My Web Presence, it is a Changin'

I'm starting to get tired of this blog, which is a normal thing for me after having the same blog for a year or two. Not sure what I want to use in it's place, or maybe I just need a new web project to occupy my time.

As I hinted at in my last post, I've been really inspired from the content and user base over at hacker news. One such blog-related topic that really stands out, is a user over there who runs their blog through github (example post). The whole idea of a host-less blog is really intriguing to me. People keep coming up with amazing new ways to leverage github and I love it. Maybe I'll try to do something over there.

Music Blog?

For a while now, I've wanted to start a music tumbler. It would be a place where I would just list new music I bought, not like a review-type blog or anything. I've always been a big music freak and lately I've found myself buying a lot of music. I enjoy nearly all types of music, as well as sharing my music with my friends and learning of new bands from them. What better way to find out about new music than to share what I'm into.

We'll have to see if I actually carry through on this idea. I've probably sat down a handful of times to get it going, but always decided against it at the last minute. Maybe talking publicly about it will be the last push I need.

Tumblr Fills a Niche for Me

I created a tumblr account a month or so ago and really like it. I have always found myself posting links to twitter that I enjoyed. I realized that a link-dump style twitter stream was not the type of content I enjoyed reading (as a follower), so why was I forcing my friends to read the exact shit that I didn't want to see? I still wanted to share interesting content with an audience and that's where tumblr steps in.

No More Twitter

I deleted my twitter account last night. With the huge surge in popularity with twitter in the past couple months I have become increasingly annoyed with the service as a whole. The stupid "who can get one million followers" thing between Aston Kutcher and CNN was not quite the last straw for me, but it was close. Then yesterday my friend showed me Ice-T's account (twitter gang? come on Ice-T, don't be a fucking jackass), then that very same day Oprah gets a twitter account and Shaq is replying to her first message? Well fuck me. I am out of here.

We'll have to see how this one pans out. I still want to read what my twitter friends are up to, but I don't want to have an account. Twitter makes it very difficult to do this. Maybe some type of third party service is in order. I've been inspired by my coworkers use of all client-side coding to pull in interesting twitter content, maybe something like that could be cobbled together to allow people to check up on their twitter friends without actually needing an account.

Lots of Rambling Thoughts

In short, I've been going through a lot of changes lately WRT my web presence and how I browse the web. I'll have to see how it all shakes out in the coming months, but this post has helped me solidify some recurring thoughts I've been having and also put my ideas to paper.

Written in Informational / April 18th, 2009 / 7 Comments

The Difference Between Redditors and Hackers

I used to like reddit a lot. Not like I'm old school or anything, but over the last year and a half I've gone through all the phases: "oh this is cool" → "omg I'm totally addicted" → "where's the fresh content?" (current phase).

What has filled that void for me is hacker news. The content there is stimulating and fresh, plus the audience is completely different (read: mature). I'm not sure if reddit has always been this way and I was just oblivious to it until now, but it's like the internet wasteland in there. All the current events are slightly older than I think they should be, the pictures are 99% recycled internet rubbish, the videos are 99% recycled internet rubbish, and then there's the "omg the world is out to get us" kind of idiotic crap that seems to be highly encouraged.

For me, nothing sums it up more succinctly than two (#1 upvoted on their respective sites) different comments on the same article. It is an article about a student at Boston College being investigated for computer crimes. The specific article is actually not so much about the investigation, but more about the EFF fighting to get the student cleared of any charges, have all of his computer equipment returned, and any evidence that is found on said equipment be inadmissible in court. Sounds like pretty clear "oh no the government is attacking us computer people" kind of thing, right? That is until you actually read the original warrant (the EFF has politely made available to us), which paints an entirely different picture than we are originally led to believe.

But that's not why I'm writing this. I don't really care about the case, or the student. I care about having quality online content with contributors who put thought into what they're saying.

Enough of reading a fucking sensational headline and spitting out the first thing that comes to your mind.

I didn't mean for this to turn into a big rant, but I guess it did. I wanted to just show these two quotes and then be done.

hacker quote on above mentioned article, it is the number one upvoted reply:

Has anyone actually read the warrant application? The allegations were made by a close acquaintance of the accused who directly observed him changing grades for students and cracking into other systems; the emails in question were traced back to the accused's hostname.

The EFF article completely mischaracterizes a 90% legitimate warrant.

redditor quote on the same article, it is the number one upvoted reply:

"a black screen with white font which he uses prompt commands on" HAHAHA! Oh Noes! We haz a haX0r!

Enough of this. Do not pay attention to sensational headlines and soundbites taken out of context. They are testing you, to see if you are paying attention. Let's show them that we are.

Written in Informational / April 14th, 2009 / 0 Comments

President Obama, You Are My President

When it finally hit me that Barack Obama is now President Obama, I was elated. Maybe even a little teary eyed. I mean, we've had this George W. Bush joker supposedly running this country for 8 years now. Eight. Long. Years. Sure Kerry wasn't a great candidate, but for pete's sake he was a million times better than President Bush. We lost a lot of hope after that election. It was brutal.

But now we've got Obama! We've got President Obama! Hooray!!!

Did you watch the inauguration though? How the oath was a little messed up and so when President Obama (he was officially president by the time he read the oath) repeated the (incorrect) oath, he stumbled a bit. Because he knew it was recited incorrectly.

Whatever, it didn't matter because according to the 20th Amendment, the term of the previous president officially ends at noon and the term of their successor begins ...

The terms of the President and Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January, and the terms of Senators and Representatives at noon on the 3d day of January, of the years in which such terms would have ended if this article had not been ratified; and the terms of their successors shall then begin.

So that's it right? It's official? Well, not according to Fox "Fair and Balanced" News. Did anyone see these clips of talking heads on Fox talk about how Obama wasn't really the president because he "flubbed" the oath? About how because the oath was in the constitution and Obama didn't recite it correctly, that he wasn't really president? Fuck those jackasses. I mean really. Fuck. Them.

Great, it's in the constitution that the president needs to take oath before taking office. Yes, and the 20th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America says that the former president's duty ends at noon of inauguration day and their successor's term begins. That would be regardless of any oaths being taken.

Please President Obama, can you introduce a "stupid news" tax or something? Maybe a "it will make you less intelligent to listen to this" tax? That would be splendid.

Oh and on the subject of taking oaths on the bible, I thought this little tidbit from the Bible itself was interesting:

"Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not break your oath, but keep the oaths you have made to the Lord.' But I tell you, Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God's throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. Simply let your 'Yes' be 'Yes,' and your 'No,' 'No'; anything beyond this comes from the evil one." - Jesus (Matthew 5:33-37)

-source

Let us say 'yes' when we mean yes and 'no' when we mean no, and just leave it at that.

Written in Informational / January 23rd, 2009 / 0 Comments

T-Mobile G1 First Impressions

I've been patiently waiting for the Android-powered phone for quite a while now and last night my G1 arrived a whole 12 days earlier than expected. I was like a little school girl with her very own pony. I've now given myself a little over 24 hours to actually use the phone, talk on it, play games on it, etc., and wanted to provide some early feedback for anyone considering the phone.

Setup

Using my old SIM from my previous phone, the G1 came with a weakly charged battery, enough to get me up and running. I was instantly prompted with a Google login screen (or you can create an account if you don't already have one). Once past there, you're in and ready to use the phone. The next thing I had to do was get my contacts setup. Since the G1 uses your gmail contact list, and I've been using contacts stored on my SIM, I had a lot of work to do. This process was painful because although the G1 provides an "import from SIM" feature, you have to add contacts one at a time. This sucked. Somebody will probably tell me there is a bulk-add feature and that will be funny.

The next step once I got all my contacts from my old phone into my gmail contact list was to merge records together. This was another painful task because I had previous contacts in my gmail contact list with email only and no phone, and now I had many duplicates except they only had a phone number. So I had to merge them one by one, always having to delete the duplicate contact before saving the primary because gmail won't let you have two contacts with the same email address. Luckily, this can all be done on a computer since the G1 auto-syncs your contacts.

So that entire process took me about an hour, but it is actually something I've needed to do for a long, long time. Many people more organized than myself probably already have well-maintained contact lists, in which case this setup process will be a breeze.

That was about all I did last night, once finished I plugged it in since by then it was ready for a full charge.

Daily Usage

Before I left the house in the morning I had enabled the wifi feature and had all the auto-syncing (gmail, calendar, contacts) running. It was about 9am when I unplugged the phone from the charger. I'd say by about 11:30 my battery life was at 40% which was pathetic. So I plugged it into my computer with the handy USB cable provided and let it charge while I worked and played with the phone. As an aside, when plugged in via USB, the phone is treated as a standard USB mass storage device to your computer. What, you can just drag and drop music, videos, pictures or whatever onto your phone? Yup. Awesome.

So the battery thing turns out to be a big deal. Guess that's a good thing because it means (cross my fingers) that there will be an update to Android and/or the G1 to conserve battery life. In the meantime, I picked up a few good tricks for preserving battery life:

1. Turn off the auto-sync of your contacts (I have found this to be the single biggest consumer of battery life)
2. Don't leave the GPS on
3. Reduce screen brightness to 30% or so. It's still plenty bright at this level.
4. Set the screen timeout to 30 seconds or leave it at the default 1 minute but be diligent about locking the screen when you're done with it.
5. Don't leave the wifi on, although I'm not convinced this is a big offender, still need to do more testing.

So why is the auto-sync of the contact list so bad? Well, because it is CONSTANTLY polling gmail for an updated contact list. It's fucking ridiculous how often it checks. You can go to the auto-sync settings page and with contact sync enabled, you can watch the damn thing sync (which takes anywhere from 5-20 seconds), wait for not more than 1 second, then sync again. And again. And again. Ummm, hello, can I have a sync frequency for the love of god? If you're not going to utilize data push technology, you've got to let me adjust the frequency.

Anyway, once I turned off the auto-sync contacts, my battery life improved dramatically. It has been unplugged for more than 8 hours and I still have 50% battery life left, and that's with wifi turned on. My contacts don't really change very often, and if they do I can just hop over to the sync settings page and force a sync, no problem.

Everything else is pretty normal, phone works good, audio quality is good, dialing on the screen is easy. The web browser is great (WebKit-based) though a bit tricky to use at first when trying to click tiny little links on a page, but now that I can zoom quicker and also found out I can use the scrollball to navigate my click focus, I'm becoming better at using it.

I also setup a separate email account (IMAP+SMTP) so I can check my work email from time to time, though I chose not to have it auto-check this account. I've read some complaints about non-gmail email not working reliably, but so far I've had no issues.

My only other minor gripe is the touch screen doesn't seem to register my finger press from time to time. Maybe it's my fat fingers or maybe it's a dirty screen, or maybe I'm just not good at using a touch screen (this is my first), but I will say that I've noticed less and less "dead clicks" as I use this phone more. It's one of those things that frustrates the hell out of you for the first hour or so, then after a few days you say to yourself "this is a piece of cake, what was I whining about?".

I could go on and on about general usage of the phone, but by now we've all played with an iPhone right? Yeah, it's like that. I want to talk about the Android Market.

Android Market

This is the shit. I will be honest, I barely got my phone running and I was in the market downloading all sorts of stuff. You've got apps you might have heard about like Shazam (music identifier) or iPhone similar apps like Tunes Remote among loads of others. There's also about 5 (and growing) different "flashlight" apps. So silly. What's really cool about the app marketplace is not so much the apps themselves, but the fact that ANYBODY can put an app in there without needing to approve it. Plus, with a setting on the G1, you can run unsigned apps on your phone which basically (at least as I understand it) means you don't have to go through the official Android Market to install an application. This is very cool.

What really makes this all possible is the Android platform is open-source and their development SDK is available for download right now. Sure, it requires you to write code in Java, which for me personally, is not a pleasurable experience, but I went from downloading the SDK to running Hello World in no time at all. I'm really excited about this.

I don't really know what more to say, I've only had the phone 1 day so these are some really early impressions, but I am very impressed. Despite the battery thing, which I think I've taken care of with the contacts syncing bullshit, I am very pleased with my new toy.

What are you waiting for? Go get yourself one now. Hey, they're cheaper than an iPhone (with a 2-year contract) and instead of being with a notoriously bad customer service company you will be with one of the highest rated customer service companies (in the world of cell providers). That doesn't suck. No I'm not marketing for tmobile, I was just scarred by att/cingular after being with them for 6 years. That's why I'm talking about the G1 right now instead of the iPhone a year and a half ago.

Update: It's been about 3 days now since I got the phone and there is no doubt that the contacts list auto-sync feature is what was draining the battery quickly. I leave wifi on all the time and I still have half (or a little less) battery left after the end of the day. The contacts list will force sync itself with gmail when you edit anything in the phone, so as long as you manually force a sync if you change things from within gmail (away from your G1) then you can disable the contact list auto-sync and have no side effects.

Written in Informational / October 30th, 2008 / 6 Comments