Beta Ship

Headlines can be better than the article.

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 13:24:17 GMT

As a browsed my RSS feeds for my morning news, I ran across this headline from my local paper:

"Oldest lifeguard misses pool"

When I saw this headline, my mind started racing with the thought of a slapstick story where a kid starts flailing about in the water and an old man dives off the lifeguard post in the wrong direction, leading to a falling whistle and a satisfying splat as he hits the pavement. Sure it's sick, but it's also hilarious.

Instead, I was greeted with a rather boring story about the world oldest lifeguard retiring. Total disappointment. If you want to read the original, it can be found here: Oldest lifeguard misses pool, but I don't see why you would, as it involves no whistle or splat sound effects whatsoever.

Do you have a favorite news headline that was way better than the article itself? Post it in the comments. If I get enough interesting ones, I'll make another blog post on them.

Firefox Extension Ubiquity Enhancement Idea

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 08:47:51 GMT

I've been playing with Ubiquity today, and it occurred to me, why does Ubiquity popup in it's own little window when there is a perfectly good input box right above the tabs?

Perhaps I have been bitten by the Chrome bug, and am just looking for a ultraslim interface. It just seems to me that Ubiquity could be compressed into the Awesome bar. Wouldn't it be badass to have such a strong natural language filter right in the Awesomebar? AwesomeUbiquityBar anyone? AUB for short. Come on. You know you like it.

NASA Holding a Press Conference at 3PM

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 10:21:53 GMT

Seems NASA has got fed up with all these darn naysayers, or they are having a donkey problem. I guess we will have to wait till 3PM EDT to find out.

My new toy!

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 23:27:16 GMT

Recently I got a blackberry. I've been quite impressed with it. It is my first smartphone, so I suppose the bar wasn't that high.

I originally wanted an Android based phone, but as I was already stuck in a contract with Sprint and it looks like it will be a good while before Sprint gets one, I decided to get a blackberry instead. I'm hoping that I'll be lucky enough to have android released on the Blackberry.

So far, I'm very happy with the purchase. I've never felt so connected with friends and family. It's kinda like the feeling of getting your first cellphone(for the older crowd who grew up in the days when phones where teathered to the wall.)

We'll see how I feel in a week, but today I'm loving it.

A Nice List of Windows Shortcut Keys

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 07:49:38 GMT

While looking for a good way to popup a folder when I hit a shortcut combo, I ran into this: Keyboard shortcuts for Windows. It's a simple list, but it's got a lot of things I never knew. The the fantastic "Windows+Break" to pull up the System Properties. This is a small thing, but it will be very helpful to remember.

It was, however, missing my two favorite shortcuts.

1. Ctrl+Shift+Esc: Pulls up the Task Manager, which doesn't automatically come up with Ctrl+Alt+Del on most machines inside a business.
2. Windows+L: Locks the system, so the password must be entered to use again, but doesn't close any programs. This is really useful in a business environment where you want to keep people out of your computer.

Call this my public service announcement. I know it's odd for me to mention Microsoft without it being in reference while talking a competitor, but I can't always be a hater.

BYOND Forum Response Templates

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 22:46:02 GMT

Getting tired of making the same post over and over again in BYOND help, I decided to do something. It started with just an idea, a spreadsheet or something with some responses to common issues. This would work, but it would be a bit of a pain to manage. I ran through a bunch of other ideas, but they all suffered from the same problem.

Until I came across Hazman's "Ignore Posts" GreaseMonkey script. It was a simple script that automatically filtered out posts by certain users on the community page. This sparked a thought, why not use GreaseMonkey to add the function I need to the site. So with a good bit of help, and about 15 versions over a few days, we came up with a great solution.

It's a GreaseMonkey script that adds a dropdown box above the body box(pictured) to allow you to select from some remade templates whenever you reply to a post. It doesn't show up for new posts, only replies. It pulls the templates from an XML file, in this case stored on the BYOND Help guild files. It's a rather simple system to update and maintain, so anyone could use it.

I'm releasing this to the public as a free tool to do with what you want. Change it, repackage it, redistribute it, use it, or whatever you want. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me or Hazman.

To use, install GreaseMonkey in Firefox and add the script linked to below.

[Forum Template System]

My Next OS Will Be Linux

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:01:26 GMT

As most of you know, XP is no longer being sold. This is an attempt to push people to Vista, which is pretty standard tactics, so I'm not blaming Microsoft. However, I'm not moving to Vista. Once XP becomes too decrepit for me to use, I'm moving to Linux on my desktop.

I've been toying with it lately, and I'm really impressed with where Linux stands. I've been running Linux as the only OS on my laptop for about two years now, but I've never been able to move to it for my desktop. This is because I know XP like the back of my hand. It does everything I need it to, and most of what I want it to. I know there will be a time when I can no longer use XP, but I'm actually hoping to move before then. One of the biggest barriers I've ran into is that most video games don't work with WINE, but WINE has made great strives in the past few months, and they are working fast to add a lot of support, so it might be less than a year before it is a great alternative to Windows.

I have no plan on learning Vista any more than my job requires. I figure that if I'm going to have to learn something, it might as well be Linux. And I've picked up on a lot having my laptop running Linux for the past few years. I recommend you all take a good look at Linux when you decide XP is not enough for you anymore.

Fair well, Mr. Carlin

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 06:22:45 GMT

If I had to peg any comedian as my favorite, it would be George Carlin. He was a very smart guy, and always kept his act fresh. Through his comedy you could see him grow and age, and the content of his comedy changed with him.

He is a giant in the comedy world, one with will be sorely missed.

George Carlin was a strong atheist, so words like "He is in a better place" don't apply, but he did live to a decent age, so we also can't say "He was taken in his prime". In short, all we really can say is "Fair well, Mr. Carlin".

Stuck between a rock and a programming place.

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 07:38:00 GMT

Recently I was asked by my employer to find a better, preferably free, replacement for our scheduling software. It is a little dated, and runs on a database backend with no main server. Basically, it accesses the SQL database directly, as apposed to calling MySQL to do it. This comes into issue when you realize we have 30 users constantly using this program, which means at any given moment there may be 5 people editing the same database, with no master server controlling rights. This creates a whole slew of problems, the biggest one being instability.

So I come to you, BYOND, in hopes of getting a few questions answered. I know we have a rather large population of working adults, so perhaps some of you can give me some good tips. My first question is: Are there any good replacements, preferably free, that will have a similar layout to our old system(pictured). This flat view of all employees schedule at once is very, very important to our firm. We must know instantly who is and isn't in an appointment, and I have yet to find a layout that does a better job of this(but I'm open to ideas).

Failing my first question, my second is: Does anyone know any easy programming languages that I could create such a program with? I've looked at the GUI options for a few high level programming languages, and couldn't find any stock widgets that would produce such an effect, so I honestly am at a loss as to where to begin.

Any help I can get from you guys would be great. And if you can recommend a programming language and widget/method, any further support would be great too. If I do make a working schedule program for the office, I plan on releasing it open sourced, so that anyone else who has the problem can have a solution too.

Get Firefox Now!

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 10:15:46 GMT

Firefox 3 has been officially released, and is available for download now!

There have been a lot of updates, both visually and backend. The single biggest change is the new Gecko 1.9 rendering engine. This gives Firefox 3 the most complete implementation of the W3C standards out of all major browsers, and likely all browsers that exist. This is not something that the average user will shout for joy over, but web developers are probably doing a little dance in their chairs right now.

On the more visual side, there is a new address bar, that does more than just recall the last 20 addresses typed into it. It searches history and bookmarks to give you results that might relate, giving you quicker access to important sites. It also weighs results based on how often you visit them. This, for example, is important if you constantly visit the BYOND developer forums, and just want to type "developer" in the address bar, but you recently went to the GIMP developers website. It's pretty nifty, but I can't say I use it much(then again, I don't use bookmarks or history either).

Another big change is bookmarking. For bookmark lovers, FF3 adds the ability to tag bookmarks much like you tag BYOND blog posts. This allows you to use "Smart" folders to access only bookmarks involving Linux, programming, or IM clients. Even though some of the bookmarks might cover multiple topics, you will be able to access them in their right folder without bookmarking them twice.

One small feature that I've found very useful is better mime type support. Allowing you to customise what certain filetypes launch, including web based services like Yahoo Mail or Google Reader. It is very handy.

Get Firefox now!

[edit]Eek! Seems Mozilla has been overloaded by the landrush of all this. Well, I'm sure they expected it. Keep on trying, they are trying to break a non-existent record here![/edit]