John Pfeiffer's blog
America's Great Recession and Wealth Without Borders
Sun, 2010-09-05 14:09 — John PfeifferWhy do countries like Germany and Japan have such a high quality of life AND high productivity? Remember that their unemployed have free medical care, education, and unemployment benefits.
Are they just smarter than Americans?
"The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty examined tax returns from 1913 to 2008. They discovered an interesting pattern. In the late 1970s, the richest 1 percent of American families took in about 9 percent of the nation’s total income; by 2007, the top 1 percent took in 23.5 percent of total income."
Electric Car Rebate... Why not go European?
Mon, 2010-08-02 13:13 — John PfeifferI don't expect anybody to read this as Slashdot articles grow exponentially in comments each hour but...
The price of petrol in London is about 116 pence per liter http://www.whatprice.co.uk/petrol-prices/
1 US gallon = 3.78 liter
4.39 GBP (pounds) per gallon
1 pound = 1.5 dollars (exchange rates are always crazy)
6.59 dollars per gallon
miles driven / mpg ... -> total cost of gasoline?
195k / 49.5 = 3939.40 * $6.59 = $25,960 (hybrid)
195k / 30 = 6500 * $6.59 = $42,835 (fuel efficient car)
195k / 15 = 13000 * $6.59 = $85,670 (normal/big car)
The Magical Million 3 helicopters scratchcard scam
Sun, 2010-06-13 11:25 — John PfeifferThe Magical Million scratch card scam...
Magazines and newspapers get money from advertisers, some of which run contests and promotions.
I was not surprised to see that Rupert Murdoch's "Times" had scratch cards for the Magical Million from PurelyCreative.com
Considering the fake news from Fox, it's no surprise there's a long standing fake contest advertised in Murdoch's paper.
A scatch card says "3 identical symbols - you can claim a GUARANTEED CASH PAYOUT".
CSS 3 column liquid layout with background image stretch
Sat, 2010-05-15 14:30 — John PfeifferCSS keeps improving but sometimes it takes some creativity to meet what might seem like obvious demands: a background image stretched in a column
The following example gives two different methods of background image stretching, though I admit that the background image is just a color gradient and that this kind of stretching on a graphical image (in a liquid layout) could appear at best, "funny".
I created a color gradient and then resized it to be 640x2 pixels, otherwise all of the code is below:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
CSS 3 column liquid layout example
Sat, 2010-05-15 14:14 — John PfeifferCSS is much better than HTML, but making a webpage look the way it ought to look can be very painful, frustrating, and time consuming.
Not only do you have to create cross browser compatible code, but it has to look nice when you're done!
This is just a basic example that you can experiment with and add to later, there are some comments but the code is mostly self explanatory:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
<head><style type="text/css">
/* required to kill off any extra "helpful" browser padding */
html, body { French Toast recipe aka Purjeni Filiki
Sat, 2010-05-15 10:50 — John PfeifferFirst put oil in a pan and heat it (we use #3 of 6 on our electric stove). Then beat/whip two or three eggs in a bowl, then take slices of bread and dip them in the whipped eggs (or you can soak them if you want them more egg full) and put them on the frying pan to fry.
The medium heat should cook the egg slowly (too hot and the egg turns white/yellow like fried eggs on bread), after about 5-10 minutes? (peek underneath and check if they're golden brown) you flip them and cook the other side.
Can't delete FTP folder in Drupal - Filezilla hidden files
Thu, 2010-05-13 18:30 — John PfeifferI couldn't delete a folder in FTP (which can be pretty frustrating) until I realized that Filezilla has an option to "force showing hidden files"
In Filezilla 3 = Server -> Force showing hidden files
I could then see the .htaccess file and delete it.
(Right click on a folder/file and File Attributes shows me the permissions e.g. Read / Write / Execute)...
Blackberry Enterprise Server Express on same domain as BES (windows and exchange 2003)
Mon, 2010-05-03 13:41 — John PfeifferBlackberry Express Server install: Windows 2003 with Exchange Server 2003 with BES 5 already installed
Why Blackberry Express? Well it's the core Blackberry experience (email + contacts + calendar) but
only requires a data plan, not a special (expensive) Blackberry plan.
The big item missing: Wireless activation is only available with BES dataplan.
http://crackberry.com/blackberry-101-lecture-2-bes-and-bis-whats-difference
The dilemma, if you already have a BES installation, can you setup a BESX too?
Outlook RPC over HTTP with a non standard port
Sun, 2010-04-04 13:03 — John Pfeiffer"The proxy server you have specified is invalid. Correct it and try again."
Oh, the wonderful error messages from Microsoft...
So Outlook 2003 has HTTP and HTTPS hard coded to ports 80 and 443 (wonderfully modular thinking).
Imagine you want to move your Outlook Web Access to a different port (security reasons? Or maybe just that another application is hard coded to port 443...)
Now it's easy to tell people: https://mailserver.domain.com:4430
BUT you might have to update any Blackberry using OWA to connect to Exchange users with the new port...
365 Programming is Simple?
Mon, 2010-03-29 20:37 — John PfeifferThe following is an example of a simple programming "challenge":
Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print "Fizz" instead of the number and for the multiples of five print "Buzz". For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print "FizzBuzz".
Below I've thrown together a solution in less than 5 minutes, BUT, I thought to myself, experimentally, what would the code look like if I needed something more "Best Practice"...
