» 2006 » May

It is well talked about that our attention spans are shrinking all the time. I have noticed it in myself more and more of late. I bought a Tivo in late 2000 and have been watching recorded TV almost exclusively since then (I was already videotaping my few shows at the time).

PVR’s and time shift technology are some of the most underrated uses of technology in everyday life. No longer chained to a network’s programming schedule, I can watch the shows I want, when I want and without commercials. I can pause to get up for a minute. But more importantly, I can rewind to watch a scene again. Didn’t hear what the actors said? Didn’t quite understand what was going on? Quick rewind and watch the scene again. Now we don’t even have to pay attention during our recreational activities! We can work and recreate at the same time (and pay little attention to both).

I reached for the remote to rewind a section of a movie last week. I wasn’t at home. I was in a movie theater. It was Mission Impossible: III.

Sitting in the theater I started thinking about how many times recently I have done that; listening to the radio, watching TV, a play or at a movie.

And when the thought had ended, my mind was pulled back to the movie screen by an explosion. Not knowing what had preceeded, I reached for the remote to rewind.

Popularity: 15%

Share This

ZenCart includes an expected products box to list upcoming products release dates. By default the box only displays on the index and category pages as a center box, low on the page. I am developing a pre-ordering system for a current client and we thought it would be more useful to give customers a full page listing of upcoming products.

You can easily create a similar page in your own ZenCart site with the following steps:

1. Download upcoming_products_page.tar.gz and unzip.
2. Create a new directory on your site includes/modules/pages/upcoming_products/.
3. Upload header_php.php to this directory.
4. Upload the template file tpl_upcoming_products_default.php to your_template/templates/.
5. To create a link to the file, add this snippet to the end of your_template/sideboxes/tpl_categories.php:
   $content .= "<br />\n".'<a href="' . zen_href_link('upcoming_products') . '">Upcoming Products</a>';

   If the file doesn't exist, copy the one from template_default/sideboxes/ to your_template/sideboxes/.

Popularity: 12%

Share This

I use this PHP script to automate running multiple jobs hourly, daily, weekly and monthly. Sure you can create simple scripts for each job and run them all separately via a Unix crontab, but this self-contained script allows running unlimited jobs all from one file. Plus, it provides a framework for building jobs and storing configurations after each run. It creates a cache file .crontab.php in the same directory, to store runtime and configuration data.

This version has been customized to run under ZenCart. Place in the ZenCart admin directory and make the modification to admin/includes/application_top.php as directed. To run automatically add to your system’s local crontab.

I am currently using to run order shipped updates and custom inventory re-order warnings on ZenCart sites. If you are interested in these specific jobs contact me for details.

Download crontab.php

Popularity: 21%

Share This

I’ve had some problems lately with the BBEdit documents drawer disappearing. Clicking on the drawer open/close button, showed the button change as if it was actually opening and closing the drawer but no drawer action. The drawer just disappered.

Closing BBEdit and reopening would solve the problem, but with dozens of files open on multiple servers thats a time consuming fix. I found that when maximizing the affected BBEdit window, the drawer is redrawn correctly. So a better fix is to simply maximize and then minimize the window.

Popularity: 10%

Share This

The ZenCart default Authorize.net AIM (authorizenet_aim.php) module has a problem when using the binary version of cURL.

exec() returns the executed function output as an array. To properly use this array return, we need to pop off the first array element and explode() it at the commas.

Original

Updated

Popularity: 15%

Share This

Jeff Han of NYU is working on a computer interface similar to the one Tom Cruise uses in Minority Report (or Ben Affleck in Paycheck). In Minority Report, there are several scenes where he is interacting with the precrime computer with his hands in 3D space. Usually computers usage in movies is pretty cheesy to a techie, but the similarity of Jeff’s work to Minority Report and Paycheck is pretty cool.

Jeff details his research in the paper Multi-Touch Interaction Research. Take a look at the demo movie where Jeff and friends showcase the user interface system.

First there was the punch card, then the command line and now the windowed desktop. What will the next computer user interface be like?

Popularity: 15%

Share This