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Mozilla Weave |
| Posted to the world wide web on Sunday, August 10, 2008 |
I came across the Mozilla Weave project the other day, which intrigued me. I use multiple computers every day (mainly my MacBook Pro, but also use my Vista desktop for at least a little while), which leaves me accessing the same sites on either machine, but not both. This is where Weave comes in, as it seeks to sync multiple identities from multiple machines, thus making everyone's life better. The unfortunate part is that they are not currently accepting new users for the service.
On the fortunate side, you can easily set up your own server to take advantage of Weave. After following a tutorial here, and using the advice from one of the comments to set the value of extensions.weave.username to whatever you wanted it to be in order to skip the registration process, I had both of my machines syncing to a local Weave server. The only issue I've seen so far is that autofill data from form fields doesn't seem to be syncing for me. I'm not entirely sure if this is due to the beta nature of the extension, but I plan to keep running my own server and following the project as it matures. |
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Twitterbook Update |
| Posted to the world wide web on Sunday, June 29, 2008 |
So I've been updating my status on Facebook with some regularity recently, but also wanted to do the same with Twitter, without having to post the same thing twice. I stumbled upon Twitterbook, which pretty much did what I wanted it to do, but with one flaw: it will keep updating your Twitter account with the first item from your Facebook status feed as often as you execute the script. I was executing it every 15 minutes through cron, which meant it was updating Twitter with the exact same thing every 15 minutes.
Henceforth, I updated the script to write the last update out to a text file, so before updating Twitter it will check the content of the text file against the first item in your status feed, skipping the Twitter update if it's the same. It's a small little tweak, but one that I felt was necessary. If you're a Twitterbook user, you can get the updated source code here. |
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Mario Kart Wii (Continued) |
| Posted to the world wide web on Saturday, May 17, 2008 |
After witnessing the abomination that is the Nintendo friend code system, I decided to put together a site allowing you to trade friend codes with pretty much anyone. All you need to do is visit mariokartfriendcodes.com, enter some basic information about yourself (Mii name, friend code, etc.) and start sharing with others. I also put together a Facebook application that ties into the data on the site, in turn automatically showing you which of your Facebook friends are registered with friend codes as well as allowing you to schedule races with any of them.
Take that Nintendo! |
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Gas Guzzler |
| Posted to the world wide web on Saturday, May 10, 2008 |
| Last May I bought a TrailBlazer SS. I knew when I bought it that the average MPG was not going to be good (I get about 12 MPG consistently). Still, it doesn't make you feel good when you read an article entitled Trade-in Value of SUVs is Crashing and see a picture of your beloved ride. |
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Mario Kart Wii |
| Posted to the world wide web on Friday, May 09, 2008 |
Is awesome. I've owned/played every Mario Kart game to date, and have to say this is the best one yet. Playing by yourself isn't as good as with 10 people on Mario Kart 64 in college, but it's damn close. The Wii wheel is surprisingly easy to use and responsive (I have another wheel I bought for Excite Truck, which is not as good). My advice is to use manual drifting to get the full effect of the game, as automatic drifting sucks and is for losers.
If anyone wants to challenge me to a friendly contest, my friend code is: 3609-1730-3077
See you at the track. |
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Why Dell Is My Bitch |
| Posted to the world wide web on Friday, April 25, 2008 |
My wife had been asking me to buy her a laptop for quite sometime, which I had been putting off like usual. "I'm waiting for a coupon code" I told her (and one finally showed up in my inbox the day after I decided to finally order it). A few days later the laptop arrived at home, which made her happy.
So I started it up to remove all the crap Dell installs on their disk images, to find no bloatware at all. This was a pleasant surprise. What wasn't pleasant but certainly a surprise is when it blue screened 10 minutes later. Weird I thought, but I moved on with installing some applications on it for her.
A few minutes later I got another blue screen. I've seen enough of these to know that one of the sticks of RAM was bad, so I called Dell tech support, which I absolutely hated. I won't get into very much detail on this, because frankly it's rather boring. After deleting some registry keys, and me asking why the hell he thought this would fix a hardware problem, I told the tech support guy that I didn't have time for his nonsense anymore and hung up.
The next day there were more blue screens, and a lot of them. So I called tech support again. This time they took my suggestion and prompted me to run some diagnostics on the memory. All of the tests passed, but I still insisted I was right, and that the memory was bad. Apparently I began to get a bit hostile with the woman I was speaking to, as she told me her manager was interested in speaking to me.
After the manager got on the line, I told him I was not going to re-install the OS like they wanted me to, and that I just wanted the RAM replaced. He was insistent that I do what he wanted, and I was insistent that he do what I wanted. This got us nowhere, so he suggested that I speak to his superior.
Two days later, I get a call from the super secret tech support manager person. If you're keeping track, I am now at level 3 support for some memory that must have cost them no more than $.50 to obtain. He again insisted that I re-install the OS, at which time I actively refused once more. I was told I would not get replacement memory if I didn't at least try, so I agreed to his demands. However, instead of actually doing it, I ordered some new memory myself.
Two days later I had new memory, and a laptop that no longer blue screened when doing such simple tasks as sitting idle. I wrote the level 3 tech support god, but he never got back to me, which is what I expected to happen.
Never one to leave well enough alone, I decided to start guessing what Michael Dell's email address was, and plead my case to him. After a few hits and misses, I finally hit paydirt with michael_dell@dell.com. The day after I sent out the email I was contacted by one of Dell's minions who offered to finally replace the memory for me. I received the replacement memory the next day, at which time I threw it in my box of spare parts, still in their cute little protective anti-static bags.
You might be asking yourself why I went through all of this when I was just going to fix the problem myself anyway. Well, friend, it was all about proving I was right, and it only took three hours of my time to do it. |
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Concept Cache LLC
My new side business, offering everything from website design and hosting, to web and desktop application development.
www.conceptcache.com
Kasey Elizabeth
My daughter doesn't have teeth, but she has her own blog. Updated every month with life changes and corresponding pictures.
www.kaseywynn.com
Blog Mapping
Uses geocoded data and the Google Maps API to display US
blogs by zip code.
www.blogmapping.com
Open BlogSpeak
Open source version of my former blog commenting service.
Comes in two flavors: plain and fortified with trackbacks.
www.blogspeak.net
Social Footprint
Yes I have profiles at facebook, Linkedin, etc. Who doesn't really? It's the cool thing to do.
www.facebook.com
www.linkedin.com
www.twitter.com
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