Monday, December 8, 2008

About LCDs

For the majority of the past 8 years I've been a professional student. What does this mean? No money. So with my empty pockets I decided to completely ignore everything that was happening with flat panel displays. I mean, why drool over something that you can't have?

Now that the money is flowing in regularly I've decided that maybe its time to have one of those ultra cool computer setups as seen on Flickr's Pixel Rigs Group. Well maybe not so extreme.

Problem was, I had no idea what were the pros and cons between the various LCD technologies. Enter a couple of threads on hardforum. One gives an excellent overview on the current TFT LCD technologies and the pros/cons between all of them. The other provides an almost complete index of all the LCDs currently out there and the kind of technologies each of them uses.

I'm still probably going to go with my original choice of a Dell Ultrasharp 2408wfp, but it was nice to learn about the various technologies out there.

Thursday, December 4, 2008

Learning Cascading Style Sheets

Recently, I've decided that it was time to do a Winter cleanup on all my web content. Who knows maybe this will be a yearly tradition! The first step for me though, is changing the look of my home page. The thing looks abysmal:


So I've been dabbling around with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). I've played with it a couple times over the years, but unfortunately, its one of those things you got to work with constantly to get really good at.  Considering this, I decided it was best to go back to basics.

First google hit for CSS, is the site Cascading Style Sheets which provides an awesome index for websites that will help you learn CSS.

Friday, November 21, 2008

Ruby on Rails

Just wanted to post this guide a guy I had a couple of classes with during graduate school.  Seems to have a lot of useful links on learning Ruby on Rails.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

What's going on with biowhat?

What's been going on here you may be asking. Well I've been pretty much swamped with my job at INCOGEN. I have every intention to keep this site going but it just has not been a huge priority.

What we may have going on here, though is the addition of a new writer. Hopefully he'll start posting soon. A goal of mine is also to revamp the look of this site as well as the writing style.

So if you still have us in your reader, please stay tuned. I apologize for the lack of content and as always feedback/questions are always welcome.

Monday, November 10, 2008

Streaming Media from OSX to a PS3

The dust has settled around here and my entertainment center is close to complete. I just have to finish building the projector screen and organize some of the wires.

One thing I was worried about was trying to figure out how I was going to stream media from our computers to the PS3. I figured I'd have to dust off and upgrade my old XP box as the machines we primarily use here at home are Macs. But alas, I found a couple of sites that cover how to stream media from OSX to a PS3:

Update:  Found another useful link I'll have to check out once I get around to playing with this whole thing:

  • Plex a Media Center designed for OS X

Friday, November 7, 2008

Network of Linux Machines

I'm not really sure if I'll ever have a network of Linux machines. Managing two OSX machines is enough trouble as it is. But if multiple Linux machines ever becomes the case in my network, I know I'll have a solution in NIS to help manage IDs and such across the network. My basic understanding of this, and I emphasize basic, is that NIS is Linux's implementation of MS's Active Directory.

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Election Day '08

For some reason, with this year's election I decided that I was not only going to vote but get all the freebies as well.

The first stop of course, was to get out and vote to obtain the ever so valuable voting sticker (yes, I am actually in it for the electoral process as well). Surprisingly the lines were non existent considering all the hype of ginamorous voting lines. That's right, I used ginamorous.


I had been starving myself on purpose earlier in the day so that I could enjoy all the free goodies, so the first place I headed to, was Krispy Kreme for my doughnut.


The line here was longer than at the Voting Precinct but I obtained my free doughnut.


The doughnut was OK but not worth my waiting to eat. The next stop was Starbucks for my cup of coffee.


Again it wasn't anything to write home about but free is free.

The next stop was later in the day as Ben & Jerry's had a window of time for their deal. The line for this place was insane. This was probably due to the fact that it is the only Ben & Jerry's in the RVA.


After downing my cup of ice cream, I headed over to the Chick-fil-a over by my house for the free chicken sandwich.


So was it all worth it? Not sure. In writing this, I find it in no way enjoyable and am deducting cool points from myself. Maybe I'm going through a caffeine and sugar low. Although I do feel I will wired until the AM to see who wins the election, but I think I may have shaved a couple months off my life.

UPDATE: Obama wins and its not even the AM yet. Maybe I'll clean my office or something while this sugar rush wears off.

Macs and MySQL

Just realized that the CocoaMySQL project has been discontinued. I found the new branch off in Sequel Pro the other day. Looks like something to try out if I'm ever freed from the clutches of Oracle.

Todo lists and such

I'm a big fan of todo lists but have never fully 100% incorporated them into my daily life. The closest I've gotten was a moleskine notebook that had quite the run and is still a favorite in my book.

I stumbled upon this iPhone and Tasks article the other day and figured it might be use to some people who read this blog.

Enjoy!

Monday, October 20, 2008

Where have I been?

No where really. I just haven't been doing a lot of random web browsing. I think work and deadlines do that to people.

Anyhow, the most useful link I've found in the last several days covers the Secrets of Auto Detailing. I like to take care of my things. Hopefully I'll have time to take care of this before it gets too cold.

UPDATE: Well this detailing stuff is way more complicated than the mentioned site describes. Found a forum entry that has recommendations on products to buy and things to do. Looks like I'll be dropping the car off at the detail shop.

Thursday, October 2, 2008

Bible Word Clouds

I've started bible studies recently. This is not because I'm a super devout Christian. Its because I believe there is a little more to life than programming and blogging. Seriously! I feel the need to explore various religions. Sure I'm starting out with Christianity (its the one I'm most familiar with), but I do plan on exploring Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, and other religions. I feel people generally tend to find opinions about or judge these other religions without ever exploring them. And this journey for me is not to judge, but to discover the common ground between all these religions. It's something that, in my opinion, people really do not focus on.

So with this current journey, I've found some way to involve computers and programming. Its just a thought for an application. An aspect of this application includes the idea of word clouds (also known as tag clouds). These are essentially a measure of frequent a particular word occurs in text. The more frequent the word occurs the larger the font.

An excellent example of this is some word clouds that I found produced from the Bible.

Canned Tuna

It looks like I'll finally be making my rounds back into a gym sometime soon. Its not because I'm getting fat or anything. Its just that I enjoy working out and challenging myself physically. For this reason I've actually considered doing a triathlon.

Well like every workout freak will tell you, the truth of the matter is that the majority of training has to do with your diet. You can work out all you want, but without a good diet you are not achieving your workout goals without the good balance of exercise and diet.

So I've been considering that lately and have decided to attack the 10 cans of tuna we have in our cupboard. I stumbled on this excellent site for basic ways to spice up tuna for those of us who get tired of eating the same old can daily. Enjoy!

Monday, September 29, 2008

Programming for the iPhone

As I primarily work on a Mac and own an iPhone I've been interested in iPhone development for quite a while. I have the necessary license and several programming videos but like always don't have the time. Besides, I've decided to prioritize mastering JAVA and picking up some RUBY first.

Although I've decided to put my iPhone programming on hold tuaw had a pretty good post the other day on how to get started in iPhone programming.

UPDATE: It seems apple has gotten rid of their iPhone Non Disclosure Agreement. Now developers will actually be able to help each other with their programs. Its good to see that Apple is starting to make decisions that just make sense.

Our Pandora's Box

Well it seems like we've opened up Pandora's Box in our home. My wife and I were doing just fine with no TV and cable. This was mainly caused due to my laziness of putting up our home entertainment system. This all ended when the necessary cables came in the other day.

I immediately got the Wii and PS3 hooked up to the projector (which is projecting a beautful 80 inch image). I'd take some pics and post them online but I fear the resulting damage of turning on that system again would cause. Since the system was setup we decided to go ahead and buy Mario Kart Wii. That game is addicting! We had a semi gathering here on Saturday and everyone was instantly hooked.

We're so hooked that yesterday before we could leave to a friend's house for dinner and we had to sneak in a couple games of racing. So be forwarned if I disappear from posting for a couple of days you'll know the cause.

On a random web browsing note, I'm interested in setting up our system so that it plays .avi's and other multimedia formats. So far I've found TVersity but that seems to be a Windows only solution, BLEH! We'll see what else I can figure out in the weeks to come.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Projector Screen

As the arrival date for my HDMI and Component Cables come closer I'm starting to consider what kind of effort has to go into building the projector screen. I was able to find two good sites that had information on how to build a projector screen:
After considering these two solutions I might have to go to the total 'easy' route and just buy from Visual Apex.

Rubik Cubes

So based on my profile pic its obvious that I have a thing for Rubik Cubes. I blame this all on Mr JoyRun.

Funny story about them. A bunch of buddies and myself were heading to Las Vegas for my bachelor party. We were at the airport and I was showing them how to solve the original rubik's cube. One of their wives call and he explains what we're doing. Later, I find out that she said something along the lines of "that's going to be the geekiest bachelor party in Vegas ever." Less than 12 hours later we run into Paris Hilton at a club at Vegas. Same buddy calls his wife to tell her about it and she promptly slaps herself in the head. True story!

Anyways the same buddy sent me a link to this new rubik's cube that looks pretty challenging. That one will have to wait until after I solve the rubik's revenge and the professor's cube sitting on my shelf.

Monday, September 22, 2008

Grilled Steak and Vegetables

Yesterday when Cooky and I got home from our football game I decided to fire up the hibachi grill for a couple of hot dogs. I got the grill going so good, I just wanted to start grilling anything we had! What started with hot dogs, continued with grilled chicken, and eventually to tonight's get together.

Cooky and I used to have people over a lot. But recently with us moving to the new apartment and her starting residency we've haven't gotten to host our typical get togethers. So I decided to have a couple of friends over for some grilled steak. Of course with me, a couple of friends always turn into more than several. One day I think this will drive Cooky beserk, but for the time being it doesn't seem to bother her much. In fact, I like to think its a good stress relief after a 12 hour shift at the hospital

It ended up being a great time. We got to use the new table we got from IKEA and had a large dinner with close friends (7 people). I ended up trying to grill some vegetables base on some tips I found from here, here, and here. I'd say it turned out pretty well as we wiped out all the food we had including: rice, grilled Omaha steak (Thanks Mom Miranda), grilled vegetables, and a cherry pie. Thanks everyone for coming over!

SIDE NOTE: As I write this, it seems like the Chargers are letting yet another team back in the game during the 4th quarter. When is this madness going to stop? I'm glad we don't have cable right now.

Surge Protectors

I finally got the projector up this past weekend and ordered the remaining cables. All that's left to do is build a screen to accommodate the whoooping 70" I'm projecting. Also in the process I decided that several surge protectors were necessary to protect all my toys useful electronic hardware from frying out.

I decided that I did not want to re-experience the fiasco that happened at bestbuy a month ago and that it was time to look to good old google for information on surge protectors. How stuff works has a very informative article on an introduction to surge protectors and how they work.

Of course from as a couple of guys posted on this deal at bensbargains, the best way to protect your precious hardware is to just unplug it while not using it. Keep it simple!

Friday, September 19, 2008

Free Course Sites

One day I hope to actually go back to school and get my PhD. I didn't really applied to any big name schools for my BS or MS degrees. I did learn early on though, that while the school does have an impact on the quality of your education, what you make out of it is ultimately the deciding factor.

I have always been curious what the difference is. Fortunately for me a lot of school programs out there are moving towards posting their lecture videos on the web. The following is a list of sites I've found over the years:

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Swap Space

In an attempt to keep the learning going I've decided to go ahead with the Gentoo installation on an old machine. I know it'll be a time drain, but the brain has to keep on working right?

I've also decided that in the process I was going to nitpick and look up every part of the process I did not 100% understand. Today's winner was swap space.

I was familiar with the concept but the linked article gives a good overview of Linux's use of swap space and how it can be configured.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Loans and Extra Cash

I've been looking at the loans my wife and I have and have decided its time for another programming project. This one will probably shoot to the top though considering the longer I put it off the more money we loose.

Everybody has some kind of loan, whether it be for school, a car, credit debt, whatever. And there are programs out there to help people look at what kind of payments they have to make, how much money is going to principal versus interest, etc. In fact I've been using this simple and straightforward online tool for our loans.

The real issue is, most people have multiple loans. And these loans can be totally different: they may have different lifetimes, different interest rates, and other kinds of funky rules. So what is out there that is available for people to track these multiple loans? I did a brief search yesterday and wasn't able to find any good free applications. I know some may say, you can just set up an Excel spreadsheet but that seems like a rather tedious pain in the butt to me!

What I want to have is an application that tracks all my loans and give me all the information I mentioned above. But what I want most, is for the application to tell me which loan do I put the extra cash I have at the end of each month. I need an application to handle all this!

So like I said its something I'm probably going to build myself considering the need. So far my basic research for various loan equations have led me here. I'm sure there'll be many more links to come.

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Typing Speed

Steve Yegge had an interesting post the other day about programmers who do not know how to type. This reminded me of a site that I had checked out a while ago that I found to be pretty good for teaching people how to touch type (I had known how to touch type before but wanted to play around after getting an ultimate das keyboard).

Yegge mentioned that he had a friend who could touch type with one hand at 70 words-per-minute (WPM). I tested myself and it looks like I max out at 66 which is kind of pathetic against a guy using one hand. Yegge himself mentioned that he does about 120. Looks like I have a little practice ahead of me!

Football Sunday

It was a rather busy football Sunday today in the Castillo house. Cooky and I woke up this morning and headed out to our first Extreme Social River City Football Game. We lost the game, but had a lot of fun. I think everyone was finally exposed to Cooky's ultra-competitive side. Especially when she showed flashes of Randy Mossesque behavior when yelling that she was open.

We came home after that and decided that we both wanted to work on some QB skills. For her, because she wants to be more comfortable throwing the ball in games and for me, because I'm pretty sure she throws a much better football than me. Hey, I'm man enough to admit it! Plus I want to have to save my future children from telling their friends that Mommy taught them how to throw. Hmmm, maybe that's further humility I'm trying to save myself from.

Anyways, I was able to find a number of QB drills that our QBs used to run in training camp. Plus youtube had a number of videos that cover basic concepts in throwing:
After that we spent the rest of the day watching football with some friends, only to have it end with the Chargers's disappointing loss. I was only able to watch the first half of that game and honestly our pass rush is non existent without Merriman. Apparently we were cheated in the final seconds of the game with a premature whistle on a fumble that should have been ours, but that doesn't excuse the first half. Despite that craziness, it was a pretty good day.

Well, I guess its back to work until next Sunday. Hope everyone has a good week!

Saturday, September 13, 2008

Why Bookmark?

Seriously, why do we even bookmark anymore? Now I'm not talking about that little piece of paper you used to mark in a book. I'm talking about those hundreds of links you have in your Bookmark Menu or Toolbar that have not been visited to in over a year.

I myself am guilty of it. That's partially my reason for starting this blog. Between my computer and my delicious, I'd say I have close to 800 bookmarks. That's insane!

Now here is the real issue, if I was presented with those 800 bookmarks today I would not know what 90% of them were for. I would have to revisit each site and spend about 15 seconds or so trying to figure out what I saved them for. That's about 3 hours sorting through bookmarks. That's a waste of bleeping time!

So one's initial questions would be why do you have that many bookmarks? Or don't you delete them when you're done? Or isn't your bookmark title specific enough to tell you what the bookmark is for? I'll admit there's quite a bit of self inflicted pain here. But it's what the technology I am using currently supports.

So back to the purpose of this blog. What I've been doing is, every site I visit daily that I find of bookmarking worthiness I post about it here and write a little splurge about it. I mean I feel its far more likely for me to go back and read through my posts rather than shift through old bookmarks.

But what about the social aspect of it? What about sites such as delicious (just realized their URL is delicious.com now rather than the creative del.icio.us, bummer) that allow users to share their bookmarks? You know, that is a problem... my current methodology of "bookmarking" does not support me sharing my bookmarks on those sites.

What would be cool though is if someone developed a blogging client or blogger javascript that once I posted a post would somehow take all the links in that post and store them on my delicious account. What would be even cooler is if this application would take the labels from a blogger post and create them as tags to be associated with the delicious bookmarks. Sound crazy? Looks like people are already trying to build something such as this. We'll see if I can find something suitable or build something better.

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Publishing Source Code in Blogs

This is a topic I spent sporadic time looking into here and there. The main issue is if you want to write about code on a web page or blog, how do you go about preserving the format and code highlighting as they are in most major editors and IDEs?

I've found two main solutions which I find to be helpful, one that uses javascript to highlight code as its presented in your code and another that uses an emacs buffer to translate code from its formatted and highlighted form into HTML source.

SyntaxHighlighter

This is the more convenient of the two methods as you can do it straight from blogger. It involves hosting some code and modifying your blogger template to utilize that code. Then when you post code to blogger you utilize certain codes to provide the syntax highlighting. The sites I found to be most informative were the following:

htmlize.el

This method involves the use of emacs but is not limited to the languages supported by SyntaxHighlighter. Since emacs is such a widely used editor I would assume that syntax highlighting is supported for just about every programming language. I have no experience using emacs, but its only been on my radar to try out one day, considering my extensive use of Linux and VI. What better time than now?

htmlize.el (follow the link for the source) is an emacs package that "converts the buffer text and the associated decorations to HTML" as quoted by the original author. It was interesting because Steve Yegge described in a blog post of how he attempted to implent such a tool but was later pointed to htmlize by one of the comments on his blog.

Conclusion

I'm going to try both methods as time permits and provide more feedback here. If you're not interested in syntax highlighting and just code formatting than you can always go with this blog, that provides a text box for pasting formatted code and converts it into the necessary html format. Hope this helps!

Bash Part 3

I finished up the last part of IBM's Bash by Example series last night. It was a very informative read and provided a great real use example of bash. I would definitely recommend the series for anyone interested in advancing their knowledge of bash. It made me feel like taking one of these old laptops in the corner and building Gentoo, but alas that's a project for another day!

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Cappuccino

Someone mentioned this web framework entitled Cappcucino in their twitter the other day. Considering the person's level of programming expertise I figured its something that's worth checking out.

Bash Part 2

I've continued my journey of mastering Bash. I made it through IBM's second example in their Bash by example series. Also along the way I've stumbled upon another informative tutorial on Bash.

Some may suggest that this is a waste of time as I probably won't be building anything based on Bash, but I feel its good to be informed in some of these fundamentals. After I finish these tutorials I plan on spending a couple of weeks reading some Bash scripts just to continue the learning.

Thursday, September 4, 2008

Lean How to Program

Found this randomly on slashdot the other day. A site that teaches you how to program online. No compilers necessary as everything is hosted on their site. The only interesting aspect to myself is that everything is taught in javascript.

Bash Scripting

On twitter the other day, someone posted a pretty cool reference to bash. This got the old Linux user in me a little intrigued so I spent an hour fine tuning my bash skills. How else better to learn than by example? So I found a couple of sites that give good step by steps of Bash examples. The first was IBM's Bash by example and the second is Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide. I've gone through IBM's first lesson and hopefully I'll make through the next couple this week. This does not really help with what I've been working on, but its good to keep the brain running!

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Project Management

Just an informative page as I continue my run through the Gauntlet known as project management.

Cables, Wires, and Bears. Oh No!

No this post really doesn't have anything to do with Bears. But I figured if I didn't throw that in the title, people would not get the reference. So replace Bears with bestbuy. I've mentioned in previous posts about the home theater I'm trying to set up for myself and the Wife. Let me tell you, its no cheap or easy task!

I went to BB about a week ago and got thoroughly ripped off on the insane markup they have on cables. After realizing my newbiness, I went ahead and did what I should of done in the first place... consult the net.

Here is a good review from audioholics on receivers and their multitude of connections.

Also as a side note to myself (which is supposed to be the entire intention of this blog after all). Here's a brief snippet from audioholics describing what I'll do with the speaker cables once they arrive.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Performance Tuning Best Practices for MySQL

This video was highly recommended by a user on a Bioinformatic mailing list I follow. I'm far from being a database Guru. So these are the kind of things that may help!

Monday, August 18, 2008

Ad and url Blocking

Lets face it, there have been a time here or there where you were force fed web content and just wished you had some kind of blocking solution. For ads, a lot of people use the firefox plugin, AdBlock. While AdBlock is good for the everyday user what about a solution that doesn't require a browser plug-in or allows the user control to the point where they can block not only ads but urls also? Recently one of the mailing lists I subscribe to covered such a solution. The suggested solution was to setup a machine that would run DansGuardian, an Open Source web content filter, which would in turn serve the requested pages to the users on the network. This seems like the ideal solution for my use, but its something that will have to be looked into in the future.

Reading Code

Recently I've started to have to go through some of the code of developers that no longer work for our company. I discovered after reading Joel's article on reading code one of the better approaches is to attempt code reading as a group. Also in my search I discovered that Scott Hanselman does a series called "The Weekly Source Code" where he takes a snippet of code and does a brief review on it. These are two resources I'd definitely recommend if you want to improve yourself as a developer.

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Colossal Cave

A couple nights ago, I encountered the Colossal Cave, the first text-based adventure game. Anyways after a painful hour of trying to get through the game I remembered that google is my friend and found a couple of guides:

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Editors! Editors!

There are a ton of editors out there. Quite a number that I would like to learn for programming/historic purposes. I'd say I'm a novice at best with vim. I've barely touched emacs. But I'd definitely want to get more of a firm grasp on both to understand what all the Linux editor wars are all about.

Finally there's TextMate. I bought this a couple years back with the MacHeist bundle but have not made the most out of it. I've got the online manual at my disposal but no time. Time seems to be the one resource that is constantly elusive.

Monday, August 4, 2008

Building Web Applications

Someone from the local Ruby Group posted this link to a resource for building web applications. One of the many projects I have in the queue.

Home Theater

Well I have all the components for my home theater. The following are audioholics reviews of each individual piece:

Monday, July 14, 2008

Xobni

I stumbled onto this pretty cool looking plug-in for Outlook. So cool that I'm considering using Outlook as an email client, which is pretty hard in my case since I'm on a Mac the majority of my time now.

It was built by a company called Xobni (inbox spelled backwards). I find this especially intriguing as they received their initial funding from Paul Graham and associate's Y Combinator program. A program that myself and a couple of guys applied to several years back but probably didn't get any attention as we were focusing more on biotechnology tools rather than more general applications. Regardless this seems like a pretty awesome plug-in and I'm sure to test it out very soon!

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Ceiling Mount for Projector

I found the projector I wanted at bestbuy today! Here is the mount I plan on getting from amazon.

Office Cabinets

So I got four EFFEKTIV office cabinets from IKEA and have been eager to put them up in my wife and I's apartment. Unfortunately once opening it up I realized that the wholes on the cabinet where it is to be mounted on the wall do not correspond to the wall studs.

I was able to find this excellent forum post over at IKEAFANS. A post on the forum suggested using a suspension rail that IKEA offers with some of its other products (ie - Akurum Cabinets). Why IKEA doesn't offer this solution with all of their cabinet systems is beyond me, but hopefully this little mix and match hack will help out.

Additional Links:

Locating a Wall Stud
Post on Installing Akurum Cabinets
IKEA's own DIY on Hanging Cabinets

Monday, July 7, 2008

Job at Google

Curious at how to land that job at google? I've always been!

Steve Yegge has this excellent post covering an insider's perspective on how to land that dream job at google.

Wordpress on OSX

I've had this other site for a while. And since I'm a little bit OCD about controlling everything I've decided to stop posting to that site until I clean up the PHP a little bit.

I did setup a developer subdomain but that isn't the ideal situation as I'd be wasting bandwidth while testing (even though I barely use any of it). Thus I decided to get a Wordpress working on my Mac so that I can test the PHP locally as well as having a versioning system manage the code. The two sites that I've found extremely useful are Working with PHP in Mac OS X 10.5 and Leopard: How to Install Wordpress.

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Refactor :my => 'code'

What an awesome concept/tool! Programmers helping programmers make beautiful code.

Regex Review

I've been a little out of practice using regexs since finishing Graduate School. While in school I was using a lot of Perl and thus a lot of regexs. Now at work my regex experience has been limited to using grep to parse out certain lines from files.

I decided to spend some time reviewing regexs today so I wouldn't loose this very useful programming skill. I found several posts from a blog written by Mike Malone where he covers regexs on several levels.

  1. The absolute bare minimum every programmer should know about regular expressions

  2. 5 Regular Expressions Every Web Programmer Should Know

  3. Extreme regex foo: what you need to know to become a regular expression pro


And here is one link from my del.icio.us that provides an overall cheatsheet of regular expressions.

Monday, June 30, 2008

Wire Free Office

As my home office continues its "work in progress" phase. I'm continually looking for ways to declutter it from excessive computer wires. Hence the declutter your desk page.

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Quicksilver b54

For some reason at the blacktree stie quicksilver only goes up to b53. I heard the developer had left the project and is working for google, which explains the lack of updates for the application.

Why is this important. Well I wasted about 20 minutes of my day trying to get the famous control-enter (ctrl-enter) to work for quicksilver to set myself a reminder. Eventually I found that this was a bug that had to do with quicksilver and Leopard.

Moral of the story? Download the b54 build from macupdate to handle all those nasty quicksilver/leopard incompatibilities.

Monday, June 23, 2008

Coding Languages

In my other blog I always tried to address the issue of which programming language is best for bioinformatics. To be bluntly honest, I think most of my assessments were BS for the lack of a better term. How can I suggest which language is best which out trying out all on my own. Which brings me to this Steve Yegge throwback post talking about several different coding languages and why he likes/dislikes them. Why should you/I trust Steve? Well at the time of this post, he claimed to know about 30-40 languages, he maintains a very popular popular blog and he works for google. Your call.

Practice Coding

For the longest time, I've been trying to figure out ways to get better at programming. When I asked professionals they would always suggest, "read other people's code". Which is fine but can be overwhelming to a professionally inexperienced programmer. I mean whose code should I look at? What project am I interested in? How can I tell if its good or not.

Anyways, I decided to finally open up my Google Reader after a month of inactivity and see if there was anything in there to inspire to me. And to my delight, I found the most recent Coding Horror post that covered exactly what I've been trying to figure out on my own for years. Thanks Jeff!

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Python Tutorial

I stumbled upon this tutorial covering python and the PDB. Seems like a good link to include on my other blog once I get that a little cleaned up.

Friday, June 13, 2008

Future Dog (Hopefully)

So I had a dog before, but at my own fault was not responsible enough to take care of it. Now that I'm more mature and married, I've been trying to find a dog that both my wife and I like.

I think a boxer is our winner. Now all I got to do is figure out how to find breeders and wait for a mild mannered, female puppy to pop out!

Developing on a Mac

So I've been doing development work on a Mac for a couple years now. Yet, I still don't feel like I've harnessed 100% of the development power it offers. For instance, I have textmate, but I've just used it as a text editor and I know it has so much more to offer.

That's why I was pretty psyched to see this site. Definitely something I plan to check out, amongst many other things!

CVS and Web Development

I've been neglecting both of my sites, ryancastillo.org and biowhat.com, for the past year. Eventually after all this marriage, moving, and job craziness die down I'd like to get back to working/posting on the actual sites.

Unfortunately in the past when working with editing the sites' layout I was working with the "caveman" approach. In an attempt to get myself back to modern day web development I found this pretty good page covering web development and the use of a content versioning system with it.

Security Primer

So I lied. I haven't been posting as frequently as I claimed I was going to. In fact I haven't been posting at all.

This past week I was working on installing Apache Derby on my Mac and decided to take the time to learn more about Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). I found this awesome post that gave me a good overview of the application and how to install/run it in OSX.

UPDATE 11/7/2008: So I followed this primer word for word and had the keys backed up. I've been working on a new computer so I never got the chance to transfer everything over. Decided it was time that I handled this for these keys and went about restoring my public and private keychains. The public one went fine and imported with no problems.

The private one was another story. I banged my head against a wall for an hour before realizing what was going on. In the tutorial linked above, it mentions that when you export your private key "you will also symmetrically encrypt your private key backup with a passphrase and then output it as an ASCII armored file". What I was doing was trying to import the private key without decrypting it. Upon figuring this out, I realized the following command worked (with the use of my passphrase of course):

gpg --decrypt privatekey.pgp.asc | gpg --import

Just a gotcha for anyone that ever reads this blog (mainly me)!

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Hello World!

Hi.  My name is Ryan and I am a web addict.

WORLD: Hi Ryan.

When del.icio.us came out I also became a del.icio.us bookmark addict.  At this present day I have about 616 del.icio.us bookmarks and about 15 webpages open on my machine.

They say acceptance is always the first step to recovery.  Well,  I have a problem.

The real problem is that I love all this information, I can't get enough of it.  I've become a bookmark fiend because I want to save pieces of information thinking I'll get back to it later, which of course never happens.

So this leads to the solution to my problem which in turn is the purpose of this blog.  I propose (to myself) to post daily information I find relevant so that I have a more organized way of keeping track of all this information rather than just tossing more links into my del.icio.us bookmarks.  Also I figure I can address about five bookmarks a week, realistically speaking.  Which translates to all my bookmarks being addressed in about 120 weeks.  From an addiction recovery perspective this is rather excessive, so I'll go ahead and throw in monthly milestones to see what the progress is like.

Ah, and one more thing.  The name of this blog.  The web is a rather random place and so are my interests.  But as a computer scientist I believe nothing is truly random, hence the name pseudorandomness.  Hopefully some people will stumble on this blog along my way to recovery.  For those that do, enjoy!