Why Upgrade?

Aside from the boot time speed test, the main reason I wanted to upgrade was to improve the performance of my computer when running Virtual Machines. I use VMware Fusion and have several VM’s installed. With the 2GB RAM configuration, by memory allocation was quickly exhausted

but with 4GB, it have a little breathing room.

Now it looks like my CPU is now the limiting factor. Although most users don’t have a need for such a large amount of RAM, the general rule is “more is better”. I have notice some improvements with running basic programs, but the real advantage comes in when having several apps open at once or when using multimedia applications.

Do you have 4GB of RAM installed, if so what is your reason?

To help participate, all you need to do is download Firefox tomorrow! According to the Mozzila blog

Please download Firefox 3 by 17:00 UTC on June 18, 2008. That’s 10:00 a.m. in Mountain View, 1:00 p.m. in Toronto, 2:00 p.m. in Rio de Janeiro, 7:00 p.m. in Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Rome and Warsaw, 9:00 p.m. in Moscow, and June 19, 2008 at 1:00 a.m. in Beijing and 2:00 a.m. in Tokyo.

According to my web analytics, most of you have already use Firefox. Why not enhance your browser even more and help set a record simple by downloading the latest version.

I’ll keep you posted if any records are broken or if their web servers crash trying to handle the demand.

Since we didn’t bring our skis, we just played in the snow like a bunch of kids. The snow was too dry to make a snow man, so we had to settle for a few snow angles.

A quick photo opp. We had a blast in the snow…

until we had to dig the car out; that part wasn’t fun.

By Sunday, the snow had melted off the road and we got to do a little shopping and visit the aircraft museum on base. Below is the most recently retired Air Force One plane. Chrissy and I tried to pose like the President and First Lady.

We also took a few videos of us in the snow. 1, 2, 3. As much as we enjoyed this trip I think next time we go back, Chrissy won’t be asking for snow.

 

Hit the break to see more proof.

 

To bad I’m not still in school; no snow day for me! 

 

Georgia Tech Graduation

I graduated on Dec 14, 2007 with my Masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering degree from Georgia Tech. Since it only took me one year to get my degree I would say it was well worth it! After my Bachelors degree, I said that I was looking forward to grad school to further my technical knowledge. Not the case. Although I worked as a research assistant for Dr. Mary Ann Ingram, I transitioned my career emphasis from technical engineering toward business management.

I still did some pretty cool research. My research consisted of throughput analysis for 802.11p wireless vehicle to vehicle communications. The main purpose of the research was to determine if a two channel allocation scheme is sufficient for US city grids, or if a three channel allocation should be considered. The may “research” in the project was the development of the analysis model used to calculate the throughput for overlapping WiFi BSS’s. If I get authorization, I will post the final paper.

Wandering WiFi

I started the new year with a new job. I am working for Wandering WiFi; a startup company in Atlanta that manages wireless networks, equipment, and devices. They monitor 36,000 hot spots across the US and are expanding fast. 2008 should be a good year for us.

I am working as a project manager/consultant. I took this job because of the immediate amount of responsibility and experience I would get. One of the biggest drawbacks of other companies that I looked at was the fact that they stuck you in a training program for the first few years, Yuck! Working for Wandering WiFi is a lot of work and at times very frustrating but I feel that the future benefits will far outweigh the hard work.

Moving to a New Apartment

Between graduating, finishing the research, going home for Christmas, we decided to move! For future reference, I would not recommend moving in the middle of finals week; it’s just chaotic.

We moved to the historic Baltimore block in downtown Atlanta. We are renting a penthouse apartment with a nice view of both the downtown area and midtown. Since the inside of our apartment is still under construction, Chrissy will not let me post any images. I’ll give you a few teaser photos of the outside.

Check back soon and we should have a new album for apartment photos. Oh and if you are in Atlanta, come stay with us, we have an extra room!

New for 2008

Well to start the year off, I got a new Mac! It was a gift from Apple; my older iMac G5 crapped out and thanks to the Apple Care, I ended up with a brand new iMac. Check back for a post about my experiences with Apple and my thoughts on the Intel platform.

Since I have started my job, my time is very limited. I hope however to continue to grow my site visitor base and to focus more on personal branding and creating original posts.

Overall 2007 was a great year and I don’t expect anything less for 2008.

Enough with the chatter, the main purpose of this post is to wish you a Happy Holiday season. Because we have so many friends, we decided to only send cards to a select number of people and use the website to wish everyone else Happy Holidays.

 

 

So what are you waiting for, jump over to the site and view our message.

There already exist ways to get your Facebook status on your Wordpress or Drupal blog, but what if you are not using either? Lucky for you I created a PHP function that will allow you to post your Facebook status on any site regardless of the underlying CM system.

Stats2Site is a small function written in PHP that will echo your Facebook status (or your friends for that matter) anywhere in your HTML code. You can display as many of your status updates as you like, have the option to show or remove the time-stamp on a status update, and can even remove the “Name is” if you choose.

Get the Code

Download Stats2Site here. At the moment this solution only works with PHP5. I will be working to get it compatible with PHP4.

Configure Stats2Site

Stats2Site needs to be configured before you can use it. You will need to add your Facebook Status RSS feed and your Facebook Name, i.e. the name that shows up in your status updates. To get your Facebook Status RSS feed do the following:

1. Go to your Facebook Profile
2. Click on the “Mini-Feed” bar so you can see all of your recent activity
3. Select the “See All” link on the top right of the “Mini-Feed” bar
4. Under “View” on the right, you will see a list of “Stories”, click on “Status Stories”
5. Underneath the list on the right, you will see “Subscribe to these Stories - My Status”, right-click on “My Status” and choose “Copy Link Location”

You will then paste this link into Stats2Site for $url. You will also need to add your name into $fbname. Those are the essentials. You can also modify the prefixes/suffixes to each status update, change the number of updates you show, and turn on/off the time-stamp.

Calling Stats2Site

Now you’ve got Stats2Site setup all you need to do now is place it on your website. To do this simply include the Stats2Site file in your webpage and then call the function put_Stats2Site() where ever you would like it to show up. For example:

Conclusions

From my experience, this method works quite well with Facebook. As I currently write this, Facebook is having issues with their RSS feeds and have an extra “is” in the update. Hopefully this will clear up soon. In terms of latency, my updates will appear immediately after I change them in Facebook.

If you have any problems or questions, please post them to the comments. Good luck.

If I can view it on my screen why can’t I download it? Well you can, you just need the right browser.

There are many products, scripts, extensions, you can buy or download that will give you some of the same functionality, but why would you buy a software tool to download free internet content? Also you may not be to comfortable with installing a bunch of third party scripts that could infest your computer with Adware; how will you know!

Safari Is The Solution

Lets face it, Safari (Webkit) is becoming the de-facto standard for a web browser. It is now available for download for both Winblows and OS X. The best part about Safari is that is has a small secret under the Window menu, Activity.

The Activity window shows all the current files that Safari has(is) downloaded(ing) (to display the webpage you are viewing) and sorts them by site. To download a specific file from the web, just find it in the Activity window and double-click. If you are downloading a video from Facebook or any other site, it will probably be a large file size and still be downloading when you view the Activity window.

That should open up a new browser window and download the file. Then you can just save it to your computer.

That’s right, all your favorite artists that place music on MySpace but have not allowed you to download the songs can easily be downloaded in a few clicks. Unfortunately it doesn’t work for 100% of the stuff on the web but I would say it is more like 99%. You can download YouTube, Revver, AOL, Facebook videos, MySpace audio, and much more.

Conclusion

What I like about this method over others is that it works for ALL my websites. I don’t have to worry about installing a plugin for Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Revver, … you see where I’m going.

What do you think, is this the method you like using to download the not-so-easy content from the web?

A quick check under the hood and you will see that along with the 10.4.11 update came Safari 3.0.4. The problem that is happening is that you might have an older version of PicLens installed. What you will need to do is simply uninstall it via the View->PicLens->Remove PicLens menu in Safari and then restart Safari. You should be good to go now. Then just visit PicLens.com and reinstall the newest version of PicLens.

Everyone knows we can’t live without PicLens!