[RANDOM] What does it mean when the news report a "two alarm" or "three alarm" fire?

This always made me curious. It definitely wasn't the number of fire alarms in the building. That wouldn't make much sense and would be hard to determine if the building burns down.

Here's a good explanation I found.

[OTHER] Adding an internet radio station to itunes

Internet radio can be a great source of new music once you've become the type of person who no longer listens to radio regularly (specifically, people who don't have/drive in cars often).

iTunes comes with a good selection already, but in case you know of one that isn't in the list and that you want to add, try this.

[FUN] Google search suggestions

Hmm...

I didn't realize pregnancy required instructions.

In case anyone was curious what I was actually searching for, it was "How to fold a sweater". It's surprisingly difficult to do properly.

And yes, it's the same as folding a long sleeved shirt.

[FUN] Rock band on a flute

I need to work on these tags... someday.

Anyway, this girl from SUNY discovered that you can play rock band on the flute. It's quite seriously one of the most amazing things I have ever seen.

Which might be a little sad if you think about it.

[IDEA] Need an html editor on the fly? Use a blogger!

For those who aren't aware, my work consists of making improvements to a web based application. A large number of users work with the application, and despite our best efforts at perfect, "no training required" usability some people still need a little help.

We outsource our help files to a guy who doesn't actually receive any training from us. We give him a login to the application, he clicks around checking what changes we've made, and he updates the help files. I swear, the guy is a genius. I can't imagine writing help files for the stuff that I built.

Anyway, he's been doing his work in Microsoft Word, and saving it as an html file. He then sends us all the help files before a release to be put in "as is" into the application. Word being what it is, it saves the files and and formatting with a bunch of other garbage. Some of that can actually be dangerous. We found out the other that some of the embedded HTML in the help file linked to an external site. It wasn't harmful, but it could have been.

We realized we needed to get him a no frills, free HTML editor. Something simple like notepad wouldn't work because he didn't know how to write HTML (and it'd be a pain to do the formatting even if he did).

Browsing around, I realized that a blog editor works perfectly. It has everything you could possibly want- fonts, bolding and italics, size changes... All you need to do is make a dummy account.

Ironically, we also realized that we had a built in HTML editor in our application and that's what he ended up using, but I thought this was a good idea if anybody is stuck in an electronic desert and is wracking their brains for an HTML editor on the fly.

[INDUSTRY] Browser load times

Before I post these, what do you think would be the fastest of these browsers:

-IE 6, 7, 8
-Firefox 3
-Chrome
-Opera

Now check out the actual results.


The commentators make some good points. FF isn't an internet "suite", and many people download addons on to it that make it slower and eat more memory. Chrome is fast, but it has very few bells and whistles.

Internet Explorer has no excuse, of course.

[INDUSTRY] Visual Source Safe is...

...neither visually appealing nor a safe repository for source code. Ha ha, what a lame play on words.

While we're on the subject of source control, I thought I'd bring up Visual Source Safe (VSS), which many companies out there still use.

VSS is a joke. I've used it. A few quick reasons why VSS is a terrible source control system:

• It costs money. That in and of itself should dissuade you, when there are better implementations out there that are free. It'd be like paying for Windows- oh wait. I mean, it'd be like paying for Internet Explorer. Six.
• You can permanently delete files. How exactly is this different from a normal file system, again?
• You can't make branches.
• "User-unfriendly" does not even begin to describe it. It could easily be used as an example of bad usability design, sort of like Microsoft Word's "Clippy". Some (mostly fabricated) quotes by the infamous character, and a quick overview of the problems with it. I mean, the thing was parodied on the Simpsons. Multiple times.

This article that does a better job summarizing the argument against VSS than I ever will.