We don’t usually post about medical technology on our blog but it’s kind of hard to ignore the topic when what’s involved can save so many lives. There are a number of prostate cancer treatments available today and patients stand a good chance against the disease today. There are a number of factors which go into a doctor’s recommendation of a specific treatment path including the patient’s age and specific condition.

While each treatment has its advantages and disadvantages and choosing the right one depends on the patient, a new procedure called High Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU) is proving highly effective with little side effects. The base core behind this innovative prostate cancer treatment is the concentration of ultrasound waves on the infected tissue.

The manufacturer of the device provides a good analogy as to how the procedure works on their website (internationalhifu.com). The site suggests to imagine how one could focus light beams from the sum using a magnifying glass which generates enough heat at the point of intersection to burn a leaf or other small object. HIFU works in a similar way by concentrating a large number of sound waves on one specific spot. The sound waves in themselves are harmless to human tissue but a concentration of numerous waves can effectively destroy the infected tissue with minimal damage to surrounding cells.

There is a reason whey people often refer to debt in metaphors of clutches and various traps. The big problem with debt is that the more you sink into it, the harder it is to get out of (maybe a better metaphor would be quicksand). What happens with most people is that as they fail to make payments for the first time, they are tempted to take out further loans in order to make payments for their current ones. But this is usually the worst thing you can do. Especially since most of the time the types of loans they can take out in order to pay off their current loans turn out to be quite expensive ones.

As the loans get bigger and bigger with interest (especially since they are not actually paying them off, rather taking out new ones with higher interest rates just to cover the old ones) it becomes almost impossible to pay them off without a drastic change in one’s financial situation.

But there are options for getting out of debt smartly and the sooner you tackle the problem the better. Cleardebtsolution.com offers a number of options for consumers overwhelmed in debt. One option for dealing with multiple loans and debt which typically add up due to loans taken out for the purpose of paying off old ones is by the means of credit card consolidation. While this essentially is also a loan to pay off other loans, it is usually in much better terms and completely replaces the old ones providing an easier and more reasonable payment plan.

For more severe cases the site recommends the option of debt relief in which a debtor comes to an agreement with his creditors to lower the sum of the debt and pay off a smaller sum through an agreed upon payment plan which will officially clear the debt.

Los Angeles Criminal Defense Lawyers | Experienced California Criminal AttorneysOne thing I have leaned over the years and that is if you are in a situation which you can’t handle on your own, you better get the best people possible to handle it for you. This way your lack of capabilities on the matter isn’t a disadvantage but rather you shift the situation giving you the upper hand.

This is especially true in cases when someone is charged with misdemeanors or felonies. You don’t want to leave something like this to fate, you want to take fate in your hands and seek the best representation you can find. Kestenbaum Eisner & Gorin LLP specialize in aggressive representation in criminal defense cases and have been rated “Preeminent Top 5% U.S. Firm”. Now that’s called upper hand.

You may not think it is a big deal when you download a video clip or an image from the Internet, took information from an article you read and used it for your project or research, or passed on a song to a music-sharing website. Technically speaking however, these acts may very well be a violation of the law.

Intellectual property is protected by copyright law in almost all countries and the first thing it clearly requires is a permission from the creator or the owner of the work before any reproduction, distribution or other use can be made by another party. So before you use any information you see in the Internet, check if the site declares a blanket permission for use of its material. Otherwise you might be getting on the wrong side of the law.

The Experiment:

There has been a lot of speculation that if you are showing low subscriber count to your feed, people may be less likely to subscribe to it. I figured I would try to either prove or debunk that theory. I manipulated jetpacked.com’s subscriber count to be a few thousand subscribers more than it actually is, and after a little bit over a week, our subscriber count didn’t change much, and even lowered at some points. So through this experience, I wouldn’t listen to the bloggers who tell people not to show your subscriber count right off the bat. It’s all a matter of whether you want to show off or not. If you’re embarrassed to show your low count, then don’t. If you really don’t care, and are confident enough to think people will subscribe to your feed anyway, go for it. The bottom line is, if people like your content, they will subscribe to your feed regardless what the number of current subscribers is.

How to manipulate your feed count:

Part II

Back in April, I wrote an article called “How to manipulate your FeedBurner feed count.” The article described a process that was certainly one clever way to do it. But when I was doing the current experiment, I had to think of a way to manipulate the subscriber count, without actually adding fake subscribers. I didn’t want the count to be false forever. So I found a plugin, the same plugin used to show chicklet free stats. It’s called FeedCount by Francesco Mapelli. In the newest version of the plugin, you can show a subscriber count from one feed, while linking to completely different feed. Like so:

As you can see, I pulled the feed count from the 5thirtyone feed, but still linked to the jetpacked feed. This made it appear like Jetpacked.com usually had over 3000 subscribers, when it usually has around 80 or so. Please keep in mind that this was only for experimentation.
Don’t lie about your feed count, it may make your blog look popular, but it won’t bring more people to your site, or make your content any better.

Saving a word doc to html simply creates junk. Disgusting code that noone can work with.

Well today for Dickerson Driving School‘s new student contract registration system I have to take a word doc, save it to html, have it dynamically edited based on a user’s database info, and render a resulting customized pdf.

The first step was to edit the saved html from the original word doc so it would render correctly with html2pdf converters. Enter Testism’s Word HTML Cleaner. It not only cleans out the trash that word renders when saving html files, it does it pretty damn well. Using the newly cleaned up code I can easily adjust spacing and formating.

Now that we have an html file that we can work with we plug it into DomPDF, a free open source PHP5 based HTML to PDF tool. While there are multiple programs that can do the conversion, I need something that can be installed on the server so it can be modified to search the db for a specific user’s information and render the pdf’s on the fly.