I always wanted my own URL shortener. There pretty damn sweet – like me.

I grabbed a domain from Blacknight – http://bkenn.me and installed some sweet assed Yourls. I noticed it was a rather pain in the ass to hit up the admin interface and shorten some links.

I spend much of my time in the terminal – so I ruby’d some shit. First of all much love to threestage for their yourls gem.

This allowed me to rub for example

ruby shorten.rb http://url.to/shorten

Boring – lets shorten that up some more.

vim ~/.bash_profile

Then add in some niceness

shorten () {    ruby ~/shorten.rb $1}

Done! I can now go to any of my terminals and type “shorten http://www.whatever.com” and it’ll be in my clipboard ready to paste.

So I’ve been playing around with the idea of CoffeeCoders for a bit. The basic idea is that anyone can walk into a coffee shop and buy a couple of hours worth of time from a web designer on site. There would basically be a couple of designers that hung out at the coffee shop during the day.

Grab a latte and get some changes done on your site that you need on a Saturday morning etc.

So I’ve been getting the ducks in a row for that and talking to different coffee shops and throwing together a small pitch email for the coffee shops:

Hi,

I’ve come across your coffee shop and I’d love to pitch you an idea to hopefully generate some great buzz for you business, lots of new customers and revenue.

The idea is to bring both web designers and web site owners together under one roof. Hopefully your coffee shops.

We will ensure that a group of high end web designers are present at your coffee shop on an arranged date. Customers can then arrive and purchase your beautifully brewed coffee and an hour or two of a web designers time if they so choose.

This is just an idea at present. We’re looking for excellent barista’s and coffee shop owners to work with to make this happen.

We will publize the event dramatically to ensure as many people are informed of the day as possible. If it’s a hit we’ll launch further dates with the hope that it will become a regular sought after date for web site owners to get some work done on their websites.

We’ve got the web designers and if you think your coffee shop would be up for the challenge we’d love to hear from you.
Thanks for taking the time to read this email, we understand how busy you are. It’s greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Brian & Keith

I got some great responses back from this. Including one kick ass coffee shop that I hoped would come on board.

I asked Keith from Clear Designs to mock up some logo’s for a website. A website that web designers could log their interest on and go from there.

Check these guys out for some amazing logos:

He’s a great interview between David H. and and the guys who created and sold slice host. Some very inspiring stuff:

A small piece of bash scripting that will search through a list of defined networks for open ssh ports and then try to connect to them with a specified ssh key.

If your looking for a method to use findstr search every file in every directory your in for a pattern within the file and then delete it, use:

for /f %q in (‘findstr /s /i /m “pattern” file.name’) do (del “%q”)

The Vodafone Sure Signal box carries licensing for the following softwares. Some of them are pretty strange.

* Linux Kernel
Fairly obvious it would run on linux.

* db4-libs-4.3.28
This is a debian package so she’s running some version of debian. It’s a set of tools for manipulating databases.

* less
A standard tool for allowing backward movement in a file when your printing it to the screen.

* libcap
This is a tool for capturing network traffic.

* libstdc++
Standard C++ compiler

* smail
This is a application for sending emails.

* ntp
This application gets the current date and time from a remote server and sets the time on the device.

* openssh
This allows remote users to connect over SSH to the device. This also contains multiple licenses for encryption algorythms and the likes.

* openssl
This allows encrypted traffic over http. Basically the goodness that allows secure payments online.

* ssleay
This is a perl extension for openssl mentioned above.

* shadow
A password and privledge management tool

* strace
Allows debugging of programs on the linux system by tracing processes.

* tcpdump
A packet analyzer for TCP. Works with libcap mentioned above.

* u-boot
A universal boot loader.

My desk is really important to me. It’s not just a physical thing but a state of mind. I’ve only started to think in dept about this recently. My desk must always contain only what I have left on it. I don’t mind having a messy desk as long as it was me who created the mess. Why is this?

I’ve had many arguments with people about my desk. If I walk into my office and see things on my desk that aren’t belonging to me, I’m upset for the day. Sounds a touch to far doesn’t it? It is but I’ve had this notion in my head for years of what my desk means to me.

I strive for a great working environment. How I see my desk in the morning dictates how I will work for that day. They say a messy desk is a messy mind. What does this mean for a empty desk? I think how your desk is setup tells much about that person. Their character.

My desk at home is very different in comparison to the one in work. The one at home is completely empty and sits along side a full length blackboard wall. The basis of my idea generation incubator. At work it’s a very linear, almost industrial factory line of documents.

I think with the adaptation of the internet and remote communications people are actually starting to fight back against this nomadic lifestyle. Fighting for a life that again contains their hub, their desk.

After Nathalie posted this on Facebook yesterday I cannot get enough of it. Hair standing on the back of your neck stuff.