, Alexa, etc)

popuri.us is a tool to check at-a-glance the link popularity of any site based on its ranking (Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Technorati etc.), social bookmarks (del.icio.us, etc), subscribers (Bloglines, etc) and more! Simple, nice, clean!

All we need now is a zillion more ranking places to show up on popuri.us and we're home :-)

popuri.us

Free CakePHP E-Book - Super Awesome Advanced CakePHP Tips

There are a few books out for CakePHP development. The main problem with them is that they're fairly old. There's also a book on the way (2010) that has not yet been released. And then there's Matt Curry's completely free CakePHP book for those that have managed to grasp the basics of CakePHP and want a guide to somewhat more advanced topics.

One can only congratulate Matt on a great idea and implementation; and what's not to like about a free book about CakePHP development?

An introduction to the book here: www.pseudocoder.com/free-cakephp-book/
Matt Curry's original blog post about it here: www.pseudocoder.com/archives/2009/05/13/free-cakephp-e-book-super-awesome-advanced-cakephp-tips/
The book's direct download link is here: www.pseudocoder.com/Super_Awesome_Advanced_CakePHP_Tips.pdf

More about CakePHP can of course be found on www.cakephp.org

Matt has also released a number of CakePHP plugins and code snippets here github.com/mcurry.


Thanks Matt!

Monday, March 1. 2010

Xmouse on Windows 7

Being an avid Linux user, I have come to "need" Xmouse functionality in my daily battles on the desktop (hmm.. that sounds like I could be describing something else, but I'm not).

Simply put, Xmouse lets you shift input focus from one window to another simply by moving the mouse pointer over the window to which you want to give focus, without raising the newly focused window to the top. This sounds like a lame requirement, but once you get used to it, you will realize its advantages of having to click on a window to give it input focus (or cycle through 20 windows using Alt-Tab or similar). Of course, if you're a "single threader", you may never have more than one window open at any given time, in which case this tip is not for you :-)

Anyway; for Windows XP, Microsoft had a utility called "Powertoys" and "Xmouse", where you could set this behavior. Obviously, they didn't remove the functionality in Windows 7, they just made it harder to activate it. Why Microsoft after a zillion years of desktop and window management hasn't made this a standard feature, configurable via the Control Panel is beyond my comprehension.

Open the Windows 7 registry by launching regedit.

go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop
Edit UserPreferenceMask value to be 9F 3E 07 80 12 00 00 00

Also in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop
Edit ActiveWndTrkTimeout, change 'Base' to Decimal and put in 25 as the 'Value Data'
(the original post says 150 here, but 25 works much better IMHO)

Log out and back in again, and Bob's your uncle.

Kudos for the solution found here.