Inspired Intuition

At this point, it’s kind of ridiculous how many weeks I am behind on blog posts. It is a recurring todo item on my personal calendar, but I never quite find the time for it in the day. The worst part about that is that I have content for the blog. LifeHacker did a new summary of the MUST have free apps for the Mac, and I am meaning to supplement it with my 2 cents. I have started my internship (been doing it for 3 weeks now) and have already learned plenty of topics ranging from DNS to proper unit testing in a real development environment to learning Python (which is a very fun language). Sprinkled in amongst such activities and learning experiences, there have been news posts worth my comments (in my opinion), and other developments in my personal life that I have debated discussing and just haven’t for the same reason that there hasn’t been an update before now, I didn’t do it.

So, with that being said, I am working on a post on one of those subjects for later this week and hope to get that trend going again. I’m thinking that the first subject will be all the issues I’ve had during the past couple weeks with WordPress due to upgrading BurgerBlog to WordPress 3.0 without taking a database backup. So frustrating.

See you later this week!

The weekend was definitely a busy one. Between having/attending a party at a friends’ place and then spending the rest of the weekend doing homework (had an assignment for my Algorithms class and a group paper for my Ethics class to finish), it was a very busy, but productive weekend. I got all the work done (eventually), and had a great time Friday night! I’d rant a bit about my Ethics assignments not being clear enough, but I don’t think that’s really necessary when I have better fodder to write about in the form of my Marketing online homework submissions.

So the system is called Management by the Numbers and the site/product is completely new. At the beginning of the semester, they provided us with accounts according to the school we are in and the number we were on the roster (I assume that’s how the number was generated at least). So, the format would be gtxxx, and they initially gave EVERYONE in these classes the EXACT SAME PASSWORD! I noticed this immediately in the email that they sent out to us regarding what our login credentials were. As someone who wants to professionally doing information security for a living post undergrad, I just cringed when I saw this. To make matters worse, I did the first assignment on the WRONG username because ALL the passwords were the same. Of course, I didn’t realize that was the issue when I saw a 0 for the grade, but only after contacting the professor and TA about the issue did it become apparent “Aaron, your username is gtxxx.” “OH MY GOODNESS, I did the homework on the wrong username, I did it on gtxxy.”

After further discussion, I discovered that the company was “working on” a password change “feature,” which I consider standard in ANY login system. I almost asked for a contract to write the code to do it in PHP out of frustration, but thankfully I didn’t because I have had a bunch on my plate this semester. Overall, it was really disappointing. The funny part, that’s not even what I wanted to show with this blog post.

When I was doing the assignment that was originally due tomorrow, I found a few interesting bugs in it (causing the due date change). The first one had to do with an algorithm that was used to obtain the answer for a problem. It was supposed to be:

(($23.90 – 10) / (.71 * $23.90 – 10)) – 1 = 0.99

Instead of:

(($23.90 – 10) / (.75 * $23.90 – 10)) – 1 = 0.75

You see, the .71 in the correct answer was because it was supposed to have a 29% decrease (in this problem, since that number is dynamic) in price for the comparison, but the algorithm had been setup for a static 25% decrease in price instead. This caused correct answers to be completely wrong.

The more interesting bug, pictured to the right, had to do with precision. They were taking the number out to multiple decimal places, and requiring precision according to that, but the dollar amounts were automatically rounding as we expect cents to do. The end result was that a correct answer was STILL wrong. Of course, this was extremely frustrating for me at first, until I thought to myself “I wonder if it will accept the decimal written ALL the way out (I think I did 6 places just to be over accurate). It worked of course, since the issue had to do with their accuracy, but displaying it as a whole cent was extremely confusing. Regardless, I have finished the assignment and the due date has been pushed back to this Thursday now.

So, I’ve switched hosting over at this point to windfirehosting.com, a hosting reseller account that some of my friends and I setup a while back. My hosting account was going to expire on the 14th of the month and I felt like it was time to move it over. So the last 10 days or so have been spent waiting for DNS registries to reflect the changes I have made to them, getting the DBs moved over, and uploading all the files. I ran into a few interesting snags while doing the migration, but also learned quite a bit in the process of doing it.

First, I used to be hosted at Startlogic. They did a more than adequate job of hosting my sites over the last 6 years along with keeping their 99.whatever% uptime. There was only one snag that I was aware of that caused a loss of access to my sites, though that one lasted about 24 hours. Regardless, they did a good job of hosting me, but their prices increased in one of the previous 2 payment cycles to $6 per month from $5 per month. Not a huge price hike, but noticeable, especially when my friends and I have already setup this reseller hosting account for a cost of $5 per month. The solution, to me, was pretty obvious: just move my sites over to it.

There was one downside to this, Startlogic had all the domain names registered through them. This meant that I had NO idea what was involved in this process or how to modify it. So, after calling Startlogic’s support, I found out that I could downgrade my account instead of moving registrars too so that I could just manage my domains through them, and that I just had to change the domains to point to the new name servers. Of course, that’s skipping about 20 steps in the process of getting there, both with their tech support and with DB issues, cpanel access issues, and FTP access failures, but you don’t want or need the full story there. Once I knew how to change the name server information, I was all set… minus the fact that it takes 24-48 hours for registries to reflect the changes. So literally 6 or so times a day, I would ping the domain names to see if they were pointing to the correct IP yet. Took a while, but they finally were pointing to the right place, then I was able to solve the DB issues, then things became much smoother for the second domain (I chose to move one domain at a time so that at least mostperfect.net would be up and running while I made changes to rachelburger.com).

So, assuming that all goes according to plan and Startlogic doesn’t just decide to close my domains (which are renewed), or change where they are pointing, this should be the new home of the websites that I run (for personal use, not including the other websites that I manage). Overall, it wasn’t too painless, but I didn’t want to post to a database that was just going to be migrated shortly thereafter, so I postponed posts till now. I should have content for the next few posts, so till next time.

For all 3 dedicated readers of my blog, sorry that this post is a day late. Last night was a long one that didn’t include time to take care of updating my blog. Secondly, I also noticed that I was actually, shockingly, getting some legit comments on my blog since I opened that section up and they were just going to the Spam folder for whatever reason. I will try to moderate the spam folder more to take care of these. To those 2 comments that I found to be legit, thanks for actually being legit… there’s a reason I don’t typically check spam folders anymore.

Actually covering what I wanted to discuss in this post:

You remember the movie Minority Report? You remember how cool the computer interface was in that movie and how FUTURISTIC it was? Well the guys who designed that same futuristic computer interface for the movie took the project to the next level, production. I had seen snippets and pieces of this project over the last 2 years and only just realized how far it has come in making this computer system closer to a reality. It isn’t 100% there in my opinion, but it definitely encompassed at least the video interaction and the “natural” body interaction with the computer. Yes, interacting with a computer based upon something other than a mouse, keyboard, and/or a stylus.

Of course, this article was predictably inspired by the iPad changing how we interact with computers by switching ENTIRELY to a multi-touch system. But it is of course worthy to note that this multi-touch technology is in use in other Apple products and has been incorporated into other company’s offerings as well. The interface in the Minority Report movie, and in the demo video that you can see on the article I have linked below, is something far beyond simple multi-touch tech. It is the ability to interact with a system the way you would expect to interact with the items on your physical desktop (papers, pens and the like) with the addition of a “heads up display”. There is something very different and intriguing about this, except for one aspect that is of course being ignored. What does the student, traveling business person, or entrepreneur do with this when they are not able to tie themselves to a single location? How can you incorporate this concept beyond an entire room’s dedication to this system? Once they answer that question, you can count me in the “enthusiasts” camp who wants to not only play with it, but own it ASAP.

The article of inspiration is on TechCrunch.

So, I said in a previous post that I was going to be reviewing Evernote as a note taking a productivity tool this semester. Unfortunately that is much harder now that I have attended my first few classes. 2 of my classes discourage or just flat out forbid the use of laptops during class (the one that doesn’t forbid it only allows them on certain days that we are doing in class activities). For the third class, I’m not going to use a laptop anyways because that is algorithms and you just can’t easily type out those symbols most of the time required by the random proofs and equations that we will be using in that class. The remaining course is Ethics, so I will be using my laptop in that class, and hence will still be able to review the program, just not on the same scale as I would have liked.

The two classes that I cannot use my laptop in is Accounting 1 and Marketing. Overall, the classes seem like they will go well this semester, with the very structured accounting course making it much easier to deal with how much I don’t like the teaching antics of the professor, and marketing seems like it will be nice since the teacher does it very much on a discussion basis (I like). Similarly, Ethics will also be nice because it will focus on us working in small groups in class and then discussing our findings afterward. Algorithms is going to be tough, but as long as I keep up with the assignments and the reading of the textbook before class, I’ll be good.

This weekend is going to be a long weekend, which should be very nice and mean I’ll actually be productive (maybe). I have a new book that I want to read, so it may not be AS productive as I would like. Also, my friend is working on putting together a new project to be discussed further once we have the ball rolling with it. First steps first, we have to really hammer out the goals of the new site and such. Look for further posts about that in the future.

First off, to tie up some loose ends from the fall semester that I blogged about briefly in that “ages ago” post from August. I did not manage to get the required GPA needed for achieving my 3.5 overall GPA, but I believe I can manage it this year much more easily. I really should have gotten it, but I ended with a 3.4 for the fall semester, which resulted in a 3.43 overall. Not too shabby regardless, but not what I had hoped for. If only I had… well it doesn’t really matter what I could and should have done, the semester is over and I have now dealt with some of the best and worst professors of my entire stay at GT thus far (yes, in a single semester…).

As many of my readers know (do I have many readers? I have no idea…) I am a Jewish student and have been planning, with my girlfriend, on going to Israel this winter break on what is called Taglit Birthright (for more information, see her posts at abroadburger.wordpress.com about the trip and why we ended up missing it in its full detail). The short version of the story is that we really wanted to go and had planned our entire vacation around it. My girlfriend’s passport ended up not getting picked up from the Chinese Embassy (where it was getting validated for her trip to China during the spring semester) and hence we were unable to take the trip. The rest of the vacation has been GREAT though! Since we were unable to spend the holiday in Israel, we have done a whole lot of relaxing at her parent’s house and that has been the sum of the vacation. I did end up beating Fable: The Lost Chapters while here, so I will most likely write a review of that game at a later point.

Last point that I highlighted in my previous post: I have been checking out a note-taking suite called Evernote. It seems to be a very cool suite and I have noticed a few things about it. Firstly, it’s free with a premium account option (that I shouldn’t need for the spring semester). Secondly, it comes with both Windows and Mac native apps along with auto-syncing with the web version of the interface. Essentially they are notes that can be accessed from anywhere if I so desire, along with sharing and some other nifty features. My planned usage is going to be:

• Create a new notebook per subject
• Create a new entry per lecture that is dated
• Take pictures of any notes that are handwritten and attach those using the iSight on my laptop
• There is also tagging, but I am not sure how well I’ll be able to utilize that

Like I said before, a review will come later, but until then, I advise others to check it out for general tasks, note-taking, and anything else you can think of to use it for. There is a review of it on Lifehacker already.

This weekend was a very relaxing, necessary, enjoyment. A group of us (my girlfriend and another couple) went up to the Blue Ridge Mountains and rented a cabin for the weekend. It was very nice to be able to just sit around, watch a movie, lie around in the hot tub, read a book, and just generally relax. When you do things every weekend and every weekday, one begins to lose/forget what true relaxation is, but so be it. Always nice to get back to the essence of pleasure.

In other news, I finally, FINALLY put together the blog that I have been promising my girlfriend since the Spring semester. Now she has a place for her own music and political, and whatever else she wants it to be, blog. Nice to finally follow through with that. As of now, I have only done some very basic editing of the theme that is presently on the blog, but might do something similar to my own blog and see what happens. There are a couple stylistic things that I would like to slightly alter (including the smileys though they aren’t used very much since I refrain from using them in normal blog posts). You can see the Links page for the actual link to the blog.

Be aware that I wrote this list for a friend and figured it would be a good thing to put out on my blog also, so below is simply my own opinions/experiences and should be taken with a grain of salt. Also, grammatically speaking, I geared the entirety of the text towards my friend, so consider the “you”s as universal “you”s.

Quicksilver: This product is starting to finally age, but at the same time, it is one of the greatest productivity apps I have found. I know that you love using the keyboard as your main input device and only go to the mouse as a secondary option. Well when you use Quicksilver, the first thing that you will notice is that it is not only faster, but better than regular Spotlight usage. The guy who made it now works at Google and has been focusing on the Google Desktop (but it isn’t nearly as good sadly :/). Check out all the guys stuff at (I also like Visor but wouldn’t list it as an essential :P): http://www.blacktree.com/

Growl: It’s a wonderful notification tool. It synchronizes with MANY apps on the Mac OS and continues to expand (or so it would seem). It has ALMOST seemed to become a bit of a standard when it comes to internal notifications (but that is just my own opinion on the matter). Either way, it is extremely useful and is synchronized with the majority of my apps that run in the background, including a Gmail app and an RSS feed app that both get updates (hence the need for notifications :P). The app can be found here: http://growl.info/

iStat Menus and Dashboard Widget: When it comes to keeping tabs on a Mac’s internals and checking in on the status of the hardware, I have not found a better set of tools than the iSlayer apps. iStat Menus will give you customized menus in the top menu bar and the dashboard widget (I use iStat Pro) will let you know EVERYTHING that is going on with your computer including fan speed and temperature and battery health. I also was just glancing at their website and noticed a new widget they have made called Organized which I will be checking out. Looks pretty good and very useful. The apps can be found here: http://www.islayer.com/apps/

Postbox: In my very brief usage of it, Postbox seems to have all the things I want and use from Gmail. I still use an app called Mailplane which I got back when it was in beta (and now it is a pay app so I got a serious discount on it), so I would suggest Mailplane normally for Gmail usage, but am really impressed, once again my usage of it has been very limited so far, with Postbox and would suggest at least trying it. The number one thing it has is a conversation view which is by far my favorite thing about Gmail! Can be found here: http://postbox-inc.com/

Flip4Mac: A necessity for being able to run wmvs on the Mac. It is essentially a plugin for Quicktime to be able to run .wmv video files. Basically a must have in the still dominating Windows environment of today. Site is here (get the free version, it is all I have): http://www.telestream.net/flip4mac-wmv/overview.htm

Handbrake: This is THE necessity for anyone that is going to EVER rip a DVD. Get it, I am not kidding. This + VLC == greatest video duo ever created (need VLC for the video codecs)! Can be found here: http://handbrake.fr/

VLC: Get it for running any and all multimedia (iTunes is still best for your music though): http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

RSS reader: I am yet to find an RSS feed reader that I REALLY like at this point. The one I am using right now is called Eventbox which I got a free version off of a Mac package that I purchased not so long ago which I could send your way if you would like to give it a shot. It won’t ever get updated though, so I have started considering a new option. My pull towards it at the time was that it was both an RSS feed reader AND it got the news feeds from Twitter and Facebook for me (not that I care about Facebook anymore). There are actually a bunch of RSS feed readers already out there, and I really can’t knock Google Reader, but the latest that I have seen which looks good is NetNewsWire which can be found here: http://www.newsgator.com/INDIVIDUALS/NETNEWSWIRE/

FTP client: For simple, easy FTP usage, I would go with OneButton FTP (http://onebutton.org/). For more complex FTP setups, I would use Fugu (http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/fugu/). For just connecting to a regular server, you can use the command+k shortcut to open up a connect to window where you can type in the server information, etc. Very, very useful for most server connections.

Adium: iChat is pretty good, but it doesn’t provide EXACTLY what I want when it comes to tabbed browsing. For that, I use Adium. Adium allows a keyboard shortcut to bring it to the front, keyboard shortcuts for switching between tabs, and some very slick theming of the buddy list and the chat window. It is basically Pidgin for the Mac (runs on the same libraries so it also has the same downfalls of poor file transfer and the like). Can be found here: http://adium.im/

Espresso vs jEdit: I got lucky enough to snag a free copy of a program called Espresso. It is a very clean and good editor for project based coding. Overall, I really like it, but it is hard to beat a freebie like jEdit. I will leave this one completely up to you :P

Disk Inventory X: Very good for visually seeing what is taking up large chunks of your hard drive should you ever need to make some room on it. Wonderful app! http://www.derlien.com/

Firefox vs. Safari vs. other: So there are naturally a bunch of options for web browsers when it comes to the Mac OS X. There is Opera, Firefox, Safari, Camino (a Mozilla project also), and a bunch of others that I have seen or played with but they stuck out so well from the rest that I don’t remember their names. Well, for me, the real debate is between using Firefox or Safari as your main browser. I personally am presently with Safari and have been so since they released Safari 4, but at the same time I have been using Firefox 3.5 at work and have been just as happy with that as ever. There are a few things that make one stand out from the other (i.e. features the other hasn’t implemented yet). Safari 4 has a wonderful top sites, is very slick, is speedy, and the tabs are separate threads (I believe). Firefox 3.5 is slick (with the add-ons, can’t really beat them for development), since their update it has gotten back on par with Safari’s Java engine, and there are a large number of keyboard shortcuts for switching between tabs and the like. As I said, Safari is my present choice but Firefox 3.5 is still more than just used sometimes on my computer. This one I TOTALLY leave up to you. Opera is still a pretty good browser, but even though I used it as my main browser in my Freshman year (almost 3 years ago now), it really didn’t compare when it comes to compatibility… though it had some wonderful features of its own like custom searches including me figuring out at one point how to get it to automatically fill in all the LAWN auth information minus a single character. To each their own here, you know?

As for virtualization of multiple OS’s, I haven’t made a decision between VMware and Parallels yet. ?Boot Camp is a wonderful alternative, but at the same time, it doesn’t support 64-bit XP, only 64-bit Vista (32-bit XP is supported though) and requires a reboot to switch between OSes. Unfortunately I haven’t had ample opportunity yet to really test any one of these but plan to start delving into this in the near future.

Other than that, here is a LifeHacker article that I stumbled across which covers the items I have little to no experience with: http://lifehacker.com/5291841/lifehacker-pack-2009-our-list-of-essential-free-mac-downloads

Lastly, a tidbit that I found somewhere else and haven’t thoroughly tested out myself quite yet:

MainMenu (donationware)
Various scripts and tools for keeping your Mac running smoothly are sprinkled around the system. MainMenu enables you to access them from a convenient centralised location. The app also provides ‘hidden’ Finder options (force-empty Trash, toggle invisibles, relaunch) and a handy ‘batch’ tool for quickfire activation of multiple scripts.

Butler (donationware)
The extremely configurable Butler enables you to populate your menu bar with all manner of items, including running apps, menus for accessing addresses, bookmarks and volumes, recent pasteboards and more. Items can have triggers (hot-keys/hot corners/abbreviations) and alternate icons applied, and Butler also includes a Quicksilver-like ‘intelligent’ abbreviations-based launcher window

So both my girlfriend and myself got tired of how much personal information we had out there on the respective sites that we have joined. The result was the two of us literally sitting down and purging our Facebook accounts and removing our Myspace accounts completely. However, it also brought up a wonderful concept that really should be done.

When dealing with Facebook, the main reasons most people want to keep it is because they have the contacts with old friends and they don’t want to lose all the pictures. Well, wouldn’t it be nice if you could just click a button on a photo album and download all the pictures from that album to your computer in a single zip file? Or be able to go to all the images where you are tagged and download all of those files? As is, you can already go through and save each individual file pretty easily, but that just takes WAY too long to go through all 200+ images that have me tagged in them AND then make sure I have every single image that I ever posted to my profile. Well, long story short, I am thinking about trying to get a group together to make this small application for Facebook. It probably won’t be happening within the next couple weeks, but maybe in a month or so, after I have my business ideas going a little bit (I might make it a first project to get the sites name out there?) I will tackle it. We shall see about that, but at least now I have the idea in writing and out there, so worst case scenarios are a) someone else makes it or b) it never gets made. Either way, here is the start of a possibility.

Also, I have continued working on my business ideas/plans, but unfortunately have gotten side tracked by having to deal with a couple people getting involved that I didn’t really want to have knowing. Today (or it might have been last night, doesn’t really matter) I sent off an NDA to both of those individuals so that hopefully I can tie things up with a pretty bow legally and ensure no competition from either of them (only really worried about one of them even doing anything with the information thought). I will naturally do my best to update on this soon.

It has become apparent to me that either web browsers have gone down hill or the web itself is so poorly coded at times that it just crashes all browsers. It is likely the latter, but that doesn’t keep me from complaining about the inadequacies of certain browsers. Everyone knows about how much Internet Explorer sucks, and that is why their market share went from a peak of 95% of all browsers to ~65% of all browsers today [source]. The latest typical browser of choice has become Firefox, and that is the browser that I lately have been bitching about the most.

Recently I encountered an issue with the Gecko engine behind Firefox that made it difficult at best to get a web page to print in the format you desire. As a result of such issues, It has been built into CSS to be able to select the media that the style sheet goes to (selecting print will only send that style sheet to the page if it is being printed). This is extremely handy for trying to get around these bugs that are built into a lot of different browsers including Firefox. As it turns out, Firefox is not able to print all CSS even though it is all supposedly supported. After a lot of trial and error, amongst other attempts at fixing the issue, I found that Firefox didn’t like the CSS “display: inline-block;” which does so happen to be valid… stupid Firefox!

Since starting this post, I have encountered a brand new reason to hate the way that IE6 renders a page. It actually does it counter-intuitively! Here is an example of it:

Argh! So basically I am pissed at web browsers and their difficulties right now, but I must say one nice thing about one of the above mentioned browsers. Firefox is very nice to do web development in. It has a plugin called Firebug that is absolutely awesome and without it, quite a few of us web developers would be lost when it comes to styling a web page.