John Hesch

Using the uptime command on one of my Red Hat Linux servers

Let's see you keep your Windows server online for 258 days without a restart.

Condiment Conundrum

activeCollab is an easy to use, web based, open source collaboration and project management tool. Set up an environment where you, your team and your clients can collaborate on active projects using a set of simple, functional tools. 100% free.

I've been using activeCollab for a month or so and it is the most adaptable, easy-to-use project management application I've ever used. Unfortunately the developer is closing up the source as of v1.0, but 0.71 is still open source and hopefully some developers will take that code and begin a new branch of activeCollab.

There is a close-knit active community that is hacking the 0.71 code to add functionality but it hasn't taken off like I'd hoped.

Check out this cool Text Link Worth Calculator that calculates the worth of a link on your site. The application uses such things as traffic, link popularity, and link placement to determine your sites link worth.

Wow!! Skype now offers free PC to phone calling.

Skype has now removed any cost barrier for its American and Canadian customers to keep in touch with friends, family and business associates. Skype anticipates that completely free calling in the US and Canada will expand Skype’s increasing penetration in North America and solidify Skype’s position as the Internet’s voice communication tool of choice. More people will now have the chance to benefit from Skype’s premium services and online calling capabilities," the company said in a statement.

This is amazing. Say goodbye to all long distance charges on your phone bill. This is assuming you're calling from and within the US or Canada, you have a broadband Internet connection, and the appropriate microphone-headset.

This is a good read by Richard Kuo in part 1 of his two part series on how to manage email effectively.

The take home message is turn off your email applications delivery notifications. To be effective you need large uninterrupted blocks of time, and that can't happen when you're constantly being interrupted. Every interruption costs 15 minutes of time.

Canadian music artists including Avril Lavigne, Sarah McLachlan, Chantal Kreviazuk, Sum 41, Broken Social Scene, Stars, Raine Maida of Our Lady Peace, Dave Bidini of Rheostatics, Billy Talent, John K. Sampson of Weakerthans, Sloan, Andrew Cash, Bob Wiseman, a co-founder of Blue Rodeo, and the Barenaked Ladies recently launched the Canadian Music Creators Coalition.

One of the purposes is to lobby for music fans rights including the right not to be harrassed by the music industry. The coalition has identified three simple principles that should guide copyright reform and cultural policy.

1. First, we believe that suing our fans is destructive and hypocritical. We do not want to sue music fans, and we do not want to distort the law to coerce fans into conforming to a rigid digital market artificially constructed by the major labels.
2. Second, we believe that the use of digital locks, frequently referred to as technological protection measures, are risky and counterproductive. We do not support using digital locks to increase the labels' control over the distribution, use and enjoyment of music, nor do we support laws that prohibit circumvention of such technological measures.
3. Third, we strongly believe that cultural policy should support actual Canadian artists. We call on the Canadian government to firmly commit to programs that support Canadian music talent. The government should make a long-term commitment to grow support mechanisms such as the Canada Music Fund and FACTOR, invest in music training and education, create limited tax shelters for copyright royalties, protect artists from inequalities in bargaining power and make collecting societies more transparent.

AMEN!

FORTUNE's annual ranking of companies that rate high with employees.

Tom Coates said it best.

...the attitude is clear and simple. We're not going to dwell, we're not going to indulge in an orgy of introspection and outpourings of grief. We're not going to perform our emotions on stage for everyone around us. We're going to stand by the victims and their families quietly. We're going to make it absolutely clear once and for all that this is a city that has been burned to the ground, ravaged by Plague and bombed to hell and will not be moved by these terrorists. And then we're going to get on with our lives. As normal. Full Stop.

Well said!!

The Star Spangled Banner - Song Lyrics

The Star Spangled Banner
by Francis Scott Key

Oh, say, can you see, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hail'd at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thro' the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watch'd, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof thro' the night that our flag was still there.
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore dimly seen thro' the mists of the deep,
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam,
In full glory reflected, now shines on the stream:
'Tis the star-spangled banner: O, long may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash'd out their foul footsteps' pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

O, thus be it ever when freemen shall stand,
Between their lov'd homes and the war's desolation;
Blest with vict'ry and peace, may the heav'n-rescued land
Praise the Pow'r that hath made and preserv'd us as a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause is just,
And this be our motto: "In God is our trust"
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Francis Scott Key's words commemorate precise details of a specific event during the War of 1812. The actual star-spangled banner was 30' by 42'--the largest battle flag ever flown. It had been commissioned by Major George Armistead, the commander of Fort McHenry at the entrance to Baltimore Harbor, who wanted a flag large enough to be seen by the British at a distance. Flag-maker Mary Young Pickersgill, assisted by her 13-year-old daughter Caroline, assembled the flag with fifteen stars and fifteen stripes, laying out yards of woolen bunting at night by candlelight on the spacious floor of a brewery.

British forces had burned Washington in August of 1814, and captured a beloved elderly physician named William Beanes. Francis Scott Key, a successful Washington lawyer, had permission from President James Madison to try to negotiate Beanes' release. Negotiations took place over dinner--while the British officers also planned their attack on Baltimore. Beanes was freed, but he and Key were not permitted to return to Baltimore until after the battle whose plans they had overheard. They spent the night on their own sloop under a flag of truce, listening and watching for signs of the battle's outcome.

The British fired 1500 bombshells at Fort McHenry, including specialized Congreve rockets that left red tails of flame ("the rockets' red glare") and bombs with burning fuses that were supposed to explode when they reached their target but often blew up in midair instead ("the bombs bursting in air").

Watching from eight miles downstream, Key was able to see the huge battle flag hoisted at dawn to replace the storm flag that had flown through the rainy night. An amateur poet and hymn-writer (his hymns include Before the Lord We Bow and Lord With Glowing Heart I'd Praise Thee), he began a commemorative poem, which he called The Defence of Fort M'Henry, on the back of an old letter.

Finishing the four stanzas of the poem in a Baltimore hotel, he gave it to his brother-in-law to take to a printer who produced handbills of it. Two Baltimore newspapers, the Patriot and the American, published The Defence of Fort M'Henry anonymously on September 20, noting that the words fit the tune To Anacreon in Heaven. Soon it appeared in other newspapers around the country, with its new title, The Star-Spangled Banner . Ferdinand Durang, a Baltimore actor, sang the song publicly at Captain McCauley's tavern that October. Carr's Music Store of Baltimore was able to offer The Star-Spangled Banner in their 1814 catalog.

Through the 19th century The Star-Spangled Banner remained one of several popular patriotic songs. In 1916, by executive order, President Woodrow Wilson ordered it played at military events. Its baseball debut was in 1918: league officials had considered cancelling the World Series due to the War, until they learned that American soldiers in France were looking forward to knowing the results of the Series. At the seventh-inning stretch of the first game, the band suddenly started playing The Star-Spangled Banner as a patriotic gesture. Players and spectators stood, took off their hats, and sang. The song was repeated at subsequent games.

While The Star-Spangled Banner had been acknowledged as America's unofficial national anthem since at least 1914, it was not until 1931 that an Act of Congress, signed by President Herbert Hoover, made it official. The law does not include the words of the anthem--and several different versions date back to Key himself--so there is no definitive set of words. During World War II, the tradition of singing or playing the anthem spread to other sports events.

I caught this program on NPR the other day, School Features Real-World Learning, No Grades.

It's hard to imagine a school with no tests, no grades and no classes. But those familiar elements of education are missing at two dozen Big Picture schools in six states, each with no more than 120 students.

The results are pretty impressive.

The school measures its success in many ways -- standardized achievement scores are higher than those at the three largest Providence high schools -- but parents are most excited by these statistics: Almost every senior gets into college, 80 percent go to college, and five years later, most of those students are still in college or have graduated.

I have become a fanatic at watching my Google rankings. I check every day for three of my websites. I use a cool online tool called Keyword Tracker from Digital Point Solutions. I have all my keywords setup and the URL's I want to track. Everyday I activate the tracker and within a minute or two I can see my search rankings for each of my keywords along with their daily, weekly, and monthly changes. I can even create charts based on my specifications. If I was ambitious enough I could create a cron and run the report everyday for me. The only downside is it can become very frustrating to watch my hard earned rankings dwindle right before my eyes. The key is not to get anxious over short term swings. I have seen one of my sites go from ranking number one to not even showing up in the top 100 all in a weeks time. I think I know what it feels like to be a gambler.

Anyway, the point of this post is to announce that for the first time in almost five years KZION has overtaken BYU Radio as number one out of 208,000 for the term LDS Radio. I have been working on tweaking the KZION home page little by little to see if I could get to the coveted #1 spot. I probably won't be there for very long so I took a screen shot for posterity purposes.

Also, LDSTeach ranked number two today on Google for the search term home Teaching, which is a highly competitive search phrase as people use it to search for home schooling. There are 132,000,000 search results for home teaching and to be number 2 I think is pretty darn good. I have never been able to get LDSTeach to rank very well for either home teach or home teaching. Surprisingly, all it took was to change the phrases home and visiting teaching to home teaching and visiting teaching. You would of thought I would of caught that long ago.

Now I need to work on getting KZION moved up the ranks for the term lds music. You would think KZION would do well with that particular search term but I sit at #95 and #96. I think that lds music would be a much better term for attracting new listeners so LDS Musicworld watch out.

I used to travel 50% of the time with a previous employer and spent more then my fair share in airports. I haven't been in a position to travel in quite awhile but after reading Chris Pirillo's experience with JetBlue I'm wishing I was back on the road. Well, maybe not back on the road, but a vacation flight would be nice.

I wrote earlier about two teenage girls who were sued for dropping homemade cookies off at the doors of their neighbors. One of the neighbors was frightened by the girls and had to go to the hospital for an anxiety attack. The neighbor won a $900 judgment for medical expenses.

The national press has picked up the story and the donations are pouring into the girls to pay for the judgment. Unfortunately the neighbors who won the judgment are receiving death threats and harassing phone calls. These people are not any better then the nasty neighbors.

The girls...

They have already been invited on national television shows and a cookie company has created a "Kindness Cookie" in their honor.

That's pretty cool!

Tools You Might Have Missed is an amazing collection of online research tools.

Such as:

AnyRank: Find the CurseRank, GeekRank, NaughtyRank, or IntellectRank for your URL.

Categorizer: Automatically find a category for your keywords.

Citybrowser: Find out everything about a city.

Keyword Variations: Finds site with variants of your keyword.