Blog – Page 8 – Chris Gagné

Sonali Mukherjee: A drought of action in a sea of reaction

Sonali Mukherjee is a blind, nearly deaf, and penniless 27-year-old woman. At the age of 17, she was assaulted by three intruders who broke into her Dhanbad, India home in April 2003 and poured acid on her after sexually harassing her for years. Since then, her family has spent their savings treating her injuries, her assailants have been released from jail, and now they have begun a campaign of death threats that have turned Sonali and her family into fugitives. Sonali lost her grandfather to shock shortly after the attack, and her mother has slipped into a depression. Today, she needs approximately $30,000 to pay for the balance of restorative surgeries.

Nine years later, Sonali has requested the Indian government to either intervene by controlling the assailants and providing funds medical treatment or grant her permission to die.

Here’s Sonali’s plea for help. I’ve hired translators to translate and transcribe it into English, which I’ve reproduced below.

(more…)

Chris Gagné2014-03-11T22:08:07-08:00August 2nd, 2012|5 Comments

Baynham & Tyers’ Rube Goldberg Machine

Tom Baynham and Ben Tyers made this Rube Goldberg machine shortly after completing their Masters degree in Manufacturing Engineering at Cambridge University. Although it doesn’t have the polish of some of the high-profile machines we’ve seen in the last several years (such as the one featured in OK Go’s “This Too Shall Pass” video), it’s remarkable in its complexity and creativity on a small budget. Enjoy!

via Robert Fishkin (@bobbyfishkin)

Chris Gagné2014-03-11T22:11:49-08:00July 31st, 2012|0 Comments

Time Lapse of a Sunrise Over the Okavango Delta

In December 2010, I traveled to the Okavango Delta near Maun, Botswana. Here’s a short time lapse video that I shot at the Khwai River Lodge with a Canon 5D MKII just for fun. The lens was a Canon EF 17-40mm f/4.0 L USM with a B+W slim-line circular polarizer.

Chris Gagné2012-07-27T13:44:41-08:00July 27th, 2012|0 Comments

When Do They Sleep? A small suggestion

I first learned about “When Do They Sleep,” a project from Amit Agarwal (http://labnol.org, @labnol) at MozCon 2012. The suggestion was to identify when your target blogger slept so that you could tweet to them at a time they were most likely to be awake.

I like the tool and it seems relatively accurate, at least based on my tweeting patterns. I just have one minor suggestion… strip leading @s from the user name. Sure, the user should “know better.” But sometimes we haven’t had enough coffee and this is a very simple fix that might improve the experience for a few more users.

Chris Gagné2012-07-27T13:27:46-08:00July 27th, 2012|0 Comments

A little trick to reduce spam using aliases, Apple Mail, and sed

I don’t get much spam these days: 2-3 pieces hit my local spam box a week, with almost nothing in my inbox.

The crux of this strategy is never, ever, giving any online entity the same email address. Thus:

Amazon -> amazon@example.com
eBay -> ebay@example.com
Cat Fancy Forums -> catfancyforums@example.com

(more…)

Chris Gagné2014-03-11T22:16:14-08:00July 27th, 2012|0 Comments

Fixing a small HTML entity encoding issue with HL Twitter

The tweets displayed on the right-hand column of my blog are displayed with an excellent little utility called HL Twtter.

I found a little bug: HL Twitter doesn’t seem to unescape HTML entities when displaying tweets.

I made a minor edit to the plugin’s functions.php file that appears to have resolved the issue. Add the four highlighted lines below to the hl_twitter_show_tweet() function to clean up the tweets a little before displaying them (additional lines provided for context):

/*
	Returns a tweet with all links, hashtags and usernames converted to links
*/
function hl_twitter_show_tweet($tweet) {
	$tweet = preg_replace("/&amp;/", "&", $tweet);
    $tweet = preg_replace('/&#(\d+);/me',"mb_convert_encoding('&#' . intval(\\1) . ';', 'UTF-8', 'HTML-ENTITIES');",$tweet); #decimal notation
    $tweet = preg_replace('/&#x([a-f0-9]+);/mei',"mb_convert_encoding('&#' . intval(0x\\1) . ';', 'UTF-8', 'HTML-ENTITIES');",$tweet);  #hex notation
    $tweet = html_entity_decode($tweet);
	$tweet = preg_replace("#(^|[\n ])([\w]+?://[\w]+[^ \"\n\r\t< ]*)#", "\\1<a href=\"\\2\">\\2</a>", $tweet);
	$tweet = preg_replace("#(^|[\n ])((www|ftp)\.[^ \"\t\n\r< ]*)#", "\\1<a href=\"http://\\2\">\\2</a>", $tweet);
	$tweet = preg_replace("/@(\w+)/", "<a href=\"http://twitter.com/\\1\">@\\1</a>", $tweet);
	$tweet = preg_replace("/#(\w+)/", "<a href=\"http://search.twitter.com/search?q=\\1\">#\\1</a>", $tweet);
	return $tweet;
} // end func: hl_twitter_show_tweet

I didn’t use chr() on lines 262 and 263 because it doesn’t support Unicode characters (such as the em-dash I was looking for).

As always, comments and suggestions are most welcome. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were some edge cases I didn’t catch.

Update 7/18: Got in touch with the developer, Luke. At some point, PHP is supposedly phasing out support for executing code in preg_replace but he’ll implement a different fix. Thanks! 🙂

Chris Gagné2012-07-18T06:28:02-08:00July 17th, 2012|5 Comments

On Food: The Five Contemplations

In 2008, I spent a few days at the Deer Park Monastery in Escondido, CA. One of the things I came away with was five contemplations about food. I enjoyed them very much and hope you will also find them interesting and/or useful.

This food is a gift of the whole universe, the Earth, the sky, numerous living beings, and much hard work.
May we eat in mindfulness and gratitude, so as to be worthy to receive it.
May we transform our unskilled states of mind—especially our greed—and learn to eat with moderation.
May we eat in such a way as to keep our compassion alive, reduce the suffering of human beings, preserve our planet, and reverse the process of global warming.
We accept this food so that we may nourish our brother- and sisterhood, strengthen our Sangha, and realize our ideal of serving living beings.

Chris Gagné2014-03-11T22:21:43-08:00July 13th, 2012|0 Comments

Yapp.us has a beautiful layout and form design

I first ran across “Mad Libs” style form designs about two years ago when I read Luke Wrobleski’s blog post “Mad Libs” Style Form Increased Conversion by 25-40%.

Here’s the image they used to illustrate the differences (taken from Luke’s post who in turn obtained it from Ron Kurti):

I’ve used this form design on a couple of products and I’ve always been impressed with the conversion improvements.

I came across Yapp.us from a Twitter post retweeted by @DovSeidman, CEO of LRN and checked out their site. Here’s a screenshot:

So what do I like about it?

The form design. it’s fast, easy, and fun. Click on a field, select a radio button, and it updates the chalkboard. By using the form, I simultaneously hear and tell a story: “I <3 apps. I have like >50 on my Android device. I dream about creating an app of my own. Let me create one in minutes + for free.”
The site’s voice. It’s informal and friendly but not edgy or irreverent.
It’s subtle, but they’ve done a elegant job of compositing the assets. In particular, wiggle the window size around a bit and look at what happens to the thought bubbles.

Updated for better description: I did notice one drawback, however. The “mad lib” bubbles pop up when you hover over a field, but one has to be very careful about moving the mouse from the “_____” to the radio buttons. Here’s the issue, illustrated with a slightly exaggerated image:

The user activates the control by hovering the cursor in the blue area.
The user is expected to transition from the blue area to the magenta area.
In the current Yapp experience, the user must move the cursor through the green shaded area if they want to reach the magenta area without it closing. Put another way, if the user’s cursor is in the left or right periphery of the blue area, they must first move their cursor to the center of the blue area and then move straight down through the green area.
In the ideal experience, the user can move in a straight line from any part of the blue area to the magenta area. I might also add a ~1/50th second delay before hiding to assist in the cases in which the user might “clip a corner” on the way from one field to another.

Anyway, that’s pretty nit-pickey. 🙂

I’m looking forward to trying the beta, Luke!

Chris Gagné2012-07-14T11:16:21-08:00July 10th, 2012|1 Comment

Fixing Broken Clips on an Omega Paw Litter Box

I have a large, green Omega Paw litter box. If you have cats, consider this product. With a simple inversion of the litter box, kitty poo and hardened litter falls into a waste receptacle. A second inversion of said waste receptacle dooms the feline discard to a purgatory filled with other trash.

For those naysayers who suggest that I toilet train my cats: I have tried and I do not have the requisite patience. (I am not the patron saint of kitty poo, apparently.)

There’s only one problem with the Omega Paw: the clips break. When the clips break, not even duct tape will hold the thing together during the inversion process. Thus, I bring to you a simple, obvious solution that eluded me for about one litter-scoop-filled day for too long: the humble #8 machine screw.

(more…)

Chris Gagné2014-03-11T22:21:38-08:00June 26th, 2012|4 Comments

Two Photographs That Impact My Life

In September of 2010, I travelled to Mumbai and New Delhi with twenty fellow MBA students to learn more about India’s financial markets. I took this photo out of the back of an air-conditioned tour bus in Mumbai. Near as I can tell, she was unattended. This photo haunts me because I think it illustrates how easy it is to ignore all of the things that we find unpleasant and difficult. I remember asking one of the finance ministers about the state of banking in India and he remarked that the vast majority of Indians had good access to financial services. I countered, postulating that micro-finance seemed to be an awfully big topic for a country that apparently didn’t need it. He replied, “Oh, you mean that India. See, there are two Indias. There’s India, which is the 100 million people you’ve spent the last few days with. They have good access to banking. And then there’s Bharat, which is the traditional Sanskrit word for India. That’s the other billion. They don’t have access to banking.”

This is Dr. Becker, and I’m in a classroom at the University of Cape Town. She’s a physician who has been fighting HIV and AIDS in South Africa for years. There are two things that this image reminds me of. First, she’s incredibly passionate and moved by her work… she’s a real scientist who is doing incredible work for good and it’s clear how it is incredibly fulfilling for her. Second, it was clear to us that many of the problems she was facing weren’t medical, but operational/marketing/logistics/social. In other words, she needed more of the people in that classroom to be there in her field and the truth is that it’s hard to get post-MBAs to do anything like that.

Chris Gagné2012-07-12T10:02:41-08:00June 10th, 2012|0 Comments