Apple Traffic up 34%, iPhone Attracts Young Users
In light of Apple's earnings announcement later today, here are some traffic numbers: the market share of visits to Apple.com was up 34% from March 2006 to March 2007. Keyword breadth (the number of keyword phrases containing a term) for 'ipod,' which is a great measure of brand popularity, was up by 18% for the 12 weeks ending March 31, 2007 ... (Read on Source)
Chromium in drinking water causes cancer: U.S. agency
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A type of chromium highlighted in the film "Erin Brockovich" causes cancer in lab animals when they drink it in water, and it could be harmful to people, the U.S. National Institutes of Health said on Wednesday. (Read on Source)
Bulls look to block Matfield move
Matfield’s agent, Jason Smith, was quoted in newspapers saying that his client had signed a letter of intent with the French second division outfit, but the Blue Bulls Company [BBC] have released a statement saying that Matfield denies this. (Read on Source)
BlogCatalog Updates
Blogcatalog announced on their blog yesterday some fairly major changes and I just spent an hour or so looking around to get a feel for what has changed. (Read on Source)
El fuel vertido por el buque hundido en Ibiza llega al Parque Natural de Ses Salines
La ministra de Medio Ambiente, Cristina Narbona, ha confirmado que parte de la mancha de fuel que flota frente a la costa de Ibiza ha conseguido traspasar durante la noche las barreras de protección dispuestas en torno al Parque Natural de Ses Salines irrumpiendo en las aguas de esta área marítimo-terrestre protegida...
High Blood Pressure Medication Strategy Proves Effective In Hispanic Women
Hispanic women with hypertension and coronary artery disease respond better to drug regimens aimed at controlling high blood pressure than non-Hispanic white women, University of Florida researchers report. Researchers studied 22,500 patients and tracked a subgroup of 5,017 Hispanic and 4,710 non-Hispanic white women who were randomly assigned to ... (Read on Source)
The 9/11 Generation
Confronted with a generation-defining conflict, the cold war, the Boomers--those, at any rate, who came to be emblematic of their generation--took the opposite path from their parents during World War II. Sadly, the excesses of Woodstock became the face of the Boomers' response to their moment of challenge. War protests where agitated youths ... (Read on Source)
Treat Your Competitors As Partners
Online competition is a strange thing. On the one hand, you want your website to be the best in your field. Whenever someone is looking to learn something about your topic, you want them to come straight to you. And while they're there, they should click on some ads too. (Read on Source)
NationwideSmartRide.com Provides Tips for Parents on Making Their Teens Smart Drivers
NationwideSmartRide.com presents a Q&A on teen driving and safety with Anne McCartt, Senior Vice President of Research, Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. (PRWeb Oct 17, 2007) Post Comment:Trackback URL: http://www.prweb.com/pingpr.php/UGlnZy1DcmFzLUNvdXAtTG92ZS1UaGlyLVplcm8=
A new Rails plugin for TextLinkAds (including support for Feedvertising)
Change of Strategy
Instead of updating my constantly breaking Typo sidebar plugin, and to implement Feedvertising from TextLinkAds, I?ve changed gears and chosen to implement just a regular plugin (very close to the new way of doing sidebar plugins in typo 4.1). This approach should work in all versions of typo, as well as any other Ruby on Rails?s application.
The support for feedvertising is slightly different than the one from the Wordpress plugin that is the only option offered so far, but should be fairly close.
Installation
Get the plugin from subversion:
script/plugin install http://svn.nanorails.com/plugins/textlinkads/or to use svn:externals and get future updates via svn update
script/plugin install -x http://svn.nanorails.com/plugins/textlinkads/The installation will copy a file textlinkads.yml into your config directory.
The file looks like this:key: TLA_KEY affiliateid: 0 title: Sponsors advertisehere: Advertise here! testing: false caching: true Replace TLA_KEY with the one provided by TextLinkAds, set your affiliateid if you?d like to have a link to TextLinkAds with your affiliate id (so you can get credit if someone signs up for a TextLinkAds account). Change the title and advertisehere messages if you don?t like the defaults.
Set testing to false once you?ve verified it works (while testing=true, the plugin will use a special page provided by TextLinkAds that displays to links. However, that page does not contain any RSS links)
Finally, if the caching done by Rails is not enough, the plugin can cache the calls to retrieve the links. See the caching section for explanations on how to setup caching.
Integrating with Typo
Adding the display of regular links
To add the regular TextLinkAds links, you need to add a call to render_TLA anywhere in the rendering code. In typo, the most likely place is in your template?s default.rhtml
Here?s what my template looks like <div id="sidebar"> ... <div class="sidebar-node"><%= render_TLA %></div> <% response.lifetime = 6.hour %> <%= render_sidebars %> </div> <div id="sidebar"> <%= render_sidebars %> </div> Add the RSS links
For RSS2.0 for example, edit the file app/views/xml/_rss20_item_article.rxml to add a call to render_TLA_RSS(post_id)
here?s the original file:
xm.item do xm.title post_title(item) if this_blog.show_extended_on_rss content = item.full_html else content = item.body_html end xm.description content xm.pubDate pub_date(item.published_at) ... xm.item do xm.title post_title(item) if this_blog.show_extended_on_rss content = item.full_html else content = item.body_html end content += render_TLA_RSS(item.id) response.lifetime = 6.hour xm.description content xm.pubDate pub_date(item.published_at) Depending of which format you need, you may need to edit a different file.
That?s it.
Integrating with other apps
For other apps, just take a similar approach and add calls to render_TLA and render_TLA_RSS where most appropriate. Both calls are accessible from any Controller or Helper class.
Caching
Set ?caching: true? in textlinkads.yml. Make sure Rails is configured with some caching. Typically, you need to have
config.action_controller.perform_caching = true config.action_controller.fragment_cache_store = :file_store, "#{RAILS_ROOT}/tmp/cache" either set from config/environment.rb or config/environment/[CURRENT ENVIRONMENT].rb
This will cache the pages where the ads appear, and cache the feed pages. But to make sure these pages will update properly if the TextLinkAds ads inventory is updated, you must ensure the cache will expire.
The best way to do that is to use the expiring_cache_action plugin. To install:
script/plugin install http://typosphere.org/trac/browser/trunk/vendor/plugins/expiring_action_cacheresponse.lifetime = 6.hourThis way, the cached page will expire 6 hours later so that would be the lapse of time to wait to see the updated ads.
No need to expire the cache for RSS, it should get expired automatically every time an article is added.
If you use this plugin in other applications, add a comment or send me a not (psq_0×40_nanorails_0×2e_com) and I?ll add a link to your instructions or code.
Nokia Internet push slips in music, gaming (Reuters)
Reuters - Nokia's move into Internet operations faced headwinds on Friday, as the cell phone maker postponed the start of its gaming service due to software testing delays, and Warner pulled its songs from Nokia's music shop.
Whiskey Geeks Keep Moonshine Tradition Alive
Making moonshine has gone from a backwoods black art to a high-end hobby practiced by "whiskey geeks" with a taste for top-shelf hooch.
Unlike their bootlegging predecessors, who cooked up big batches of white lightning and distributed the illegal booze out of the backs of cars, today's moonshiners focus on quality rather than quantity.
"It took me years, but with practice and dedication you can make any spirit every bit as good as a commercial distiller," says Dave Robison, 42, owner of Pioneer Spirits, a single-batch distillery in Chico, California. "You might not be able to reproduce it exactly, but it will be as good as anything you can buy on the top shelf."
Home distillation of liquor used to be the province of backwoods bootleggers. Up until 1974, when the world price of sugar skyrocketed, commercial moonshiners throughout the Southeastern United States made enough money making hooch that it was worth the risk of getting caught by federal revenuers.
Today, making your own liquor is as illegal as ever, and a lot less lucrative. In fact, it's considerably cheaper to buy it off the shelf.
As a result, today's home distillers are quintessential do-it-yourselfers. Many are engineers and techies, much like the liquor connoisseurs who attend the Whiskies of the World Expo each year in San Francisco. "We have a whole audience that we refer to as the whiskey geek," event founder and organizer Riannon Walsh says. "I think 90 percent of them are techies."
John Spidell misses the moonshine tradition. A former federal revenuer, the 65-year-old spent the first half of the '70s "busting up" illegal stills in North Carolina. His job sometimes required living in a sleeping bag under a piece of canvas for weeks at a time, watching a big still, waiting for the owner to appear. Smaller stills got less attention.
"A five- or six-hundred-gallon outfit wasn't worth wasting time on," he says. "I'd go back to my vehicle, get the C4 explosives and blasting caps, and I'd blow it up. There were only so many of us, and only so much time."
Spidell was blowing up simple pot stills, which were used to distill mash made from sugar, water, yeast and hog "shorts" (corn feed for hogs). After it was fermented, the mash would go into the boiler, where it was heated.
Because alcohol boils at a lower temperature than water, the vapors that rose from the mash contained more alcohol than the mash itself. Those rising vapors traveled through an angled lyne arm to a condenser, traditionally made of copper coil. The condensed spirits were collected and redistilled until they reached a sufficient proof, then bottled in quart-size mason jars or gallon-size plastic milk jugs.
Bootleggers delivered the illicit liquor to "shot houses" in the cities on Wednesdays and Thursdays, ensuring they were stocked for the weekend.
Today's home distillers are more likely to build a small reflux still and hide it in the garage. Unlike a pot still, the vapors rise through a column packed with copper wool or another high-surface-area material before being directed into the condenser. A beer keg makes a good boiler, and a homemade column and condenser are within the reach of anyone with basic welding and soldering skills and access to copper pipe.
The packed column makes the reflux still more efficient than a pot still, so it produces a higher-proof spirit on the first distillation. Still, the average home distiller isn't making any money on the endeavor.
"People are trying to keep a tradition alive," Robison says. "They're not selling it. That's looked down on in the home distilling crowd. Most people I know aren't making more than a gallon at a time. Some people on the forum come from the moonshiner tradition, and we've learned a lot from them. But I've never met anyone who makes it for money."
Robison runs the popular Home Distiller forum with more than 2,000 registered users and 50,000 unique visitors per month. Other online home distilling resources include Smiley's Home Distilling and American Distiller.
Depending on the efficiency of the still, home-distilled alcohol can vary from 120 to 192 proof, or 60 percent to 96 percent pure alcohol.
The concept may be simple, but high-quality home-distilling isn't exactly easy. The moonshine tradition spawned a lot of misinformation, which Robison tries to rectify on the forum. First and foremost, he makes it clear that home distillation of liquor is illegal in all 50 states and just about every country, save New Zealand.
Besides being illicit, white lightning has earned a reputation for blinding and killing people who drink it. Many sources attribute these effects to methanol ("the heads"), which boils off naturally during an early stage of the distillation process.
"The heads will make you blind if you drink it, but I defy you to try to drink it," says microdistiller Michael Heavener, co-owner of Highball Distillery in Portland, Oregon. "If it doesn?t make you wince when you smell it, it's probably not going to make you go blind."
The real culprit in poison moonshine was usually radiators, according to Spidell. "Copper coils are not the most efficient condenser. If you're making 10,000 to 25,000 gallons at a time, you might immerse a truck radiator in the water. Chemicals in the moonshine leach out lead salts from the soldering. As a result of that, here comes the lead poisoning."
Made properly, home-distilled spirits are as safe to drink as any commercial liquor. Still, Heavener warns, "I'd be more concerned with the danger of explosions."
Most stills are heated with propane burners. Purified ethanol is highly flammable, and its clear blue flame can be difficult to see under certain conditions. Open flame plus high-proof alcohol equals one potentially explosive combination.
Even innocent mistakes -- such as using lead soldering or plastic parts in the still - can lead to serious consequences. So Robison encourages would-be home-distillers to do their homework first and make liquor later.
After all, he says, "This ain't stamp collecting."
Nokia E71
... converter. There are also a number of security features, including memory encryption and mobile VPN. There's 110MB of internal dynamic memory, and the microSD slot can accept up to ...
Person Struck, Killed By Blue Line Train
CTA Blue Line trains are skipping the Western Avenue stop on the Near West Side Monday morning and trains are running on a single track through the area, after a person was struck and killed by a train. (Read on Source)
Goodyear brings in extra tires amid concerns at the Brickyard - USA Today
 Auto Racing Daily | Goodyear brings in extra tires amid concerns at the Brickyard USA Today - By Nate Ryan, USA TODAY INDIANAPOLIS - Goodyear trucked in extra shipment of tires Sunday morning for the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard amid complaints about excessive wear during practice Friday and Saturday at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. NASCAR orders mandatory cautions to monitor tires Tire issues could pop up during the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard |
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Winclear Review
Do you know that the computer you're using right now is tracking everything you are doing? Are you aware that the Windows operating system keeps a log of every program you open and close? Per...
Meta-analyses: objective or subjective?
Ian Shrier1 , Jean-François Boivin1,2 , Robert W Platt2 , Russell J Steele3 , James M Brophy2,4 , Franco Carnevale5 , Mark J Eisenberg1 , Andrea Furlan6 , Ritsuko Kakuma2 , Mary Ellen Macdonald7 , Louise Pilote2,4 and Michel Rossignol2,1 (Read on Source)
lebua Hotels and Resorts joins Preferred Hotel Group
lebua Hotels and Resorts joins Preferred Hotel Group.
Inventor has 'Radial' solution to shattered bat problem
A New Jersey inventor believes he has the solution to baseball's spate of shattered bats, and MLB officials are intrigued enough ... (Read on Source)
Google rolls out Android to rival iPhone
Rolling out ... Google co-founders Larry Page (L) and Sergey Brin (R) wore rollerblades to the T-Mobile G1 launch / AP, Reuters GOOGLE'S answer ...
BioMed Central sold to Springer
For FREE access to this blog and more, you must register. (Read on Source)
Web Hosting Windows Hyper-V Control Panel, Unveiled at DotNetPanel
Vancouver, B.C. - (The Hosting News) - October 20, 2008 - Windows hosting control panel product of SMB SAAS Systems, Inc., DotNetPanel, has unveiled its new, first-ever Hyper-V control panel for hosting companies desiring a complete virtualization and VPS solution.
The new DotNetPanel VPS solution is a set of modules designed exclusively for provisioning Virtual Private Servers (VPS) based on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V technology.
Feodor Fitsner, Director of DotNetPanel remarked, ''We are the first control panel development company to build and offer Hyper-V virtualization provisioning software to hosting companies and SaaS providers. Our new Hyper-V enterprise modules provide our customers the ability to create, start, stop, and automate VPS provisioning -- all in one control panel.''
System administrators can completely automate VPS provisioning while giving end users a web-based self-service control panel to manage their own servers. The new Hyper-V module supports Virtual Data Center (VDC) mode for hosting, development, testing, and demo purposes. VDC users have full control over their VPS, private, and external networks.
Mr. Fitsner noted, ''Providers now have full control over their virtualization environment at a remarkably low price without sacrificing quality, speed, and uptime. All features and functionality are available in one control panel for complete automation of all business operations.''
DotNetPanel with Hyper-V supports reseller features including custom hosting name patterns, hosting plans with 'Hyper-V' resources, customizable 'VPS Setup Letter' template, and the ability to add an external network address. End users can view a list of virtual machines, their status, disk space allocation, memory utilization, VPS state, manage VPS Networking, and a dozen other features.
Mr. Fitsner concluded, ''The new DotNetPanel Hyper-V modules offer Enterprise-class virtualization at a fraction of the cost compared to more expensive, complicated systems on the market. DotNetPanel is the only control panel that can automate VPS provisioning in less than ten minutes. Administrators get complete automation of all business cycles: customer sign-up, VPS provisioning, recurring charges, upgrades/downgrades, and bandwidth calculation.''
DotNetPanel is the flagship Windows hosting control panel product of SMB SAAS Systems, Inc., a privately-held independent software vendor that creates innovative products, services, and technologies for Windows hosting companies and Software as a Service providers. DotNetPanel supports Exchange Server 2007, Windows SharePoint Services, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Internet Information Services 7.0, SmarterTools Bundle, and the new VPS solution for complete Enterprise-level automation of virtualization. DotNetPanel offers a free express edition and commercially available standard and enterprise editions.
For more information about DotNetPanel, please visit: www.dotnetpanel.com.
Red Reef Landing
Middle Eastern military forces disembark a U.S. Navy landing craft air cushioned during a live-fire rehearsal of the final exercise with the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit during Red Reef 2008 in the Middle East, Oct. 27, 2008. U.S. Marine Corps... (Read on Source)
Flash CMS Intros - a New Invention by TemplateMonster
... About TemplateMonster.com TemplateMonster - is our anchor. It is a first-rate E-commerce project in web design. Started in 2002 as a project of Artvertex, Inc., it was the first company ...
Collar system will save your pet from drowning and locate them at night
?The "Float-A-Pet" system is both a pet locator and safety system for pets. To find your pet at night, the collar illuminates solar powered LEDs around the neck of a pet. For safety, the collar includes an integrated humidity sensor that detects moisture and if you pet is submerged in water, automatically triggers the onboard CO2 cartridge to ... (Read on Source)
New White Paper Helps Retailers Dynamically Forecast Labor During Volatile Times
Workforce Insight publishes new white paper to arm retailers with key strategies to improve forecasting accuracy in today's unstable economic climate. (PRWeb Dec 31, 2008)
Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/retail-labor-forecasting/workforce-management/prweb1813264.htm
name: MAGPIE