Category: geek

Saturdazed

I really don’t have much to say today. I’ve been working on that new series I mentioned the other day, but its nowhere close to being ready to post. So I’m sitting here, racking my brain for something to write to maintain my goal of posting every day but nothing is coming.

I’ve been playing around with XBMC today, trying to see how practical it would be use that and some sort of stripped down Linux install for my parents’ media PC. They’ve been using Vista and the darn thing barely functions at this point with all the weight of the OS + all the default junkware from Dell that came preinstalled. I’m thinking Ubuntu 9.04 minimal install would work best (9.10 still doesn’t work well with XBMC and some of its components).

Looks like the healthcare bill just passed the house, even with 30+ Dems voting against it. I can’t help but wonder if that would have happened had the Stupak amendment been killed – while it’s a great idea to make sure that the government health care program doesn’t fund abortion clinics, I think I would have rather just slashed the program altogether. Now we’ll have a broken health care system, more restrictive laws, higher taxes, and a weaker economy, but clean political records with the NRLC. Hope it was worth it.

Tomorrow is Sunday, and I am looking forward to church. Hopefully it will be followed by a Cardinals victory in Chicago and a chance to meet up with a couple of friends. Either way, in the meantime, I’m going to try and get some sleep.

Google Wave: my initial thoughts

So I received my invite to Google Wave one week ago, and have been playing with it off and on since then.  It’s a fascinating platform, not quite what I expected, and it’s been really interesting to think about potential applications and uses of the platform.

My initial impression upon logging in was that it was a typical Google app, visually very clean, colorful, and smooth. I had some idea of how things worked from watching their tech demo video, so I began to play around with creating and joining waves. For those of you who haven’t geeked out to this as much as I have yet, “waves” are the individual threads (documents?) that the platform is built to create and share. The wave can be just yours, which would make it functionally similar to an office document, or you can collaborate on it by inviting other users to join the wave, or by making it public. Once a wave has multiple users, the users can edit the wave itself, either by changing the “base” wave or by adding comments, discussion threads, links, or other media. These individual additions each have their own privacy settings as well, so if I wanted to comment on a wave but only wanted the original author of the wave to see my comment, I could do that. The wave itself remembers each of these edits and the order in which they happened, and so all waves are able to be “replayed” so that the user can see how the document has evolved to the state it is in now. Continue reading Google Wave: my initial thoughts

Google – The OS.

They want my soul, they can have it.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010…

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Awesome. Where do I sign up?

Shameless plug

Just gotta take a moment to throw out a plug for DestroyTwitter to any of my readers who use Twitter but haven’t experienced the joy that is DT. It’s a well-designed app with a streamlined interface that makes using Twitter just that much more fun and easy. I didn’t really get the “Twitter thing” until I started using this.

It’s also really nice that Jonnie Hallman, the guy who created the app, is very active in the community and is literally a tweet away for questions and comments. It’s really cool to have been able to watch this app go from a pretty small app with a few hundred installs to one with nearly two hundred thousand and growing rapidly.

Keep up the good work, Jonnie!

Current Events, Yours and Mine

So I enrolled in a course over at the O’Reilly School of Technology, for their PHP Programming with MySQL certificate. So far I’m pretty happy with the services offered as well as the instruction – the instructor for the course has responded within minutes to every question I’ve had  that I’ve asked during normal hours. The fact that it’s accerdited through the University of Illinois also is a plus. The project I’ve working on has driven my forehead into the wall with frustration many times since I started working on it, and I’m hoping the training offered by these courses will help me with that as well as advancing my long-term goals.

PHP is a very interesting language in that is both extremely simple and powerful. It’s not nearly as arbitrary as other languages I have looked at, with most of the structures and functions working in exactly the way you’d assume they would. I am having a great time learning it, and as I find out more, it seems like things just get easier  and easier. It’s something I actually enjoy doing, which is more than I can say about a lot of other things I’ve tried.

Tangentially related, I have been watching the events unfolding in Iran with great interest, both as a geopolitical matter and also as a fascinating demonstration of the power and effectiveness of the “new media.” I’ll avoid dealing too much with the geopolitics right now, but I will say that watching so much information coming directly from those involved via Twitter and Facebook is a wonderful example of the potential of the internet and social media. I have gotten all of my information from Twitter, Youtube, and various blogs – and these are the same sources that CNN and the New York Times are using. Earlier tonight, General Rahim Safavi himself twittered on the events going on – it’s a beautiful thing that we have this ease of access so widely available now, even in such a place as Iran where freedom is so limited. I hope the bravery of the protesters does not go unrewarded.