The Elections Canada web site is very confusing. If you wish to register to vote by mail in Canada, download one of two “Application for Registration and Special Ballot” forms: For electors residing in Canada For Canadian citizens residing outside Canada
Author Archives: paulschreiber
What to do when you get a new credit card
As soon as you get that shiny new credit card, do the following: Activate the card. Call the 800 number on the sticker and answer the IVR prompts or convince the human that you’re real. Sign the card. If you haven’t already, call customer service and opt out of everything: phone, mail and email solicitations; …
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HOWTO count words in JavaScript
Here is a handy JavaScript function for counting words: String.prototype.countWords = function(value) { // remove html tags var cleanedText = this.replace(/< .[^]*?>/g, ' ') // remove numbers and punctuation .replace(/[–—.(),;:!?%#$‘’“”'"_+=\/\-]*/g, '') // remove/coalesce space chars .replace(/( | |[ ])+/gi, ' '); // don't split "" into words, as you'll get 1 ([""]) if (cleanedText === "") { …
HOWTO set up IMAP email for Yahoo
A few weeks ago, I was helping my cousins set up their new iMac. Once everything was up and running, she inquired about adding their Yahoo account to Mail. The conventional wisdom says you can’t do this. Yahoo charges for POP access. IMAP? Unavailable. But then she hands me her new iPod touch…with her Yahoo …
Only if I have an equation editor
I’m supposed to sign up for your site how?
NPR Valentines
HOWTO setup multistage deployment with Capistrano
These instructions are outdated. They were written for Capistrano 2.x. As of March 2016, Capistrano 3.x is current. When I wrote about deploying PHP sites with Capistrano, step 6 was a bit of a throwaway — hey, here's a quick hack for handling multistage deployment. I'd been using variants of that technique for quite some …
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How to display tweets on a WordPress page
There are a lot of ways to display your tweets on your blog. Many are complicated and ugly. Sometimes, you hit Twitter’s API rate limit. Most require the client to perform additional work. I made a very simple WordPress plugin to handle this. All you do is stick [get_latest_tweets username=”me”] where you want the tweets …
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Fixing iChat Google Talk login failures
I was helping a friend set up her new iBook MacBook yesterday, and we were unable to get iChat to log in to her Google Talk account. We kept seeing this error: iChat can’t log in to talk.google.com because your login ID or password is incorrect. And this XMPP error was logged to Console: iChatAgent[33567] …
How to display the latest blog post on a WordPress page
There are a lot of ways to display the latest blog post. They’re all complicated and ugly. I made a very simple WordPress plugin to handle this. It has no settings or options. All you do is stick [get_latest_post] where you want the post to go. You get markup like this, which you can style …
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