Riley McArdle

Have you ever wondered where money comes from? Some people think its still based on bars of gold and silver sitting in vaults somewhere. Its not though, its created out of thin air. Most of it isn’t even printed or coined, its just typed into a computer.

When you get a loan from a bank, whether it be a mortgage, a car loan, a line of credit or even just a credit card, where do you think that money comes from? Most people think that it comes out of a big pool of money encompassing everyone’s checking accounts, savings accounts, CDs, etc. It’s not though—this is how the banks create money. When you get a loan, the bank creates the money out of nowhere and adds it to your account. No muss, no fuss. And since hardly anyone ever wants their loan in cash, they don’t even have to bother to print out paper money.

Don’t believe it? Watch this video by Paul Grignon to see how they do it, and how things got this way. You can also order your own DVD copy of the video from the Money as Debt site.

Alexander Marchand also has a great article about this on his blog, The Universe As.

All this pretty easily explains how Citigroup (A.K.A. Citibank) has over $1 trillion in assets. Just think of how much that is.

Seth Godin just posted a great article where he talks about his upcoming book on New Marketing called Meatball Sundae and explains what exactly a Meatball Sundae is.

People treat the New Marketing like a kid with a twenty-dollar bill at an ice cream parlor. They keep wanting to add more stuff—more candy bits and sprinkles and cream and cherries.

I think his points are right on the money. Its so easy to get caught up in the technology sprinkles, that you can lose sight of the bigger picture of how and why New Marketing works.

He also brings up the fact that for New Marketing to really work, the entire company has to get behind it and change the way they think and work.

New Marketing—whipped cream and a cherry on top—isn’t magical. What’s magical is what happens when an organization uses the New Marketing to become something it didn’t used to be—it’s not just the marketing that’s transformed, but the entire organization.

This article is just the first in a series that Seth will be posting each Monday about a topic from the book.

Meatball Mondae (#1) on Seth’s Blog

As I have mentioned in the past, I work for a company called Ergotron. We make stands, arms and carts for mounting flat panel monitors and televisions and notebooks among other things.

Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror has posted an excellent review of one of our products, the Ergotron LX Desk Mount LCD Arm. He is using three of our arms for his triple-monitor configuration. The pictures of his final setup look great.

LCD Monitor Arms on Coding Horror

There’s a great post on the Oracle E-Business Suite Technology blog that explains how the JDBC connection pools for the Oracle eBusiness Suite work, how to configure them, monitor them and troubleshoot problems. There’s also an excellent diagram of the tiered architecture of Oracle eBusiness Suite.

Understanding Oracle JDBC Connections From the eBusiness Middle Tier via Oracle E-Business Suite Technology

Doc Searls, one of the writers of the Cluetrain Manifesto, asks good question – “Can marketing be conversational?” I think the answer depends on the company, and a lot of companies just take it for granted, but I definitely think its a good question for them to ask themselves.

Before a company leaps in and tries to join the conversation, they should take a step back and ask themselves if they truly can be conversational or are they just fooling themselves? In reality, I’m sure there are some companies that can be conversational. It’s just in their culture… their corporate DNA. In other companies, it would be impossible. Even if they tried, even with the best intentions, they would come off as disingenuous. Not being genuine in the blogosphere is much, much worse than being silent.

Can marketing be conversational? via Doc Searls Weblog

VMware has announced an ultra-thin enterprise virtualization solution called VMware ESX Server 3i that fits into 32MB of flash. It can be installed on a USB flash drive or can be integrated right into the server by hardware vendors.

It is remotely managed by VirtualCenter Management Server. New ESX 3i servers are automatically discovered, configured and provisioned. Need more virtualization capacity? Step 1, buy a server with ESX 3i built in. Step 2, plug it in. Step 3, you’re done! This is a revolutionary. VMware continues to show their innovation and dominance in the market by releasing features like this. Microsoft is years behind with their virtualization efforts.

And the best part of this new technology, it will be included in future versions of VMware Infrastructure 3. Which means it will be free for existing customers. You can choose either to install the standard ESX 3 server or the ultra-thin ESX 3i server.

Meet the Next Generation of Virtual Infrastructure Technology via TechGripe
VMware goes flash with 3i via tech.nocr.at

I know I’ve been posting a lot of KiXtart stuff lately, and I don’t mean to have my blog become all about KiXtart but it seems to be a pretty popular topic. I’ve been watching my web stats and have seen a few users come by from searches looking for how to open a browser from KiXtart so I thought I’d post the answer.

Here’s a function to open the default web browser. An optional URL can be specified and it will be opened in the browser.

; Open the default browser
FUNCTION OpenDefaultBrowser (OPTIONAL $URL)
	; Get the command line to start the default browser
	$BrowserCommand = READVALUE ("HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\HTTP\shell\open\command", "")
 
	; Check if there is a %1 in the command
	IF INSTR ($BrowserCommand, "%1")
		; Replace any occurences of %1 with the URL
		$BrowserCommand = JOIN (SPLIT ($BrowserCommand, "%1"), $URL)
	ELSE
		; Append the URL to the end of the command
		$BrowserCommand = "$BrowserCommand $URL"
	ENDIF
 
	; If no URL was specified, remove " -nohome" from the command line
	IF NOT $URL
		$BrowserCommand = JOIN (SPLIT ($BrowserCommand, " -nohome"), "")
	ENDIF
 
	; Open the default browser and return immediately
	RUN $BrowserCommand
ENDFUNCTION

With the above function, if Firefox or Opera or some other browser is installed and set as the default, it will be opened instead of Internet Explorer. If you need to be sure that Internet Explorer is opened, and not some other browser, here’s a function that will open Internet Explorer no matter what.

; Open Internet Explorer
FUNCTION OpenInternetExplorer (OPTIONAL $URL)
	; Get the path to Internet Explorer
	$BrowserCommand = READVALUE ("HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\IEXPLORE.EXE", "")
 
	; Append the URL to the end of the command
	$BrowserCommand = "$BrowserCommand $URL"
 
	; Open Internet Explorer and return immediately
	RUN $BrowserCommand
ENDFUNCTION

Here are some examples for using these functions:

; Open the default browser and go to the home page
OpenDefaultBrowser
 
; Open the default browser and go to http://blog.glyff.net/
OpenDefaultBrowser ("http://blog.glyff.net/")
 
; Open Internet Explorer and go to the home page, even if it isn't the default browser
OpenInternetExplorer
 
; Open Internet Explorer and go to http://blog.glyff.net/, even if it isn't the default browser
OpenInternetExplorer ("http://blog.glyff.net/")

PSD Vote is a new social media site for sharing and rating Photoshop tutorials. It is set up similar to Digg and reddit where you can vote for or comment on posts that you like. It just launched and there are already some really good tutorials. Check it out.

As you may have noticed, I have posted some bits of KiXtart code here on my blog and the code is prettied up to be easy to read similar to an IDE.

To do this, I use a plugin for WordPress called WP-Syntax. WP-Syntax is a wrapper around a library called GeSHi that performs syntax highlighting for programming and scripting languages.

By default GeSHi supports dozens of programming languages (see their site for a full list) but it doesn’t support KiXtart. So, I wrote a custom language file for GeSHi to add support for KiXtart.

Download: geshi-kixtart.zip (ZIP - 2.61 KB)

After installing WP-Syntax, just extract kixtart.php from the above ZIP file and copy it to the /wp-content/plugins/wp-syntax/geshi/geshi directory on your WordPress server.

To include KiXtart code in a post, surround your code with <pre lang=”kixtart”> and </pre> tags.

I have submitted this language file to the GeSHi developers so hopefully it should be added as a standard language in upcoming versions of GeSHi and WP-Syntax.

At Ergotron, we have a browser based, third party application that works best when the server is added to the Trusted Sites Zone in Internet Explorer. In a perfect world, we could bug the developers to make it run correctly on the principle of least privilege, but that’s not likely to happen.

So, I added code to our log on script, which is written in KiXtart, to add the servers for this application to the Trusted Sites Zone.

Here’s the main function:

; Add a site to the Trusted Sites Zone
FUNCTION AddTrustedSite ($Protocol, $Server, $Domain)
	$DomainsKey = "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\Domains"
	$SiteKey = '$DomainsKey\$Domain\$Server\'
	$SiteValue = $Protocol
	$TrustedSitesZone = 2
 
	$Result = WRITEVALUE ($SiteKey, $SiteValue, $TrustedSitesZone, "REG_DWORD")
ENDFUNCTION

I also wanted a way to remove sites from the Trusted Sites Zone as well:

; Delete a site from the Trusted Sites Zone
FUNCTION DeleteTrustedSite ($Protocol, $Server, $Domain)
	$DomainsKey = "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\Domains"
	$SiteKey = '$DomainsKey\$Domain\$Server\'
	$SiteValue = $Protocol
 
	$Result = DELVALUE ($SiteKey, $SiteValue)
ENDFUNCTION

Now, to use these functions:

; Add buggy application to the Trusted Sites Zone
AddTrustedSite ("http", "buggyapp", "example.com")
 
; Remove fixed application from the Trusted Sites Zone
DeleteTrustedSite ("http", "fixedapp", "example.com")

The value passed to $Protocol can be “http”, “https”, “file”, “ftp” or “*”. If “*” is used, the site will be trusted when it is accessed using any protocol. If anything other than “https” is specified, you must disable the “Require server verification (https) for sites in this zone” option.

This is how to disable the “Require server verification (https) for sites in this zone” option:

; Do not require https for sites in the Trusted Sites zone
$TrustedSitesFlags = VAL (READVALUE ("HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Zones\2\", "Flags"))
$TrustedSitesFlags = $TrustedSitesFlags | 4
$Result = WRITEVALUE ("HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Zones\2\", "Flags", $TrustedSitesFlags, "REG_DWORD")