Plug for Pangie

Pangie asked me to plug his new blog to get some people heading over there. I think he is required to keep a blog for one of his classes, but as always his writing is really good. If you are a teacher then its probably more interesting but it can be funny even if you aren't. Check it out!

October Is Crazy!

I haven't blogged much the past few weeks because I've been mad busy. This October is hellish at work because of a few deadlines and then to top it off we've been trying to plan the wedding! Ok enough complaining. The wedding planning is actually going pretty well. We picked a date and a place and as soon as we book it I'll put another post here. Probably today or tomorrow.

I told Tora that I'd put up a web site with all the information about it but I've been moving a little slow on getting that done. She even photoshopped up some templates for it so I wouldn't have to be creative at all. I guess I have no excuse, I'm just a shameless procrastinator. I did register a domain name and set up hosting for it though. If anyone is thinking about registering a domain name then I'd highly recommend doing it through google. Its $10 and they annonymize your contact info and hook your domain right into google apps. This means that you can use the gmail interface for your email addresses at that domain, pretty sweet! I set up hosting on Joyent which seems pretty good, but I haven't used it much. I'm thinking about maybe hosting the blog over there when I get some time, I even re-registered cakeface.net for a future site. I had owned that domain name but let it lapse last year.

Thats whats up, if I had more time I'd post about Ian's awesome Halloween party that I went to Saturday night but I don't. Lata

Vintage Nike Shoes

My friend Seton gave me a call the other day to let me know that Nike is re-making many of their vintage shoes from the late 1970's. As someone who used to steal my dads 25 year old racers just because they looked cool, I am really excited about this. Yeah they probably aren't great for your feet and they probably won't help all that much toward a new P.R., but they just might make you feel like Pre running in shoes made on Bowerman's waffle iron.

I'll probably pick up a pair or two to wear around. Not sure if I'm going to try running or racing in them though. Mostly because I don't run or race too much anymore, unless I'm in the mood for some good old self loathing.

Tango: According to Cvaty

Check out Tango Icons, according to cvaty they will win.

(2:56:29 PM) cvaty: tango
(2:56:32 PM) cvaty: the icons that will win
(2:56:39 PM) cvaty: they've all ready won
(2:56:41 PM) cvaty: who am i kidding
(2:56:51 PM) cvaty: cauz eventually
(2:56:59 PM) cvaty: everybodys gonna use the same themed icons
(2:57:02 PM) cvaty: and icons will just be
(2:57:10 PM) cvaty: and tangos getting to that point

OpenMoko

So I've been drooling over the iPhone since it came out but I have some serious reservations about getting it. Yeah its awesome and slick and it will make women want me and men want to be me, but it costs a freakin fortune! Even after they knocked $200 off of the price it still costs $400 for the "cheap" version. Then they lock you into a service plan with AT&T. I'm not totally against AT&T but I don't like the idea of being locked into it for 2 years are whatever. Also it has wifi and internet access but no IM client. WTF is up with that? Also you can't just install software on it because its all locked down by Apple. I know that hackers have unlocked the iPhone and I'm sure that I could follow the instructions and do it myself, but why bother when there is going to be such a better alternative with OpenMoko!

From what I've gathered so far OpenMoko is a linux distribution meant to run on phones. The project has one phone so far that is built just to run it, but it has been installed on other smart phones with some success. I've always felt that cell phones were kind of a dubious racket, with all their locking you in to service plans and charging out the ass for anything extra. Having a totally unlocked phone running free and open source software seems really cool to me. Almost rebellious, as much as having a cell phone can be rebllious, which is not much.

The one phone that is built to run OpenMoko, the Neo1973, seems pretty sweet. It has a iPhone-esque look and a touch screen. They are only offering development versions right now which require you to flash a copy of the OS and filesystem to it but they say a real version will be coming between October and December. I'll be keeping an eye on this and I'll probably get one soon!

Launchy

Heard about this cool program called Launchy the other day. I've been using it today at work and I like it a lot! It is a quick way to run programs or open files on your computer without messing around with the start menu, desktop shortcuts, or folders. After you install it just hit <alt> + <space> and it pops up a box for you to type in. This is kind of like the run box (<windows key> + <r>) but it looks much better and is a lot smarter. You can pick from lots of great looking skins and customize where the app looks for files. It sort of makes a guess as to what you want too so if you open the same programs often it will pick those to show up first. Try it out!

Virtualization

Somehow this week I started checking out virtualization software. Virutalization software lets you run multiple OS's simultaneously as if they were each running on a single machine. There are many ways to do this and a number of software packages that allow it. I looked at Xen, Qemu, and VMware. I actually ran virutal machines using Qemu and VMware but not Xen. This technology is really interesting and I think its going to take off in the future. You can see evidence of this by its adoption in the form of virtual private servers at hosting companies like RimuHosting and the fantastic IPO that VMware had. Now seems like a good time to learn more about this stuff, especially with the way VMware has been hiring.

VMware has opened up a few of its software products as free downloads. I tried out VMware Player which lets you run virtual machines on your computer but not create them. To get the virtual machine images you can download them from VMware's catalog, download other 3rd party pre-built images, or "roll your own". I grabbed a preinstalled version of Fedora 7 and tried it out. It works really well. The only catch is that for it to work smoothely you really need to install a set of tools from VMware, but they are only available in the paid for versions. I downloaded a trial version of their VMware workstation and used that to get the tools. The tools make things like mouse movement and sharing files between the two systems easier. Right now I haven't done too much else with it besides install, but I look forward to checking out more of the features later.

del.icio.us

Because I am a Web 2.0 whore, I set up a del.icio.us account. Del.icio.us is a site that has community bookmark lists. Its got some tagging features and users and whatever other features you'd expect from a respectable web 2.0 site (like facebook integration). What sucked me in was the firefox plugin that lets you easily tag sites as you surf. I'm not really sure if its going to kick ass or suck but I always run across random shit on the internet and most of the time I don't feel like bookmarking it in firefox. Its funny how I have a high standard for storing bookmarks there, but whatever. Another thing I've been using for bookmarks is the Firefox plugin Foxmarks. It lets you synch your firefox bookmarks between different computers.

I think I'm just going to put random sites that I think are funny or useful on this del.icio.us thing. I'll see if I can get a "latest bookmarks" sort of linking thing going on this page.

Also: JK where are the comments on JK math?

Craigslist and Google Maps

Found a pretty decent Google Maps mashup called Housingmaps.com. It puts apartment listings from Craigslist on a Google map. The site has a few options to limit the criteria that you use for searching such as price or if the listing has photos. If you are like me and pick apartments more on the area that they are located than anything else then this might really help.

CSS sucks

My css style is not all that I thought it was. I just clicked on amurica and realized that my main content box has nothing to do with the size of the nav bar. Or maybe its the other way around.

Regardless, this means I'm going to have to dig into my template again and fix it. I know its just a stupid thing but it will bug me if I don't. I might spice up the page a bit while I'm at it. Maybe I'll put some sweet images and whatnot. Maybe not. I like it really really simple.

While I'm making a post I'd like to link an article I just read by Wikipedia founder Larry Whales. He gives a shoutout to wowwiki so I'm a big fan.

A good example of this is a successful wiki called wowwiki.com , a wiki about the online computer game World of Warcraft.

here is the rest of the article about Online Collaboration.