September 2008 Archives

Google Calculator lets you enter a mathematical calculation in the search bar, and will return the result. Apparently, Google Calculator has some trouble handling arithmetic between large numbers. I found it particularly amusing that Google bungles some calculations involving a googol, a number equal to 1 x 10^100. This CNET article dives a little deeper into this problem.

Dan Grigsby is running an SEO competition at the U of M. The point of the competition is to see who can get the first Google search result for the phrase Abalastow Compendium. I’ve always wanted to play that game, and I’m getting a kick out of seeing how the students approach this problem.

One Two clever students contacted me and asked me to give him an inbound link. Smart move. Here you go, Abalastow Compendium dot org and Abalastow Compendium dot com. Now I’m curious to see where the Bust Out site ends up in the search result mix.

Best Buy announced their Remix platform that provides open APIs. Outside Web developers can now draw on any information from the Best Buy Web site – product specs, prices, photos, user reviews &ndash and port it over to their own sites. Pretty big news for a large retailer, but hopefully an indicator of the direction things are going.

Gary, Steve, and Curtis showed off Giftag at the DEMO conference on emerging technologies. Gary, like the studly champ that he is, also sported the soon-to-be available Bust Out t-shirt. Giftag is available now, and the t-shirts will be available shortly.

For the past several months I’ve spent some time working with the team at Best Buy on Giftag, an online gift registry and social sharing application. Giftag has recently been gaining the attention of the larger media, and tomorrow Gary Koelling and Steve Bendt are presenting Giftag at DEMO 08. Congrats to the Giftag team on their immediate successes. Looking forward to fun times ahead!

Bust Out Solutions has moved! New studio space is located in the Warehouse District of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Come check it out!

For some odd reason, I always forget the stupid syntax for mysqldump. There are a bunch of options that you can use with this program, but if you just want to grab a simple dump of your database, use this command:

shell> mysqldump -u[user] -p[password] [databasename] > dumpfile.sql