Who thought up this product name?
Posted by Eric Bazerghi in Blogs, Fun on May 24, 2004
-closeup.gif "Creme Filled Long John Closeup")
.gif "Creme Filled Long John")
I’m imagining a room filled with marketing folks. They’re all sitting around, trying to come up with a clever name for a brand new snack cake product they would like to launch. One of the ‘brainstormers’ jumps up and yells “I got it!” We’ll call this giant Twinkie-like snack cake a “Creme Filled Long John”. And the rest is history. And someone paid good money for a ridiculous product name such as this…
I found this tasty treat while buying a soda at a gas station while driving down to North Carolina.
I’m addicted to the Pepsi / iTunes Promotion
Posted by Eric Bazerghi in Blogs on March 30, 2004
It’s getting out of hand at this point. It’s gotten to the point where I will walk into our cafeteria, open the door to the fridge full of soda and proceed to tilt individual bottles of Sierra Mist and/or Pepsi just to make sure I’ll win a free iTunes song. I’m up to 19 free songs right now. Ironically, I don’t usually drink this much soda at work, but I just can’t stop myself. It’s like the caps keep calling out my name…
Mr. Bazerghi goes to Morton’s
Posted by Eric Bazerghi in Blogs on March 29, 2004
Here’s a BEFORE and AFTER view of my delicious Double Cut filet mignon I consumed for lunch today at Morton’s. Since the whole project team at work was able to make it to 7 consecutive staff meetings without being late (a GREAT feat for us, believe me), our client treated us to lunch at Morton’s Steakhouse.
Unreal Tournament 2004 – Productivity’s Worst Enemy
Posted by Eric Bazerghi in Blogs, Fun on March 26, 2004
I recently got my hands on the Limited Edition “Unreal Tournament 2004 DVD Special Edition” at Best Buy for only $29.99. It’s a box full of goodness! The multiplayer game is insane! I’ve been playing a few minutes here and there 😉 and all I can say is *WOW*. I’m slowly getting better, but my coworkers still have fun yelling at me when I’m driving a tank in the wrong direction…
Incredible file compression using rzip
Posted by Eric Bazerghi in Bookmarks, Geek Stuff on March 26, 2004
While reading through some newsfeeds today, I came across a small comment by someone trying to compress a 700Mb mbox file full of spam emails. He said he was able to compress it down to 70Mb using a small utility called “rzip”. That’s quite a nice compression ratio, even beating out “bzip” which I thought was an awesome compressor. This is from the “rzip” site:
rzip is a compression program, similar in functionality to gzip or bzip2, but able to take advantage long distance redundencies in files, which can sometimes allow rzip to produce much better compression ratios than other programs. The original idea behind rzip is described in my PhD thesis (see http://samba.org/~tridge/), but the implementation in this version is considerably improved from the original implementation. The new version is much faster and also produces a better compression ratio.
The utility can be found at http://rzip.samba.org/
Creating a bootable Fedora DVD from CD ISOs
Posted by Eric Bazerghi in Bookmarks, Geek Stuff, Linux on March 26, 2004
Since Fedora Core 2 will now be a 4-CD set, I decided to look into creating a DVD out of the CD’s in order to avoid having to carry around 4 CD’s in my laptop bag. Found my answer on the Fedora-Test_list today. A small script called “mkdvd” written by Chris Adams. His script can be found at http://www.iruntheinter.net/files/misc/
*Update* Another possible solution, while not as elegant, can be found at ftp://people.redhat.com/ckloiber/mkdvdiso.sh
Turning a Google News search into an RSS feed
Posted by Eric Bazerghi in Geek Stuff, RSS on February 9, 2004
While going through my RSS feeds oer the weekend, I came across a small script that someone wrote. In simple terms, it takes any search request you make to Google News and turns it into an RSS feed. The possibilities are endless! I’m thinking of using the script on this site allowing me to customize some feeds ofr news that interests me.
You can test the script yourself by going to http://www.voidstar.com/gnews2rss.php
This would be a great asset to many researchers out there who have to rake through dozens of sites each day looking for information/articles related to a certain area. My friend Kirkhope of the Terrorism Research Center comes to mind. Everyday, he has to gather over 3 dozen articles related to terrorism and information security, etc. Using something like this, he could probably save himself quite a bit of time. All the “first layer” searching is done for him and he just has to review the hits for relevancy…
Pretty cool if you ask me…
Will Real One Player make it off my Black List?
Posted by Eric Bazerghi in Geek Stuff on February 7, 2004
For over a year now, I have refused to install Real Player on ANY of my computers. I had reached the point where I just couldn’t justify the need for it, in return for the loads of other crap it installed, the way it slowed down the computer, etc.
Someone has finally taken the time to go through the whole install procedure and describe, step by step, how to install Real Player without having it take over everything, etc…
It’s an interesting read: http://home.comcast.net/~leeandheather/tutorials/realone.htm
Six tips for better RSS feeds
Posted by Eric Bazerghi in RSS on February 5, 2004
While reading through my ever-increasing list of RSS feed entries, I came across this great article.
http://writingtheweb.com/archives/000020.asp – Six tips for better RSS Feeds
RSS seems to be what everyone who runs a site is talking about these days, yet few people actually implement it correctly or effectively. My biggest pet-peeve is Slashdot‘s RSS implmentation. They only include the title of the story and about 20-40 words from the article itself. In many cases, it’s simply not enough information to get an idea of what the article is actually about! Such a frustrating waste… This article brings up this issue, as well as a few others.
A good read for everyone who runs a site and already has an RSS feed or is planning to implement one.
What will I do without SamSpade.Org?
Posted by Eric Bazerghi in Bookmarks, Geek Stuff, Information Security on February 3, 2004
Many times a week, sometimes many times a day, I rely on being able to do some quick informational type lookups on one or more IP’s. Be it trying to find out who owns a particular server or what link between me and the box is causing me connection issues. Over the years, I have relied heavily on http://www.samspade.org for all my IP related tools. It’s a great site, with all the tools I need to get all the information I’m looking for. The added benefit is that it’s not on my network, so the results provided give me an external view of the issue, as well as providing some level of anonymity.
SamSpade has been overloaded recently; not sure what’s going on, but during some periods of time, the site is barely accessible. This has led me to look at some alternative for those times when Sam is down. That’s when I came across http://www.geektools.com
At first glance, it doesn’t look like much, but they do provide two of the tools I use the most; WHOIS and Traceroute. But here’s where things are different. You are given the choice of running your Traceroute from over a hundred sites scattered across the globe. This is great to see if an issue is a result of a down box somewhere, or a bad router.
While SamSpade still has a few extra nice tools (such as the anonymous URL browser and URL decrypter), Geektools adds that extra level of accessibility for those times when Sam isn’t available…
‘Theme’ issue resolved
Posted by Eric Bazerghi in TheHouse.Net on January 30, 2004
As you can now attest, the site theme issue has been resolved. I really like the look and feel of the site now, so it looks like I’ll be sticking with it. Just a few tweaks here and there…
Have I mentioned that Drupal ( http://www.drupal.org ) really rocks?
My current online RSS reader of choice
Posted by Eric Bazerghi in Bookmarks, Geek Stuff, RSS on January 30, 2004
I’ve been using http://www.bloglines.com for about 2 weeks now and I must say, I’m addicted to it. Previously, my reader of choice was PocketFeed on my PocketPC. It’s a great app, but the current development effort is EXTREMELY slow, with a small, incremental release once every 6-9 months if you’re lucky. It also restricts me to a PDA only solution for all my RSS reading. Now with Bloglines, I have a full web-based interface for reading/tracking all my feeds of interest, as well as a ‘mobile’ version, which is perfectly designed for my PDA. I get the best of both worlds! And with OPML support, I can easily move my ‘feed list’ around to/from any machine I want, if I need to at all…
Bloglines sure makes my life easier…