tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-64950986851101905612024-02-20T13:25:05.590-06:00Stephen's RandomnessRandom thoughts and cool Internet finds that may be interesting to othersStephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13976432803303461181noreply@blogger.comBlogger17125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6495098685110190561.post-22465787546200132362012-09-17T19:49:00.002-05:002012-09-17T19:49:50.069-05:00A Possible Cure for Celiac??Trials are currently underway for a possible cure for celiac disease!<div>
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<a href="http://www.celiac.com/articles/23034/1/Celiac-Disease-Vaccine-Enters-Phase-1-Clinical-Trials-in-US/Page1.html">http://www.celiac.com/articles/23034/1/Celiac-Disease-Vaccine-Enters-Phase-1-Clinical-Trials-in-US/Page1.html</a>
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<div class="blogger-post-footer">-- Follow me on Twitter: @smbyers --</div>Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13976432803303461181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6495098685110190561.post-88129888777630031162012-09-08T13:55:00.000-05:002012-09-08T13:56:11.154-05:00My Ongoing List of Gluten-Free FoodsI started accumulating a list of restaurant menu items, candies, and retail items that are gluten-free. Google Docs and my Android phone make it really easy to quickly reference the document when I'm trying to find something to eat from a single place rather than having to navigate all the different web sites. I decided to share this document in case anyone else finds it useful. Obviously, there are no guarantees it is completely up-to-date, but I will attempt to validate and continually add new items.<br />
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<a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0ApP0YzjF4MpNdEFiMXY1QXlJN29VT0hnV0FneGxfN3c&output=html">Stephen's Ongoing List of Gluten-Free Foods</a></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">-- Follow me on Twitter: @smbyers --</div>Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13976432803303461181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6495098685110190561.post-86327830643115342262012-08-20T20:17:00.001-05:002012-08-20T20:17:54.935-05:00A New Frontier: Celiac and Gluten-FreeSince being diagnosed with celiac disease by biopsy on July 31, 2012, I've been attempting to eat gluten-free. It hasn't been ridiculously difficult, although there have been a few times I almost decided not to eat lunch simply because I was unsure of what I could eat. Bread isn't the worst part - I can live without that. Cookies, cake, pizza, etc. have been the toughest things to avoid. Eating at restaurants can be a pain as well since you never know what's in the stuff you're eating. I'm quickly discovering people at restaurants have no idea what it really means when you say you need to avoid gluten. For example, I ordered something just the other day and the waitress seemed to understand when I said I had to avoid gluten so I needed to leave off the gravy, but then she brought my plate out with a roll on it.<br />
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I'm going to attempt to find organize the celiac and gluten-free resources (e.g. URLs, Twitter feeds, etc.) on this blog in case others are attempting to local similar information. If nothing else, I'll at least have things organized for myself if and when I need to find it again in the future.<div class="blogger-post-footer">-- Follow me on Twitter: @smbyers --</div>Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13976432803303461181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6495098685110190561.post-89544653879255264952011-06-15T21:28:00.000-05:002011-06-15T21:28:55.012-05:00New Google Image SearchAt the time of the post, Facebook has close to (or maybe even has reached) 700 million users. Before too many more years Google will be able to index the pictures of most humans that have access to some form of electronic communication and the rest will likely be tagged in at least one Facebook photo that someone else posts. With the new Google Image Search (now available from browsers @ <a href="http://images.google.com/">images.google.com</a>), the FBI and all your ex-girl/boyfriends will be able to find out what you are up to. Well, maybe that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but I thought it would be fun to drop in my own picture and see what would come up. It (as expected) was able to find this blog - no real surprise. However, more interestingly the "visually similar images" section at the bottom of the search results made me realize I am really a female in my mid-20s from the Philippines!<br />
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I guess I better go for now. I have to go ask my Mom what she has been holding back from me and make an appointment with my therapist.<div class="blogger-post-footer">-- Follow me on Twitter: @smbyers --</div>Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13976432803303461181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6495098685110190561.post-57447288752268069612011-01-23T15:51:00.000-06:002011-01-23T15:51:04.115-06:00Managing Your Social PresenceThere are so many different social sites to share information (blogs, facebook, twitter, buzz, etc.), but it's really a pain to update them all with things you think others may care about. There are also different audiences that may care about different types of information. I've personally settled on three information channels - blog, twitter, and facebook: <br />
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<ol><li>My facebook friends are mainly people I went to school with and likely don't care much about software, cell phones, techie articles, etc. I don't post often to facebook, but when I do it's something pretty casual and more personal.</li>
<li>Twitter on the other hand has become one of my primary news sources. It's also where I interact with people I usually don't know and I post more technical topics or just things I find interesting. Also, it's a great avenue to post my little 140 character comment or reaffirm something someone has posted (the infamous retweet).</li>
<li>Lastly, my blog is more of an information capturing mechanism where I write about what's on my mind so I can go back later and remember what I found/did. It's basically the "dumping ground" for something interesting I've found and think others may care to read. It takes more thought and time to post on the blog so it's usually something that's left an impression or I think could be helpful.</li>
</ol><div>Now the question is how to manage the different sources. Currently (no doubt this could change anytime), my approach is this:</div><div><ol><li>Use TweetDeck on Android to post to twitter, facebook, or both when applicable. It's as easy as selecting one or both in the app.</li>
<li>I subscribe to RSS feeds using Google Reader. This is where I get a lot of funny and techie/cell phone related information. When I find an article I like, I simply click "share".</li>
<li>I use Google's Blogspot for my blog which has widgets to automatically show my shared content from Google Reader and my tweets. I add those widgets to my blog and never really think about it again.</li>
</ol><div>To tie everything together I use <a href="http://www.twitterfeed.com/">Twitterfeed</a>. It monitors the RSS feed of my Google Reader shared items and posts them to twitter. It also monitors my blog and posts that to twitter. If you like, Twitterfeed can post to the same (or a subset) to facebook. I'm not very active on facebook and since those folks probably don't care so much about the latest cell phone update, I personally haven't hooked facebook into Twitterfeed but it's easy to do.</div></div><div><br />
</div><div>I know it sounds a little confusing, but in reality it's not that complicated. I use a couple of main information sources and can easily share across one or all of the main social sites without even thinking about it.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer">-- Follow me on Twitter: @smbyers --</div>Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13976432803303461181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6495098685110190561.post-83979464000743152962011-01-11T22:01:00.002-06:002011-01-21T21:37:46.542-06:00Processing Credit Cards on Android with SquareI downloaded the Square app from the Android market (free). The cool thing about this app is it allows you to process credit card transactions on your Android phone (iPhone and iPad versions available too). The even cooler part... when you login to the <a href="http://squareup.com/">squareup.com</a> site on a PC and fill out all the information, they send a free "square" that plugs into the phone's headphone jack and reads the magnetic strip on a swiped credit card!<br />
The square app has email receipts with the transaction location and map on the receipt along with an optional picture of your choosing. Rates are on a per transaction basis and reasonable especially since there are no fees for hardware, software, separate merchant account, etc.<br />
My "square" is on the way and will hopefully be here in a few days. I'll post an update when I've tried it out.<br />
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<b>UPDATE:</b> The Square came in the mail in just a few days. It fits very nicely in the headphone jack and works great. I also associated my checking account online. They made two small deposits and one withdrawal (the sum of the two deposits). I entered those in my account setup to validate the associated checking account and now I'm free to process credit cards and receive the money in my bank account. I can see this coming in handy for people in service industries (e.g. onsite computer support, wrecker drivers, etc.) or, more likely for me, at a yard sale when the interested buyer just doesn't have enough cash to buy that old couch. Great idea by the Square Inc. guys and I hope to you use it more soon.<div class="blogger-post-footer">-- Follow me on Twitter: @smbyers --</div>Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13976432803303461181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6495098685110190561.post-13931960316758531162011-01-09T19:32:00.003-06:002011-01-11T20:11:22.201-06:00Tweetdeck for AndroidI had downloaded <a href="http://www.tweetdeck.com/">TweetDeck</a> from the Android market once before but didn't keep it. To be completely honest, I'm not sure why I uninstalled. I saw a new post the other day about a recent update and decided to give it another shot. Also, there is a Chrome app that I downloaded. Since TweetDeck can check twitter and Facebook, I got rid of my current Tweetcaster and Facebook widgets on my Android phone and switched over to the single TweetDeck widget. Now the experiment begins to see if one widget updating runs the battery down as much as the two widgets updating separately. It took me a while to get the whole "column" concept in TweetDeck, but I'm starting to like it. For example, it allows one to search for something on twitter and make that a column which will also update on an interval. That's not to mention the whole combined list of showing everything from twitter, Facebook, Buzz, and Foursquare together with different color-coded backgrounds for the particular message source. The widget needs work. Would be great to have a full-screen widget that scrolls the column without having to go into the actual application.<br />
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</div><div>I did have some problems with the Chrome app though. I thought (right or wrong) that logging in to TweetDeck and creating "columns" would also show up the same way on my mobile phone. Maybe it will but I haven't played enough with it. Also, it appears the Chrome app doesn't save the changes across logins. I'm sure this is a bug or something since that's got to be the intent for the single, separate login with TweetDeck.</div><div><br />
</div><div>I'm going to play more and I'll post what I ultimately decide. Right now I'm more than moderately impressed.<br />
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<b>UPDATE: </b>Really liking the Android version of TweetDeck. Again, not sure about the Chrome browser app nor the synchronize option in the Android app, but very nice on the battery, eliminates the need for multiple apps, LOVE the column feature for searches/etc. However, I did hear that Tweetcaster is releasing an update in the next day or so. I'll definitely have to check that out, but TweetDeck has an upper hand by nicely combining multiple social sites.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer">-- Follow me on Twitter: @smbyers --</div>Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13976432803303461181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6495098685110190561.post-4805121183046766352011-01-01T17:25:00.003-06:002011-01-07T21:26:43.199-06:00My New RokuI purchased a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00426C56U?ie=UTF8&tag=stepbyer-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00426C56U">Roku XD</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=stepbyer-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B00426C56U" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" /> for my bedroom and am loving it! In addition to the large selection of channels in the Roku Channel Store there are lots of private channels out there that I can add (here's just one <a href="http://www.roku-channels.com/">Roku channel list</a> I found... there are many others). So far it looks great and the network setup was very simple. I received a $20 coupon from Amazon which made my Roku XD only $59.99.<br />
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</div><div>One thing I'm really interested in taking a look at is <a href="http://www.roksbox.com/">Roksbox</a> which is supposed to give me the ability to play my own movies, videos, music, pictures, etc. I also signed up for the developer site, but have not explored the Roku SDK yet.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer">-- Follow me on Twitter: @smbyers --</div>Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13976432803303461181noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6495098685110190561.post-12019878211778877382010-12-06T19:42:00.005-06:002011-01-07T22:26:07.849-06:00The New (to me) Cool ThingI finally broke down and bought a Blu Ray player. I have been hearing all the hype about streaming <a href="http://www.netflix.com/">Netflix</a> and, like probably half the U.S. population, I have used Netflix in the past to get DVDs. I did the whole <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sling-Media-Slingbox-PRO-HD-SB300-100/dp/B001EZRJZE?ie=UTF8&tag=stepbyer-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">Slingbox</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=stepbyer-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=B001EZRJZE" style="border: medium none ! important; margin: 0px ! important; padding: 0px ! important;" width="1" /> <img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=stepbyer-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=B001EZRJZE" style="border: medium none ! important; margin: 0px ! important; padding: 0px ! important;" width="1" />thing a long time ago but haven't done much with streaming content since then other than playing with <a href="http://www.orb.com/">Orb </a> (when it was free and young) on my smartphone. I have to say I am very amazed at what Netflix has done with streaming media. If it were up to me I would never use another DVD again. It is a great service with some content limits right now, but it really is pretty amazing. Obviously there are licensing issues to work out to get more recent content for streaming, but I have read Netflix is working on that. Wonder service and I cannot wait to get it on my Android device. Let's hope that's soon!! I'm tempted to buy a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Roku-XD-Streaming-Player-1080p/dp/B00426C56U?ie=UTF8&tag=stepbyer-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">Roku XD</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=stepbyer-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=B00426C56U" style="border: medium none ! important; margin: 0px ! important; padding: 0px ! important;" width="1" /> for the bedroom, too.<div class="blogger-post-footer">-- Follow me on Twitter: @smbyers --</div>Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13976432803303461181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6495098685110190561.post-56830342171961972202010-11-23T20:30:00.003-06:002010-12-03T20:30:36.558-06:00Web Developer ToolsI found some pretty cool tools for web developers. If you are interested in what your web app is doing, where it is spending its time, areas for improvement, etc., take a look at the following...<br />
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<ol><li><a href="http://getfirebug.com/">Firebug </a></li>
<li><a href="http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/">Page Speed</a> </li>
<li><a href="http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/">YSlow</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.httpwatch.com/">HttpWatch</a> <b>[Update]</b></li>
</ol><div>Page Speed and YSlow need Firebug (a Firefox plugin) to work. Firebug is very impressive with all the details it provides and ability to inspect and alter the page. Both Page Speed and YSlow give a type of rating for a page and offer advice for areas of improvement.</div><div><br />
</div><div>I'm not sure which one I like best, but no doubt Firebug is pretty amazing. I took a look at <a href="http://msfast.myspace.com/">msfast </a>which is a tool born out of Myspace. I couldn't find enough information about it and usage docs were almost non-existent so I decided to give up and pursue the others mentioned above.</div><div><br />
</div><div>I'll post with an update when I find which one provides the best information based on what I'm trying to do at the moment.<br />
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<b>Update:</b> I actually went with all of them, but Firebug and HttpWatch helped the most for what I was doing. A plus about HttpWatch... it works on IE (even though I don't like IE, but I really needed to use it for this exercise if possible) and it also works on Firefox.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer">-- Follow me on Twitter: @smbyers --</div>Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13976432803303461181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6495098685110190561.post-67087205348603255862010-11-18T20:01:00.001-06:002010-11-18T20:10:57.371-06:00Android DevelopmentI started reading about Android development a while back and never really devoted a lot of time to a project. The bad part is every time I think of something to write, there's already one or more like it in the market. The challenge is finding the right project that I'd be willing to throw the time needed into. It would only be bonus if I could write something others cared about and could get a buck or so per copy to keep me interested.<br />
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Why oh why do I lack the creativity to think of something that would be halfway useful?!?<br />
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A good resource for others interested in the same thing.. <a href="http://developer.android.com/">Android Developer site</a>.<div class="blogger-post-footer">-- Follow me on Twitter: @smbyers --</div>Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13976432803303461181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6495098685110190561.post-82284677303169577572010-11-17T20:07:00.001-06:002010-11-20T23:22:53.454-06:00To Root or Not To RootI've only had my Android phone (Samsung Captivate) for about 4 months or so and am itching to root and mod it. I'm not 100% convinced I'll get enough out of a rooted phone, but I'm sure if I ever cave in and do it I'll never go back; however, I am a bit worried about getting back to a stock ROM in case I have a hardware issue that requires me to get a warranty replacement. I've read it will void my warranty and that definitely wouldn't be a good thing if I couldn't get it back to stock. I've read about Odin and ROM Manager. It appears that both can get me back to where I need to be if the a problem arose. Lots more reading on <a href="http://forum.xda-developers.com/">XDA-Developers Forums</a> and some extremely convincing reasons why I should root are still required.<br />
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<b>UPDATE: </b>Z4root in the Android Market is very simple. Mod'ing on looks really easy with all the other apps out there like ROM Manager, but not to that point yet.<div class="blogger-post-footer">-- Follow me on Twitter: @smbyers --</div>Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13976432803303461181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6495098685110190561.post-84814785421192043522010-11-17T19:59:00.001-06:002010-11-20T14:48:04.171-06:00QR CodesSo I find QR codes to be pretty cool and a great addition to a business card, letterhead, etc. There are many sites online that will generate them, but (currently) I'm partial to the <a href="http://webmasterhandytools.com/image-tools/qr-code-generator/">Webmaster Handy Tools QR Code Generator</a>. You can choose from a lot of different types such as a vCard (which imports nicely as a contact), bookmark, tweet, etc. I generated the one on this site using this tool. I know there are lots out there, but this is the one I settled on that seemed to have the most options.<div class="blogger-post-footer">-- Follow me on Twitter: @smbyers --</div>Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13976432803303461181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6495098685110190561.post-48135959875211667552010-11-11T19:39:00.001-06:002010-11-11T20:14:07.020-06:00A Word on the Hessian ProtocolI've personally done some testing with a few different protocols lately and one of those was <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hessian_(web_service_protocol)">Hessian</a>. I had actually never heard of it until some other tech guys filled me in. I've done some testing around it with web services and can definitely say it is extremely fast. It's a binary protocol, but you can actual marshal objects like a standard org.w3c.dom.Document object (in Java) without having to distribute a bunch of custom classes to clients. It is extremely fast and a very light-weight protocol as best I could tell. Not difficult at all to deal with in the Spring world or straight Java. It's not a Java-only thing, but I do not have experience with Hessian in other languages.<br />
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</div><div>Just an interesting bit of information and learning for others that may want to research more. I have been amazed at what I have seen with Hessian so far.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer">-- Follow me on Twitter: @smbyers --</div>Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13976432803303461181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6495098685110190561.post-30740648868953270442010-11-08T18:53:00.007-06:002010-11-10T23:43:54.010-06:00Masking Blogger URLI currently use <a href="http://justhost.com/">JustHost.com</a> to host my personal domain as well as another domain for a web site I maintain for my son's school. Of course my personal domain (<a href="http://stephenbyers.net/">StephenByers.net</a>) just redirects to my Blogger account. I'd really like to hide the fact that it forwards to Blogger and Google tells me how to do that, but it requires more DNS control than what JustHost offers (at least as far as I can tell). I can understand why I shouldn't be allowed to merely modify my .htaccess file and mask a redirect because that seems to be a major security problem. I'm just not sure I will always host my content on Blogger and it would be nice to just mask the URL so people always see my original domain name.<br />
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Since this is one of those techie things I'm trying to figure out, I'm sure others may have the same problem. A lot of it probably just depends on your DNS servers and how much control you have. I've submitted a support ticket to JustHost to see if I can have more control or if there is another solution. Any ideas welcome.<br />
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<b>UPDATE</b>: It appears that my hosting company does not let me control DNS but they will do it for me via support ticket. I think I can have them setup a CNAME for "www" that goes to ghs.google.com. I'm afraid to have them mess with the 'A' NAME because I have subdomains that are for other sites and I have a feeling that will send everything to Blogger. However, I think I could update my .htaccess file with a redirect for anything going to the "naked" domain (stephenbyers.net) and redirect it to "www.stephenbyers.net" which will then be the CNAME that they configured. It's easy to see I am NOT a networking person (software only for me), but this stuff is pretty interesting. I'm sure my analysis if flawed, but now I have to decide if having support create the CNAME will get rid of my search friendly URLs that Google and other search engines love.<div class="blogger-post-footer">-- Follow me on Twitter: @smbyers --</div>Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13976432803303461181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6495098685110190561.post-40481202190812472732010-11-06T14:20:00.001-05:002010-11-06T14:21:44.664-05:00"Stumbled Upon" This<div>Interesting read...</div><div><br />
</div><a href="http://www.marcandangel.com/2010/03/29/25-beautifully-illustrated-thought-provoking-questions/">25 Beautifully Illustrated Thought-Provoking Questions</a><div class="blogger-post-footer">-- Follow me on Twitter: @smbyers --</div>Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13976432803303461181noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6495098685110190561.post-43065694243683824432010-11-05T19:56:00.001-05:002010-11-05T21:01:03.267-05:00Let's try this again...I've tried more than once to create a blog and this is my latest attempt. I run across a lot of interesting things on the Internet sometimes for fun and other times for work. It would be nice to have a place to post random thoughts and cool/interesting finds on the Internet for future reference. They also may be of some interest to others so I thought I'd give it a shot (again).<br />
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Just to let you know, I'm a software developer type that enjoys technology. I love cell phones for some reason and currently own a Samsung Captivate. I'll try to post cool Android information that I run across, articles or helpful sites I find when trying to solve a software issue, and anything else I find to be of interest.<br />
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Hopefully this will be somewhat interesting for others or at least serve as a place that I can reference when I completely forget something cool I once found.<div class="blogger-post-footer">-- Follow me on Twitter: @smbyers --</div>Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13976432803303461181noreply@blogger.com0