Top Facts

Crockpot: Pork Chops and Rice

topfacts — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 04:47:26 +0000

Pork Chops and Rice

4 pork chops
1 cup rice, uncooked
1 envelope onion soup mix
1 can cream of mushroom soup
2 cups water

Pour rice into crockpot.

Sprinkle with 1/3 onion soup mix.

Place pork chops over rice.

Pour mushroom soup over all.

Sprinkle remaining onion soup mix over all.

Add water.

Cook on low for 8 to 10 hours.

Serves 4.

Crockpot Cheese Fondue

topfacts — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 02:19:09 +0000

I decided to try out the idea of crockpot fondue – hopefully it’ll be as wonderful as my last dish!

1 can (10 1/2 ounces) Cheddar cheese soup
1 pound process cheese (Velveeta) cut in cubes
16 ounces shredded swiss cheese
12 oz. can beer (or 1 1/2 cups apple cider)
1/2 tsp hot pepper sauce
2 drops liquid smoke flavoring

Gmail: Getting notification sound

topfacts — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 05:26:18 +0000

I have switched completely to using the GMail right in the browser. No more messing with software settings, no router work-arounds. It works amazingly well. And with Firefox tabbed browsing, I can always have it on my desktop without taking up either a memory footprent, or desktop real estate.

One thing that I missed was, notifications – I keep having to check my mail. I finally solved it. Check it out: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=10967&topic=13383. Now I’ve reached Nervana.

Pork chops casserole

topfacts — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 19:28:52 +0000

From http://www.razzledazzlerecipes.com/

Pork Chop Casserole

5 to 6 pork chops
1 can cream of mushroom soup
2 to 3 onions, sliced
6 to 8 potatoes, peeled and sliced
1/2 pound American cheese, sliced
2 tablespoons oil

Brown pork chops in oil, cover with onion slices. Add to crock. Spoon on mushroom soup and spread over onions. Place potatoes on top to cover onion and mushroom mixture. Salt and pepper to taste. Top with cheese slices, overlapping to cover potatoes. Cook on low for 6 to 8 hours in crockpot.

New IPhone is here!

topfacts — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 19:21:57 +0000

The new iphone has finally arrived! Nice going, Steve! It addresses most of the problems I’ve written about. So, do I upgrade?

Here are the goodies:

Video camera – YES! Finally!
Voice control. Perhaps we shall see fewer iphone-related auto accidents.
A 3 Megapixel camera. I’ve been impressed with the existing iphone camera – its settings tend to be just-right for the usual snapshots. Even the original 1.2 Megapixel seemed to generate impressive results. Now we are seriously in the range of decent!
Copy-and-paste. That one *had* to be included, to avoid an iphone fans rebellion, I think.’
Mac-style Spotlight search finally makes an appearance. Mr. Jobs, you are making me happy!

There is more, but I feel like iphone will now have earned its hype. And what a nice pricetag at $199!

BTW, the 3G can now be purchased for $99. Go get-em, tigers!

Project Management software

topfacts — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 17:01:49 +0000

For years I’ve been looking for an effecting project management tool. I tried everything from sharepoint to gforge and eventually gave up. They all suck! A useful system is not MSProject with some ghantt charts! Those live somewhere on some stressed out manager’s desktop and get updated each time we miss a milestone – again! Evenutally somebody suggests switching to RT. But gosh, not everything is a ticket!

A software project management system should be following:

A ticket system
A collaboration/discussion system
Documentation repository
A tool for assessing actual project pace
An aid in estimation/milestones/tracking

And does so in a fluid do-it-as-you-go way that requires little additional effort. Lord knows, we are busy enough!

And then I discovered trac! There are two tracs: the little one, http://cvstrac.org and the big one: http://trac.edgewall.org . The idea is so simple, it makes any project manager, software developer or tech lead stare in wonderment the first time they are introduced.

There are three basic notions in trac:

Everything is a wiki. Documentation, tickets, even version control check-in messages!
Everything is interlinked using simple markup. Entering #32 anywhere turns it into a hyperlink to ticket number 32. @3523 is automatically a hyperlink to check-in 3523 (with diffs, cvs/svn comments, etc right there!) and of course CamelCase anywhere is a link to the page. There is much more, but you get the idea.
It’s all one system!

Now, you can go to a wiki of technical spec, which refers to the document attachment that’s the business doc (because business users haven’t discovered the joy of wiki yet!), see the list of completed (because they are automatically crossed out when closed) tickets, and unresolved ones – and mozy over to the emerging wiki user manual. Add a milestone, look at ticket reports – go over and view the discussion within the pesky #232, which refers to what would have been 15 lbs of paper documents right there in the body of the ticket. While you are there, see “related check-ins” – the ones that mention #232 in the comments and finally view the timeline to see how the project is doing: how often check-ins are happening, tickets are being closed, etc.

This is just the bird’s eye view. I am a fan of the little trac. It supports cvs, svn and git for version control and is so simple, it takes 15 minutes to set up amd get going. And if there is anything you don’t like, you simply modify the template and recomile. There are some customizations, but it’s not about flexibility.

With the big trac, you can have it all – and a person whose job it is to keep everything well-organized and running. It’s definitely worth it for a team that maintains large systems. Though regrettably, it’s missing some of the little trac’s features like my favorite: related checkins. I just love the idea of clicking over from a ticket and looking at all the diffs! (This happens by magic when a ticket # is mentioned in the CVS comment).

Still, both systems are a joy to work with. I finally decided that perhaps people should know more about them as they have changed my life!

Using keywords effectively

topfacts — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 05:25:36 +0000

The following information about using keywords in your writing was an amazing discovery for me. Though we all know that SEO is all about keyword use, this should bring your SEO effectiveness up more than a few notches!

In November of 2003 Google did a major update to their search relevancy algorithms, which was known in the SEO community as the Florida update. That update marked the day that SEO became hard. Prior to that point in time, on page optimization tips from many SEOs would have sounded something like this “use your keywords heavily everywhere.”

But that update changed how on page optimization works. Keyword density is an ineffective measure of relevancy, so rough repetition is not an effective SEO strategy. Many pages and sites that use keywords too aggressively end up getting filtered out of the search results.

Your on page SEO strategy should use semantically related phrases and mix up your keyword usage. If your page title is “Chicago Dentist & Dental Care : Business Name” then your on page heading tag should be something like “Your Friendly Dentists in Chicago”.

Now go back to the first paragraph of this post and look at what I did with the title keyword!

Blog Promotion Tips & Tricks

topfacts — Thu, 28 May 2009 21:16:58 +0000

Question of the day: Blog promotion!

Last time I set up a blog, the idea of blog promotion was daunting, and I quickly gave up. Looks like a lot of people have been working on solutions.

Looking at the free options, first, of course.

Firstup: BlogUpp. The idea is: everyone gets a widget, promoting each other’s blog. 1/10 of the impression goes to the sponsor. Not too bad. One problem: this, of course, is invisible to search engines.

ContentPromote. They syndicate blog content: first they fetch your RSS feed, then put it into their syndicated feed with backlinks. Nice idea for getting started. This approach should enable Search engines to see and respect the blog. I wouldn’t go with that approach for too long: this dilutes the value of the content as search engines find it somewhere else. Basically, you are sharing your page rank with the syndicated feed. Still, great option for a while!

Iphone problems – no Navigation App!

topfacts — Thu, 28 May 2009 20:25:25 +0000

Google maps is awesome. But boy, is it dangerous!

Despite building a GPS satellite navigation receiver into the iPhone, Apple has stopped short of offering voiced, turn-by-turn navigation into the device. Yes, you can plot directions from your current position to somewhere else, and you can watch yourself as a little dot on the map, but have you ever tried doing that in a car?

via Top 10 reasons to hate the iPhone 3G.

Iphone prblems – no cut-n-paste

topfacts — Thu, 28 May 2009 20:20:34 +0000

I am personally very forgiving of iphone problems. But seriously – no copy or cut and paste? No way to copy a phone number to dial it? Boo Apple!

Copy and paste is an essential feature for the iPhone, which has been requested by users since the first generation iPhone was released. Copy and paste is a simple tool that would make blogging and other tasks on the iPhone a whole lot easier.

via Seven problems with the iPhone 3G.