Disallow: /harming/humans. A lesson in Easter Eggs from Last.fm

Written by Robert Greiner | posted in Random, Tips and Tricks | View Comments

Adding Easter eggs to your application is a great way to reward your frequent users with a bit of a surprise out of the blue. Easter eggs allow you to have a little bit of fun with your user base without being too explicit.

The problem, however, is finding the right balance of fun and professionalism. After all, you still want to hold on to the hard earned respect your users give you for providing them with a high quality software application. Easter eggs that are too extreme, blatant, or political can end up having the opposite effect and create a negative experience for your users.

Here’s a great example of an Easter egg that Last.fm placed in their robots.txt file.

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /music?
Disallow: /widgets/radio?
Disallow: /show_ads.php

Disallow: /affiliate/
Disallow: /affiliate_redirect.php
Disallow: /affiliate_sendto.php
Disallow: /affiliatelink.php
Disallow: /campaignlink.php
Disallow: /delivery.php

Disallow: /music/+noredirect/

Disallow: /harming/humans
Disallow: /ignoring/human/orders
Disallow: /harm/to/self

Allow: /

The last lines are a reference to the Three Laws of Robotics created by Isaac Asimov.

This is a very subtle and perfectly placed Easter egg that will likely resonate with the types of users that will go digging around in a site’s robots.txt file.

You also get the added benefit of healthy discussion when your Easter eggs are discovered.

Next time you’re looking for an interesting way to make your product stand out from the competition, why not let your users stumble on an Easter egg?

Creating a Google Custom Search Engine to Search Your Favorite Sites.

Written by Robert Greiner | posted in Random | View Comments

I was goofing off online the other day and came across Google’s Custom Search Engine. Creating a CSE allows you to leverage the power of Google’s search engine while keeping the search constrained to a very small subset of sites. This can be especially useful if one of the sites you use frequently has very poor searching capabilities (ahem… I’m talking to you reddit.)

I went ahead and created my own Custom Search Engine to search StackOverflow and StackOverflow Meta.

If you are interested in extending what I already have or want a jumping off point for your own project, you can check out the code for StackSearch here.

Setting an MP3 as Your Alarm on the HTC EVO

Written by Robert Greiner | posted in Random, Tips and Tricks | View Comments

I had a little bit of trouble with this today and thought I’d share.

If you plan on using the built-in alarm on the HTC EVO (Android 2.1) and want to wake up to the soft melodies of one of your favorite songs instead of the blasting simulated alarm sounds the EVO provides, follow these simple steps.

1. Plug your EVO into your computer and select “use as drive”.
2. Create a folder called “alarms” in the root of your SD card.
3. Place your desired .mp3 file in the folder (I renamed mine to have the word “alarm” in the file name.)
4. Disconnect your EVO.
5. Reboot your phone.

Now, when you go to set your alarm tone, your mp3 file should be there. This method is better than rooting your Android phone, changing the file format of your music file, and placing the file in the phone’s limited on-board storage.

By the way, the full write-up on the EVO is coming soon, I just wanted to play around with it for a little while before I gave my thoughts. Check back for more updates.

LifeHack: Getting More At Starbucks

Written by Robert Greiner | posted in Random | View Comments

This post is not programming related.

Today we did a little social experiment and I’d like to share the results.

On one of my weekly excursions to Starbucks with a few of my work-friends I noticed that the barista always makes more Frappuccino than is needed to completely fill up the requested cup size. This makes sense if you think about it because you definitely don’t want to short-change your customers by not filling their $4.50 coffee all the way to the top. So, the question remains, what happens to all of that extra coffee goodness that doesn’t have the misfortune to make it into your cup? It gets quickly washed down the sink so the pitcher can be used to make the next drink.

Today, one of us asked for a “Solo Grande Coffee Frap” (just like always) but with the added request of “hey, would you mind putting that in a Venti cup?” The cashier obliged and informed us that all of the cups at Starbucks are conveniently marked with measurement lines so any size of coffee could be poured into any cup (brilliant.)

So, just like clockwork, the barista begins filling orders and eventually gets to our experiment order and dumps the entire pitcher’s contents into the Venti cup. Success!

So, if you ever wished you could get a drink at Starbucks between Grande and Venti, now you can. I’m not sure if this works everywhere but it’s worth a try.

By the way, I took this picture with my super cool HTC EVO.

Have you tried this? Did it work? Leave a comment.

Installing Git on Windows with msysgit

Written by Robert Greiner | posted in Tips and Tricks, Tutorials | View Comments

I wrote an article a while back showing you how to get started with Tortoise Git and and Cygwin on Windows.

It seems that people are starting to favor msysgit now since it is much more lightweight than the Cygwin route and Github recommends it.

The installation process for msysgit is extremely straightforward and an older tutorial is already available on Github. However, I figured that it would be a good idea to have an updated installation tutorial available to all the new gitters out there.

These are the installation options I used to install Git-1.7.0.2-preview20100309.exe on Windows.

Note: You can enable the options to show a Git GUI or Bash shell if you want that option to be available every time you right-click on something in Windows Explorer. I just didn’t want that much space taken up on my right-click menu.

And, that’s it! Now you have Git installed on your Windows machine and can create your first Git repository or install Tortoise Git. Happy version controlling.