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'We speak with Kamran Loghman, the expert who developed weapons-grade pepper-spray, who says he was shocked at how police have used the chemical agent on non-violent Occupy Wall Street protesters nationwide — including students at University of California, Davis, female protesters in New York City, and an 84-year old activist in Seattle. “I saw it and the first thing that came to my mind wasn’t police or students, it was my own children sitting down having an opinion and they’re being shot and forced by chemical agents,” says Loghman, who in the 1980s helped the FBI develop weapons-grade pepper -spray, and collaborated with police departments to develop guidelines for its use. “The use was just absolutely out of the ordinary and it was not in accordance with any training or policy of any department that I know of. I personally certified 4,000 police officers in the early ‘80s and ‘90s and I have never seen this before. That’s why I was shocked... I feel is my civic duty to explain to the public that this is not what pepper spray was developed for.” [Includes rush transcript]'

"When designing a large website, especially one that contains a store, you may be required to design a system for ordering online, or a multi-step process of another sort. Walking users through this process by making it easy and intuitive is key to helping increase conversion rates. Any frustration along the way may cause them to leave and pursue other options. Progress trackers are designed to help users through a multi-step process and it is vital that such trackers be well designed in order to keep users informed about what section they are currently on, what section they have completed, and what tasks remain.

In this article we will look at various uses of progress trackers and see how they’ve been implemented, what they are doing well, and what they are not doing well."

I'm doing some research on progress trackers for multi-step webforms and this article seems useful.

Postgres seems to need explicit action to get sequence numbers setup for auto incrementing primary keys after importing a data set with existing keys.

This bit of code helped me out...

SELECT  'SELECT SETVAL(' ||quote_literal(S.relname)|| ', MAX(' ||quote_ident(C.attname)|| ') ) FROM ' ||quote_ident(T.relname)|| ';'
FROM pg_class AS S, pg_depend AS D, pg_class AS T, pg_attribute AS C
WHERE S.relkind = 'S'
    AND S.oid = D.objid
    AND D.refobjid = T.oid
    AND D.refobjid = C.attrelid
    AND D.refobjsubid = C.attnum
ORDER BY S.relname;

"Bootstrap is a toolkit from Twitter designed to kickstart development of webapps and sites. It includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, and more.

Nerd alert: Bootstrap is built with Less and was designed to work out of the gate with modern browsers in mind."

Check it out if you're into a quick boot on the design of your web projects. I'm using it now in a small test project and so far so good!

"A furry feline named Willow, who was last seen five years ago in Colorado, was found this week roaming the streets of New York."

Here's are some thoughts on REST worst practices by Jacob Kaplan-Moss. They seem to make sense so I wanted to post a link here to remember.

Here is a shell script that I ran from the command line to do some file downloads from S3. Note the sh Parameter Expansion to parse the url.

for url in 'https://example-bucket.s3.amazonaws.com:443/example.tomswebhosting.com.zip?Expires=1234567890&AWSAccessKeyId=12345678901234567890&Signature=123456789012345678901234567%3D' 'https://example-bucket.s3.amazonaws.com:443/example.tomswebhosting.com.zip?Expires=1234567890&AWSAccessKeyId=12345678901234567890&Signature=123456789012345678901234567%3D';

do

    file=${url##*443/}; # get everything after "433/" in the url
    file=${file%%\?*}; # get everything before "?" in the url

    wget --no-check-certificate "$url" -O $file;

    done

You can now do bulk mark message as deleted and not deleted operations in the Message administration for your websites.

Say you have a product section with lots of related webpages on your website and that you are no longer going to carry that product. Using a bulk operation you can mark the whole product section as deleted with just a few clicks.