One of my goals for this fiscal year is to try and develop some guidelines and best practices for development in our team.
While reading some blogs related to standardization, I stumbled on the following coding standards documents:
Earlier this week I installed the Redirection Plugin for WordPress to handle some broken permalinks caused as a result of changing the URL structure for my domain.
There’s some great information about customizing the plugin at Redirection Plugin and Regexes. For my purposes, I was trying to redirect posts like:
http://www.leonelson.com/2009/02/title-of-this-page.html
to:
http://www.leonelson.com/2009/02/title-of-this-page/
Here are the settings that worked for me:
Source URL: /(\d*)?/(\d*)?/([A-Za-z0-9-]*).html
Target URL: /$1/$2/$3/
Earlier today, when trying to run an executable on a Windows 2003 server, where my account is part of the Administrators group, I received the error “Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item.”
Weird. Checked the file permissions, file ownership and for some reason this issue seemed vaguely familiar.
Turns out that in order to execute the file you have to do the following:
Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item.
Posting it here in an attempt to save an hour of my time or yours in the future.
To laugh is to risk appearing the fool,
To weep is to risk appearing sentimental.
To reach out is to risk involvement,
To expose feelings is to risk exposing your true self.
To place your ideas and dreams before a crowd is to risk their loss.
To love is to risk not being loved in return,
To live is to risk dying,
To hope is to risk despair,
To try is to risk failure.
But risks must be taken because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.
–William Arthur Ward
If you’re going to rebuild a company’s customer service reputation and customer experience, good foundations to start building on include transparency, accountability and brutal, yet humbling honesty. Kudos to the Comcast team for starting down this path.
We’re holding ourselves accountable and we are working hard to make real improvements across the board. While it will take us some time, we can and will do better than this.
Source: A Public Apology to Conal O’Rourke.
I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
Leo Widrich, from Buffer, on Bad Customer Service Support
While at a conference recently, a vendor was using a Twitter activated vending machine from Innovative Vending Solutions.
Each Twitter-activated vending machine incorporates a touch-screen interface to display the instructions to the consumer. The consumer is prompted to “tweet” a specific #hashtag to a dedicated @handle from their mobile device. Once the consumer tweets the @ and #, a product is immediately dispensed from the machine. Apparently, the machine utilizes a unique hashtag that is specific to the machine, so you have to be standing directly in front of the machine in order to utilize this functionality.