char[] Blog

Disable two-finger swipe through history in Safari

2011-11-30T13:36:00.001-08:00

With OS X Lion, Apple introduced the concept of swiping through your browsing history in Safari (or swiping through pages of a document in preview). Although this is potentially a cool feature, the default way of activating it is a two-finger swipe left or right. This is the same way you scroll left or right on a web page, so I routinely find myself scrolling left on a web page and all of the sudden I have scrolled right off the page and gone back in my history... this is devastating if I am working on a state-dependent page like a form and I lose the data I was filling in.

Here is how to disable the history swipe or change it to a 3 finger gesture:

Apple menu > System Preferences... > Trackpad > More Gestures
Either uncheck the box next to "Swipe between pages" to disable the feature or use the drop-down menu to change the gesture that activates this feature.

If mercurial could be used in real life

2011-11-13T12:27:00.001-08:00

Moving into a Portland Apartment!

2011-08-20T21:35:00.000-07:00

A friend and I finally (well, we haven't been looking THAT long) found an apartment to move in to and we applied for it and we are first in line! We applied to a couple other places before this one but were second to apply. It is not right in downtown, but it is only 4 miles out.

We got a tour of the place and saw a room that is really similar to the one we will be in (same layout) but I forgot to take any pictures. What I do have is a floor plan (see below)! We move in on the 15th of September.

Story time 1

2011-08-10T09:06:00.000-07:00

When you get your first Leatherman (multitool), you carry it with you everywhere. You have probably bought it in anticipation of some particular event in your life when it would be especially useful. Then, over time, you stop carrying it. You realize that you almost never need it when you are going out for food with a friend or getting a haircut, so you only carry it in certain circumstances. For me, those circumstances are outdoor activity. I now bring my Leatherman on outdoor adventures such as going hiking and rock climbing, and almost nowhere else.

Today, I am going on one such adventure. So, I woke up, got dressed, put my Leatherman on my belt, and went to the bathroom to clip my fingernails. This is when something magical happened (bear with me, it takes a certain kind of person to find the following "magical"). I was reaching for the nail clippers in the medicine cabinet when I knocked an open safety pin into the sink.

Safety pins, for those who haven't seen one in a while, are pins with one pointy end, a springy 180 degree bend, and the other end which is attached to a bulky head that you can lodge the pointy end in so no one gets hurt. They are often used to attach name tags to shirts.

Anyway, there the safety pin went, into the sink, and head first down the drain. The pointy end of the pin and the springy bend remained exposed, but the head was out of sight. I grabbed the pointy end and tried to pull it out, but the head was stuck on something below sink level. After a couple of seconds I realized there was no way I could get the leverage I needed on the safety pin to jostle it just right and pull it out. Then I remembered I was carrying my Leatherman! I pulled it out with my free hand and, using the pliers, I had the safety pin free moments later.

Maybe I am making too much of the situation, but here is the magic: I clip my nails about once a month, so I have clipped them many times in my life. I have never before had my Leatherman on me while clipping my nails, nor have I ever knocked a safety pin down the drain. The single time that I accidentally put my self in a situation to need a Leatherman while clipping my nails, I happen to have one on me!

Motorcycling

2011-07-02T20:24:00.000-07:00

I just bought my first motorcycle. This is meaningful to me for several reasons.

It is the first vehicle of any kind I have owned. It is weird that it belongs to me rather than my parents or friends.
I never would have guessed that I would learn to ride and then buy a motorcycle prior to a few months ago and yet now I have gone and done both. The decision to take the training course with a friend was fairly impulsive for me. I have grown to like my impulsive side.
It is really, really fun to ride. And it gets better gas milage than most cars. And it didn't cost me that much.

It will take me a while to get used to being able to go places without first checking on the availability of a friend's or family member's car.

Here it is (and me, on it):

Custom LaTeX list environment

2011-06-26T15:36:00.000-07:00

Built-in LaTeX list environments such as enumerate, itemize, and description are great; they do the trick almost every time I need a list of something. Sometimes I really wish I had more control over them, though. For example, I recently needed an itemized list with no vertical space before and after it and no indentation before each item. You will find my solution below, but first, a little explanation.

For those who don't know, creating a custom LaTeX environment is as simple as:

\newenvironment{name}[args]{begdef}{enddef}

This allows you to execute some code or print some text just before and just after whatever the user puts inside the begin and end tags of the environment you define. Within list environments, the command \item starts a new item in the list. So, all we need to do is redefine the \item command to do what we want it to do in order to get a custom list environment. Don't worry, redefining \item within a new environment does not effect the \item command outside of that environment (which means \item still behaves the way it should within other list environments).

Because the \item command has already been defined elsewhere (not by us, necessarily) we must use the following command to redefine it:

\renewcommand{cmd}[args]{def}

With this information, we can create a custom list environment that, for example, precedes every list item with "item:"

\newenvironment{customlist}{%
    \renewcommand\item{item: }%
}{%
}

Notice, however, that this setup will not work if we wish to put a new line between each item but not before the first item. In order to accomplish the compressed list environment I was looking for, I needed a bit more.

A little more background: First, for the rest of this to work, you need to either be working in a LaTeX style file (.sty) or a LaTeX class file (.cls). This is because the commands used are only available in files of these types. For information on how to create a class or style file (both very useful things for re-using your LaTeX shortcuts) you will have to look elsewhere - a google search will do just fine.

Alright, we need to understand a few more commands. Here are links to the additional commands: \ifx, \gdef, \global, \let.

This is the final solution to my problem (note that in class files the "at" symbol (@) can be used as a letter by default, whereas in style files I believe the following code would need to be preceded by \makeatletter and followed by \makeatother calls):

\newenvironment{bulleted}{%
\gdef\@skipbulletnewline{y}%
 \renewcommand\item{%
  \ifx \@empty\@skipbulletnewline% 
   \newline%
  \fi%
  $\,\bullet\;$%
  \global\let\@skipbulletnewline\@empty%
 }%
}{%
}

It says, whenever a bulleted environment is entered (\begin{bulleted}), define a variable that tracks whether a newline is needed before each item and set it such that a newline is not needed. Then renew the \item command. Whenever \item is called, check the newline variable to see if a newline should be output. Regardless of whether a newline is output, output a bullet. Then, set the newline variable such that in the future newlines will be output before each item.

Awesome customer support

2011-05-25T09:56:00.000-07:00

I have written before about bad customer support but today I experienced awesome customer support.

Two days ago I used a Groupon to purchase a canvas print of one of my favorite photographs from a company I had never heard of before: CafePress. It was a ridiculously large discount, as Groupons tend to be. I was stoked so I quickly uploaded the picture and began anxiously waiting. I received an email today from CafePress saying the following:

Hi Mathew,

Regarding your recent order, the image that you submitted does not fit the exact proportions for the size of canvas you have chosen. In order to assure a good fit, we are going to make your canvas a custom size of 16x24 instead of 16x20. We will do this at no additional charge to you. Our goal is for you to be completely satisfied with the finished product, so we just wanted to keep you informed of this modification. We will get started immediately. We will do a great job for you!

Is that not the coolest thing they could have done for me? Here were their other options:

Just crop the image and give me the print without saying anything.
Let me know that I need to re-submit a picture with a certain form factor.
Charge me more for a custom size that they do not offer.

The fact that they chose to give me the custom size for the same price because I did not realize my image was non-standard (well, at least not the standard for most point-and-shoot cameras) shows me that they really want my repeat business. And they will get it. I will happily order from them in the future because they have been so good to me this time around.

Graduation

2011-05-15T08:45:00.000-07:00

Graduation day is here. I have a bitter sweet feeling settling in my gut. Here comes the rest of my life.

Pet peeve #2

2011-05-11T11:55:00.000-07:00

Pet peeve: when people who I know are capable of opening a door use the handicap button to open the door instead of grabbing the handle and pulling or pushing on the door. Obviously, people moving large boxes or bicycles through the doorway are exempt from my judgement.

Spiral Ramps

2011-05-06T17:31:00.000-07:00

I have seen the most popular spiral ramp in the world first hand!

http://www.oobject.com/category/18-spiral-ramps/

Undoubtedly, this is more exciting news for me than anyone else, but I am the one writing this blog and you are just the one reading it.

By the way, I took a better picture of that ramp than the one posted at oobject.com:

Oranges

2011-04-19T20:44:00.000-07:00

Here is what I have noticed about oranges: I never crave them, and yet, when I eat a nice and juicy one, I find them absolutely delicious.

So, why don't I ever crave them? Is it because they are messy? Certainly at the time of eating them they are not too messy to be worth eating. Is it because they are difficult to peel? If I imagine a peeled orange, I really don't crave that any more than I do an orange in its peel. Even just minutes after enjoying a delicious orange, I feel no need to ever eat one again unless I am particularly hungry and an orange is the closest edible.

Ubuntu networking with alternative window managers

2011-04-06T15:20:00.000-07:00

I recently started using an alternative window manager with my Ubuntu install (specifically, wmii). I love it, but I had the hardest time getting wifi to work within it. Ubuntu's standard window environment is very nice, but it is not obvious how to launch the network manager included with it other than to use the applet in the status bar. I searched for quite a while before coming across the required piece of information, so here is how to get networking working quickly and easily:

Assuming you have already set up a particular wireless network within Ubuntu's default window manager, all you have to do is launch nm-applet upon login from your alternative window manager. This will automatically look for wireless networks and connect without further interaction.

If you have not set up a particular network before, launch nm-connection-editor to get a GUI connection editor.

Launch nm-tool and you will get a text printout of useful information such as available network interfaces, your current IP address, available wireless access points, etc.

Finally, nmcli will give you control over which network interfaces are up, which connections are up, whether wifi is on, etc. It is your command line interface to controlling NetworkManager.

Fixing Audio in Ubuntu 10.x on a Macbook Pro

2011-04-03T14:59:00.000-07:00

I recently installed Ubuntu on my Macbook Pro (2010 unibody model) and was unpleasantly surprised to find audio output not working. Here is what I did to get it working:

Install the ALSA Mixer (sound mixer). This is easily done through the package manager:

System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager
Quick Search for "alsamixer" and install the gnome-alsamixer

Launch the mixer (Applications > Sound & Video > GNOME ALSA Mixer)
Generally, just mess with the various volume controls until you get a result. Specifically for my model of Macbook Pro, turning the "Front" speaker up got me audio out of my right speaker and turning the "Surround" speaker up and checking the "Surround Speaker" box got me audio out of my left speaker.
Be sure that PCM volume is up as well.

How to run the last command used in Terminal/Shell windows

2011-02-03T11:29:00.000-08:00

There are two popular ways to do this. The most popular these days is the up-arrow. This will let you scroll through previously used commands to access one you want to run again (the down-arrow scrolls in the other direction). This is great, if it's available. Through some shells and ssh environments the up-arrow does not maintain this functionality. In these situations, how is one to use previous commands without typing them all of the way out again?

The second method depends upon the history of the shell in use. This history can be disabled, but it is usually enabled by default. Assuming you have a history (you will know very soon if you do or not) you can run previous commands with a bang. I mean this literally (and, pun intended):

Type !! to run the most recent command.
Type ![number] to run a command from the history. Note that the numbers index from old to new, so !1 will get you the oldest command in the shell's history.
Type ![partial command] to run the most recent command that matches the partial command entered. For example, !grep will get you the most recent grep command run (assuming you have not run a different command beginning with "grep" more recently).
Type history to print out a complete list of the commands in your shell's history with indices listed (for use in ![number] commands).

Note that bang commands do not themselves show up in your history, the commands that they reference do. If you think about it, it would be a pain if the bang commands did show up in the history.

Also note that "bang," in this context, is synonymous with "exclamation mark."

Markup disabled for a PDF document?

2011-01-30T17:10:00.000-08:00

I recently opened a PDF file with the intention of marking it up (highlighting, underlining, etc.) only to find that all of those markup options were disabled. I also noticed that there was an unfamiliar message at the top of the Adobe Acrobat window stating that I was viewing the document in PDF/A mode.

To be totally honest, I have not figured out why I was not able to mark that document up. As far as I know PDF/A does not prohibit markup. In fact, the security settings for that document specifically stated that markup was allowed. The only guess I have so far is that Acrobat would not allow markup because the document did not conform to the PDF/A standard despite apparently claiming to be in that standard. What I did figure out is a workaround.

SOLUTION (workaround, really)
What you need: Adobe Acrobat Pro, Adobe Acrobat Distiller

From Adobe Acrobat, save the PDF/A file as encapsulated postscript. Then, open the EPS file you just created with Acrobat Distiller. This will (by default) automatically create a PDF file from the EPS file. Now you have a PDF file that can be marked up by Acrobat Pro!

EDIT For multiple page documents, this solution can be a pain because saving as EPS from Acrobat Pro appears to only save the current page of the document. Alternatively, use a third party program such as Preview in Mac OS X to re-save the PDF document. In this situation, you do not need to change the format, leave it as PDF. I assume this solution would work with a program such as Foxit PDF Reader on the PC but I have not tried.

Weed smokers are a minority 'round here!

2010-12-25T00:55:00.000-08:00

I recently saw an interesting (and funny, I think) statistic on the back of a bench at a bus stop near my old High School in Portland, Oregon. It referred to students at that high school and their drug use. Here is what it said:

"Way to go, Wilson Students! 70% don't smoke pot."

This statement raises several questions for me, so I'll list them here:

Seriously? Who thought this was a good idea?
Is this a congratulations? Is it a motivational (or persuasive) statement? Is it for the students or the parents or the general public? None of these possibilities seem like good reasons to me. This sign is unlikely to make students who abstain from pot feel better about themselves or encourage them to continue to stay off drugs, they already have their reasons why they don't smoke. Question #4 illustrates why I don't think it is a good statement to make to parents or the general public.
How did they get this statistic? Probably by anonymous poll, which with high school students on a subject like pot seems less than trust worthy. I remember not taking those polls seriously at all. I also remember answering questions on them in the way that I perceived as being least embarrassing or coolest, even though they were anonymous.
Is it really that impressive of a victory that 70% of students at Wilson don't smoke pot? That means that 30 of every 100 students does smoke pot. This actually seems like more students than I thought smoked pot in high school, but maybe I just didn't notice how many of my friends smoked.

Basically, the statement strikes me as inconsequential (if not silly), but correct me if I am wrong.

How I came to be the sixth best resource for resume development at Willamette University

2010-10-10T20:35:00.000-07:00

OK, well, the title is a bit of a fib, or maybe even a full on lie; it is at the very least misleading. What I mean is when you search for "resume" on willamette.edu (or do a google search for "resume site:willamette.edu", they are equivalent) the page with my resumes on it is currently the sixth result. When my friend brought this to my attention a few days ago, I was both excited and shocked. It turns out that hardly any students or professors at Willamette have their resumes online in a prominent way. Granted, professors may just be more likely to have Curriculum Vitae than resumes.

Putting a resume online is a great way to get recognized and I feel like online resumes are very professional; teachers I have talked to say the same thing. So why haven't more students put their resumes online? I think the biggest barrier is a lack of awareness. What I mean is, most students I talk to at Willamette do not know they have the option of creating a person web page that is hosted by Willamette. This fact really needs to be publicized and talked about more if more of the student body is to be interested in developing their online presence. Ideally--in my opinion, of course--there would be a part of every freshman's colloquium class dedicated to not only mentioning the option of creating a personal web page but also creating a simple one with a starter resume included. Not every student would opt to keep this web page and resume up to date, of course, but I bet that a lot of students would.

Then again, I have also seen some very poorly designed web pages (using software like Microsoft Word) that are maybe more harmful for a student's image than they are beneficial. For this reason, I hope there would also be an educational seminar for professors that explained the basics of good (or at least decent) web design. For example: a simple design is way better than a convoluted design. Then students would all get off on the right foot.

I doubt my vision of required student web presence will be implemented, but perhaps I will at least vocalize the idea so that I don't feel like it is partially my fault for not saying anything.

Keeping files synched with DropBox

2010-10-01T07:56:00.000-07:00

If you have never heard of DropBox, check it out now (it's free!), then read this post.

Alright, now that all of the transients are gone, lets get down to business (read as "fun"). When you install DropBox, a "DropBox folder" is created on your system.

The simplest way to keep things online in your DropBox is to drag those things into the DropBox folder. I don't want to keep all of my documents in the DropBox folder, though, I want to keep them in the "Documents" folder; after all, it is their namesake.

Well, option number two is to copy files to the DropBox folder whenever you are done editing them, but I hesitate to even call this an option because it is such a pain.

The option that I personally use, is shortcuts (or links, to be more accurate). Create a shortcut within the DropBox folder for a folder outside of the DropBox folder and DropBox will keep the files within synched without a hassle. This is not totally straight forward, though, so read on (I promise it isn't hard, either).

The instructions for setting things up can be found on the DropBox wiki, here. Note that, as stated on the instructional page, it is safest to only create links to entire folders in your DropBox folder. Single file links, if edited through DropBox on another computer, will no longer be links and therefore your file will fall out of sync on the machine where the link was created.

A shocking twist in browser fitness

2010-09-30T23:03:00.000-07:00

A while back (December, 2009) I ran some benchmarks on internet browsers running on my computer to see which one I should use, assuming performance is the most important factor. I posted the results here. Safari was by far top pick. Now I have a new machine and several updates have been released for all of my browsers, so I decided to rerun the benchmark test (which you can run too, for free, at the PeaceKeeper website).

Both old and new results can be found below for comparison. Incredibly, Chrome and Safari have switched places on my new system, making Chrome my new #1 pick. This mostly just goes to show that the performance of these browsers is very dependent on both your operating system and hardware. This means you all should go run PeaceKeeper tests on your favorite browsers yourself to compare them on your machine; it's the only way to know which one will run the fastest for you.

Old benchmark results (December, 2009)

New benchmark results (September, 2010)

On Bob Dylan as a poet

2010-08-13T19:00:00.000-07:00

I have had short, uninformed discussions with a number of people before about how good of a musician (or poet, for that matter) Bob Dylan is or is not or was or was not in his prime. Most people will agree that Bob Dylan is a good musician, even if only after pointing out that Blowin' in the Wind and Like a Rolling Stone are his songs. However, I feel like a lot of people do not listen to music for the lyrics anymore. Rather, they listen for the beat, for the sounds that are produced by the words, even, but not the words themselves. I am not saying that these things are not important. In fact, these are what differentiate song from written poetry. What I am saying is that in order to really appreciate Bob Dylan (and many, many other musicians) you have to appreciate his lyrics.

Most all of his songs have great poetic qualities, if not fantastic messages, in my opinion, but I want to point out one that I think exemplifies Dylan as a poet: Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie. You can view the lyrics and hopefully play the song at the link provided. Otherwise, try YouTube, because you really need to hear Dylan speak it in my opinion. Hopefully after listening to that, you will be persuaded to never again miss out on the genius of Dylan's lyrics while enjoying his rhythm.

Force directed graph layouts are awesome

2010-08-01T10:59:00.000-07:00

Recently I came across the concept of force directed graph layouts in the context of a grant proposal with a collaborator. I had known about them in the past, but never had a need to create one of my own. Examples of popular force directed graphs include several of the implementations of the Facebook friend graph idea (not the one that puts all friends in a circle, though).

The idea behind this sort of graph is fairly straight forward, at least in its simplest form. Each entity in the graph (a person, in the case of the Facebook friend graph) repels each other entity in the graph. This action is similar to negative gravity. Each connection between entities (friendship in the Facebook example) draws those entities together. This action is similar to that of a rubber band.

My collaborator and I wanted to graph a network of people. In this network, there is a core group of people that all have connections and then some of those core people have connections to smaller clusters that are not part of the core. The force directed layout turns this sort of graph into a really attractive shape, it turns out (see below).

We looked through many examples of force directed graphs but had trouble finding one that we could plug our own data into easily. So, because I already had a graph creation program (Graphite), I wrote a force directed layout manager for it. The version hosted on this website at the moment does not have this feature, but I will put it online soon, hopefully. Without further ado, here is the result (without names, of course):

We also ended up coloring the nodes according to cluster (so each exterior cluster and the core nodes connected to it had its own color).

The Island (East Sand)

2010-06-06T20:46:00.000-07:00

I am now well into my summer collaborative research experience and as of yesterday I am all moved in on East Sand Island. I will be studying lateralization of Caspian Terns there with Dr. David Craig of the Willamette University Biology Department. In Caspian Terns, lateralization is seen in the side of the parent that the baby Tern is more capable of feeding from.

Below are some pictures of our camp on the island.

Half of our WeatherPort, a heavy duty tent and our research HQ.

My tent, set up under the "front porch" tent.

Our camp site prior to us clearing space and setting up.

A small portion of the edge of the Caspian Tern colony.

Minto-Brown Island Park

2010-05-11T12:03:00.000-07:00

Click here to visit the gallery.

Synchrony and Java GUIs

2010-04-28T14:14:00.000-07:00

Java GUIs are great. They are easy to put together (and quickly, too), and they look pretty darn good most of the time. However, I recently had some trouble getting scroll bars (specifically a JScrollPane) working the way I wanted them to.

JScrollPanes automatically update the size of their scroll bars when their content is scaled. This makes it really easy to zoom in and out, sort of. It is really easy to zoom in and out, but not so easy to make the zoom action centered in the JScrollPane, which is usually the desired effect of zooming. My initial thought for coding this went something like:
1) Change the size of the client of the JScrollPane (zoom).
2) Change the location of the scroll bars so that zooming is centered on content (pan).

I figured that in updating the size of the JScrollPane's client the scroll bar sizes would be updated immediately and I could work with the new scroll bar sizes in step 2. This turned out to be a faulty assumption. The updating of the scroll bars upon a client size change was happening asynchronously; that is, in a separate thread. So my step 2 above was being executed before the JScrollPane had made necessary adjustments to accommodate for me changing its client's size.

The solution to this was not overly complicated, though, and it applies to all Java GUI development (not just JScrollPanes). The solution is: use listeners whenever they are available. All I had to do was add an AdjustmentListener to both scroll bars and perform step 2 in the adjustment listener's callback function rather than immediately after step 1. So, in the future I will be checking to see if any listeners apply to a GUI task I am performing before I try to code the task synchronously.

Mercurial merge mistake

2010-04-15T12:50:00.000-07:00

I recently started using Mercurial, a distributed source control management (SCM) system, for a project I am working on with a partner in our Computer Simulations class. It has been great so far in all but one instance, and I don't think this scenario is unique to Mercurial.

I was working on code locally when I committed a change and then pulled changes my partner had made from the server. Mercurial determined I needed to merge. I had previously set up Mercurial to use "vim -d" to merge. However, I had never used vim to merge before, so I did not know any of the merge specific commands and I did not want to learn them at the time. I figured I would just quit out of vim and Mercurial would let me merge at a later time... but it didn't. Upon quitting out I was confronted with a "successful merge" message. I committed the merge out of habit, but was worried, so I looked at the source code and sure enough it had arbitrarily merged in all of my partners changes and there were tons of errors as a result.

Well, now what? I decided I would just revert back to before the merge and try again, but this is not so easy. Reverting back got me the files I wanted, but did not roll back the log (so the most recent commit was still the one after my unsuccessful merge). I tried committing with the reverted files and then merging with an earlier revision, but no luck. Mercurial does not let you merge two revisions that are in the same branch. I even went so far as to create a separate branch and then try merging. This time the merge went through, supposedly, but it just said 0 files were merged and moved on.

After an hour or two of troubleshooting, I finally decided to cut my losses. I updated to the revision with my latest changes and copied my source to another folder. Then I updated to my partners latest revision and opened a merge program manually between the two folders. Afterwards I committed once more and finally had the latest changes and no errors. What a mess, though! It all could have been avoided if I had either chosen a merge program I already knew how to use as the default or learned vim -d before trying it out.

Presidential Scholarship

2010-04-10T12:40:00.000-07:00

I found out yesterday that I have been awarded the Presidential Scholarship at Willamette University! It is given to two students each year. It is not a run-of-the-mill scholarship, though, as it entails an intensive research project and paper. Over the next year I will collect data, research methods, and write a paper on applying a behavioral computer model to the study of lateralization in Caspian Terns.

One great thing about this proposal is that it fits perfectly with the Science Collaborative Research Program (SCRP) position that I will be filling over the summer. Through SCRP, I will be studying Caspian Terns on East Sand Island (in the Columbia River estuary) with Professor David Craig of Willamette University. My Presidential proposal builds off of this research with a computer model, allowing me to fully integrate my love of the outdoors and ecology with my experience in computer science.

Needless to say, this whole thing is getting me really excited.

Silver Creek Falls

2010-04-05T19:47:00.000-07:00

I decided to start posting about new photos I put on my website, because, why not?

Click here to visit the gallery.

One year anniversary of this blog

2010-04-03T13:28:00.000-07:00

I just noticed that it is now 40 posts and one full year, to the day, since I first posted on this blog. Crazy how time flies. Hopefully I have something a little bit useful (or interesting?) going here. I know that, if nothing else, this blog helped me get a summer opportunity for this coming summer that should be unforgettable; so really it has already made itself worthwhile to me.

Thanks to anyone out there that has felt compelled to read my blog on more than one occasion! Happy one year, char[] Blog().

DuroCast updates and expands!

2010-04-03T13:11:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a big day for DuroCast. We announced to Oregon news sources that we will be expanding our closed beta to other university campuses in Oregon beginning April 4! Among the first to be let in are OSU, U of O, and PSU.

We also made some nice changes to the DuroCast website yesterday.

We now have a universal search box, so it is no longer necessary to know exactly what criteria you want to use in your search; just type in whatever you know about a station and hit "search." We have also split search results up into multiple pages so they are easier to view.
Notifications have been added! A user now has the option of receiving an email when someone else tries to add him/her as a contact, when we announce updates to DuroCast, and when we accept suggestions that user made to us. More optional notifications are on the way, too.
Everyone in the beta gets invitations now! We are still in a closed beta, so there are currently only three ways to get a look at the website:

Sign up with an email address from one of the Oregon schools we are letting in.
Send an email to Elliot, Bryce, or me, letting us know your interest and intent to either test the site or write about it.
NEW! Get invited by someone who is already in the beta!

Life lesson #2

2010-03-27T23:13:00.000-07:00

Never trust that even the driest of sand is going to stay dry through the next high tide.

Here is the story:
What I thought was a strong wind had woken me and my brother. He anxiously said "was that what I think it was?" and I replied "the wind?" But a quick look outside the tent confirmed that it was exactly what he thought it was: the ocean. We quickly threw on our shoes, grabbed flashlights, and hurried outside to save our backpacks from being washed out to sea and then relocate our tent to 100 feet down the beach where the sand was still dry. By morning the tide had come in to within 10 feet of our new location, but we had only needed to relocate once in the night.

This first picture is where my brother and I first pitched our tent. The sand was dry enough that we knew the tide hadn't touched it for days and we assumed that meant it wouldn't come in that far while we were there either. As you can see, the sand was very wet by morning.

This next picture is where we moved our tent to in the middle of the night.

(Comedic) Deception

2010-03-21T18:10:00.000-07:00

If I ever make it big in life, the name plate on my desk will read something like:

Of course, I don't expect I will still be using my Willamette email, but that isn't the point. My initials, MDP, are made for this!

EDIT: I don't intend to become a doctor, so regardless of what line of work I go into, the above nameplate is my goal.

Marble Marvel

2010-03-05T13:27:00.000-08:00

The following video does not need much of an introduction. If you are into DIY engineering type projects, this one will probably floor you. The following is a nice little video explaining the intricate workings of a wooden marble machine that takes a marble from low ground to high ground using no motors (only gravity, weights, and ingenuity are used).

Marble Machine - 9:57

The single greatest speech I have ever watched

2010-02-21T23:05:00.000-08:00

Believe me, the title of this post is not meant to be taken lightly. I may not have watched or listened to all that many speeches, but this is a very sincere proclamation. The next time you get an hour and 16 minutes or so, I highly recommend watching it.

The Last Lecture - Randy Pausch
You have to give this a chance; don't stop watching after just 10 minutes and I promise you will come away glad that you stuck with it. This is the most inspirational and sincere speech I have had the privilege of watching to date.

This is my only exposure to Randy Pausche, but I can tell that he was an incredible person and all of us who never got to meet him are at a loss. He did, however, leave us this talk, and for that I am very grateful.

Things to do with visitors in Salem

2010-02-21T20:53:00.000-08:00

Maybe I am alone in this, but for the last two years in which I have been going to school in Salem I have mostly thought of it as a slow-moving town without much going on. I have often struggled with thinking of things I would do with a friend if they came to visit me here. I recently decided to try to keep track of cool things to do as they came to mind (rather than my usual brainstorming sessions that came up emtpy-handed). I actually started to come up with a good sized list, so I thought I would share.

Things to do in Salem (in no particular order):

Visit the waterfront park, Bush Park, Minto-Brown Park, etc. *
Check out the Mission-Mill and Hallie Ford Museums
Walk around the relatively quaint downtown area
Stop by one of the many nice coffee shops downtown (even if you aren't a coffee drinker)
Hang out by the Mill Stream or Quad on Willamette University's campus *
Eat dinner downtown (choose from Greek, Mexican, American, French, and more!)
Visit the Reed Opera House, even if you aren't in a shopping or eating mood
Go for a day hike in the Opal Creek Wilderness Area (just east, off of Hwy 22) *
Go for a bike ride down River Road East and either stop at Minto-Brown Park or keep going all of the way to Independence (if you are comfortable riding on the road) *
Visit the Oregon Gardens (just 10 minutes out of town) *+
Drive to Portland +

* These activities are far more enjoyable on a sunny day.

EDIT: + added from comments.

So that's what I have come up with so far. Feel free to add to the list in the comments.

From Excel (or OpenOffice) to LaTeX

2010-02-03T17:34:00.000-08:00

I am pretty excited about this find. I was working on a homework assignment and I had a really large table in an OpenOffice spreadsheet (similar to Excel) that I wanted to put in a LaTeX file I was writing (I do as much homework as I can in LaTeX because it looks so bad-ass). So I did some searching on how I might go about doing this, short of actually manually writing the LaTeX table. This is what I found:

csv2latex
This cool little utility takes a CSV file and spits out honest to goodness LaTeX code in the form of a table. You may have noticed that I said it takes a CSV file, not an XLS (Excel) or ODS (OpenOffice) file. That isn't a problem, though, as both Excel and OpenOffice will export your data to a CSV file for you! I won't explain that here, but a google search for "excel export to csv" or "openoffice export to csv" should get you started. Anyway, happy mass LaTeX table creating!

EDIT: UPDATE: See my resources page for a patch I wrote for this program that will give you a couple of extra options for the formatting of the LaTeX that this program outputs. The source code for this project has already been updated with my additions. Just checkout the latest version from the svn server listed on the download page and you will get it all!

Pas De Deux

2010-01-22T00:12:00.000-08:00

I was just reading my textbook for a film studies class and I came across a film I thought I would see if I could find online. It intrigued me for two main reasons:

1) It is a short ballet and I enjoy watching dance, a side effect of having a good friend who has danced all of her life.
2) It was made in 1968 and used an optical printer to produce a special effect that involves overlaying and staggering footage of the two dancers to create a unique strobe-like or ghosting effect.

It turns out you can find this video on Youtube and it is very very worth watching if you like dance, film, outmoded F/X, or all of these things. I think the video is beautifully put together and really impressive for its time.

Part 1 (9:03)
Part 2 (4:17)

Why do ducks assemble on water?

2010-01-20T12:42:00.000-08:00

Over winter break, on several occasions, I saw whole masses of ducks assemble on water. I found it interesting that they grouped together the way that they did. They did not take up the whole of the water's surface and each was a uniform distance from the others around it. My question is: Why?

Given the relative silence, I think casual verbal communication can be ruled out. They were far enough apart that warmth can be ruled out. They were so evenly spaced that random chance can definitely be ruled out.

So it occurred to me that they might be huddled so that they could all be quickly made aware of imminent danger, or perhaps it is a social gathering, despite the lack of chatter, but I have not looked into it enough yet to find an answer for this question.

UPDATE: I found out that my hunch was more than likely accurate. That is, the reason for the ducks gathering was probably a recent spotting of a predator. Furthermore, were we to know which ducks in the group were important to the group, we would have found those ducks in the middle of the huddle somewhere.

Here is a picture, for the other side of your brain.

Life lesson #1

2009-12-31T12:21:00.000-08:00

Always make your own hotel reservations and be careful when cutting corners.

My family is currently vacationing at a quaint little place on the Columbia River. Most of the rooms are quite nice, but we made the mistake of letting a family friend book our room. They signed us up for two people, rather than the four we are. Usually this is a decent price-cutting measure but in this case we ended up in a room the size of a janitorial closet; Not the best fit for us. It all worked out (we are in another room), but we probably would have gone home before spending another night that couped up.

Windows 7 upgrades and laptop (or desktop) peripherals

2009-12-29T01:30:00.000-08:00

Has an upgrade to Windows 7 left some of your laptop (or desktop) peripherals unresponsive? It is well acknowledged that Windows 7 is a GOOD thing, but upgrading a computer from Vista to 7 does not guarantee that everything will start working. For that matter, some stuff that used to work may stop working. There is hope, though!

If you have a peripheral that worked with Windows XP or Vista and stopped working when you upgraded to Windows 7, you probably are just missing the drivers it requires. Drivers tell a computer how to communicate with devices. So, if something that came with your computer has stopped working, visit the website of the manufacturer of your laptop. Look for a support & driver section of the website, do a search for your laptop model, and download the driver you need. If your peripheral did not come with your laptop, look for drivers on the website of the manufacturer of the peripheral.

This tip was brought to you by my brother's IR remote that came with his HP computer. It stopped working when he upgraded and now that he has a new driver for Windows 7 everything is good.

Need customized reports for that survey?

2009-12-13T09:00:00.000-08:00

I recently found out that Google has offered a survey creation option for quite a while now. They call it "Forms" and you can create your own forms from within Google Docs.

Google Docs
What is really cool about this is it is backed by Google Spreadsheets. What does that mean? It means that you create a form, you send an email or offer a link to people to the survey, they fill out your survey, and the data ends up in an Excel-like spreadsheet in Google Docs. That makes it really easy to create your own charts and look at the data you collected however you want to! And, of course, this is all free because it is just a feature of Google Docs.

Saran wrap, please.

2009-12-09T23:41:00.000-08:00

A little background:
I live in a fairly old house and one of the unfortunate things about that is it does not retain heat all that well. One of the biggest problems is the windows. They are two pane windows (top and bottom) and even when they are closed a lot of air can flow through the gap between them. For this reason, my room has been between 5 and 10 degrees cooler than other parts of the house.

Shrink and Seal Window Kits
Now for the real point of the post. A house mate of mine found this product at Lowes that is made for windows that do a poor job insulating. It is basically just a sheet of plastic that you tape to the windowsill and then shrink with a blow drier. As odd as it may sound, these things work wonders, especially if you are stopping airflow from outside like I am. Below are two pictures of the plastic after "installation." It's not pretty, but it's effective.

Maple speaks LaTeX too!

2009-12-05T20:40:00.000-08:00

This is so exciting I can hardly contain myself. You know that really cool piece of software that you can use to solve and visualize mathematic problems (Maple)? Well, it turns out Maple allows you to output results to LaTeX. All you have to do is this: Select (highlight) the thing you want to turn into LaTeX, right click on it, select "Conversions > LaTeX" from the context menu, and then copy the LaTeX code it spits out! This is particularly cool when working with matrices or other math constructs that are a bit of a pain to write LaTeX for.

example:

Which internet browser should you use?

2009-12-03T18:46:00.000-08:00

This is a tough question. I think, despite what some might tell you about Firefox or Chrome being the ultimate browser, you should use the browser you are most comfortable with. After all, what good is the internet at your finger tips if you are not enjoying yourself? That being said, one thing that really makes me enjoy the web more is speed. Today I came across a cool site that will let you run speed tests on all of the browsers you may be considering using.

PeaceKeeper
Check this site out if you are at all curious how fast a given browser runs on YOUR machine. This is not only an opportunity to look at someone else's benchmarks, it is an opportunity to make your own! Run this benchmark on each browser you have installed and you are guaranteed to find out which one runs fastest on your machine (it even gives you scores in different categories, so you can choose your own criteria).

These are my speed test results on my Mac booted into OS X:

5 really cool Unix utilities

2009-12-01T23:00:00.000-08:00

Here are some of my favorite Unix utilities, not counting the obvious and necessary ones (ls, cd, grep, find, etc).

lsof - list open files
This is a really cool program that lists all sorts of information about files that are currently open on the computer. One really useful piece of information is which program has a certain file open. have you ever received an error about deleting a file because it was in use? This utility will tell you what process is using that file!

ps - process status
This utility program will list any subset of processes on the system. Take a look at its man page for options that allow you to restrict or expand the list of processes displayed by which user launched it. For an extensive list, try 'ps -a -x'.

diff - file differences
This will tell you the differences between two files, but I actually use it more often on two folders to tell me what files one folder has that another does not. I use Time Machine to back my Mac up, but I also keep a lot of old documents and photos on another external in order to only keep my current projects backed up with Time Machine. That is where diff comes in. I often forget what exactly I have put on my external, and diff can tell me what pictures or documents I have on my computer, but not the external. There is also a companion utility, patch, which can take a file produced by diff and "update" a target file based on the differences. Pretty awesome.

make - build files
Often make is used to build programs (call upon the linker, compiler, etc.) but it happens to be really good at any automation process that involved running one file through a program to produce another file. If you check out my resources page you will notice that I use make to "build" my resumes in PDF (using pdflatex) and plain text (using a sed script I wrote) at the same time. It makes upkeep a snap.

sed - stream editor
I really like sed. It is not right for every task, but for certain tasks involving replacing text in a file it is perfect. Basically, it allows you to easily run one or more substitution regular expressions on each line in a file. Its capabilities go further, but you should really just check out its man page (and maybe my sed script on my resources page).

ACM Programming Competition

2009-11-08T09:54:00.000-08:00

Yesterday two teams of three people from Willamette University attended the NW regional ACM Programming Competition. Both teams worked on 11 tough problems for 5 hours. I was on Team Zoidburg (supposedly somewhat of a polar opposite name to our other team, Cthulhu). My team was able to solve every problem we attempted (5 out of 11) and we came out of the competition feeling really good about that. We came in 30th place out of 78 teams.

If you want to check out the scoreboard, you can find it here. Be sure to look for other schools in the NW, many of them were represented at the competition.

UPDATE: Apparently we came in second among Oregon teams!

Older Macbook Pros are hot...

2009-10-29T09:25:00.000-07:00

when running Snow Leopard with high processor usage. If you own a Macbook Pro and you recently upgraded to Snow Leopard, you may notice your fans coming on a LOT more than they used to. You may not, but if you do, your computer is probably running warmer than it should.

I have read several explanations for why this would happen on older Macbooks and I don't think anyone really knows what the cause is. The best explanation I have heard is that in Snow Leopard the graphics card is getting used more heavily on a regular basis at the same time as the CPU and my laptop does not have adequate cooling. However, iStat Pro said that my GPU was running at only 50ºC while my CPU was at 100ºC! What I have noticed, though, is that the temperature of my laptop is directly linked with my processor usage and there is usually something you can do to keep that usage down a bit.

To check your processor usage, open Activity Monitor (found in the Utilities folder inside Applications) and if there is a drop-down list with "My Processes" selected, change that to "All Processes." Now sort your processes by processor usage by clicking on the "%CPU" header and look for the highest number in that column. If this number is over 50-60%, the program behind that process may be the culprit of your overheating problem.

I hope that Apple fixes this problem soon, if it is something they can fix. I know that my computer never overheated when running Leopard. Until they come out with something themselves, you can try to disable whatever program is using so much of your processor power. For me, an anti-virus program called iAnti-Virus was running a background process at 80% of one of my two processor cores' capacity. My computer was running at 100ºC, unless SMC Fan Control and iStat Pro were both reading my temperature sensors wrong.

Netgear SUCKS

2009-10-22T16:37:00.000-07:00

Spoiler: This post is all about why you should never buy a Netgear product.

Before I begin my rant, I will clarify that Netgear products do not actually seem to be that bad. I was very happy with my Netgear router until it stopped working. That is when things got ugly.

When my router failed to finish a firmware update and subsequently bricked itself, I got in touch with Netgear technical support via email. First I was asked to try to force new firmware over to my router with an FTP program because I was not able to access the router's configuration page. I tried this, and the router would not respond to FTP requests. The next email I got from Netgear support really frustrated me. It went something like this (except in broken English):

"We have determined that your router's hardware is the problem. Please accept our sincere apologies. We are sorry for any inconvenience."

Sorry for any inconvenience! How about the money I wasted on the router?! I wrote them back, saying that they had told me what was wrong but not given me a resolution. I asked if there was somewhere that I could get the router fixed (even if this cost me money, it would be cheeper than scrapping the router). When I received my next reply, I had been handed off to another tech support guy who asked me questions I had already answered for the first guy! These are not phone conversations, the answers he wanted could have been found just an email or two earlier in the same support thread. Anyway, I answered his questions and did not hear back from anyone for five days. At that point I tried to log in to my account on Netgear's website (to check the status of my support ticket) only to find that my account had been deleted! The webpage said my email was not in their database, but it had been just a few days earlier... coincidence? I have a hard time believing that this was an accident.

I could go on, about how I also called Netgear support and got nowhere because they kept passing me back and forth between two phone numbers with no one willing to answer my questions, but I will stop my story here.

Netgear has forever lost my business, and I hope anyone who reads this is dissuaded from buying their products as well. It takes more than good products to make a good company, it takes good customer support as well. A company should actually care about its customers' problems. I can only conclude that Netgear does not actually care at all. They could take a lesson or two from Expeditors International, the company I interned with last summer (a company that gives customer support a really high priority).

Batteries disappoint me

2009-10-03T22:43:00.000-07:00

Particularly rechargeable batteries, particularly the kind that is hard as hell to replace on your own (either because the battery is proprietary, or because it is embedded deep within the device, or both).

I realize that no battery is going to retain its maximum charge forever. And don't get me wrong, I am really glad that rechargeable batteries exist. However, I also always feel let down by manufacturers when my battery starts to go south. Once it starts to die, it always seems to continue to die at faster and faster rates. Not only do batteries inevitably die, but it always happens sooner than the manufacturer says it will. Maybe this is because I am a power user and they expect the device they make to be used less or something, but it still sucks for me. I feel like if their estimates are off, they should give me a new battery for free (which actually did happen once, with Apple) but usually this is not the way it works. Usually you have to send the device in and not only pay for the new battery but pay for someone to install it because the manufacturer buried the battery so deep in their device.

This part is for the manufacturers: I want to hear more about what you are doing to keep my devices' batteries alive for longer. Most of you say nothing about this topic, and it makes me think you are just sitting around waiting for someone else to roll out a better battery. The battery is essential to your device, though, and should demand more of your attention. If you have not already got a dedicated battery research team, get one. If you have one, start bragging about it so I know you care how long my device lasts me as much as I do!

Damn, should have looked into that more.

2009-09-12T11:06:00.000-07:00

For the first time since I started blogging I googled "void blog" to see if this blog even showed up. It didn't, at least not early on in the results, but I did find something very unfortunate. Although I came up with the idea "void Blog()" on my own, someone else did as well. No one else writes it "void Blog()" but there is a programming blog referred to as "void * blog" and a website at voidblog.com. Damn. I am not going to worry about changing it immediately but it seems like a good idea to come up with a different name for my blog now.

Any ideas?

Simultaneous Dual Boot

2009-09-04T08:46:00.000-07:00

The ability to dual boot an Apple computer is a great thing. It has allowed Willamette University to put a computer lab in Ford (a new building) that both Windows and Macintosh fans can enjoy. One person might be working in Windows at the same time as the person next to him or her works in Mac OS X.

There is, however, an unfortunate truth about dual booting that makes the process annoying for anyone who just wants to get something done. If someone wants to use the operating system that a computer is not currently booted into, that person has to restart the computer (true, only a 1.5 minute process, but annoying nonetheless).

This is where software like VMWare Fusion or Parallels comes in handy, sort of. With these solutions, at least the computer does not need to be restarted in order to use either Mac OS X or Windows or both at the same time. There is still a shortcoming, though. Windows does not run very quickly and graphics capabilities are greatly reduced. The creators of both pieces of software are working on these problems but the fact remains that there is a piece of software between the user and Windows so it will never be as efficient as running the operating system on its own.

Now to get to the crux of this post (and some slightly technical language). What I am waiting for is the ability to boot into Windows and Mac OS X at the same time, natively. This would require at the very least some fancy boot-loading and might require new standards for "splitting" resources such as processor cores and RAM addresses so the two OSs could share nicely. Regardless, I hope it is on the way. It would still mean the two OSs sharing one computer's resources, but neither OS would be crippled by an intermediate software interpreter. How cool would that be?

Of course, I would also settle for Mac OS X having the ability to natively execute Windows binaries (flawlessly, not like WINE), but I don't think that is ever going to happen.

UPDATE: Simultaneous dual booting is on its way! Check out this PCWorld Blog post.

A new twist on presentations

2009-08-22T22:21:00.000-07:00

I have been fortunate in avoiding class presentations since I left high school. Not one in college that I can think of. I recently finished a summer internship, though, and the culmination of that was a presentation summarizing my time with the company. It was time to get out MS Power Point again. Or was it?

Prezi
I had just begun working on my Power Point presentation when a friend at work showed me a tool he was using to create his presentation using Flash. The tool was Prezi and the concept was totally new to me. Instead of a series of slides on which text zooms in and out, the presentation is represented by a bulletin board where all content is on one big "slide" and to show people different information you zoom in and rotate to focus on parts of the board. I won't explain it thoroughly here because the Prezi website has a full description and cool demos. I will give you a brief review of it though.

Pros

Free (or cheap for the full version with some useful extra features)
Catchy and original
Fun (to create and to watch)
Simple online interface for creation
Downloadable standalone package to play your presentation on any computer (PC and Mac)

Cons

Glitchy at times (nothing major, but sometimes rotations don't act the way you expect without some experimentation)
Limited capabilities and graphic styles/colors for text (a tradeoff for the simplicity of the interface)
Could be used to create a horribly nauseating presentation if used maliciously.

If you ask me, the pros outweigh the cons significantly and Prezi is definitely worth checking out.

Pet peeve #1

2009-08-14T06:03:00.001-07:00

Pet peeve: when I go to click on a button on a website and the clickable area of the button is a lot bigger than the button appears to be (see unnecessary diagram below).

Lotus Notes 7 + Java = PAIN

2009-08-07T18:52:00.000-07:00

DISCLAIMER: I have never used Lotus Notes 8, and most or all of these issues may have been fixed in the newest version.

That being said, holy crap do I have issues with Java in version 7 of Lotus Notes. It is cool that Notes comes bundled with the JVM and allows agents to be written in Java, but it is a real struggle to get a large project built smoothly using the tools provided.

I will start with the IDE packaged with Notes Domino Designer. There is only basic syntax highlighting that cannot be changed, there is no code completion, syntax errors are not found until compile time, and there is no fixing of imports. Granted these are all superfluous features, but they are nice. You cannot save your code without compiling it, there is no easy way to browse between classes or files if you have many of them, there is no way to collapse all files (which reside in a vertical list that can be expanded or collapsed) at once, and all of those files are auto-expanded every time you open the agent.

To avoid using the built-in editor, you can write your code in another IDE and import it into Notes. This sounds great (and I would have gone insane by now if I had not opted to do this myself) but in practice it does not alleviate all pain from the process of creating a Java agent. Whenever you make changes to the java files outside of Notes, you have to refresh them within Notes and then recompile. This process can take a while if you have a lot of code, and, believe it or not, the process of refreshing files actually takes a significantly longer amount of time if the Java files are not collapsed (which is why it sucks so much that EVERY time you open the agent all files are expanded and there is no way to collapse them all at once).

Once you do have your code in Notes and refreshed and everything, it is time to save and hope that all goes well. If a compile time error occurs, Notes shows it to you in this ridiculous combo-box. Why a regular old text area is not used, I have no idea. So you have to click the drop-down arrow to see the full error message if it is more than one line AND, guess what happens if the error is too long to be shown in the combo box... it is cut off and you will never know how the error message ends! OK, so not quite true, because there is a minimalist debug console. At any rate, if you get an error due to a mistake you made, you are lucky. The alternative is the dreaded "System out of resources" error, which is actually quite common in my experience because apparently Notes does a really bad job of memory management within Java. If you get the system out of resources error, you have to shut Notes down, bring it back up, reopen your agent, and refresh again because Notes did not save the changes you made because it was not able to compile your code (due to the memory that Notes let leak and apparently never collected again).

I actually could go on, but my complaints get more and more specific to my project and how Notes has made my life tough, so I will end it here. If you are ever asked to develop a Java agent for Notes 7 and expect the project to be medium to large scale, don't. Try to find an alternative.

Sudo life

2009-07-23T18:00:00.001-07:00

I am a bit surprised to be blogging about a web comic, but I think I found a way to justify it: If you are not already a fan of xkcd, and you are one of the few people reading this blog for who knows what reason, you need to check xkcd out.

I have come across many really funny xkcd comics but the one that made me laugh enough today to want to blog about it can be found here: http://xkcd.com/149/

Wouldn't it be great if Linux/Unix commands and utilities worked this way? All of us nerds would have such an advantage in life...
"grep -r 'keys' /house" or
"chown earth everyone"

DIY panoramas: The results

2009-07-04T20:42:00.000-07:00

Quite a while ago I made a panoramic head for my tripod and wrote about it here. It took me a long time due to my busy summer schedule, but I have finally tried it out! My conclusion is that it will take some practice to get good results but the tripod head itself is a success. True, it is not nearly as easy to use as a store-bought one would be, but it also cost me around $100 less and only took a weekend to design and build.

I have taken one panoramic shot so far (damn the work week and its ability to suck up all of my time). It turned out blurry, because choosing the right focal length for the entire shot was tricky and will take some practice. It is also overexposed in portions of the sky, making parts of the picture totally white. Those two things aside, though, it worked as expected. That is, the pictures stitched together very well. I find this indicative of my success in building a working panoramic tripod head because this shot is made up 140+ pictures. Even three or four pictures always had noticeable parallax issues for me in the past.

I will put my first panorama in the projects section of this site soon. I will keep posting more as I take them and hopefully there will be some really good ones in the future.

EDIT: My first panorama is now posted in the projects section of the site.

Java can do a lot

2009-06-17T19:27:00.000-07:00

No, put your coffee away, I am talking about the programming language. I have not always been a very big fan of Java, for several reasons, but as the title of this post suggests, I have come to enjoy it at times.

First for the reasons I never have liked it before.

Java is slow. This is less and less true as newer iterations of java byte-code get closer to machine level code, but the fact that Java is interpreted means it will never run as fast as code that is native to an OS.
Java does not look very clean or attractive. OK, I admit that this is not nearly as true as it used to be either. However, in my opinion, Java windows still do not look quite as good as the native OS application windows do. There is something to be said for a standard appearance across all open windows; it just looks cleaner. This is one of the reasons that Apple insists on making its own Java interpreter (so Apple can make Java that is run on a mac look like everything else that is run on a mac).
Java is not good for accessing OS-specific functionality. For example, it is a bad idea to make graphics intense apps with it because you are better off calling graphics libraries like OpenGL (or even an operating system dependent library like DirectX) from within native applications.

Now for the reasons I am coming to like it.

Java is platform-independent! You write the same code and compile once and your app can be run on any OS that has a Java interpreter (all of them that I can think of).
There is a large wealth of libraries that come with the standard Java SDK for all kinds of tasks. Examples I recently found useful (and easy to use in comparison to counterparts) include SQL, network, and image APIs. One great thing about networking with Java is two computers do not need to be running the same OS to communicate with each other flawlessly.
Java can run on the web or on the desktop. True, Flash web-apps are running rampant, but you can still find java applets on many websites. Whether or not it is always relevant to a certain project, it is nice that the difference between a Java application and a Java web applet is only a few of lines of code.

Early Summer Mornings

2009-06-12T19:31:00.000-07:00

I just finished my first week of summer work. I am interning at an international logistics company, Expeditors International (their headquarters is in Seattle, WA). I am also living with some friends in Tacoma, WA. So that means that I wake up at 5am every weekday and don't get back to the house until 6:30pm. That's a long day, at least the longest I have ever had to go through. So this summer will be interesting. I am optimistic about the internship regardless of the commute, though, because it will be a great learning experience. I also get a bonus lesson in why I do not want to commute long distance for my job in the future.

Unfortunately these long days have forced me to put my outdoor ambitions and personal computer project on the backburner, especially during the week.

Mostly I just wrote this post because I have not written in a while but hopefully I will get to play around with my new home-made panoramic tripod head soon and let you all know how it turned out. I know it looks pretty decent for being all wood.

DIY panoramas!

2009-05-24T18:13:00.000-07:00

I love do-it-yourself projects and I love photography so this is a fun topic for me. I recently became really interested in creating some 360 by 180 degree panoramas. The cool thing about these is that you can create a cubic projection of them and, using QuickTime VR or the like, put yourself in a 3D environment which is identical to wherever the picture was taken. You can digitally look anywhere that you could have looked from where the picture was taken, including straight up and down (although the nadir, or directly down direction, is tricky to capture on camera due to the presence of a tripod in that photo).

Anyway, when shooting panoramas it is easy to get distortion in the form of parallax unless you use a panoramic tripod head. These are expensive, but I found a really cool DIY page on making a wooden panoramic head for about $10. You can find it here. I have not made mine yet, but I am working on my own design based off of the one in the tutorial right now so hopefully all will go well.

Semi-Institutionalized

2009-05-13T22:15:00.000-07:00

I feel like I was semi-institutionalized by my school this year. I am now over 8 hours past being done with my last final and instead of being excited for the trip I am about to take to see my girlfriend or for the cool summer job I landed I am sitting here not sure what to do with myself; I am spacing out and I am anxious. I think it has to do with being tired as well, but it also has a lot to do with the constant workload over the past semester that my body has become accustomed to. I don't know how to not have homework, what will I do with my free time?

Parkour meets biking

2009-05-04T15:43:00.000-07:00

Urban Biking
I have seen bike trials before, but I think Danny MacAskill has got to be the best rider I have found. This video is definitely worth watching; it will blow your mind no matter who you are, but if you have ever Mt. or BMX biked before, your jaw will drop.

Fun with your browser

2009-04-30T00:14:00.001-07:00

More and more these days the things being done within websites utilize internet browsers in the most interesting ways.

Ball Experiment
This is a really cool experiment. I will resist the temptation to tell you all about it here, both because it is self explanatory and because it is so much fun to play with. One thing I will say, though, is don't forget to create some windows with the "create window" button because the demo gets way cooler if you have multiple unmaximized windows to throw the ball between. Check it out! It has saved me from boredom on several occasions.

What scholarship?

2009-04-24T18:57:00.000-07:00

I was leaving my dorm for lunch yesterday when I received a congratulations from a friend. For what? I had no idea.
"For my birthday?" I replied.
"No, for the scholarship!"
He explained to me that I had been awarded a scholarship the night before at a dinner that I had not gone to. I found this unlikely, after all I had not applied for any scholarships recently, but later the same day the story was confirmed by a professor of mine.
Apparently I was supposed to be invited to the dinner by a letter in my mailbox, which I had never received! I am not terribly hurt to have missed the dinner, though, and it is still nice to be recognized. This can definitely get added to the list of least expected things that ever happened to me.

Online storage/backup/distribution for all!

2009-04-18T08:06:00.000-07:00

These days it is a good idea to back everything up as much as possible. Because hardware is getting less reliable? No, because everyone is doing it! Actually, it is because it has always been a good idea to back stuff up, but only now is it becoming easy and affordable for everyone to do so.

If you are not currently backing stuff up, I strongly suggest you consider it, at least for those things that are most important to you (family pictures, school homework, etc.).

getdropbox.com
With that in mind, check out getdropbox. With this service, you will sign up for a free 2GB of online storage (plus an extra 250MB if you use the link above). Then you download and install a small service app which will put a new folder on your computer and monitor it for changes. Anything you put in that folder, is automatically synced with the online storage. This not only serves as a backup, it also allows you to put stuff in a Public subfolder so that you can give friends a URL and they can download files you upload with a snap. This is the sort of thing you might now do through email, but email usally has a 20MB limit on attachments, the only limit here is the amount of space left in your online storage!

Oh, and did I mention, if you use the link above, both you and I get an extra 0.25GB of storage?!

The harsh reality - cats die

2009-04-16T16:54:00.000-07:00

If you have seen Twilight, I think you either liked it a lot (I am not sure how), or you thought it was awkward and just barely bad enough to be good. I fit into the second category. I had a hard time imagining how the two leads could possibly have pulled off the level of awkwardness they do in the beginning of the movie, but I think I may have figured it out: They don't even like each other in real life.

Here is a clip I found on youtube where Robert Pattinson mercilessly explains to Kristen Stewart that if she really couldn't live without her cat, she would be screwed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQpeZOxZXdk

PDF forms: way underutilized

2009-04-06T17:25:00.000-07:00

It amazes me that, nowadays, pretty much every form you have to fill out for anything will come to you as a PDF by email, but those forms can almost never be filled out on the computer! Many of these forms come from institutions or businesses that I know have a copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro, so why do they refuse to recognize the brilliance that is Electronic PDF Forms?

For those of you who do not know, there is a feature built into Adobe Acrobat Pro (not Adobe Acrobat Reader) that will take a document and pretty accurately turn it into a form for you with almost no hassle. What does this mean for the person filling the form out? He or she can sit at the computer and type the answers into fields rather than printing the form out and writing in answers by hand (and filling the form out only requires Adobe Reader). It also means a form that does not require a signature can be sent right back by email without ever printing anything out at all!

There are a number of key advantages to filling out a form electronically:

Forms can often be filled out and emailed back without wasting paper.
Answers to questions can easily be changed without starting over (and wasting more paper).
Handwriting can be sloppy (case and point: me), but typing is always legible.
Forms can have fields that auto-calculate values for the person filling the form out.
Electronic forms can still be printed out if that is desirable.

The list goes on, but I will stop here because I feel I have made my point: There is no good reason for a form to not be made electronic if it can be.

In case you are curious, here is a link to documentation on the form feature of Adobe Acrobat Pro.

Free website designs?

2009-04-03T17:15:00.000-07:00

oswd.org
Have you ever tried for hours to figure out how to lay out a website and what colors to use, only to give up (at least for the time) in frustration? Alright, so maybe I am especially lacking in artistic ability, but I still think this is a really good resource for anyone to know about. The Open Source Web Design website has a ton of free web layouts to use or adapt to your own needs. There is something special about coming up with a design all your own, but sometimes the time is just not worth it.

First

2009-04-03T00:00:00.000-07:00

Well, there is a first time for everything. I guess I have finally stumbled into creating a blog. It remains to be seen whether I keep it up to date, but for now it hardly matters since I am the entirety of my audience so far.

In case someone does happen upon this post, I better put it to some purpose; here is a quick review.

ineedtoreadthis.com
Last night I was shown a demo of this new website that can help with the clutter of browser tabs I know a lot of us experience. If you find yourself leaving tabs upon tabs open in your browser just so you can remember to look at a web page at some unknown future time, you should check this out. It is called ineedtoreadthis.com and it is a great way to temporarily "bookmark" websites you want to check out but do not have time to look at immediately. The two big differences between this and conventional bookmarking: this is temporary (removed once the webpage is viewed) and there is a lot less clutter than there would be if you bookmarked instead. Just bookmark them with this service, close the tab, and check it out later with the click of a button. This website is still in its infancy but it already is worth a look; I am excited to see what features they implement next.