Smart Rescheduler in Google Calendar

GCalendar Smart Rescheduler

Google has added another new feature in Google Calendar labs called Smart Rescheduler. If you are a heavy user of Google Calendar and schedule your meetings with others who also use GCalendar than this nifty feature might be right up your alley.

Instead of spending time researching everyone's schedule manually Google says this new feature will:

apply some of Google's search experience to the problem of scheduling... Just like Google search ranks the web, our scheduling search algorithm returns a ranked set of the best candidate dates and times... You'll see ranked list of possible times for your meeting. By investigating the calendars others have shared with you, Google Calendar can make some educated guesses about how easy it might be to reschedule a conflicting meeting...

Sound worth a try? Go ahead and turn on Smart Rescheduler now!

GCalendar Gets 3 New Labs Features

Google Calendar got 3 new features via labs recently, as mentioned in their 3 new Calendar Labs post from 3/10/2010. The new features are Event Flair, Gentle Reminders and Automatically declining events.

Event Flair lets you assign an icon to events. At-a-glance you can see which events are more important than others, or other things limited only by your mind.  Gentle Reminders pops up less obtrusive reminders of your meetings, Automatically declining events and lets you automatically decline things at times like Vacation, or other times when they would conflict with your schedule.

More Details

Buzz off! Outta my inbox!

One Google product I've not gotten into, nor even shown any interest in is Google Buzz. Because I can drag-n-drop my labels to hide them, I hid the new Buzz label the first day I noticed it. Considering Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Plaxo and other social timesuckers, errr social networks last thing I needed was another.

In their "Better Buzz Controls" post Google posted this:

"When you participate in a conversation in Google Buzz, we bring that post to your inbox to make it easy to keep up with the discussion. But we’ve heard loud and clear that buzz in your inbox can get noisy — we feel it too..."

Redirecting Dynamic URL to Static using .htaccess

I (finally) found some documentation today on how to redirect a dynamic URL to a static URL. For example changing www.example.com/page.php?article=22 to www.example.com/apples-and-oranges.php

This is your .htaccess file entry to do the above redirection, of course the RewriteEngine on command is only needed once before the first redirect... This will work for ONE variable pair

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^article=22$
RewriteRule ^page\.php$ http://www.example.com/apples-and-oranges.php? [R=301,L]

Now if you need to redirect a dynamic URL with more than one name/valu pair like this:

www.example.com/page.php?widget=cellphone22&color=red

You will need to use the following code:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} [&]?widget=cellphone22[&]?
RewriteRule ^page\.php$ www.example.com/cellphone22.php? [R=301,L]

In this last example, &color=22 is ignored.

Resources for this post:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/apache/3365089.htm
http://www.seoverflow.com/blog/seo/setting-up-301-redirects-for-dynamic-urls/

Gmail – Merge Contacts

Finally, merge all duplicate contacts with one button. I just tried this out and it found and merged several contacts, and now I don't need to do it manually "later" since this one-click and review option was so easy!

How? Go to Gmail > Contacts and look for the "Find Duplicates" button. Press it and follow the directions, and visit the original Gmail blog post (link above) for more detail.

Learn more about merging contacts.

MORE GMAIL

More Gmail Storage
More Gmail Security Tips
Hide Gmail Labels With No New Messages

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2: Fighting Tips (in the Favela)

Favela: Head to the LZ to the South of the market

LISTEN TO THE ENEMY

During this mission, as in many of COD: MW2 missions it pays to listen to the enemy. First off, listen to your enemy. Even with a moderately priced ($15-$30) set of stereo headsets you can get a pretty good idea of where your enemy is - above you, below you, behind you, or to either side - you get the idea. Also listen to WHAT they say, even though you may not know the language. Many of the IMPORTANT words are similar in English. Here are some, though the spelling may be off...

covertura = cover
grenata = grenade

MOVEMENT

This area of the favela has a LOT of chickens jumping around in their cages that will make it harder to determine what to shoot. The first time in I killed as many chickens as people - partly because I started shooting them in an effort to get rid of their "ambient movement" so I'd be able to recognize threats, the gun-toting Brazialians.

Watch for shadows to give away your enemy, especially shadows from above. Shadows can be an important tip-off, but before you go attacking a shadow make sure you know its an enemy and not one of your own - friendly fire isn't friendly!

MOVEMENT ROUTES & ENEMY INTELLIGENCE

The favela has lots of different paths to move through if you look. I tend to look straight down the middle and sometimes miss flanking routes, side alleys, paths around stands and paths through stands and buildings. Keep an eye open for alternate paths, especially in areas where enemy resistance is strong.

Be sure that you remember the people of the favela knows its paths well and take advantage of the fact that most places have 2 areas and rooms of approach, if not more. Its difficult ot get your back safely up against a wall there.

In this particular area there are 4 pieces of enemy intelligence. There is a lot of "visual noise" in the favela because its a city area - things laying around like clothing, boxes, pots, pans, cans, bottles, cages, baskets, LP gas tanks etc. Keep an eye out for enemy intelligence (open laptops).

COD4: Modern Warfare 2 – Doorway/Opening glitch

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is a great game (more later) but having completed it once, and playing through it again tonight I have to complain about "sticky places".  If you've logged enough time on the game then you've surely gotten stuck running through a doorway or other opening where you should be able to move, but instead get stuck.

Assassin's Creed 2 has a similar glitch in which Ezio will suddenly look down as if on top of something when, in fact, he's standing in a doorway or other surface. In COD: MW2 the issue is openings (doors, wall openings, and the like) and it can be a little frustrating when you are running full tilt and get "stuck" - boom, dead.

Great game, and admittedly this is a minor glitch that is not "everywhere" and its not "every" doorway, either.

PHP Local Time – Your timezone

UPDATE: After a comment from a visitor I re-checked my code, did some testing and added the echo statement with formatted time, and improved the comments about how to check for the correct value of $offset. Also, note I have not used this code for a year yet so I do not know if daylight savings has been taken into account.

PHP code to get time in YOUR timezone...

<?

$mydatetime = time ();
$offset= 0; // offset in # of hours from desired location
// check the time displayed using $offset = 0 and adjust
// the offset accordingly
$mydatetime = $mydatetime + ($offset * 60 * 60);
echo date ("g:i A", $mydatetime);

?>

Check the PHP Time manual page for formatting the time. This code has only been tested on two implementations. When I wanted to display the local time for a website's "offical time" I couldn't find any simple explanations online.

Comments/feedback are invited.