Writing Twitter Bot, the “intellectual one”, in php

Hacks PHP Thoughts

What is Twitter? For many it is a place to brag about everyday life events and post pictures. Some use it to promote themselves, corporations and alikes try to provide “customer service” using Twitter and other folks are doing all sorts of things from selling knock-offs to completely illegal stuff.

This article is about how you can use Twitter to promote a site, service or anything you’d like to the tweeps.

It is apparent, that searching for a keyword or a key phrase and responding to all of those would take a lot of time, so we are going to use automated scrip (a twitter [ro]bot), which will do all the job for us.

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Increasing your startup productivity by investing into your employees physical activities

Reviews Thoughts

I am lucky I work out with a personal trainer, having Complete Body & Spa as one of my clients. At first, I simply wanted to loose weight. This took 2 years of extreme sweat. While most of the workouts back then I was suffering, things got better with time and I definitely got stronger, built some muscle and lost weight. As time went by, I realized that working out on a regular basis gives you productivity boost, ability “to get through” and this incredible drive for self-development.

Another thing I have noticed was increased concentration and ability to solve problems which I would not even try to take on before. I have never dealt with Linux before, but somehow I started using Linode and got pretty good in installing stuff onto VPS box and tuning it. On my road to easier and more sophisticated frameworks I learned Grails and wrote my first serious project.

My usual routine now is gym 3x a week and cardio every day for 30 minutes. On a good day running outside with your iPod listening to the right podcast track can be quite uplifting.

I will not go in explaining here what should startups do for their employees, but look – we all work seated and rarely move. So making gym classes mandatory for everyone capable in the team is a great idea. Not paying for the gym membership, but forcing people to attend different sorts of classes and checking their attendance!

If I were to run a company, this for sure would be my first executive order.

Why Design Your Own WordPress Theme?

Thoughts

If your site runs in WordPress, then you will have no doubt already encountered the concept of using WordPress ‘themes’. However, you may not be aware that there are several advantages to designing your own, should you choose to do so.

Of course, the overall purpose of implementing such themes is that they offer a means by which you are able to personalize your site, and make it appear different from the standard WordPress page design. With the majority of people having access to broadband internet from providers such as Verizon or O2, most will be able to utilize much more advanced features than the standard WordPress layout tends to offer. This can help to improve their overall experience of visiting your site – which can be something of a priority of those looking to promote a particular cause, business, or organization.
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Installing Windows 7 with Silicon Image 3112 RAID Controller – where to get the right driver?

Hacks

Windows 7 is definitely an awesome piece of software. Sounds funny when such words come out from me, Apple hardware and software fan. Yet, this post is about troubles i had while setting up Windows 7 on a client PC with Silicon Image 3112 RAID Controller.

Despite Windows 7 being aware about most of the drivers for most of controllers it did not recognize my RAID card when booting from the installation DVD. After googling around and looking for the right driver on numerous forums, i found two places: an official Microsoft forum post and Station-Drivers.COM page. Some of the posters suggested that you need to update your controller’s BIOS in order for the driver to work, however in my case it was not necessary. After a few tests with different versions of drivers from Station-Drivers.COM i finally succeeded. continue reading »

Visit to Fort Tryon Park and Washington Heights

Photos

Fort Tryon ParkOn a sunny March afternoon i took a walk in Fort Tryon Park, which is up in Washington Heights area in New York City. Technically speaking it is upper Manhattan, where you get by taking an A train up to 190th street. The entrance to the park is right there when you get out of the subway. continue reading »