This is the best XML parser I've found to date: http://www.bin-co.com/php/scripts/xml2array

by Dick Williams
 
If there is no reason behind the universe,
then that is a fact, and it is a fact I need to know.
For if I knew that,
I should know that whatever reason
I can construct for living will be sheer invention,
having no authority whatever,
save that of my own mind.
 
But if there is a reason for everything,
that too is a fact,
and it is even more important that I should know it.
 
For to be alive for a purpose
and to be ignorant of it,
would be a tragedy beyond imagination.

Ever wanted to have a shortcut key to "Paste Unformatted Text"? I frequently find myself having to go edit -> Paste special -> Unformatted Test which is very slow. Recently I found this neat little app called puretext that adds a "Windows-V" shortcut to past unformatted to and from anywhere in windows. http://www.stevemiller.net/puretext

Several years ago my family decided to do Christmas gift giving differently. We came across a Christmas Gift-giving game which has now become tradition.
I was asked by a work mate of mine to blog the rules for this game, so here it is:

1. Every person buys ONE gift up to a set amount (eg $30). It works best if the gift is something fun and would have wide appeal to the people playing the game.

2. Everyone wraps their gift and places it in a pile in the middle of the room

3. Everyone draws a number from a hat to determine who gets to go first.

A friend of mine recently made a comment about the "calculated" population of the world, pre-flood. The estimate was in the billions of people. I thought this must be wrong, after all, the genealogy from Adam to Noah is not that long. When discussing this with some friends, I was shown this website: http://ldolphin.org/morris.html which explains population models and gives predictions on population growth given a number of factors and circumstances . Many of the examples cited are from the biblical period.

Mail Server:
http://workaround.org/ispmail/lenny

Chrooting:
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/opensource/?p=229

Here is some advice on what to do on a date 1950's style.

I've been looking around for quite some time for a good regex that can extract links off a page (from the <a href=""> part). I've finally found a good one that seems to work in all cases. http://onaje.com/working-regular-expressions-href-url-extractor

<\s*a\s+[^>]*href\s*=\s*[\"']?([^\"' >]+)[\"' >]

I had a need today to parse a whole folder of email into a spreadsheet. It turns out that it's not that hard to do using just MS tools.

1. Follow the instructions at http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/msoffice/?p=744
The code will need a little tidying and the message field will need to be added to the output.

2. Use the Left and Right functions in excel to select the right part of the email message (see attached for my example)