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Katie Davis shares some QR Code promoting insight with us!
7I have been working on QR Codes since 2006 and I have seen and found many different uses of them. They are widely known and used in Japan and other eastern countries since the nineties and I watched them getting known more and more by western countries in the last two years.
After creating my generator page on this site and publishing Qrafter, I started to meet great people, one after another. Then one day, I met Katie Davis, who is a talented children’s book writer. She recently finished her first eBook aimed at us, adults: How to Promote Your Children’s Book: Tips, Tricks, and Secrets to Create a Bestseller. She has some great ideas and insight in it and she let me publish a few ideas that include the use of QR Codes here. Let’s read them in her own words, and hey, don’t forget to grab a copy of her eBook:
Five Ways QR Codes Are More Than Just a Gimmick
Thank you, Kerem for hosting a stop on my blog tour for my new eBook, How to Promote Your Children’s Book: Tips, Tricks, and Secrets to Create a Bestseller. There are some awesome ways people in creative businesses can use QR codes and I’m going to share a few of the things I’ve advised authors in hopes your readers get some ideas for their own businesses.
2010 Dünya Kupası’nda vuvuzela sesini filtrelemek
0You can find English filtering instructions on this page.
Dünya Kupası’nda vuvuzela seslerinin başımızı fazla ağrıtması nedeniyle hepimiz bu duruma bir çözüm bulmaya çalışıyoruz. Ben de evde kullandığım Apple Mac bilgisayarı kullanarak, vuvuzelanın ses frekanslarını bulup filtrelemeye çalıştım ve 2 gün önce başarılı bir çözüm buldum. Çözümü İngilizce olarak yazdım ve hemen ilgi çekti, bunun üzerine Türkçe olarak tekrar yazmamın faydalı olacağını düşündüm. Ayrıca TRT’den yetkililer ile görüşerek vuvuzela frekanslarını kendilerine ilettim, çok yoğun vuvuzela gürültüsü olan maçlarda benzer bir filtrelemeyi kendilerinin de yapabileceğini söylediler, umarım faydası dokunur. Fakat bu filtrelemeyi kendiniz yapmak istiyorsanız, aşağıdaki adımları takip edebilirsiniz. Filtreleme için Rogue Amoeba tarafından yazılmış bir yazılım olan Audio Hijack Pro‘yu kullanıyorum.
GÜNCELLEME: Çok daha basit ve neredeyse mükemmel bir çözüme denk geldim. Özellikle vuvuzela sesini filtrelemek için, Prosoniq firması tarafından yapılmış VuvuX adında ücretsiz bir Audio Unit eklentisi. Kullanmak için şu adımları izleyin:
1. Televizyonunuzun line out çıkışını Mac’inizin line in girişine takın.
2. Audio Hijack Pro uygulamasında Default System Input‘u seçin.
3. Input sekmesine tıklayarak Built-in Input: Line In‘in seçili olduğundan emin olun ve Hijack butonuna tıklayın.
4. Sonicworx sitesinden bu dosyayı indirin, zip dosyasını açarak, dmg dosyasını mount edin.
5. Vuvux.component dosyasını ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components klasörünüze kopyalayın.
6. Audio Hijack Pro çalışıyor ise, yeniden başlatın.
7. Effects sekmesine tıklayın ve 1 tane VuvuX efekti ekleyin. Bu efekti eklemek için, karelerden birine tıklayarak menüden şu seçimi yapmanız gereklidir: AudioUnit Effect > Prosoniq > VuvuX. Varsayılan ayar bana gayet yeterli göründü, ama ayarı değiştirmek isterseniz Editor butonuna tıklayarak düzenleyici penceresini açarak gerekli değişiklikleri yapabilirsiniz.
How to remove vuvuzela sounds in World Cup 2010
7Türkçe filtreleme açıklamalarını bu sayfada bulabilirsiniz.
FIFA World Cup 2010 would be great, if only those horrible vuvuzelas were not there. If you have a Mac, using the magnificent Audio Hijack Pro application by Rogue Amoeba, you can now filter out the vuvuzela sounds.
UPDATE: I have come across a much simpler and nearly perfect solution. A free Audio Unit plug-in called VuvuX by Prosoniq which is created just to remove vuvuzela sounds. To use it, follow these steps:
1. Connect the line-out of your TV to your Mac’s line in.
2. Select Default System Input in Audio Hijack Pro.
3. Click on Input tab and be sure that Built-in Input: Line In is selected. Now, start hijacking the sound by clicking Hijack.
4. Download this file from Sonicworx site, unzip and mount the dmg file.
5. Copy Vuvux.component file to ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components folder of your Mac.
6. If Audio Hijack Pro is running, restart it.
7. Select the Effects tab, and add a VuvuX effect. You can add VuvuX by clicking on one of the squares and selecting AudioUnit Effect > Prosoniq > VuvuX. Default settings were successful enough for me, so I did not change anything after adding the effect. But you can change its settings clicking on Editor button.
Adding Facebook and LinkedIn icons on Mystique v2.x
152Mystique theme for WordPress has reached version 2.0. Milenko is very active on updating it. With 2.0, you don’t need to edit any theme files manually, and this makes it much easier to add new social networking icons and replace the default Twitter and RSS icons. Here is how to do it:
First, download the image below (all icons were created by Mark Hewitt, I only merged the LinkedIn icon into the default icon set. You can find other icons on his site.), and upload it to your site. It will go to the SITE_ROOT/wp-content/uploads/ directory, if you did not change your upload destination.
OK, now that you have uploaded your image to your site, you will have to edit your site style. You will add the necessary changes to Mystique’s settings, so that they will not be overwritten after a theme update. Go to your admin panel and select Mystique settings under Appearance. In the settings page, select the User CSS tab, and add the following lines there:
/* Extra navigation icons */ #header a.nav-extra.rss{background:url("/wp-content/uploads/nav-icons.png") no-repeat scroll right top transparent} #header a.twitter{background:url("/wp-content/uploads/nav-icons.png") no-repeat scroll -128px top transparent} #header a.linkedin{background:url("/wp-content/uploads/nav-icons.png") no-repeat scroll -64px top transparent} #header a.facebook{background:url("/wp-content/uploads/nav-icons.png") no-repeat scroll 0px top transparent} |
The numbers after scroll in these lines select which icon to show. 0px is the first icon (i.e. Facebook), -64px is the second one (i.e. LinkedIn) etc. with decreasing 64 pixels.
Adding up on Mark Hewitt’s Mystique Facebook Icon Hack
12UPDATE: This post is only valid for Mystique versions up to 1.7.2. Newer versions need a different approach which can be found on this post.
Well, Mystique is a beautiful theme, but the original icons for Twitter and RSS Feed you see on the upper right were not very appealing to the eye. And the Facebook and LinkedIn icons? They are not part of the theme.
So, what I have done to add those extra icons is, follow the instructions on Mark Hewitt’s Facebook Icon for Mystique Theme post. But editing the style.css file and uploading the icons over and over is not necessary after each theme update, so here are more update friendly instructions:
First, download the following image (all icons created by Mark, I only merged the LinkedIn icon into the default icon set), and upload it to your site. It will go to the SITE_ROOT/wp-content/uploads/ directory, if you did not change your upload destination.
OK, now that you have uploaded your image to your site, you will have to edit your site style. But instead of editing the style.css file directly, you will add the necessary changes to Mystique’s settings, so that they will not be overwritten after a theme update. Go to your admin panel and select Mystique settings under Appearance. In the settings page, select the User CSS tab, and add the following lines there:
Mystique and WP-Syntax Incompatibility
7If you use Mystique theme and WP-Syntax plugin (the syntax highligher) together, you will notice that, your code snippets will use Mystique’s fonts instead of monospace for colored words. When reading codes, monospace fonts like Courier fell much better, because they are easier to read.
Mystique’s style.css file defines default fonts with “*”, so every element on your site which does not have font information will use Mystique’s default fonts. WP-Syntax uses span elements for colors, and these elements do not have their font attributes defined.
In order to solve this problem, you have to add the following to wp-syntax.css file of the plugin:
.wp_syntax span { font-family: Courier, "Courier New", monospace; } |
This way, WP-Syntax will use the correct fonts for every span element, rendering colored words with correct fonts.
Supporting Oracle FCF in Tomcat
24We use Tomcat with Apache HTTPD in our company. And as a database backend, we use a two node Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC).
We were having stale connection problems when a RAC node was behaving abnormally, because the JDBC pool which was created by Tomcat was not getting any notification about it. So I started searching for a way to take advantage of Oracle’s Fast Connection Failover (FCF) mechanism. FCF is superior to Transparent Application Failover (TAF) as it is event based and supports load balancing across the RAC nodes. It is also superior to having no failover mechanism whatsoever. 
FCF leverages Oracle Notification Service (ONS) to get information about database events. With the help of ONS, a JDBC pool which has FCF enabled can see if a RAC node is up or down and can act accordingly. To be able to use the method I am about to show, you will have to have a minimum Oracle RAC version of 10.2.0, because Oracle versions prior to that do not support “Remote ONS”, which is an essential part of this configuration.
Enabling tftpd on MacOS X (Snow) Leopard
1Enabling the tftp daemon in MacOS X Snow Leopard (or Leopard) is an easy task with little documentation. This is a quick reference. The manual page for tftpd in MacOS X Snow Leopard (or Leopard) recommends that tftpd is launched via launchd, so we will do it that way. First, we enter launchd% console using sudo:
sudo launchctl |
After that, we enable tftpd in launchd% console:
load -F /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/tftp.plist |
That’s it. Now you can put your tftp files into /private/tftpboot folder and start using tftpd.
When you are finished using the daemon, you can unload it by entering launchd% console and issuing the following command:
unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/tftp.plist |
If you use tftpd a lot, you can enable it at boot time by entering the following in launchd% console:
load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/tftp.plist |
And to disable it from starting up at boot time:
unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/tftp.plist |
