It's not completely accurate seeing that I work with two monitors and this little app only supports the primary screen. so that's why you see a lot of horizontal movement near the right side of the image: it's me moving my mouse to my secondary monitor. The large black dots are where the mouse was not moving for a period of time.

Check out the cross-platform java applet here.

function getQueryStringVar(queryStr:String, targetVar:String):String
{
	var pairs = queryStr.split("&");
	for(var i:String in pairs)
	{
		var splitStr = pairs[i].split("=");
		if(splitStr[0] == targetVar)return splitStr[1];
	}
	return "";
}

Usage is easy. Just send it your query string as the first parameter (make sure there's not a "?" at the beginning) and key you want to know the value of.

// myVal is set to "example"
var myVal:String = getQueryStringVar("val1=test&val2=example", "val2");

Let me know if you find this function useful or if you improve upon it.

[via]

This little 27 minute cartoon introduced me to topics such as music theory, the golden ratio, geometry, and I feel most importantly: the concept of infinity.

Thanks to the wonder of the internet, you can now watch the program in its entirety on youtube, but I've conveniently embedded it here for you to watch!

Mathematics is the alphabet with which God has written the universe.

-Galileo Galilei

Mo·hawk

Etymology: of Algonquian origin; akin to Narragansett or Massachusett Mohowawog Mohawk, literally, cannibal

Date: 1634

3 : a hairstyle with a narrow center strip of usually upright hair and the sides of the head shaved

Here are some examples of a mohawk haircut fresh from the tubes of the Internet:

Since "fauxhawk" isn't really a word, it's not in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, we must look to urbandictionary.com.

fauxhawk: A full head of hair combed into the middle to fabricate the look of a mohawk.

As you can clearly see, fauxhawks don't have a defined line from where the short and long hair meet. It's basically just combed straight up into the shape of a mohawk. Fauxhawks are generally associated with pop-culture and general douchebaggery. Mohawks are generally associated with anti-pop-culture.

And for my final exhibit: a photo of me. I have a mohawk, not a fauxhawk.

If you're going to do something, do it all out. fauxhawks are a cop-out for people who don't want to make the commitment of shaving the sides of their head.

Sorry to say, that this wasn't the case in 70%-80% of the music I downloaded. I've always been a pretty fanatical completionist (are you an incrementalist or a completionist?) so I'd keep the bad songs around with the good ones, "because then I have the whole album," or "I might like that sometime in the future."

No More!

You may know about my obsessive iTunes star ratings, so I know what songs I don't really like. However, I'm not going to blindly delete all my 1 and 2-star rated songs. I'm going to delete songs as I come across them during my normal listening schedule for each day. I don't expect to delete any more than 4 or 5 songs a day from my 4,000 song, 20 GB music library.

Do you think I'm going about this the right way? Am I stupid for deleting songs in this age of extremely cheap storage mediums? Let me know. The deleting begins today.

First song to bite the dust and see the inside of my trash bin? "Full Moon" by The Black Ghosts.

I now have a problem: I have a bunch of glass bottles with different styles of beer in them. The majority of these bottles are unlabeled. Luckily, I have two different color bottle caps that I've used, but that's really the only differentiation between the bottles at the moment.

I've decided that whenever I create a new batch of beer, I'm going to create a custom label for it. just like commercial micro-breweries do. I'll print out the labels on my inkjet printer on plain paper, cut them up, and adhere them to the bottles using Elmers' Spray Adhesive (the stuff schoolkids use to tack things to display boards for presentations). With the type of spray glue I'm using, it shouldn't be too hard to remove the labels once the bottle is empty. I understand that the inkjet printer won't produce the best and most lasting results, but it'll do for now.

So, I proudly unveil my first-ever label. It's for my latest batch which I'm calling "Bitter Old Lady IPA" (India Pale Ale).

I'll be printing, cutting, and adhering the labels tonight. Who knows... if this turns out to be way more of a hassle than its worth this may also be my last label!

Bitter Old Lady IPA

And here is the label on a few test bottles:

So what do I do with the files? What any sane person would do: bring 'em into Garage Band and record the lead guitar part with nothing other than my vocal chords.

Here's two songs we collaborated on. I hope you enjoy them.

Dream Theater: The Count of Tuscany

Muse: Hysteria

Yeah... they're not that good... mostly because of my horrible hackjob on the vocals, but it was fun

Luckily I brought my tripod, remote shutter release device ("the spoon") and a 10 foot cord so that I was able to be in the photo. Framing and taking photos while being a subject at the same time is difficult!

Anyways, here's the best of the results.

Merry Christmas!

Turns out that the city council passed a measure (5-4) to put an additional $7 million bond on the next ballot because the first bond won't be enough to pay for the center. Granted, the taxpayers voted in favor of using bonds to finance it during the last election cycle. Wait... what? I wonder if anyone has ever done a poll of voters to see how many of them actually know what a bond is?

Bond:

In finance, a bond is a debt security, in which the authorized issuer owes the holders a debt and, depending on the terms of the bond, is obliged to pay interest (the coupon) and/or to repay the principal at a later date, termed maturity. A bond is a formal contract to repay borrowed money with interest at fixed intervals.

I'll be willing to bet that if all voters realized that a bond is a fancy name for a great big loan and that you actually have to pay it back, that greater than 50% of those who voted for the bond to build the aquatic center would not have voted that way. Why doesn't the city save up money it needs by operating under budget, and when they have enough money to build the aquatic center, then build it? (That was a rhetorical question... we all know that governments-especially those in the great state of North Carolina-can't control their spending).

Now the Greensboro City Council have decided that the cost will be more than originally thought! Whoda-thunk-it?!

I'm sure that there was some heavy lobbying to get the first bond measure on the ballot by companies that stand to make a profit from building and/or operating the aquatic center

Personally, I vote all bond issues down-no matter what. There no reason the government can't save up for something to pay for it later. It's this whole American system of instant gratification and digging yourself into a debt hole.

So my grand totals for the past 292 days is ~60 lbs and 37 inches!

If you haven't seen me in a while, you may not recognize me next time you see me

Check out my weight loss tracking tool that uses Twitter, http://tweetweight.com and my personal graphs and goals page http://tweetweight.com/markrickert

I have a source repository on a server and clone the project to my local machine to work on it. I also clone the project on that same server to a web-accessible directory so when I'm done with changes all I have to do is git pull in the web directory and it updates itself to the most recent version.

I was working on a project that needed some files and folders rearranged. It started out something like this:

/*.fla
/*.as
/www/*.php
/www/includes/config.php

I wanted to turn it into:

/*.php
/includes/config.php
/flashsource/*.fla
/flashsource/*.as

Thus, moving all the stuff from the /www/ directory to the root of the project. So I made the changes on the server in the web directory and did a commit and a push to the repository.

Whoops! I forgot that I needed to update that very same config file with some different information in order for it to work on the server (local vs. remote database authentication mumbo-jumbo). So on my local machine (which still had the old folder structure), I made the change and committed it to my local clone.

Anyone who has worked with version control systems knows what most of them (namely SVN) would do if I tried to push the changes to the server - vomit error messages all over my screen. Fingers crossed, I did a git pull to get the most recent version and then a git push to (hopefully) put the changes to the config file.

Holy crap it worked! The pull rearranged my folder structure locally, keeping the change I had previously committed to the config.php file but was smart enough to move the modified and committed config file to the new home I had given it on the server.

A git pull in the web directory to get the changes config file and we were in business.

SVN probably would have exploded in this situation.

Check it out.

Turns out that they've dropped support for PPC Macs. I'm not sure why they did this, but I'd speculate that it had to do with all the fancy new networking features.

This move is going to alienate a lot of users sill on older PPC hardware. It also makes it so that developers of extremely popular AIR applications (such as TweetDeck) won't want upgrade their apps to utilize these cool new features.

It's easy to upgrade software but extremely hard to upgrade hardware. Perhaps they'll add back PPC support in the final release build, but that's only wishful thinking.

As someone who relies on their computer for their livelihood, I have what I consider to be a pretty solid backup strategy.

I don't care who you are... if you're reading this and thinking, "I don't need to backup my computer", I'm here to tell you that you're sorely mistaken. If you have anything that you hold precious on your computer (whether that be photos, music, financial documents, recipes, etc) you need to backup your data somehow.

I have a 3-tiered backup and recovery plan:

1. I have a 250gig external drive that I use as a Time Machine backup drive.

   Right now, I can go back about 2 months and see almost every file that has been on my computer in Apple's mildly annoying Time Machine interface. This makes it easy for me to go grab a file that I may have deleted accidentally or roll back to a previous version of a document that I had edited.

2. I have a 1 terabyte external drive that gets a clone of my internal drive every night at 3am (Using Carbon Copy Cloner).

   This clone is bootable and also moves deleted files into an archive folder. This is a second layer of defense against accidentally deleting something in case of a catastrophic failure of my primary Time Machine drive. This drive also serves as a temporary working drive in case something should happen to my laptop's internal hard drive. I can work till I have time to grab another internal drive, install it, and copy all the content over.

3. I use Mozy to back up my really important stuff online. This backup runs every night.

   Granted, I don't copy everything to Mozy because of limited upload bandwidth at my house, but anything that I couldn't live without gets synced up to the Mozy cloud: my  iPhoto Library (16+gb), my iTunes Library (22+gb), financial documents (yes, Mozy storage is encrypted), archived project folders, and basically anything else that doesn't change a whole lot. Mozy is a great option to make an off site backup in case of a house fire, burglary,  or similar incident and I highly recommend it. (Click here save 10% on your first year of Mozy online backup service). One important distinction to make is that Mozy is a remote backup service, not an remote archival service. If you delete it from your machine, Mozy only stores that file for 30 days, after that, it's gone from their servers for all time.

So there's my backup solution trifecta. It's automated, it's easy to recover files, off site backups are encrypted, and most of all it's saved my butt numerous times.

How do you back up?

I'm thinking a reinvention of my website is due. I'd keep all the content from my years of Wordpress blogging content as an archive, but what do you think would be a cool site idea?

The Twitter feed as a blog thing is pretty lame, and I really want to consolidate my online "stuff" into one place–here. I feel like my digital content is spread around everywhere: Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, etc. Twitter is the thing right now, so I'd want my updates to be a big portion of the site, but I'm thinking I want to delete all my Flickr photos, and only use my site as a host for my images. I'm also not so active on Facebook anymore but 2 or 3 times a month to check on events so i want this site to be an easy way to get in contact with me.

Any suggestions about the direction I should take the site? I feel like the blogging thing isn't really working for me recently.

Although we grew apart after I graduated, I'll still miss you. You will never know the impact you had on my life and the lifes of everyone you came in contact with.

Roland Grenouillou and I were room mates during my senior year at the University of South Florida while he was working with the on campus ministry, Friends of Internationals. Sadly, he passed away this week.

Roland's Obituary in the Charlotte Observer

After about a week of searching and my wife getting sick and tired of me looking, I finally bought a new (to me) car. I settled on a 2008 Dodge Magnum. It's smaller than an SUV but larger than a standard car. That way I get better gas mileage than a large vehicle, but still have a decent amount of space in the vehicle.

My previous method of determining when I needed to cut my mohawk was when it hit the ceiling of my Daewoo. Looks like I'm going to have to change my criteria for the length I let my mohawk get because of all the headroom! We'll have to see about that.

Anyways, here are some photos. I didn't purchase the rims and wheels, so I'm going into the dealer to get them switched out for regular rims and wheels but for now I've got the *bling*. Those rims were $1,750 and I wasn't willing to add that to the total price of the car so that I could look (in some peoples' opinion) "cool".

This tutorial will assume a few things:

1. You have purchased the Prowl iPhone application and have it set up and working properly.
2. You have a Bluehost account or other hosting environment that allows you to schedule cron jobs and install custom Perl modules. Installing Perl modules on Bluehost is done from the control panel, other servers are out of luck for the scope of this tutorial, as I have no way to know how their setup works.
3. You are reasonably savvy at general computer and server things.

First task is to purchase Prowl for the iPhone and get it working. Do not proceed if you don't own this application. It is probably the best $3.99 I've spent on an iPhone app to date. Then generate an API key in your account settings on the prowl.weks.net site.

Next, you want to install some Perl modules in your environment. Again, these instructions are for Bluehost account holders.

1. Log into your control panel (http://yourdomain/cpanel/) and click the camel icon that says "Perl Modules"
2. Under "Install a Perl Module", type: "Net::Twitter" and click "Install."  This will take some time as the Net::Twitter has quite a few dependencies.
3. Install the modules "WebService::Prowl" and "JSON::Any"

After all these modules are successfully installed, we need to write our script and upload it to the server. I believe in giving credit where credit is due, so thanks to ohnekontur.de for the code framework.

#!/home/earfungu/perl
BEGIN {
my $homedir = ( getpwuid($>) )[7];
my @user_include;
foreach my $path (@INC) {
if ( -d $homedir . '/perl' . $path ) {
push @user_include, $homedir . '/perl' . $path;
}
}
unshift @INC, @user_include;
}
use Net::Twitter;
use WebService::Prowl;
my $prowl = WebService::Prowl->new(apikey => "YOUR PROWL API KEY");
my $nt = Net::Twitter->new(
traits => [qw/API::REST/],
username => "YOUR TWITTER USERNAME",
password => "YOUR TWITTER PASSWORD"
);
open(LASTTWEET, "
my @IN = ;
my $lastid = $IN[0];
close(LASTTWEET);
eval
{
my $statuses = $nt->replies({ since_id => $lastid});
for my $status (@$statuses)
{
$prowl->add(application => "TwitterProwl",
event => "$status->{user}{screen_name}",
description => "$status->{time}\n$status->{text}");
print " $status->{time} <$status->{user}{screen_name}> $status->{text}\n";
$lastid = $status->{id};
}
open(LASTTWEET, ">lasttweet.id");
print LASTTWEET "$lastid"; #Write the data
close(LASTTWEET);
};
if (my $err = $@)
{
die $@ unless blessed $err && $err->isa('Net::Twitter::Error');
warn "HTTP Response Code: ", $err->code, "\n",
"HTTP Message......: ", $err->message, "\n",
"Twitter error.....: ", $err->error, "\n";
}

Save this script as "twitterprowl.pl" and upload it to your server.

Go to twitter and find your most recent tweet ID. You can do this by clicking the date and time of a tweet in your timeline. Look at the URL and the long number is the tweet id. Open a new text file and paste this tweet id. Save the file as "lasttweet.id", upload it to the same directory, and make sure that perl can write to the file. This most likely calls for CHMOD 766.

Run the command by SSHing into your serve,  traversing into the proper directory, and running: "perl twitterprowl.pl" to make sure there are no errors.

Set up a cron job to run every `n` minutes. How often is up to you, but make sure you are mindful of the Twitter API call limit of 150 calls per hour. My IP is whitelisted, so I can make 10,000 calls per hour, so I set up my cron job to run every minute.

You now have a pseudo-push notification service for replies to you on twitter delivered right to your iPhone!

One last thing: this script would be very easy to modify to include all of your timeline instead of just replies to you, but for those of you who are following hundreds of people, this might not be a great idea.

Let me know in the comments if this helped you, or how you modified the script to do something even cooler!

Groundspeak has just realeased a new update to their Geocaching application. Here's a run-down of the new features:

In this update, we have added some of the most often requested features, including:

-The 3Gs compass is now supported.
-Field notes can now be automatically published to the cache page as a cache log using the app.
-The number of trackable items in a cache is now visible on the geocache list.

In this update, we have also addressed some issues, including:

-A series of bugs caused some geocache data to be lost, even if it had been saved. These bugs have been fixed.
-The difficulty and terrain ratings for caches are no longer rounded down in some cases.
-Search by Address now works for any type of address. Previously, there were documented issues with non-U.S. addresses.

This is a great update, especially for a 3GS owner, like me.

I'm excited to see how well the new compass functionality works.

Searching around the 'net, I found a great class that I used with no problems to create my dashed lines. It even has the capability to create polylines! Awesome.

Check out the blog post
Check out the example
Check out the source code

Head on over to the Wordpress plugin page or just go to your plugins page in the admin to upgrade.

A word of warning about upgrading: the folder name of the plugin has changed and you'll have to do a few extra steps this time in order to get it working properly.

1. After installing the plugin in its new directory: nike-ipod you need to check the permissions of the cache directory.
2. In the plugin options page, make sure you update the path of your cache directory and submit the changes.

Your plugin should be working properly now at version 1.4.4.

Leave a comment on this post if you're having issues or need assistance.

I'll keep you updated as to my progress.

I'm not sure what I can or can't say about it so I'll keep it brief. I know that God has bigger and better things in store for my life.

Whether I start freelancing or go to work for another company, I know that God is in control and that this happened for a reason. Who knows, I might end up happier and wealthier because of it.

Please pray for me.

Also... anyone need a programmer/web developer?