b.√ (b.radical)

Good advice...

2009-06-08T15:35:00.001-07:00

The Blog of Maxim Porges - maximporges.com

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Here is a post I could actually recommend to someone thinking about becoming a software engineer. His points are all valid and generally ranked in the proper order (especially the top 4)

1. Know that you love writing software. There are a great number of unhappy programmers in the world b/c they got into programming to the money. Problem is, if you don't have the love for it, you'll end up not studying it the way you need to, which leads to doing the least glamorous (although still decent paying) jobs.

2. Point on, but this can be hard b/c the last thing you generally want to do is continue programming after work and few employers offer the opportunity to learn new languages/technologies.

3. True, although it kind of goes along with number 1. If you're the type of student who only programs to do homework, you probably don't love programming.

4. True... I started programming in high school, but there were so many things about CS I didn't encounter until college. Not that college will teach you everything, but it definately gets you started on the right track.

5. Don't agree with this 100%, atleast in my case, I've found myself don't both application development and software engineering. Again, if you have a true interest in programming and do it long enough, you'll generally find yourself doing a wide variety of tasks.

6. Agreed.

7. This can also apply to working in a tech company for a manager who doesn't really understand technology (i.e. never programmed), and therefore under values the talent of the engineers under them.

8. An understated point here, it should be emphasized that pressure and stress are, in my mind, the number one job hazard in computer programming. Have you ever asked yourself why programming make a lot of money. Many people tend to overlook the fact that engineering is a highly stressful job, and for many it's hard to leave that stress or a particular problem you're working on at your desk when you go home at night.

9. Agreed, 100%. If you plan to do this job for any amount of time, you will probably witness the birth of a new major language in that time, not to mention so many custom languages that individual companies use that understanding how a parser/compiler works and the basic language paradigms is far more useful in the long run than understanding any particular language entirely.

Permanently Rating Your Music With Songbird

2009-05-25T12:45:00.000-07:00

One really cool feature of Songbird, my music player of choice, is the ability to save song rating directly to the MP3, i.e. the ID3 tag. Rating isn't an ID3 field that gets saved to the .mp3 file itself, like artist, album, etc, so every MP3 generally has it's own proprietary system that saves these ratings to an external database. This causes two problems...

1. MP3 ratings aren't interchangable.

2. Moving your MP3's on your hard drive or to a different computer without using the program or backing up this database loses as the ratings.

While the Songbird solution doesn't solve the first issue, i.e. your Songbird ratings aren't immediately imported into, say iTunes, there is a way to save the rating directly to the file, allowing you to move them around at will, etc. I'm manicuring my library so I can say "create me a playlist with these genres and songs I've rated at 4 and above", so I want to make sure that if I go to the trouble of rating songs, that they don't get lost in the future.

Anyway, to enable this functionality, open a new tab in Songbird, and type

about:config

in the address bar. Then in the filter box, type

songbird.metadata.ratings

which should filter out all options except

songbird.metadata.ratings.enableWriting

Click on the value of this setting from 'false' to 'true'. Now, every time you rate a song, it will write you rating to the track itself. To test this, you can rate a song, then delete it from you library and reimport it, and notice your rating is still there.

Entering the world of t-shirt design

2008-11-02T11:30:00.000-08:00

Among the many thousands of cool things you can do on the Internet these days is design custom t-shirts (not to mention mugs, hats,etc), have them printed and sent to you, even resell your designs online for free!

I've been toying around with the idea a while, and finally finished my first design, shown below.

You can find it (and buy it) at

http://www.zazzle.com/abstract_syntax_mas_tree_shirt-235439264930650299

It's quite geeky, I'll admit and probably doesn't make sense to 99% of people out there, only that strange breed whom call themselves computer programmers. It stems from a concept in computer science called an abstract syntax tree, which is a graphical representation of the syntax of some source code. An example of the statement x = 3 * (y - z) can be found here.

Anyway, to share the knowledge for anyone interested in making their own shirts, here's are some basic steps...

1. Get an idea. This is, of course, the hardest part, but for your first design, try something simple. Looking at the links below, a t-shirt can be as simple as photo , some text or a simple geometric design. I am, by no means, an expert t-shirt designer, but a couple of basic principles I use

Keep the design simple. I, like everyone, suffer from the issue of over-complicating things, and I've found that what actually takes time in designing a shirt are the decisions to remove stuff and simplify. For instance, in the Abstract SyntaX-mas Tree design, my first draft included Christmas lights and colored balls. After taking a step back a week later, I realized this stuff just tends to clutter the design and doesn't help to get the message across any better.

Keep the colors to a minimum. Typically, the best shirts are screen printed, where each color has be a separate screen, and are generally limited to 3 or 4 colors to reduce the complexity of making them. Shirts from sites like Zazzle and CafePress I believe are some type of iron-on design (I haven't seen my shirt yet) and allow for as many colors as you want (like a photo), but there is something to be said for the cartoony simplicity of a 3-5 color design.

2. Learn to use some design tools. Another great fact of the modern Internet is the amount of free, high-quality software there is out there. Two programs I've come to love are GIMP and Inkscape . GIMP is a Photoshop clone, that aside from some small usability issues, is a great free alternative to Photoshop. Inkscape is an Illustrator-like tool for producing scalable vector graphics (SVGs). The different between working with these two programs is GIMP is designed for working with photos and images, while Inkscape uses more of a mathematical representation of the design, which can then easily be scaled up or down to any size without losing resolution. While I don't have time to get in a lengthy discussion about the difference between the two approaches, I think most designs would agree you should generally try to create your design using Inkscape, otherwise you make sure that you make you design really large using GIMP so that you can shrink it without losing clarity.

3. Execute your design and upload. After creating your final design, create an account on a site like CafePress or Zazzle to upload and sell your design. This seems to be a pretty competitive market (custom product manufacturing/marketing) at the moment, so I can't say which is better, they both seems to have certain advantages. I choose Zazzle for my first design, but might try CafePress with some others. Here are a few things I like about Zazzle...

Slightly cheaper, atleast in the T-Shirts department, but only by a $1 or so and this is probably not true for every product each site offers.
Integration with Google Analytics. Zazzle offers integration with Google Analytics, and although I haven't gotten it work yet, it sounds like a great way to see how many people have viewed your shirt.
One type of store front. It seems that CafePress has two different store types, a free one and a premium one, whereas Zazzle on has one, which puts everyone on the same playing field.
Zazzle recently began offering custom embroidery, which is a cool option I would like to explore in the future.

This should be taken with a grain of salt as I have yet to explore CafePress and I'll let you know more once I do.

b.

Flooding in downtown Cedar Rapids

2008-06-13T13:48:00.000-07:00

My hometown of Cedar Rapids, IA has been in the news this week b/c of disastrous flooding. For those unfamiliar with Cedar Rapids and the flooding, I managed to find the two above photos online that show roughly the same view point of the city before and after. Notice that the three major bridges crossing the river are now completely submerged. The tall building on the island is City Hall, and a little known fact is that Cedar Rapids, IA and Paris, France are the only two cities in the world with their city hall on an island in river that runs through the city.

Photos sources
old : P & N Flight Charter
new : New Yorks Times

SpotCrime

2008-05-22T18:00:00.000-07:00

Following my San Francisco and Oakland murder map themes, I came across a post on Mashable for SpotCrime.com today. Here is their map for San Francisco

http://www.spotcrime.com/ca/san+francisco

Couple of issues I have with this site are

1. No murders

2. Their classification of crimes seems a little vague... For instance, shootings? Well, yeah, it's a crime, but it seems like there could be several different outcomes of the shooting (exchange of gunfire, injury, or death). And what about stabbings? Are those just considered assaults?

3. The problem with sites like this that try to cover the whole United States is that the data comes from so many sources and is probably not accurrate for many of them. Better to stick to something local like SFGate.

San Francisco Homicide Map

2008-05-22T10:41:00.000-07:00

Apparently, Oakland isn't the only interesting spot for SFGate.com to plot Bay Area homicides, here is another map SFGate is doing for San Francisco

http://www.sfgate.com/maps/sfhomicides/

I would be an interesting experiment to put this data into a KML file with a time slider and compare the data of the two cities in a time-based analysis.

Evil Google and their Evil Legos...

2008-05-19T20:37:00.000-07:00

Came across this article in the NY Times today (and actually saw it make it way to the Mixx entertainment page)

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/something-google-doesnt-want-you-to-see/index.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

How does a potentially light-hearted subject like Google's celebration of Lego's turn into yet another cheapshot against Google. Doesn't the author, Jennifer 8. Lee (what's the 8?), understand in all of her infinite wisdom (she seemed to make such a big deal of everyone knowing who Brian Kernighan is) that maybe there is some reasoning behind a "no photographs" policy inside Google offices, just like any other corporation in America. Isn't it possible that people could take photos of unreleased products that Googlers are working on? Or maybe it's in the company's best interest not to reveal that experts in certain fields have been hired and are working for the company? There are a number of good reasons for this policy, unfortunately the author is just too naive to consider any of them. Of course, working for Google, I do take a certain position, but regardless of what you think about Google, this article is about Lego's of all things, and the author has gone to great lengths to twist even that the wrong way. Unfortunately, because it is the NY Times, it's not only the author's reputation at stake, but the editorial integrity of the publication, and I guess it just goes to show once again that bad news sells news.

Dolores Park at night...

2008-05-14T20:49:00.000-07:00

It's beautiful weather in San Francisco tonight, so I thought I'd hang out on the roof and surf a little on my new Leveno X61 tablet PC.

I am loving this computer for several reasons...

1. It's small,but not too small, the perfect size actually. Even using it in laptop mode is incredibly comfortable, although it doesn't have a touch pad mouse. The touchscreen makes up for that.

2. Built-in Wacom touch screen with stylus... I haven't used any other tablets, but Wacom is the leader in this area and the functionality is similar to my Wacom Intuos, except you can draw right on the screen. Too cool. It's an interesting browsing experience using a basically mouse-only computer (there is a virtual pop-up keyboard). Very fun for using Google Reader, and it's interesting how you start to rely on mouse-friendly interfaces for things (like Google Toolbar).

3. Built-in SD card reader for camera-to-computer blogging. Unfortunately, mine doesn't seem to be working right now, wonder if it's b/c it's a 4 Gb card? That would be lame.

4. Good battery life. I would say I've gotten about 4 hours of use out of it so far on a full charge (with 15% left).

A few things I don't like about it so far...

1. The keyboard isn't lighted... I'm a pretty decent typer, but I always need to look at the symbols, and the Thinkpad keyboard has a normal-sized Backspace key, which I have problems with.

2. A major complaint I have about Thinkpads in general is the key in the lower-left hand corner of the keyboard is a "Fn" key, not control, which messes with anybody who has ever cut and paste. I had this mapped on the previous Thinkpad I had, have to figure that one out again.

23 and b.

2008-05-12T21:36:00.000-07:00

In case you haven't heard, there is a new trend brewing on the web in personal DNA analysis, you can read more about it in the following article...

http://www.wi red.com /medtech/genetics/news/2008/05/portfolio_0407

I have always thought that if I wasn't a software engineer, I could very likely have been a geneticist, and maybe in future I'll be involved in some type of cross-disciplinary work. Anyway, I've decided to take the personal DNA plunge (http://23andme.com), and below are some pics from the unboxing of the sample kit. I'll send this off to the lab tomorrow and expect results in 6-8 weeks...

Stay tuned!

Oakland Homicide Map

2008-05-08T11:14:00.000-07:00

After reading this recent article about the latest homicide in Oakland (the 48th this year),

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/08/BADS10J5B6.DTL&feed=rss.news

I found that sfgate.com is using Google Maps to plot homicides in the East Bay during 2007/2008

http://www.sfgate.com/maps/oaklandhomicides/

Apparently, there were 126 homicides in 2007

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/31/BAR0U7223.DTL&hw=oakland+homicides+2007&sn=027&sc=389

Twittering with Google Talk

2008-05-06T22:39:00.005-07:00

Ok, gimme a break, I just got on Twitter a few days ago after Scoble kept blathering on about it...

I couldn't figure out what the big deal was until I starting noticing the flexibility of it, and that's when I stumbled across Twitter's integration with Google Talk. Google Talk (GTalk) is Google's chat application which they began secretly weaving into the fabric of GMail a while back (brilliant btw), and in a sense the lifeblood of Google day-to-day communications, next to email. Digging around in the Twitter FAQ page, you'll see the following

http://help.twitter.com/index.php?pg=kb.page&id=28

Once you've authorized GTalk to access Twitter, you can simply post to Twitter by chatting with twitter@twitter.com. But the cooler thing using GTalk as a live feed for what's going on with in the Twittosphere. Get started by GTalking 'help' to twitter@twitter.com

me: help
twitter: Reply with what you're doing.
'invite' to invite a friend.
'follow' to receive updates.
'track' to track interests.
'whois' for info.
'off' to silence.

Kinda of a Web 2.0 CLI style interface... So trying, whois scobleizer

me: whois scobleizer
twitter: Robert Scoble, since Nov 2006.
bio: Tech geek blogger @ http://scobleizer.com
location: Half Moon Bay, California, USA
web: http://www.fastcompany.com/scoble

produces the Twitteresque version of whois. Even cooler is the 'track' command

me: track foosball
twitter: (craigchilds): games night tonight, pong, foosball and more. all welcome. - http://bkite.com/004l7

Sent at 11:50 PM on Tuesday

and the chat will continue to notify you as time goes on. This is cool, but an interesting side effect of it is that Twitterese GSpoken is searchable in your Gmail, how cool is that?

I intend to play around more with this as time goes on, but since I always have GMail open, it's a nice, highly-configurable way to keep tabs on Twitter updates I subscribe to.
b.

Unknown sinner

2007-11-11T22:32:00.000-08:00

The distinct tatoos and environment of the elusive Teasley.

Country grammer... BNF grammer, that is...

2000-01-27T16:40:00.000-08:00