Cruel And Unusual Punishment

June 08, 2004

My study materials for the Patent Bar arrived yesterday. Joy. You’d think that for the amount of money paid for these materials I’d get some sort of free ride on the exam; a “golden ticket” that I could just slip to the proctor and then be on my merry way. Apparently that’s not how it works and it’s starting to sink in that I’m actually going to have to study for this damn thing. As I outlined in a previous post, I assumed that the studying was going to be slow and painful. I was wrong. It’s much worse. I slogged through the first two (of 63) modules today and can liken it only to, well, nothing. You’re literally trying to memorize a ~3,000 page manual that is more dense and boring than anything you’ve ever seen. It’s horrible.

Bloglines

June 05, 2004

After using desktop aggregators for years, I’ve recently moved my subscriptions over to the web-based Bloglines and have no intention of going back to NetNewsWire. I’m always reluctant to use server-side anything; I think this general aversion stems from the fact that I usually don’t feel that I’m in control of web applications (i.e., there are never enough customization/configuration options and everything is centralized on a computer other than my own). That said, I only thought to give Bloglines a chance after seeing some other prominent netheads rave about it. After using it for the past two weeks I have to say that it gets just about everything right; my problems with it are both mild and easily curable. The next few paragraphs outline some of the changes I’d like to see, but even if none of these come to fruition, Bloglines is my aggregator of choice until something better comes along.

The first thing I’d like to see is the number of unread headlines as part of the title of the page (i.e., instead of “Bloglines | My Blogs,” I’d like “Bloglines | 187 unread”). That way, a quick glance to the Bloglines tab in my browser would reveal how far behind I was (come to think of it, maybe that’s not a good idea).

I wouldn’t mind an easier way of sorting the subscriptions. As it stands now, it’s easier to export the subs list, import it into a desktop client (i.e., NetNewsWire), sort the subs as I see fit, export them, and then re-import them into Bloglines.

I think a name change would be nice as well. Bloglines implies that it is only for weblogs and not syndication in general. Furthermore, even it were somehow confined to weblogs, I think the name is stupid — what the hell does “bloglines” mean? Perhaps it is a play on “headlines?” Whatever, I don’t like it. *shrug*

Finally, the feature I’d like to see most is for Bloglines to include in my list only the subscriptions that have unread headlines — if there aren’t any unread headlines there is no reason to encumber my list (which requires quite a bit of scrolling as is) with those empty sites.

Sticking With AdSense

June 04, 2004

I started placing Google’s AdSense ads on my individual archives about a month ago just to get a feel for the amount of money that might be generated. I’m happy to report that I’ve actually made quite a bit off the ads (people actually click on these things, who knew?) and see no real reason to pull them. Not only will this pay for the hosting, but it will leave me with a nice little chunk of change each month.

I’ve debated moving the ads from the bottom of each entry to being inline with the menu on the left, but I hesitate because I feel that that would look a little too ‘commercial,’ though it would surely compel more click-throughs. I’m going to leave them at the bottom of the pages for now, but might move them in the future.

Slideshow Project

June 01, 2004

After an overwhelming response to my earlier post about the new slideshow I’m using on the photos page, I’ve gone ahead and added some comments and instructions to the code and am now offering it to everyone. Keep in mind that this is just something I whipped up a couple of days ago to display my images after tiring of my previous solution and being unable to find something simple and small that did what I wanted (read: it is both simple and small and is meant to fulfill a niche need of mine). Apparently this sort of thing is something that a lot of other people were looking for as well given the strong response to the earlier post.

Go to the Slideshow project page

Pics From LA

May 29, 2004

I just put up some photos from my trip to LA. I didn’t take too many pictures and am a little disappointed with most of those that I did take so don’t expect too much.

Photo Slideshow With PHP

May 29, 2004

I’ve completely redone my photo pages. After much more consternation than there should have been, I decided that I wanted to do a slideshow with the picture sets instead of the tiled thumbnails that I previously used. I spent a fair amount of time looking at possible solutions for this, but opted to build it myself in PHP after not being able to find a method that I liked. Among the different solutions I looked at were the BetterHtmlExport plugin for iPhoto and Galerie (not to be confused with Gallery, which I’ve used a few times in the past and knew would be overkill for what I wanted to do now). I probably worked through eight different options before deciding that I would just write it myself because none of the things I found captured the simplicity of what I was shooting for: the ability to drop a single PHP (or other) file into a directory of sequentially numbered images and have those images presented as a slideshow. I also wanted the presentation to mesh well with my current page templates and be easy to change in the future.

My solution takes care of all these things and the code is fairly short (as it should be given the simplicity of the problem). The way I have it set up, you need to include a one line text file in each directory of pictures which specifies the title of the page (so that the PHP code/template can be kept completely separate from whatever set of pics its working with). This could obviously be easily extended to cover more variables like descriptions for individual pictures (for example, you could set up each text line to correspond to that line number’s matching image number, thereby allowing you to give a description of each picture). After you create this text file you simply need to drop the PHP file into the directory and then point to it.

Initially, I planned to have the pictures show up in my “content” div (where this text is), but this would have required me to either widen the div or go back and resize all of my pics to 400x300, neither of which I wanted to do. Because of these constraints, I decided to keep the slideshow pages free of the menu and title header found on the other pages. I removed the title header because I wanted to make sure that the pictures could be viewed in full without the person having to scroll, which they would have had to do if they were viewing 375x500 portrait pics on a 1024x768 screen (yah, I find it hard to believe myself, but some people still use that resolution).

So, yah, nothing revolutionary here, but I’m pretty pleased with the results. If past experience is any indication, I have a feeling a few people are going to ask for the code. If this turns out to be the case, I’ll probably flesh it out a bit and make it more robust before passing it around.

Apple 23” Cinema HD Display

May 26, 2004

A good friend of mine (one of the many that I’ve convinced to move to Apple’s OS X) is leaving for the summer to do a study abroad program, and as luck would have it, I get to “look after” his 23” Cinema HD Display while he’s gone. Given my propensity to become attached to all things tech, I was a little apprehensive about taking it in the beginning knowing that I’d eventually have to give it up, but I’ve since changed my entire outlook on the situation. I’m just going to keep it. You hear that Dave? I realize this might put a damper on our friendship, but the fact is, I just can’t go back to life without it. I hope you understand.  :P

In other news, if anyone out there has a spare $2000 that they’d like to donate to my just-created monitor fund, please let me know.

Movable Type 3.0 Developer Edition

May 25, 2004

There has been a lot of controversy/hype/anger/apathy surrounding the recent release of Movable Type 3.0 Developer Edition. I must admit that I’m lumped in with the apathetic crowd. Because I only run one weblog through the system (perhaps two in the near future, I’m still debating that), I’m not affected at all by the new pricing scheme (i.e., for my uses, it remains free), which is the impetus behind all of those who are ‘angry.’

That said, I upgraded to v3.0D a couple of weeks ago and have experienced no trouble at all (including no plugin hiccups). Besides some subtle interface design changes, there really is nothing aesthetically different from past versions. I knew this going into the upgrade and am well aware of the changes to the ‘guts’ of the system, but I was still expecting something more. Notwithstanding the lack of feature updates, I see no reason to stop using Movable Type — I still feel that no other CMS comes close.

For kicks, I installed WordPress a few weeks ago and messed around with it for a while, but its interface did nothing for me nor were its features on par with Movable Type’s. To be fair, I was running v1.0.2, but v1.2 was released a few days ago, which might have fixed some of the things I didn’t like; I’ll probably play around with the new version sometime this week. Adding to Movable Type’s pull on me is the number of plugins available for it. Not to be left out, WordPress also offers the ability to easily create plugins for the system, but its repository is currently much smaller; granted, WordPress’s user base is much smaller and it’s only been out a short while compared to Movable Type.

To be clear though, if it turned out that the new Movable Type pricing scheme required me to pay for it, I would probably get past my hang-ups with WordPress and begin using it, which seems to be the attitude of most of those who are now forced to pay for v3.0D upgrades. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t pay for Movable Type (as I’ve said many times before, it’s one of the greatest pieces of software I’ve ever used), but if there is another [free] solution available that can do everything that Movable Type can do, logic dictates that I would opt for the other solution. *shrug*

Back From SoCal

May 24, 2004

The trip down to LA was great. I’m going to try to make this quick as I have 2323243 other things to do — I’ll save trip details for phone conversations and inquisitive e-mails. I stayed with a good friend of mine and his aunt and uncle in a small town called San Dimas. The first full day down there we hit up Hollywood and Sunset Boulevards. Pretty much walked the entire Hollywood Walk of Fame (the star walk thing) and saw the Man’s Chinese (it’s actually Grauman’s) and Kodak theaters. Stopped in at the Roosevelt hotel and got some drinks.

Later that day we drove through Beverly Hills and did some window shopping (*cough* couldn’t afford anything *cough*) on Rodeo drive. The amount of money in that area is truly unbelievable. To be perfectly honest, it was disgusting. I saw four Bentleys in less than 20 minutes, not to mention the Aston Martins and countless Porsches and Range Rovers. Speaking of cars, I actually saw a Maybach on Hollywood Boulevard; what a beautiful machine. We ended the night at a seafood restaurant/bar called Gladstone’s on the water in Malibu.

The following day we woke up pretty late and wanted to be back in time for dinner with my friend’s uncle so we didn’t stray too far from the house. We went down to the shopping/bar area in Pasadena and walked around and had a few drinks. That night we had dinner at Little Tokyo in San Dimas, which, I was told beforehand, was the best sushi outside of Japan. My friend was absolutely right — it was the best sushi I’ve ever had. From the quantity to the quality, it just doesn’t get any better. At the end of our meal I put on my best Fear Factor face and ate crickets that were given to us by the sushi chef. After seeing him take a few down I didn’t hesitate too much and went for it; they were surprisingly good (I think they were coated in sugar), but I can’t say I was too fond of the legs.

The next day we met up with another friend of mine from the law school. She was born and raised in the LA area and had a lot that she wanted to show me. We started out the day walking up and down the sidewalk at Venice/Muscle Beach. The area there was really neat; there were lots of places to skate and play paddle tennis and basketball. The sidewalk was lined with the usual shit-knack stores and sidewalk vendors hawking everything from handmade purses to kites. The one odd thing I noticed was that all of the meatheads working out in the “beach gym” thing were wearing nothing but what can best be described as tighty-whitey underwear — weird.

After we left Venice beach we hit up the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica where we stopped at a few places to eat and drink. We then walked along the Santa Monica Pier, which was gorgeous and very ‘busy.’ That night we went to a bar called Miyagi’s in West Hollywood (where Hugh Hefner supposedly frequents; no, he nor any Playboy bunnies were there that night). The plan was to jump in and out of a few places but I was smitten with the bartender and didn’t want to leave — it was a good time. Be prepared to pay at this place; the drinks I was getting were $17.50 each (needless to say, I wasn’t aware of this until the tab came).

The next day I drove down to Huntington Beach to meet up with one of my best friends from high school who is now living there. We went down to the beach and the Huntington Pier, which was awesome. The beach was packed and the water was full of kids and surfers. There was actually a big surfing competition going on while we were there, which was kind of neat. We stayed on the pier for quite a while and snapped up a lot of pics. At the end of the pier we watched some guy and his kid reel up a stingray they had caught. The plan that night was to head back up to LA and go out on the town but I was so tired that we decided to hit up a local place in Huntington Beach. Good times.

I Wish I could write more, but I’ve got a lot of other things to take care of. If you’ve e-mailed me within the past week, hold on tight, a reply is forthcoming, but it might take a couple more days — I have a shit ton of e-mail to return.

I did manage to get a few pictures but nothing too great. I forgot my camera on one of the excursions and am waiting to get the pics from the girl whose camera I used that day — I’ll put some pics up shortly after I get those other photos.

City Of Angels

May 18, 2004

I’m headed down to Los Angeles later today with a good friend of mine. I’m incredibly excited as I’ve never been to LA and have always wanted to go (hell, the furthest south in California I’ve ever been is San Luis Obispo). I probably won’t post again until Sunday, but you never know. Expect a new picture set sometime next week and some great stories to boot (though I’ll probably have to confine most of the stories to e-mail, depending  :P).