Doing things the hard way

People seem to enjoy doing things the hard way. This 1024 bytes (code-length) VBA code can be converted into this single link excel formula:

=Month(Today()) & "/" & Day(Today()) & "/" & Year(Today())

Both converts the date serial value that excel returns from all it’s date/time realted functions into a string type mm/dd/yyyy formatted date. That’s all!

MySQL Worm

If you use MySQL publically (meaning your MySQL server is publicly accessible) then you should definitely change your password. According to this recent news more than 8,000 computers running MySQL server was compromised. And the users who were affected were all using weak passwords.

Read this article to find out more on how you can make your passwords stronger.

Re-Useable Images

I was working on a project last week and part of the work was to create sort of like a template / menu / footer with an opening image. Initally I was positioning the title of the page as a regular h3 but then I thought of something great (I find it to be). Take a look at this page — if you notice carefully you will see “Salman’s Blog” is just a text. This was done using absolute positioning forcing the div and text to display over the image (with 40% opacity). Absolute positioning shouldn’t be a concern in this case because it’s meant to be used as headers which are constant and therefore have a definite pixel height from the top.

Logos in Photoshop

Inspired by Macintosh Panther logo, I designed this logo. I started with the letter X of course, then I manually marked the black marks. The second step was to add lighting. I used dodge and burning to do the lighting (while being careful about the nature of light). Then I marked the X layer to Bevel-and-Emboss blending. To give the letter a texture I added a little bit of monochrome gaussian noise. To complete the process I made a copy of the all the layers and inverted vertically then moved the copied layers just below the first X. Then I did a gradient (from white->transparent) to give the glass reflection effect.

You can download the PSD file and see how things were done.

Free Voicemail

Here’s a great free useful tool: eVoice. This service lets you get your own voice mail number for free. Whenever someone calls you there he/she can leave a message and that message will come to you as an e-mail attachment.

Great stuff for free!

Let users find you…

Modern search engines are allowing users to search for services within a given city. For instance, Google Local and MSN added a new Near Me option.

So how do these search engines know where you are located? Mostly it’s educated guess based on factors such as language, location of the server and text within the site that might suggest where the website or the services are being delivered.

By using GEO Tags we can formaly define exactly where a certain website/physical service is located. The idea is to include the following four meta tags:

The meta tags above reflect my location. To generate yours just go to the GeoTag generator and at the bottom of the page enter your zip code and you will find a set of values (geo.country, geo.position, geo.placename, geo.region) corresponding to your zipcode. This takes the guess work out, in respect to search engines — which helps produce better results.