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I’m looking forward to seeing the new HBO Original movie Phil Spector starring Al Pacino and Helen Mirren. I recently watched a couple trailers and featurettes at HBOCanada.com and thought this quote by David Mamet translated well into building teams and building products and businesses.  From the “David Mamet Interview” video:

When you do a movie what you want to do is work with people who are going to give you something that you didn’t expect. Who can design better than you, can act better than you, who can light better than you, who can take it to the next level rather than fulfilling your image.

Words for wisdom for any manager!

Product Management

I believe that I have mastered cooking The Perfect Steak at home. You be the judge.

Ingredients:

• A nice bone-in ribeye
• Montreal steak spice
• Spanish onion
• Cremini mushrooms
• Crushed garlic
• Butter

Prepare:

1. Thaw the steak ideally overnight in the fridge.  Take it out a while before you are ready to cook and let the meat reach room temperature.  Pat it dry.
2. Apply Montreal steak spice lovingly to both sides of the steak.
3. Place the steak on a shallow rack on a sheet to catch meat slobber.
4. Place in oven preheated to 275F for 20-25min.  After that time, it won’t look done at all.  Don’t lose your nerve.  The fat should be starting to melt and the marbling beginning to separate.
5. Pan sear in very hot macadamia oil until brown and crusty on both sides.  I like macadamia oil because it has the highest smoking point.
6. Move steak to wooden cutting board and cover with a bowl for 10-15 minutes
7. If you want a hotter steak, throw it back in the oven for a couple minutes before serving
8. Serve with sautéed onions and garlic butter sautéed mushrooms
9. Send me note thanking me for the gift of The Perfect Steak.

Food and Drink

I’ve been working on my first fully independent development project for the past few months and have immersed myself in PHP, JavaScript and CSS. I wanted to post some links that I found to be extremely useful for learning how to set up my site with “pretty URLs”. This is a common setup, and yet it took quite some Googling to find the following set of super-handy tools.

The first thing I learned is that you don’t need to add rewrite rules to the Apache conf file (httpd.conf) – you can add the same rules to .htaccess in the root of your web server. This was handy for me since I have a bunch of sites on shared hosting via cPanel and couldn’t find http.conf. Just create a new .htaccess file in the web root and drop in your rules.

Here is what I wanted to do:

If a vistor hits the URL http://www.example.com/21/descriptive-page-name, I wanted my PHP script to interpret the URL as http://www.example.com/script.php?id=21&name=descriptive-page-name.

The first tool is Mod Rewrite Generator. It lets you enter the script URL with arguments, set some preferences and generate a ReWrite rule. It produced the following:


RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([^/]*)/([^/]*)\.html$ /script.php?id=$1&name=$2 [L]

I hit the formatted URL and it worked like a charm! The problem was that ALL my pages were re-written to /script.php. For example, I have a URL http://www.example.com/gallery which was writing http://www.example.com/script.php?id=gallery&name=. Hm. Time to learn a bit more regex.

I found this great tutorial on mod_rewrite for beginners and quickly determined that I needed to use a regex pattern to only rewrite URLs where the page is a number. The testing, trial and error quickly got annoying however.

Enter the rewrite rule tester! You can quickly test your regex to see what it will produce. Within a couple of minutes, I had a sweet mod_rewrite setup:


RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)/([^/]*)$ /script.php?id=$1&name=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^gallery$ /gallery.php [L]

Thanks @martinmelin, @Dave_Child and @GenerateIt!

Technology

Marc Saltzman’s article Using Facebook to sign into other sites: A good idea? on moneyville.ca was a good idea for an article, but the experience was an exercise in irony.

First and most importantly, the article contains a misleading inaccuracy Read more…

Interactive Strategy, Product Management, Social Media

Recently, there has been an increase in demand for adding a game layer to our user-generated content applications. Gamification – most widely recognized in applications such as Foursquare and Farmville.

We do in fact, need badges. Read more…

Media Technology