My Geek Notes

Before I was getting paid to do programming and server administration I was doing it as a hobby. It was quite the celebration when I landed my first web programming job and all of a sudden I was getting a paycheck to do what I loved all day long. Now the only problem I have is keeping a separation between work and play, as both happen in front of the computer. Tonight I took a break though and watched a funny movie, For Your Consideration, with the wife. My favorite Christopher Guest movie would have to be Best in Show, but this one comes right underneath it.

It looks like my tech plugs for the next little while are going to be pretty Google specific. Yesterday I talked about the search engine in general and also commented on everything they have under the more > even more section of their site. I’d like to mention another section of their site tonight - things that haven’t made it to the “more > even more” section yet - Google Labs. Wow, I’ll be talking more indepth about a lot of tools under both of these sections, but take a look.

Tons of stuff in the news. First, I talked about that cruise ship sinking near Greece yesterday. Looks like it now has its own Wikipedia article with some interesting details and you can even check in on the Santorini Caldera webcam (when it’s not getting hammered with traffic). Second, there are some photos on Flickr that show how an iPod saved a soldiers life. New marketing spin? The Apple iPod not only plays all your favorite media, it’ll take a bullet for you! And in closing, a ninety year old fish is caught off the coast of Alaska. I’m not a huge fish fan, but there’s no way I’d eat a fish that was 3 times older than me.

I asked a co-worker where he wanted to go to lunch today and his response was, “I think I’ll pass, I’m not hungry right now.” Sounds pretty normal, sure, but it reminded me of an article I ran across a little over a year ago about a new type of diet called “intuitive eating”. The premise is eat what you want, when you want, but only when you are hungry and only until you’re satisfied. Pretty much common sense and I think I’ll give it a try again, see if I can shed some pounds. Here is the original CNN article I found, and here is one from his university.

I’ve added some tools and ads to the site today from Google. Pretty straight forward stuff and who doesn’t like Google (aside from MS and the other search engines?) Anyway, if you haven’t ever looked at all the stuff that Google has to offer, you should click on the more > even more link on their homepage. I use a bunch of their stuff, but for today I’ll just mention their search engine. Have you googled it?

And in the news. Looks like a cruise ship hit some rocks near island of Santorini, Greece and had to evacuate everyone. Talk about a bad situation. Can Santorini even put up 1,600 people for the night or a couple of days? It will be interesting to see if this mathematician has it right as for who will dominate in baseball this year. I’m not a betting person, but it sounds like he’s been more right than wrong in the past few years.

Since Sunday I’ve had this horrible cold on the left side of my face … or nose for that matter. I’m not sure what my right nostril did to survive the infection, but nonetheless, it doesn’t seem to be getting any better on the left side. I’ve alway been curious as to why a cold is called a “cold”. Here is what Wikipedia says about it - good explanation.

I’ve recently decided that any new computer I get from here on I will build myself. The primary reason behind this is the proprietary OS discs that the manufacturers send out with their computers now. You don’t get a copy of Windows anymore. You get THEIR copy of Windows that is riddled with all the apps they think you want, or want you to want. That being said, my tech plug for the day would have to be NewEgg.com. You can get anything for almost any computer and at a great price.

My brother-in-law returned from a California trip this last week and brought up how they drove for miles and miles through some wind farms. He said at first it was pretty neat looking, but after what seemed like forever, became tiring to look at. Here’s an article I found today about the potential project of making flying wind farms - get it off the ground and get better winds up there. In closing, my wife found this on eBay today - $700+ for two scrap booking pages. I’ll be giving my notice at work tomorrow; scrap booking, here I come!

Well, for the next week my entries will be pretty short, but I’ll still try to post something each day. I have one week to complete a huge website project and it will have me working late each night. Looking forward to getting it over with, well, at least getting through the first deadline. There will definitely be other versions once it’s live.

My quick plug today will be about MPlayer, a very powerful media player for Linux. It may have been ported to Windows by now, but I’ve been using it for the last few years on Linux. The other popular media player is Xine, but I have little experience with that one. Anyway, the cool thing about MPlayer is that it lets me play Quicktime files along with all Windows types and many, many other codecs (avi, etc.) It also lets me stream dump (record) streaming media (asx, etc.) Oh, and it plays DVDs too. Great app, check it out.

One big item in the news that made me chuckle. Microsoft is being sued over Windows Vista marketing. Here’s the opening text of the article. “A lawsuit alleges that Microsoft Corp. engaged in deceptive practices by letting PC makers promote computers as “Windows Vista Capable” even if they couldn’t run the new operating system’s “signature” features.” Now that’s pretty funny. Many reviews have emerged stating that aside from cosmetic changes, Vista isn’t any better than XP, but this new article is the icing on the cake. Don’t get me wrong, I like Windows for what it’s good for; gaming and distracting hackers away from other OS’s.

We returned from the weekend vacation this afternoon and not too long after returning home we went to a nephew’s birthday party. All in all, it’s been a pretty busy weekend but we did have fun in Park City. After the birthday party we stopped at Costco for a few things to get us by for the next week and while browsing the book section I found that they were selling sets of the Hardy Boys series; 6 books for $12 and change. Hardback books at that price is great deal, but come on, it’s the Hardy Boys! They had books 1-6 and 60-66 there so we got both (the first sets of 2 different series, although I only read the first series). I remember standing in the elementary school library over 20 years ago trying to decide which book I wanted to read. Will we be getting all of them? Not sure yet.

I wish I had a little more experience with this language, but I’ll tell you what I know. I was reading today about a language called Lua that originated in Brazil and is becoming popular among embedded systems. Lua means “moon” in Portuguese, not sure why they named it that, but hey, I lived there for a few years so I’m interested to see what it’s all about. Plus, I’ve been itching to do some application programming so I may have to give it a try.

And in the news, there was a boy bitten by a shark while playing in the shallow waves. See, see! My fear about sharks and the unseen waters below are not unfounded! Haha, you’d have to read my last post to even know what I’m talking about. Oh, and it looks like Apple really loves us. They’ve come out and said you can get DRM-free tunes here in the near future for just a little more and they are even a higher quality. Would I pay more? Not sure yet, but DRM-free sure sounds good to me. And as for something else that sounds good, how about DirecTV while camping or on the road. They’re calling it the SAT-GO and it will allow you to tap into DirecTV from on the road - now that’s cool.

We had dinner tonight at Ruby Tuesday, which was my first time there. Really good food, but unfortunately our server did a very poor job. My wife ordered a fancy lemonade of some sort and never got it and if that wasn’t bad enough, it was on the bill at the end. Of course we had it removed, but needless to say I didn’t tip very well. If I didn’t tip at all she may have thought I’d forgotten. That’s why it’s always wise to tip something even if it’s just a quarter saying, “hey, you did a really, really bad job”. (I tipped 11% or so … not too harsh.) The movie we saw afterward was Meet the Robinsons, which I rather enjoyed. At least the parts I saw I liked; the youngest wasn’t too keen on the idea of watching the movie.

I need to keep track of the apps that I talk about here in my second paragraph so I don’t end up repeating myself and so I can make sure to get some of my notes in the Notes section of the site. Tonight I’ll give a quick plug on the software that is running this site, WordPress. For the last couple of nights I’ve been working on the look and feel of the site making mostly CSS changes, but also familiarizing myself with the functions it allows me to use. To date I’ve been very, very impressed with how it works and when I installed it, it was the fastest server software install I’ve ever done.

The featured article yesterday on Wikipedia was about the New Carissa, “a freighter that ran aground on a beach near Coos Bay, Oregon, United States during a storm in February 1999, and subsequently broke apart.” I was going to talk about it yesterday but ended up talking about Star Wars and space stuff. The ocean and ships have always fascinated me although I do have a horrible dread of swimming in water where I can’t see the bottom. Even swimming in a freshwater lake creeps me out. That being said, when I’m on a boat, canoe, or raft I have no concerns at all … well, except on a raft in the ocean then the whole shark fear kicks in. Either way, I don’t recall hearing news in 1999 when the New Carissa ran ashore, but it was a really interesting read on what happened and the failed attempt to pull it back into the ocean.

Wow, I really, really don’t miss dial-up internet at all. I’m away for the weekend and this was my only option for getting online. I did see a few wireless spots when I booted up, but they were all locked down. Where’s the trust? So I told the guys at work that I’d blog about where we had lunch today and what I had. There is a little cafe out west that’s attached to the school district nutrition facility - yeah, I thought the same thing. Well this cafe has some really fancy sandwiches and some other good dishes. I’m guessing that the school kids aren’t getting the same food, but boy was my Italian sandwich on sour dough complete with artichoke hearts and red peppers good.

As you may have already guessed, Microsoft has not come out with a version of their Office suite for Linux (and I’m guessing they never will), so I’ve become quite accustomed to using Open Office. In fact, I run it as the main office suite on all of my Windows boxes too. Even my wife likes it (at least I think she does), but for free it sure beats Microsoft’s Office suite. Anyway, Open Office just barely released version 2.2 so I’m looking forward to see what’s changed.

It seems like there has been lots happening in the news lately with space, that final frontier. Space.com has an article about how double sunsets are actually pretty common. Who can’t remember the two suns setting on Tatooine, Luke’s home planet? Good stuff. Also, there is an astronaut that will be running the Boston marathon in space; 26.2 miles on a treadmill. I’ll be running it in my dreams. Wish me luck.

I’ve decided I need to sit down and prioritize the things that have been pulling my attention lately. My last few posts have talked some about being tired and not having enough time, if you’ve been following along. I realized tonight that there are a lot of things I’m doing that are neat, but absolutely unnecessary within the whole picture of my life. If I can sit down and eliminate some of those things I think I’ll clear up some of my time and not be constantly running.

I read an article today about how KDE 4.0 is supposed to be really, really nice compared to the latest version. Can’t wait to see it, although I doubt I’ll use it as I’m a huge fan of Fluxbox and all its simplicity. I will for sure be looking at the new KDE though even if it’s only through using Xnest. It’s a handy little tool that allows you to run multiple desktops at once. Here is a link to an article by Linux Journal’s Marcel Gagné on how to get it working and some screen shots. Good stuff.

Nothing really noteworthy in the news except for a few Star Wars things. One, we should soon have some Star Wars stamps available to us from the United States Post Office. Two, Bono from U2 was knighted recently. Supposedly you can’t call him Sir (as he’s not British) and his youngest son thought that he was becoming a Jedi Knight. He wasn’t?

I’m finding that even though I sit at a desk all day programming, I still get exhausted (mentally?) after troubleshooting code all day and finding the best looking/working and fastest solution to whatever it is I’m working on. I’ve got a big project due in a week and a half and after working up to 9pm this evening on it I came home wanting to go straight to bed. Did I, no. I ended up playing some Zelda on the Wii which was actually pretty good for cooling down my brain. After I post this, I’m off to bed to rest up for another run at the programming grind tomorrow.

I talked some about Firefox (Greasemonkey) and jEdit in a recent posts and just wanted to talk a little more about them … or part of them. I’m finding that a lot of open source(ish) apps allow for plugins and that’s really where the sugar of the setup is. In most of the apps I work with I try to tweak them out with plugins that increase productivity and functionality. Firefox and jEdit are just two of those allowing for a great set of plugins. I’m hoping at some point to write some sort of a plugin for something.

Lots of stuff in the news today. Here’s a link to a video of some sun glasses that you can turn on and off. In addition to what ikeman posted, here are some stories about a new Spaceport in New Mexico and two links on the problem we are having with space junk. Well, I’m off to bed but I’ll leave you with two more things - the new Harry Potter book cover was announced, and no, Sinbad is not dead.

I’m pretty convinced that when you have a certain amount of time defined to get a job done, you usually take that much time to complete it. I’ve seen this over and over again in my own life. If I had 5 hours to write a term paper, it took me 5 hours. If I had 5 days, it took me 5 days. It sure would be nice if I could get it done in 5 hours when I had 5 days. Maybe it’s just me, but it really seems that most people stretch out the clock when they can.

If you were to ask me which application I use the most, the answer would be jEdit. I’ve used a lot of text editors in the past, but in the end I keep coming back to jEdit. One of the main reasons is because it is written in Java so it can run on any platform. When, on occasion, I use Windows then I can work with it there and not feel any difference in what I’m doing. It’s simple, good looking, and I’ve used it for so long now I don’t think I could switch to anything else. Any suggestions are welcome though, I’m always willing to see what else is out there.

Two interesting items in the news. First of all, Eddie Griffin has wrecked a very rare, expensive Ferrari. I have to admit, if I owned that car it would “very rarely” leave my garage, pun intended. The other bit of news makes me a bit angry, but gives me more reason, the next time I get a new computer, to simply build my own by ordering everything I need on NewEgg. HP is now saying that if you put Linux on your HP it will void the hardware warranty. Well, let HP (and Dell) have and support their Windows, I’ll do my own thing. *huff*