Aditya Chadha

Ever see a book on amazon or bn.com and have the urge to buy it, but not sure if it will be worth buying? I do - all the time!  Hence my wishlist keeps growing!

But I just found the lovely LibraryLookup tool which grabs the ISBN from any web page, and looks it up in your local library.

For some reason the New York Public Library link in the Innovative library list doesn’t take you to the place where you can reserve books.

A bit of poking around and we have a new link, so this is how it works:

1. Drag NYPL Library Lookup to your bookmarks bar
2. Find a book on Amazon or BN.com or any other place with an ISBN on the page.
3. Click the NYPL Library Lookup bookmark, and watch it find the book at the NYPL in a new window!

…magic.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: books, hacks, technology, library_lookup, amazon, library, knowledge

Recently I’ve been running into a lot of silliness that appears in files exported from MS applications (Word, Excel, etc.) called ‘Smart quotes’.

Basically MS uses higher level ascii characters to represent quotes that mean more than regular quotes (whatever for?!). You see this weirdness in vi as <93><92> etc. which are the hex values of these characters. I had to hunt a bunch on google to find out how to fix this, although the fix is very easy.

For each value that you see in your file, just do a string substitution, like so:

:%s/<93>/\’/g

of course, you can’t just type that <93> in there, so to get it in there you use (via: http://www.vim.org/htmldoc/usr_45.html)

CTRL-V x 93

which inserts hex 93 in place.

In recently exported CSV’s from excel, I’ve seen hex 91-97.

Quite annoying, frankly.

–

You could also use perl, like here

perl -pi -e”s/\x92/’/g” myfile.html

and use it on multiple files.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: smart_quote, vim, ms_word, ms_excel, string_replacement, substitution, windows_unix, export, import, decimal, hex, 92, 93, <92>, <93>

Not as painless as installing it, but the upgrade instructions here work pretty well.

1) wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

2) cp -aR blog/wp-content/* wordpress/wp-content/

3) cp blog/wp-config.php wordpress/

4) disable all plugins http://example.com/wp-admin/plugins.php?action=deactivate-all

5) mv blog old-blog && mv wordpress blog

6) make sure you hit http://example.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php

7) and manually re-enable all your plugins.

and you’re done.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: upgrade, wordpress, blog, painless, wordpress_upgrade

Started a tumblelog: http://sublucid.tumblr.com to keep this space clean of re-posts like the one right below this one!

Blogged with Flock

Tags: tumblr, web, expression

Yep, that’s right. I quit my job, and lived to talk about it.

A couple of months ago, I was just like a large majority of people on the planet. Working at a very large company. Thinking that I was making a difference helping other large companies cut costs, or increase efficiency or something equally responsible. Being underrated because I wasn’t kissing ass. Living from paycheck to paycheck, working hard at something that I didn’t quite enjoy but did anyway, because it paid the bills and let me enjoy a certain lifestyle. Falling asleep in the toliet at work, you know.

And then, it hit me.

No, not the life is short cliche (although, that is a great speech and I am an apple fanboy!) - no, it hit me that happiness is not hard to achieve. Everyone tells you to do what you love, so when you’re doing something you don’t quite love, you quit. So, that’s what I did. I quit.

But, it’s not quite that easy. How do you find out what you love doing? Well, to be honest, you don’t. (ding! ding! ding!). Like most people I had no idea what I should do with my life (Po Bronson - 2002) - but I had been reading a lot of smart entrepreneurs and their views on interactive marketing and the new collaborative web (note: yes, the so called web2.0 but that’s another cliche I’m hoping to avoid) and then I read iWoz and that was really it.

I realized that I had been most satisfied when I was building things (software), the creative thrill of starting from scratch and ending with a finished piece of code that did what it was expected to do in a fast and efficient way had been sheer joy. And, in working for a big faceless corporation, I’d lost all of that, and I realized that I missed it. I wanted to be an engineer all over again. Badly.

Leaving isn’t that easy though. You need to have some sort of a plan.

subLucid, was my plan.

[To be continued…]

technorati tags:entrepreneurship, innovation, technology

Blogged with Flock

Not that anyone uses Orkut anymore, but….

Too little, too late?

Maybe they should work on fixing the scalability issues first?