eugene gordin

Well Deserved Ice Cream

egordin — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 23:19:01 +0000

Family Game Night

egordin — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 01:25:37 +0000

Google Wave Notifier

egordin — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:21:59 +0000

I have been back and forth in my opinion about Google Wave, one day hailing it as the future and the next day dismissing it as overhyped bloatware. Regardless of the day however, more and more of my friends are starting to show up on Google Wave, so I have been trying to use it pretty regularly to see if it really is as amazing as some people tout.

If you ignore the current slowness, bugs, and usability issues, the remaining problem with Google Wave is that there currently is no simple way for you to be notified that there is a new wave in your inbox. Hiroshi Saito is working on a simple menubar notifier for Google Wave, but I have yet to get it to work. Waveboard, the first major Google Wave app was released a while back, but it is little more than a unique browser window which loads the Google Wave webpage. The little more however, is significant, because Waveboard includes Growl, Dock, & menubar notification of unread waves in your inbox. This means that those of you who are looking for a Google Wave notifier can look no further. [update: the new version (0.9) adds some very useful new features].

For those of you who don’t mind having the Waveboard icon in your dock, use the app as it is. Those of you looking for purely a notifier can remove the Waveboard icon from the dock using a great app called Dockless (which I’ve written about before). Dockless lets Waveboard run without a dock icon, meaning you get menubar notifications and Growl notifications without all of the visual clutter. [Update: The developer of Waveboard told me that hiding the dock icon will be included in preferences of future Waveboard versions.]

For the those of you who want the ultimate notifier, you can get push notifications about new waves in your inbox using Waveboard’s Growl integration and the amazing Prowl app for iPhone. There is also a Waveboard for iPhone, which works seamlessly with Prowl too.

Regardless of how you use it, Waveboard is a great sign of things to come.

Update: The developer of Waveboard, after discovering this article, has generously donated three(!) Promo Codes for the Waveboard iPhone app to the readers of this site. All you have to do to get one is leave a note in the comments of this post explaining what you currently use Google Wave to do. The promo code recipients will be chosen at random by Monday, November 9th, 2009. Good luck!

Snow Leopard Adblock & Google Reader

egordin — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:49:48 +0000

Here are two seemingly unrelated little tips for you guys, both involving things on the web I simply cannot live without!

Adblock for Safari on Snow Leopard
For those that don’t know, adblock apps are browser add-ons which allow you to hide ads on the web. For Firefox users there’s Adblock Plus (which I’ve written about before), and for Safari there is SafariBlock, which is no longer compatible with Snow Leopard out of the box.

Therefore, those of you who used adblocking in the past were faced with a problem when upgrading to Snow Leopard – there was no real app that was compatible with the 64-bit goodness of Snow Leopard’s Safari. You could force Safari to run in 32 bit mode and use Safari Adblock, but you wouldn’t be able to enjoy the speedy improvements that Snow Leopard brought to Safari that way.

Well today I found a great new app called Safari Adblocker, which is 100% free and works with Snow Leopard’s Safari (it is actually based on SafariBlock, my old favorite adblocker). It includes subscriptions to Rick572’s EasyList (which is amazing), and is quite stable. So if you’re on Snow Leopard and looking for Adblocking, be sure to check out Safari Adblocker.

Google Reader’s Popular Items
The other tip I wanted to share was for those of you who use Google Reader (I have written about its amazing usefulness before too). Last week, the Google Reader team unveiled two new features to its amazing product: Personalized Ranking & Popular Items. Personalized ranking allows you to sort your unread items by “magic,” which is a sorting mechanism catered to what you will most likely be interested in (based on the items you marked “Liked”, and shared items). This is very useful if you use Google Reader frequently (like me).

Popular Items however, is an even more interesting feature: it provides you with popular content from around the web, sorted by the content which is most likely to interest you. This combines the “recommended feeds” and personalized ranking features, and has provided me with some very interesting content to which I was not subscribed before. Also, if you’re a big keyboard shortcut user (I use the J and K shortcuts all the time in Google Reader), you can access the newly-added “Explore” and “Popular items” views by pressing g then e or g then p, respectively.

As always, let me know what you think about these things or if you have any questions.

[The Aggregate] Week of October 26th, 2009

egordin — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 06:45:57 +0000

While I was expecting large amounts of healthcare news this week, it turned out that the only large thing about it was the $1.2 trillion price tag (or roughly $4 million per word, I kid you not). There was however a return to political topics this week, despite non-political news such as the 40th birthday of the Internet. Next week, I promise to mix it up a bit more .

After the Wall: A Debate Over Democracy's Reach

An intriguing look at the latest competitor to democracy: authoritarian capitalism. With the world's emerging economies teetering in their stability and selection of a governing system, India and China provide ample case studies for both sides of the debate.

Democrats' Policies Based on Dogma, Hopes, Dreams, not Reality

Dennis Prager attempts to explain the left's unflinching faith in the ability of government to improve everything around us, including our healthcare system. While I admire undying optimism in society in general, that very same optimism in our political leaders typically results in tragedies of the worst kind.

'Civil Gideon' Trumpets Legal Discord

A new California law provides the poor with the right to an attorney in civil matters such as child custody and foreclosure, extending beyond the standard "Gideon" rights to an attorney for criminal cases. While there is more than adequate justification for the new law, it is still unclear where the money will come for such expenditure, regardless of necessity. Besides, this law definitely makes more sense than the new San Francisco policy that prevents police officers from automatically impounding cars driven by unlicensed (and illegal immigrants) drivers, instead giving them 20 minutes to find someone with a valid license to drive their car. Oh California.

Obama and the U.S. Strategy of Buying Time

Although I feel like I include Stratfor articles all the time in these posts, the balance and insight of their articles force me to add one more. This time George Friedman looks at British and Roman history as guides to understanding American foreign policy. Friedman makes the valid point that the moment that a nation establishes full national defense is the same moment that other nations view it as a threat: defense is offense.

Updating the legislative scenarios: Reply hazy, ask again later

Keith Hennessey, a former director of the National Economic Council, reexamines and quantifies the probable legislative options for the healthcare bills currently facing Congress. As a major political operative, it is always fascinating to read Hennessey's insight into Washington politics, despite the troublesome nature of our current situation.

Quick Tips: Unsaved Indicator & Single App Mode

egordin — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 05:55:03 +0000

Apologies for not posting in a long amount of time aside, I wanted to share two quick Mac tips:

The first one is an easy way to see if your document is unsaved in OSX – in an application like Microsoft Excel, just take a look at the red close button in the top left hand corner. If you see a black dot in the middle, you’ve made unsaved changes. While you’re at it, be sure to change your autosave setting in your Microsoft Office application preferences to something less than the default 10 minutes (due to traumatic experiences, I have mine set to 1 minute). You can find that setting under Preferences–>Save–>Save AutoRecover information after this amount of minutes. Thanks to OSXDaily for pointing the black dot out – always wondered what that was.

The second tip is an interesting productivity approach that has actually been built into OSX since its first release. Its called Single Application Mode, and the idea is that you only show one application on your screen at once. When you’re working in this mode, each time you switch from one application to another (using the dock), OSX will hide all of the other windows. This is similar to how the iPhone functions. If you’re looking for minimal distractions and have no desire to maximize your windows fully, simply enter these two commands into Terminal.app (Applications–>Utilities):

defaults write com.apple.dock single-app -bool true
killall Dock

To get rid of Single App Mode, all you have to do is run the same two commands, but change the word true to false. For more information, see this TidBITS article on the subject.

Hope those tips are useful – let me know what you think.

[The Aggregate] Week of October 19th, 2009

egordin — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 05:16:06 +0000

This week’s Aggregate includes only one political article (I was highly tempted to include the ridiculous Politico piece about Matt Drudge being responsible for the dollar’s decline), but instead focuses more on science & technology. However, with Congress inching closer to a vote on ObamaCare, next week is likely to include more political content.

When Tyranny Calls

A finely toned sense of pattern recognition is the perfect compliment to a thorough understanding of history: while the latter provides the context, the former provides insight to the current, as well as the future. This article, much like the bestselling Liberty & Tyranny, describes our current state in the context of the past. The paragraph about future politicians being forced to support Universal Healthcare the way that Social Security is now supported was particularly insightful.

Getting It Wrong: Surprising Tips on How to Learn

In the age of Google, and Wikipedia, much of the debates around the kitchen table end prematurely when someone whips out their iPhone in search of getting it right. New research in the Scientific American suggests that and getting it wrong the first time, and only then looking it up will lead to better comprehension. This research is particularly interesting in light of the American educational system's focus on giving away answers for fear of diminishing a student's self esteem. Looks like failing a few times really does help drive a point home.

Why hasn't Vista sold well?

Speaking of failing, Microsoft released Windows 7 this week, which caused a bit of reflection as to why Vista was such a problem. This blog post by the very talented Marco Arment looks beyond Vista's technological blunders to the bigger picture, and the computer industry's current approach to its customers.

The Future of Laundry: No Water

Just a few minutes after finishing my laundry last week, I happened upon this Popular Science article about the latest advancements in clothes washing. While the technology seems impressive (it comes out of Xerox no less), I'd like to see how clean it actually gets clothes comparing to conventional machines. Also intriguing is the article on that same page about energy efficient appliances.

AT&T's A-List

Lastly this week is not so much an article but a new feature from AT&T called A-List, which allows you to talk to 5 of your contacts for as much as you want without it counting against your monthly minute allowance. I hadn't seen much publicity for this feature, probably due to the fact that it is free for AT&T customers with cell phone plans that cost $59 and above, meaning that almost all iPhone customers are eligible. Combined with Rollover minutes, this almost makes up for AT&T's notorious lack of service coverage.

Not Quite The Same Leaves

egordin — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 05:56:28 +0000

[The Aggregate] Week of October 12th, 2009

egordin — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 05:10:18 +0000

Although it was easier to write than last week’s (which was written entirely on my iPhone), this week’s Aggregate consists of articles which I caught up on while flying back from Boston to California. A few of this week’s articles address topics covered before, but in a bit of a different light, so take a look and as always, let me know in the comments what you think about all of them!

Why Email No Longer Rules…

As I traveled around New England last week, and had the opportunity to think more about Google Wave, I began to really see the benefits of that type of real-time communication. I tried to think of a good example of the need for more instant communication which was filled neither by email nor instant messaging, and the best that I could come up with was email attachments. Have you ever sent an email with an attachment, only to find out a few minutes later that something in the attachment or email needed to be changed? Well Google Docs began addressing this problem, but Google Wave truly fixes it.

How Israel Was Disarmed

This opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal fast forwards to January 2010, when Israel is forced to disarm by the United Nations. With geopolitics spiraling the way that they have been recently, and with the White House fully investing in its impotent foreign policy of little more than words, the situation described in the article is, frighteningly, not all that implausible.

The Fallacy of Identity Theft

If you watch TV or listen to the radio, you have likely been bombarded with ads which claim to protect you from the impending disaster known as Identity Theft. This article examines that very trend, and presents some interesting statistics on how widespread the problem really is(n't).

Why Obama Was Awarded The Nobel Prize

Two weeks later, President Obama's Nobel Prize win is still on people's minds, as it is still unclear what exactly he did to win, except appease the world's left. Therefore, Dennis Prager examines the Norwegian Nobel Committee's justification of their pick, sentence by sentence. This is particularly interesting, considering the majority of the committee objected to the selection of Obama.

Presumption of Guilt

Finally, this story explains the cobwebs of the Mexican legal system, and one man's wrongful imprisonment which was ended only when a couple of filmmakers & lawyers heard his horrific story and decided to help. While Stratfor did offer some detailed intelligence on the growing trouble in Mexico, the legal issues there were not addressed. Luckily this article sheds some light on our southern neighbor.

Northeast Details

egordin — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 20:09:40 +0000

Before I completely part with this travel journal for a while, I wanted to list some of the more detailed logistics that made this trip possible.

All of the writing for this trip was done on my iPhone, and a large majority of the restaurants we patroned were also the products of the Yelp app. In fact, prior to leaving on the trip, I had set up neither the custom travel journal template nor used the Wordpress App to write anything before.

Therefore, I completed coding the custom travel timeline header all from the FTPontheGo App, which made me appreciate both my MacBook’s full keyboard as well as Coda’s syntax recognition engine.

All of the hotels we stayed in were both comfortable and reasonable in price. Although the restaurants were all different, all of them were good.

For reference, all of the more vital logistics are listed below:

The Map

View Larger Map

The iPhone Apps

WordPress: all of the journal entry writing, as well as limited formatting & photo uploading
FTPontheGo: all of the HTML, PHP, and CSS coding including FTP services
Yelp: restaurant recommendations
Action Menu [jailbreak only]: clipboard history, smarter cut & paste
Backgrounder [jailbreak only]: minimizing applications instead of closing them

The Hotels