Pseudoweb.net

Annie's Three Things

2012-01-30T00:00:00-08:00

I had dinner with Annie Beug last night, and she gave me three pieces of advice for life:

One: Save for retirement.

Open up a Roth IRA and fill it up. Right now. Compound interest is the shit.

Floss.

I’ve heard all kinds of crazy stories why you should floss. Most of them are scare tactics by doctors, but in general, you should do it.

Never mix uppers with downers.

Both advice for drug use and people.

None are profoundly amazing by themselves, but I think they go quite well with my general life goal of be happy. Anyways, happy Monday.

/Nat

2011 Year in Review

2011-12-26T00:00:00-08:00

2011 was a tumultuous year for Nathaniel Welch. In 2010, I said that in 2011 I would graduate from college, travel Europe and move to a city. Seems like a lot for a year, right? Well I agree, but I was successfully pulled them off. On top of those three things, I also quit my job at iFixit, started working at Punchd, which then got acquired by Google. Insanity.

Some of this insanity is visible in Last.fm’s graph of my year’s listening trends.

We can see I listened to more music during winter quarter when I was applying to jobs and also trying make sure I graduated on time. Around May and June, my listening started to calm down. I was pretty sure I was in the clear, but still freaking out a little. Then, on June 11th, 2011, I graduated!

Then, you’ll notice a giant dip in listening. All of July, I was in Europe (I didn’t write nearly enough about my trip…) and June was spent moving and visiting people.

In August, I moved to the Parkside District in San Francisco and started working at Google! Google has been a lot of fun, although I must admit switching from a forty person company, to a six person company to a thirty thousand person company has not been easy. College taught me how to work in small groups and write code. It did not teach me how to play the politics game though.

Near the end of August, I drove up to Seattle with my buddy David Horn. We attended PAX with the always entertaining Mark Gius and I visited my cousin Becky and her Husband Jeff. Tons of fun was had by all despite our car troubles.

September was fun as well. There was a brief excursion to Hardly Strictly to see Broken Social Scene (which reminds me, I also went to Outside Lands). Also, my good buddy Kareem and I went to Strange Loop 2011 in St. Louis, Missouri. I’d highly recommend any programmers who can go check out the conference. I learned a ton and met some really interesting people.

In October, Punchd went down to Cal Poly to recruit for Google. This was really cool because we got to present in front of around 150 people. I don’t think I did too well on my section, but oh well, it all worked out. Also, in October, Steve Jobs died. But I’ll get back to that.

In November and December, I finally started to get into the swing of things. Most of my time was occupied by work or hanging out with friends. I got to go to a few concerts and catch up with a few people I hadn’t seen in awhile. Also, I was able to meet some famous people, thanks to Google: Matz (the creator of Ruby), Bryan Voltaggio (famous chef) and a few guys from Stone Brewing Company.

Okay, back to Jobs. So, for those of you who know me well, I love create stuff. Probably one of the more fundamental beliefs I have is that empowering yourself and others with the ability to create new things (no matter the size or complexity) is one of the most important acts you can do.

Steve Jobs did this. I haven’t read his biography, nor did I ever meet him, but Jobs and Apple created great tools that let the people of the world create. Sure, some of their policies have been incredibly harmful to both journalism and technology, but when someone dies, I think it’s important to look back and remember the good that they caused in the world. Steve Jobs pushed Apple to create amazing tools that pushed the boundaries of design and technology, which made the world a better place. To remember him, I made a trip down to the Downtown Palo Alto Apple Store. I took a picture, spent a little money and then went and got a cup of coffee.

Later that day, I continued coding. I didn’t necessarily do it for Jobs, but it was interesting to think about the effect he and his company have had on my life.

Later in the year Dennis Ritchie, the creator of the C programming language, also passed away. Ritchie also had a big impact on my life, because C was the first language I ever really felt comfortable with.

Anyways, those are just some thoughts of mine on the subject, since I didn’t put them anywhere else.

I was hoping to get together a graph of my GitHub commits, but I didn’t get that far. I’ll see if I can pull together some sort of review of my programming feats this year by February.

Happy Holidays to all!
/Nat

P.s. You can also read my family’s Holiday Letter if you’d like.

Trunk Club is Awesome.

2011-11-13T00:00:00-08:00

So a few months ago, my friend and coworker Niket was talking about Trunk Club. Basically, he stated that it was cool, but really expensive. I didn’t entirely understand the idea, so I went online and researched.

The gist of the company is this: Trunk Club wants you to dress better, so they will team you up with a stylist and send you clothes for free. You try everything on, and then send back what you do not like. You only pay for what you keep, everything else (stylist recommendations, shipping and return shipping) are all free.

This sounded pretty awesome to me. I am a single guy now living in SF with a full-time salary, but I know next to nothing about good clothes and lack a source of advice on the subject. So I signed up. Trunk Club asked for some basic information such as my sizes, lists of brands I liked and what types of clothes I was looking for.

A week or so passed, and then I recieved an email from a woman named Katherine. She welcomed me into the program, and then asked if we could talk over the phone. When we finally talked, we discussed everything I had filled in on the form, plus clarified exactly what I was looking for. I said thanks and we parted ways. She was pretty helpful in clarifying details about the program and figuring out what sorts of clothes I really wanted, which was nice.

Something like ten days later, my trunk arrived!

My roommate Jeanne was kind enough to help me throw a small little fashion show in out living room. I tried stuff on and she took pictures so I could send them back with my oppinions to Katherine.

So the box contained nine items (four shirts, four pants and a jacket). I tried everything on and liked two of the shirts and two pairs of pants.

I then did the dramatic envelope opening telling me how much the entire box cost: $1500. Oi. Kind of intense, but I wasn’t too surprised. Jeanne laughed at me when I told her this was more than I had spent on clothes the entire time I was in college. So, I picked my two favorite shirts, and shipped the rest back (had to find the nearest FedEx place).

The whole process left me incredibly satisfied. I wrote a nice email to Katherine explaining my thoughts on the clothes she sent me and included the pictures, and apparently she’s going to contact me in December so we can try the whole thing again. I’m really looking forward to it.

Anyways, check out Trunk Club if you are interested in getting into the world of nice clothes and just don’t know where to start.

/Nat

Building a reputation system

2011-09-17T00:00:00-07:00

This was originally meant for the iFixit.com blog. iFixit never published it (because I never finished it), so I decided to clean it up a year later and publish it here. It should be noted that I am no longer employed by iFixit, and my views do not represent those of iFixit, nor my current employer, Google.

In November 2009, iFixit released Answers. When iFixit started on this project, we thought long and hard about how integral of a part iFixit wanted Answers to be in relation to the rest of the site. iFixit already had a forum system that had been coded based on the comment system throughout teardowns and guides, but it was growing very long in the tooth. So, after some debate, we decided to build a new tool that rewarded users for participating in our site and promoted quality content over quantity.

To reward users for quality content, we wanted to allow the community, not just the iFixit staff, to be able to judge what was useful, what was irrelevant and what was low quality. We decided on a basic reputation system, which allowed users to vote positively and negatively towards others posts, and for authors of questions to accept the answer they felt was best. That way there could be two “best” answers to every question, one the community liked and one the original poster liked. Often these line up, but this is not always the case, so we wanted to make sure everyone gained reputation when appropriate.

The reputation system was well received, but we started running into issues. Some of our users were gaining large amounts of reputation, while others were gaining very little. We had put limits in place on how fast and how often a user could do things, and these limits were being hit all far too often by some of our very active users. So we raised the limits to match our user’s activity and scaled votes, so that the answers with tons of votes gave slightly less reputation.

When I was at CodeConf last year, in one of the presentations, Coda Hale talked about metrics and how you need to measure what’s important to you and your code base. I found this funny, because we basically did exactly what the presentation said not to: we made assumptions about our users. We had no idea the users like Mayer would ever exist. We had trouble believing that a single individual would want to participate in our community so much he would answer a majority of the questions posted to the site, which meant we assumed he wasn’t writing quality content. This assumption lead us to prevent him (and others) from creating content on our site. Going forward building iFixit features, we found that we could query the database about the use habits of our more active users, and use those numbers to build limits to help us prevent spammers but also let those who want to create real content do just that.

As we sorted out the issues limiting our users, we also came across the fact that people who wrote guides also wanted and deserved reputation for content that was referenced throughout the site. So we started keeping track of a few different ways guides were being used to help others in wiki pages and in answers to questions. This was a bit of a pain, because we had to make sure our users (or some of our employees…) could not game the system easily. This required harder limits on how much reputation a user could give other users and how much reputation one could receive per day. We started noticing that some users were getting strange ratios, where they were getting 95 percent of their reputation from one user, or one user was giving all of their reputation to another user. We found after some heavy investigating that in many cases the first scenario was suspect, but not always foul play. The second scenario though, was always a user trying to game the system, so we started moderating users that were acting suspiciously, which seemed to promote fair play on Answers and throughout the rest of the site.

The system itself had some design issues in retrospect. Originally I created a single class that managed all of the reputation. This, in theory made it simple for developers to add reputation to any action on the site. The problem was this didn’t make much sense with the rest of the site. I tied reputation points to closely to objects, which was ok, but I did it in a weird non-object-oriented way. Probably one of the better ways to build the system would be to just pass in the object you wanted to reward a user for creating, instead of having the developer pass in an id and a table name. Also, instead of having a static method in a library, creating a reputation object would have been much easier for developers.

Anyways, these are just some insights into the first large project I ever launched. I should mention that Answers wouldn’t exist without the fantastic efforts of Sterling Hirsh (he developed most of the frontend of Answers). Him and I constantly butted heads on how Answers should be built and I learned a lot from him. Also, a big shout out to all of the iFixit developers (Dave, Shawn, Kyle, Chris and all the rest), you guys are the best.

/Nat

Advertising and the Heart

2011-09-12T00:00:00-07:00

I recently saw Levi’s 2011 “Go Forth” commercial. I thought it was beautiful, so I thought I would share it with you.

What makes this video so cool though, is the poetry being read. I did a little research and found the poem that is being read and included it below.

The Laughing Heart

Charles Bukowski

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

This lead me to two other videos. One is Tom Waits reading the poem, and another is the UK version of the Levi commercial. Interesting to see slightly different edits of the same B-roll.

Anyways, I just thought it was interesting. Advertising is such a predominant part of our daily lives, it’s nice to see a company apply a bit of class to the medium. Of course, Levi isn’t the first to do this, nor will the be the last.

/Nat

Summer 2011 Postcard 1

2011-07-05T00:00:00-07:00

Hello everyone!

I’m writing this to you as I head north from London to Edinburgh via the East Coast Train. It is pretty gray outside, but I’ve been enjoying the ride.

Anyways, this last week I have been in London, England. It has been a blast and I’m throughly sore from the trip.

You can see my photos from the whole trip over on Flickr.

Some general highlights and words of wisdom:

Visited the Tate Modern. I was blown away at the sheer amout of famous work this museum had. It was awkwardly laid out, but so many of the pieces were amazing, it’s hard to complain.
Visited the National Gallery and the British Museum. Both amazing places with really cool stuff in them. I kind of rushed through them, but I can see how someone could devote an entire day or more to each.
Visited the Imperial War Museum. This place was surprisingly awesome, lots of cool and interesting artifacts.
Coffee and Milk is the same as a latte.
Most bars don’t serve food between 1500 and 1800.

I did a lot of other stuff as well, but that is what is coming to mind right now. I’m looking forward to my week in Edinburgh.

/Nat

Graduation!

2011-06-26T00:00:00-07:00

So I am now a college graduate. I graduated from the California Polytechnic State University with a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science on June 11th, 2011.

Here is a slide show of the photos from my commencement.

Marissa Mayer at Cal Poly

2011-02-24T00:00:00-08:00

Cal Poly has been an interesting place for the last four and a half years. The school’s motto is “Learn By Doing”, and I have found no reason to disagree. Poly has taught me to create new things and try everything. Today, Marissa Mayer, came to Poly to talk about “Innovation at the Googleplex”, and I think it’s interesting to compare her views of corporate innovation to the innovation and real-life experience that is promoted here at Cal Poly. So here is my summary of her talk.

The talk started with a nice introduction by Dr. Ignatios Vakalis discussing the history of the Internet and computing. Vakalis is well loved around the Computer Science department, and his words of praise for Mayer were long.

Mayer structured her talk around the history of Google. One of her earlier statements is that Google didn’t start doing user experience studies until around 18 months in. Apparently, new users waited a few minutes before doing because the page was too simple. They thought the page was still loading. Google added a copyright line to make users understand that the page had finished loading.

She then went on to talk about Google’s basic infrastructure. Where are the servers? In 1999 they were renting space and trying to figure a better way to fit computers in the space. Apparently, each request takes about half a second and hits multiple data-centers.

Google apparently also ran an eight year split AB test by accident. They analysed data, and apparently users who saw ads searched more.

Mayer talked about how Google’s infamous 20% time promoted new ideas and kept employees interested. Some questions that Mayer claims Google has asked in its 20% time:

How do we revolutionise mapping?
- Street view
- Citizen cartographers
Let’s build a browser that works better with web applications. If people use the web more, they search more.
Google moderator. Democracy on the web.

Mayer then addressed what she thought where the next big breakthroughs in Computer Science were:

Automated machine translation.
- Google currently has around an 85% accuracy rate.
- She toured Japan using her android to translate for her.
Speech recognition
- can be used with translate
- 20% searches from Android phones are voice
Visual recognition
- Google goggles
- better image search
Contextual discovery
- combine all of Google’s data together to get more information.

There were a lot of good questions from the audience, but the question about Google’s and her opinion of net neutrality sparked two great quotes:

“How can you be against neutrality?” – Marissa Mayer
“More content gets accessed when there is a level playing field.” – Marissa Mayer

After the talk I had a short discussion with Mayer about how their acquisitions differed from 20% time. She said “every acquisition is ultimately different” but almost always Google has people already working on a problem. So when they acquire companies, they merge to create new but related products.

I’ll leave you with my favorite quote from the talk.

“Work on hard problems. Work on stuff that matters to people.” – Marissa Mayer

Hasta,
/Nat

Her Eyes vs. Mine

2011-01-24T00:00:00-08:00

My mom recently made a brief blog post about how our artistic views are different. I found the comparison that she made of our two photos really interesting. I think it is interesting because you can see how different our view of beauty in nature is and how we see things differently. So we may both agree that I currently take a more minimalistic approach to photography, but I would like to show how gorgeous her paintings are.

I think that painting is amazing, and I wish I had the patience and skill towards painting that she has.

/Nat

2010 Year In Review

2010-12-30T00:00:00-08:00

Ah yes, 2010. You were a good year. You, like any year, had your ups and your downs, but at the very least you provided me with some good data.

In 2010, I started playing with foursquare. I didn’t stick with it too long, but it created some interesting graphs. For example, I went to New York City to visit my friend Aaron over the summer:

And on this map, you can see where I work, go to school and play:

This year I also got really into ruby and GitHub. Here are a few projects I worked on:

I also listened to a lot of music. Because I use Last.FM to log everything to listen to, I have a nice little graph to show my last year of listening.

Also, there are a few other listening graphs…

And I continued to work at iFixit, which generates all kinds of fun graphs. Here is a graph showing how often I commited on average per day.

tl;dr

in 2010, I:

Went to NYC and Washington, DC.
Wrote lots of code
Listened to lots of music
Went to work

in 2011, I plan on:

Graduating
Traveling Europe
Moving to a city

/Nat

Infographics and the Election

2010-11-06T00:00:00-07:00

So, despite this elections rather depressing outcome, I would like to spend a moment looking at two sites and their display of the election results.

I had to crop away the header of CNN, due to some weird advertising they were doing, which broke my screenshot extension.

Anyway, I find these two sites interesting. They both display the same information (well, I screen shoted the CA election in one and the Senate in the other). The New York Times is the better designed one though, in my oppinion. Why you may ask? Two reasons. First look at how CNN represents the winner of a race. They have a check mark, but it’s hard to tell that it associated with either name, because it is in the same place for every election. Also it is visuall seperated from the actual names. The only notification that the check mark is associated with any name at all is that the order of the names changes depending on who won.

The NYT does two things better than CNN, and I think it makes it a far better display of information. The first is how the deal with the winner. They highlight the winner, and a check mark, in the color of their party. This way, even zoomed out you can get an idea of which party is winning. Also, the NYT provides an up-to-date textual analysis of the election data to the left. This textual evaluation is really useful because while data is important, analysis of data is what we, the populous care about.

Anyway, I know that wasn’t much, but I kind of wanted to share.

Hasta,
/Nat

Developing Your Resume

2010-10-25T00:00:00-07:00

A resume is an important little document. It summarizes your entire professional and academic career. Resumes are often the document that introduces you to a new company, and remember, first impressions are always important. Creating a resume is not always an easy task, and because I believe that software exists to make things easier, I set on a journey awhile back to make creating resumes easier.

As hackers, software developers and code monkeys, we have a special set of tools. The two most important of these tools, in my opinion, are plain text files and version control systems. But for some reason we ignore these tools when we create our resumes. Instead, we write them in Word documents and PDFs, both of which are not easily editable like plain text is nor easily stored in version control.

I am here to propose an alternative, my resume project. This project started as a way for me to maintain my resume, where after years, I had become tired of having to keep track of a Word document. I often had to recreate the whole thing whenever I gained a new job, or felt like reworking a sentence or two. Now my resume is stored in Markdown, a plain text format that transforms into HTML quite nicely.

The project was initially inspired by LinkedIn and Jekyll. LinkedIn is great, because it is easy to modify and lets you maintain an ongoing career history. But it’s still stored somewhere that I can’t backup, and it is very hard to revert to an older version (if not impossible). Jekyll is a static blog generator. It is where I fell in love with Markdown and helped me see the benefits to storing all of sites in version control.

I’ve been pretty happy with what I have produced. My resume now looks quite attractive, and it has gotten me a few job offers. I have been constantly tweaking it as I find better ways to say things. I’ve had a few people base their resumes off of mine, and one guy changed the project so dramatically, I was actually inspired to make mine even better. If you have a GitHub account, feel free to fork it and change it so you can have your own online resume.

Switching to Android

2010-08-14T00:00:00-07:00

So Google I/O was kind of amazing, the awesome part is that they gave me two free phones. The bad part was how to get into talks. I really need to find more conferences where they are either really old and experienced, or young without a lot of people.

But that is all besides the point, thanks to Google I/O I started carrying a smart phone. First a Droid (I sold that), then a Evo 4g (… it was taken to a better place), and now a Nexus One. Since I’ve had mixed feelings about carrying a smart phone, I decided a while ago to list the pros and cons.

Pros

GPS always at the ready - with out this and google maps, I would have never found my way around Manhattan.
Offline storage - The ability to store things like barcodes and maps offline makes life a whole lot more paperless and easy.
Address Book + Internet - An address book that syncs with Facebook and Twitter makes it so I always have contact information for people
Instant notification of new email - Useful for knowing if the servers at work have died

Cons

Always on the internet - This can be kind of distracting. I’ve found myself more often than not staring at my phone while waiting for something, instead of just thinking and waiting.
Instant notification of new email - I have no excuse for not seeing the servers are down.
Battery Life - No matter what anyone says, the battery life of smart phones suck. The nexus one lasts a little longer than a day under normal usage, but you basically need to plug it in every night. I miss just having to plug my phone in once a week, but maybe I’m spoiled.

Anyway, these are just my views. After my trip to NYC, I’m pretty set that the pros outweigh the cons, but if I were backpacking, I would need a cheap phone that would last for weeks to take with me,

New York 2010

2010-07-28T00:00:00-07:00

I recently took a vacation to New York City to visit an old friend. The trip was a blast and ended up being some of the most fun I’ve had in a long while.

I arrived Thursday morning, around 7am, at JFK. I took the A train into Manhattan, and met my friend Aaron at the FIT Dorms by Penn Station. We had a quick breakfast, but then he headed into work and I started to walk up 8th Avenue.

I passed the New York Times Building, which is just gorgeous. I continued to walk North, and found Columbus Circle and Central Park. Instead of walking up Central Park West, I went up Broadway, but quickly realized my mistake. I tried cutting across the park on 65th street, and let me tell you, that road is not built for people.

I found the Met, but it had a pretty long line, so I decided to wander around the Upper East Side. I fell asleep in a Starbucks, and enjoyed Pizza at this delicious place called Roma’s.

I then walked back to the Met, and spent three awesome hours wandering around inside.

I really loved the wide variety of stuff inside the Met, and the Picasso exhibit was awesome (although it really showed his decent into insanity…).

Probably the thing that made me the happiest about the Met though, is that they are using user submitted photos on Flickr in their advertising campaign. It seems so obvious and so awesome all at the same time.

Afterwards I got a little lost in Central Park.

That night Aaron and I hung out in Park Slope. I had some really good New York beer, and I met some cool people.

The next day I took the subway down to NYU and Washington square.

NYU was pretty cool, but rather empty because it’s summer. Thanks to my phone, I was able to find the Strand. The Strand has 18 miles of books, inside and outside. I was giddy, and if I wasn’t supposed to meet a family friend for lunch, I probably would have never left.

I bought a book, and found a coffee shop, Everyman Espresso, and read while the rain poured down outside.

After lunch with my family friend, I wandered around the area. I tried to visit the Apple Store, but it was raining so there was a line of people trying to get in. Finally four o’clock rolled around, I wandered over to the MoMA and met up with Aaron. We saw the Matisse exhibit, which was awesome. The rest of the floors were hit or miss, but there was a lot of really gorgeous art in there.

That night a group of ten of us or so went out to a few bars in Manhattan. The two that I remember the names of are “High Bar” and “Joshua Tree”. The next day we slept in (the bars are open till four, which is amazing), and then visited the World Trade Center. We got a picture together even, near the Irish Hunger Memorial (cool random place we stumbled across).

That night we went to the bars around Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Everywhere we went was pretty cool, although I especially liked the bar called “The Union Pool”. It was basically a combination of every great house party I’ve ever been to.

You can see all of these photos and more in my Flickr set for this summer.

Hasta,
/Nat

Radiohead's All I Need

2010-06-24T00:00:00-07:00

This is just so gorgeous, I couldn’t not post it. I hope you enjoy it.

Hasta,
/Nat

My Firefox Setup

2010-04-19T00:00:00-07:00

Hey there kiddos,

I’ve been thinking lately that I should talk about my firefox setup, so I guess I’ll put that right here.

Theme

Whitehart

A Very nice lightweight theme. Looks great on every OS except OS X. On OS X I just use the default.

Extensions

Firebug

Probably the greatest tool a web developer can have. It allows you to inspect JavaScript, CSS, headers, HTML, and much more on the fly. Also if you install fireCookie, you can inspect those easily too.
Web Developer

This isn’t as useful as FireBug, but I’ve had it around for so long, I still use it. One of the nice features lets you outline all block elements on a page, which is useful for seeing how strange css elements are interacting.
Screengrab!

This gives you a few different options for taking pictures of web pages.
Download Statusbar

Makes downloading things so much less intrusive than the normal download tool, especially if you enable the mini-mode, which I highly recommend.
Weave

Like xmarks, which I used for years and still highly recommend, but syncs everything including your awesome bar, and lets you store it on a server of your own.
AdBlock Plus

Blocks ads incredibly well.
Delicious

I still use delicious a lot, and this lets me save things to it easily. I always just turn on classic mode, because all of their new features are pretty annoying.

Anyway, that’s about it. I still really love Firefox, especially since 3.6 has made it so much faster. I’m running the 3.7 nightlies on my laptop, which I am enjoying as well. I have yet to figure out if I like firefox because of the way I have customized it or not, but it definitly wins points in my book for being so easy to customize.

Hasta,
/Nat

Sinatra, Heroku and You

2010-04-12T00:00:00-07:00

So there I was, done with finals, a fresh Mocha, a large piece of coffee cake and a quiet café with a fast wireless internet connection. What should I do? Ah ha! Code!

I have, for a while, been looking for a good place to store my thoughts. I didn’t need a to-do list, because most of the stuff I write down is more of a “wouldn’t this be cool” instead of a “you need to do this in the next two days”.

A long time ago I had started a little PHP app called theStack to do just this. I sadly though abandoned it due to time constraints. On this day with nothing but free time, I decided to code it up. I took a quick look at the PHP, and said, “the hell with this, I’m going to be trendy and code this in ruby.”

The first thing I needed was to figure out how to code ruby for the web. I had heard rails was awesome, but I also heard that it had a ton of overhead. Then I remembered Sinatra. Sinatra is a nice, small, and easy web framework that is really easy to learn. I read through the readme and started coding.

The readme is misleading. One thing it does not mention is that all of its code is for Sinatra >= 1.0, which, until recently, the ruby gem did not install by default. Also, since I had planned on deploying this to Heroku, I needed to figure out how to get Heroku using the correct version of Sinatra (Heroku, by default, uses 0.9.4).

To install the correct version of Sinatra on your local machine is quite easy now that 1.0 has been released, but if for some reason you are trying to get the delopment build instead of the stable build, you can add --pre to the gem install:

gem install --pre sinatra

The main two things that 1.0 support adds, is support for less and erubis.

Less

My friend Reed introduced me to less a little while ago. It’s very similar to CSS, but allows for you to nest things, and save information into variables, which is pretty awesome, and generally makes CSS files easier to read and code.

Erubis

Since I started writting this article, I’ve actually given up on erubis. It’s meant to be a fast version of ERB, but it has a decent amount of bugs in it, so I switched to plain ERB, and have been loving every minute of it.

Gems on Heroku

To get gems (such as Sinatra and less) on Heroku, you need a .gems file in your git repository. I have provided an example, but it is pretty straight forward.

less
erubis
sinatra --version 1.0
rdiscount
sequel
sqlite3-ruby

Coding…

I think I’ll save this for a sperate article, but you can see the code I am writing on GitHub.

Deploying.

Deploying to Heroku is pretty easy. You can use two methods, either a Rakefile, or just from the straight command line.

First you need to create an account on http://Heroku.com and then follow their quickstart guide. But the general overview is pretty simple. First gem install heroku then run heroku create in your directory. Finally run git push heroku master. Now your app is running on heroku! Also before you start, you need to have a git repository for your project, which I assume you know how to do.

You can also add the following to your Rakefile, so you would type rake deploy instead of git push heroku master.

Liquid error: No such file or directory - posix_spawnp

Anyway, I kind of rushed this, because I wrote most of the post about a month ago and then forgot about it. Once I am happy with theStack, I’ll write another post here about coding with Sinatra, ERB, less, Sequel, and Heroku.

Hasta,
/Nat

Respect

2010-03-08T00:00:00-08:00

I just read an article detailing an email conversation between an NYU Professor named Scott Galloway and an anonymous student. The article and it’s subsequent hacker.news post have lots of people arguing who here is in the wrong, with many, if not most, siding with the student.

Seriously people?

This is pretty common practice at Cal Poly, but I guess the idea of respecting your professors is a west coast thing.

Here is what I said on HN:

I totally agree. I currently am a student at a public university, although on the other side of the country, and this behavior in any of my classes would result in the teacher refusing to enroll a student in the class. You are older than 18, grow a pair and learn to respect others time and energy. The quote that I’m hoping the kid really gets is of course “having manners, demonstrating a level of humility…these are all (relatively) easy. Get the easy stuff right”.

Hope this kid grows up before he joins the workforce, or hell, attends another day of class, because this behavior is just not OK for an adult.

Note: this post is backdated to when I originally wrote it. I had planned on developing this further with things like logical arguments and examples, but the whole thing just infuriated me.

Review of the Logitech Anywhere Mouse

2010-02-18T00:00:00-08:00

Logitech Anywhere Mouse by Nat W.

So I was going to write this in depth review of the Logitech Anywhere Mouse. But then, Cory Doctorow went ahead and wrote a great review of it.

I entirely agree with everything he says. I bought one in early August when trying to find a new mouse for work. I needed something that worked on my glass desk, felt good in my hand, and was under $80. The Anywhere MX did all of these things, so I went ahead and ordered one from amazon.

It worked great, and I happily used it for four months. I loved it so much in fact that earlier this month I bought another one for my home. The mouse works great in Linux, Windows, and OS X (I use all three with it everyday), without the need for any extra software. The scroll wheel works really well, and I actually prefer the separate button for middle clicking, it just seems more intuitive than clicking a wheel down.

Before, I bought my second Anywhere mouse, I also briefly tried out the Performance MX. While I can see some people liking it, I found the mouse to be large, bulky and uncomfortable. I was especially bothered by the fact that on this mouse you used the button to toggle the scroll speeds while the wheel was your third button. I really wish companies would realize that consistency in interface is key. Anyway, I used it for a week and then returned it, which thanks to Amazon being awesome, was no hassle at all.

Anyway, I highly recommend the Logitech Anywhere MX mouse.

cya later,
/Nat

Learning Processing.js

2010-02-14T00:00:00-08:00

This quarter I have been taking CSC484 at Cal Poly. CSC484 is a class offered by the computer science department titled User Centered Interaction Design, and is taught by Dr. Franz Kurfess.

CSC484 changes every time it is taught, mainly due to the fact that computer interaction is something that is constantly changing. New devices and designs are being invented daily, which have the possibility to dramatically change the space.

This quarter, our class is working with Yahoo, developing possible UIs for some of their internal tools. My team, team hzzah!, has been tasked with making a workflow management tool. Basically, Yahoo needs a better UI than the current gigantic table they have for tracking instances of various workflows/processes that are being enacted by their IT team. To solve this problem, we are trying to design a few different interfaces. One of these is a circle with spokes to describe an entire process and all of the instances of that process that currently exist.

After a little searching, my team member Reed stumbled across Processing.js. This little javascript framework lets you do all kinds of fun HTML5 canvas stuff in a nice abstract way. Before I walk you through it, I figured I would dump a bunch of it in front of you.

Liquid error: No such file or directory - posix_spawnp

Cool right? There are some interesting things to notice about this code. First of all, when the page is loaded, the setup function is called. This function should in theory instantiate your classes and set things that probably will not change, like background color.

Next checkout the draw function. This is an interesting function because it is called every time a frame needs to be rendered, which since we have our frames per second set at 60, this function is called 60 times every second. This can present some interesting concurrency problems, because if you loop through a group of functions that modify similar areas of the page (like write text to a DOM element) you will quickly notice that they are stomping on each other.

Processing.js works using a cartesian plane, so if you take a look at all of the functions on the processing.js reference page, most of them are pretty straight forward. For instance, to draw any sort of quadrilateral, you just need the four points, and processing.js will just draw it for you.

Finally, once you have your code written, you probably want to be able to display it one a page. The processing.js package comes with a very nice little script to insert your processing code into a canvas element. The file is called init.js in the archive you can download, but I’ve also included it here, just in case.

Liquid error: No such file or directory - posix_spawnp

In reality, that’s all you need to know. I’ve found processing.js a really fun language to code in, because it works well when using mooTools or jquery or any other javascript framework. Probably my biggest issue is that I’ve totally forgotten how to use trigonometry in the years since highschool, so I’ve spent a decent amount of time on Wikipedia and StackOverflow re-learning my maths.

Hasta,
/Nat

The Black Perl

2010-01-30T00:00:00-08:00

I know, I know, two posts in a row? What is he thinking? Well I came across this post on Hacker News, and it was pretty awesome, so I wanted to repost it here.

This block of code is written in Perl. I don’t know much Perl, but it’s a pretty cool language, and I do love poetry. Anything that can combine poetry and code is awesome in my book.

Without further ado, the “Black Perl” by Author Unkown.

Liquid error: No such file or directory - posix_spawnp

Hasta,
/Nat

Delicious Summarizer

2010-01-29T00:00:00-08:00

For awhile now I’ve been trying to come up with a good way to inspire me to write more about current topics. The reason I had wanted to be inspired more, beyond the general want to think about things more, was so I could reach a goal of publishing one blog post a week. Since I want these blog posts to be relatively centered on thoughts I’ve had throughout the week, I figure if automatically I email myself a list of urls and the thoughts I had on them, hopefully I can come up with a decent blog post.

So I wrote a little Bash script to run every Saturday morning and email me the summary of my week, according to delicious. I will spend the rest of this article explaining on how it works. If you would like, you can just look at the source, located at my GitHub.

The Script

I’m not going to tell you how to write bash scripts here, there are many TLDPs on that subject (see the reference section). But I will do a quick walk-through.

The first few lines figure out the parameters we will be passing to the delicious.com API, mainly the dates we want, and the specific format those dates must be in.

After that we define the API URL that we will be getting and put the date parameters into the proper format.

Then we make sure you’ve passed in the proper parameters. If you haven’t we display an error, else we put all of the URL parts together.

Finally we print out some info, and use curl to pull the data from the URL we constructed. Note the -s on curl. This is important so we don’t get garbage filling our script about how long it took to pull down the script.

At the very end we take what we curl’d and pass it through an XSLT processor to give us a nice format and print this out. We could have just printed out the XML, but that is kind of a pain to read normally.

The XSLT

I found writing XSLT files a pain. But basically this is how they work. First you define that this is a XSLT file.

Liquid error: No such file or directory - posix_spawnp

Then you need to define how to turn the XML into plain text (or what ever format of text you want…). Note how we do matching in a similar structure to the actual XML.

Liquid error: No such file or directory - posix_spawnp

Cron

The following is the cron command I have set up.

Liquid error: No such file or directory - posix_spawnp

Conclusion

It’s very possible that it would be easier to write this in another language or something, but It ended up being a fun little script. The main advantage you would gain by writing it in another language is having a good XML parser, so you could skip using XSLT to parse your XML file.

Anyway, hope you found this interesting.

Adios,
/Nat

Switching to Jekyll

2009-12-20T00:00:00-08:00

I love Wordpress. I’ve been using it since 0.7, and it has stood by my as an easy straight forward blogging system. Wordpress is incredibly flexible and easily extendible.

The problem I have is that Wordpress has become rather bloated lately. It has a lot of features to mess around with, but I’ve lost the time to care about making sure it is up-to-date. Also I’ve been wanting to be able to work better offline for a while now.

First Attempts

The first thing I began doing was some research. Not a lot of systems provided what I was looking for, but Jekyll, from one of the guys that works on GitHub, looked promising. I took that, and some of the other systems I found, and used them as inspiration for what I wanted to use.

Some things that I found I liked:

Writing posts and saving them in markdown
The ability to view and work on the site offline
An abstract theme setup. Doesn’t have to be much, but and easy way to style the blog would be nice.
An easy way to store what I write in version control

Jekyll met a lot of these requirements, and inspired even more of them. Tom Preston-Werner’s article on why he wrote Jekyll really spoke to me, but Jekyll seemed to have some issues. First it required you to have ruby set up on your server. At the time, I did not have this, nor had I had good luck using ruby gems (which I recently discovered was because I was missing the debian package ruby1.8-dev). So I considered writing my own Jekyll clone in PHP. I didn’t get very far, due to the whole me being in school thing and recently releasing Answers.

Jekyll

Since I had recently switched to a new web host (HostGator) which supported Ruby and I had started learning Ruby (thanks to why_’s guide). I decided to port my blog to Jekyll. Setting up the system was straight forward thanks to all of the examples of people using Jekyll already, but I’ll give a little overview for those of you interested. The results of me following these steps can be found at icco.github.com.

Create a new GitHub repository titled username.github.com.
Add the files _config.yml and README
Add the folders _posts and _layouts
Start working on your site. Every time you push to GitHub, your site will regenerate.
You can also look at this script which will let you import a Wordpress blog.

I still haven’t installed Jekyll on HostGator, but using GitHub’s support for CNAMEs and post-receive hooks, I’ll figure something out.

Resources

Here are a list of places I looked while setting up my site.

80 Characters and You

2009-09-13T00:00:00-07:00

I use vim a lot, and I use it even more now since my work uses it as well. One thing my boss really loves, and I kinda hate, is an 80 character line limit. I used to just commit style breaking code, but now I can have vim yell at me when lines are too long, thanks to this useful post over at Stack Overflow.

Just add the following to your ~/.vimrc and you’re good to go.

" Highlights long lines
highlight OverLength ctermbg=red ctermfg=white guibg=#592929
match OverLength /\%81v.+/

/Nat

Vim Key Bindings

2009-08-26T00:00:00-07:00

Hey there kiddos,

I use Vim daily, and as such, I’ve picked up some key bindings which I think make the program just a little more perfect.

" Because we like our line numbers sometimes...
:nnoremap <C-N><C-N> :set invnumber<CR>

" But we don't always wanna wrap
:nnoremap <C-w><C-w> :set invwrap<CR>

" And all the cool kids need to paste
:nnoremap <C-p><C-p> :set invpaste<CR>

" Use the space key to open and close code folds
:vnoremap <space> zf<CR>
:nnoremap <space> zd<CR>

When reading this, remember that the vim configuration file uses “ for comments.

So first off I set Ctrl+n to turn line numbers on and off. All you need to do is tap Ctrl+n twice and line numbers will disappear or reappear. This becomes helpful when trying to switch between reading code and needing to copy something into your Instant Messenger.

The next thing I set is Ctrl+w to turn line wrapping on and off. I find line wrapping very annoying, but being able to hit Ctrl+w twice and get the entire line on the screen has proven useful when reading poorly formatted Readme.txts or mysql dumps.

The third binding is something I learned of recently and have fallen in love with. Basically, if you tap Ctrl+p twice before pasting text from an external source (lets say a website or something) vim inserts the text as it looks, instead of trying to do auto-formatting. This is especially useful if posting code with comments in it.

The final key binding lets me open and close code folds by just using spacebar. This is pretty sweet and useful when you need to ignore blocks of text at the same time. You can learn more about code folding with this writeup by Dr. Michael McGuffin or with a simple Google search.

Oh yeah, before I forget. nmap is a binding in normal mode, vmap is a binding for visual mode, and imap is a binding for insert mode. The letters “nore” in-between the mode specifier and map make it so we don’t check for recursive mappings. This is useful here because we are binding the space bar and our bindings have spaces in them.

Anyway, hope this was useful, or at least informative. /Nat

Useful PHP functions for personal sites

2009-08-23T00:00:00-07:00

I got the last two of my wisdom teeth pulled yesterday, and as such, I spent the day taking drugs, watching movies, and finally redoing natwelch.com.

I’ve decided to post some basic, but fun little snippets of PHP I’ve used on my personal site over the years here now that I got syntax highlighting working on my blog.

First and foremost is the age function. Given a birthdate, it returns a formated age.

Liquid error: No such file or directory - posix_spawnp

Of course this would be better if it was written so your birthday was passed in via a variable, but meh, I wrote it awhile ago.

This next piece of code is from Michael Heilemann but I’ve modified it a little, and I use it a lot, so I’ll post it here as well. It prints the time since a specified date in a kind way.

Liquid error: No such file or directory - posix_spawnp

And here is my favorite function that I wrote to parse twitter messages. It turns hashtags, urls, and replies into proper links using regex.

Liquid error: No such file or directory - posix_spawnp

Anyway, I hope these tidbits are useful. Sorry about the bad indentation, I haven’t quite gotten the hang of the wordpress plugin, Syntax Highlighter Evolved yet.

/Nat

Find and Grep

2009-08-21T00:00:00-07:00

My good friend Prentice posted a blog entry about using grep recursively. While I agree, this is pretty cool, I’ve recently fallen in love with using find to find things (what a crazy concept) in my code.

I got this little trick from one of my coworkers, which I now use to find just about anything in my code repositories:

Liquid error: No such file or directory - posix_spawnp

You’ll notice that that line wont work for you, so put the following in your ~/.bashrc file.

Liquid error: No such file or directory - posix_spawnp

This means that it will only look at files that end in php, so of course it will stay out of your .svn or .git directories.

But of course this isn’t the best option. What if you want to call the following:

Liquid error: No such file or directory - posix_spawnp

You need to change the gfind definition to do the equivalent of what Prentice was doing, but with find.

Liquid error: No such file or directory - posix_spawnp

If you want to learn more about find or grep you can check out the man pages on your system or the Wikipedia pages for the find command or the grep command.

/Nat

Campus is Changing

2009-08-13T00:00:00-07:00

One thing I hate is missing the fact that Cal Poly is evolving. There are lots of places on campus that I never see due to the large amount of time I spend cooped up in the lab, so last weekend I went around and took some photos of the current state of campus. Some interesting developments is that they redid the soccer fields out on the edge of campus. Also I never noticed the sweet graffiti in the Architecture building.

To see how the campus has looked over the last three years through my eyes, check out my calpoly tag on flickr.

/Nat

Obama, the speaker.

2009-01-20T00:00:00-08:00

Obama Inauguration on Flickr by John W.

Well today we ushered in a new era. I’m not sure exactly what I want to say about this, except that President Obama’s Inaugural Address was beautiful, as was the inaugural poem. I have stolen the New York Times transcriptions of these for safe keeping, but I’m going to publish my copies here.

Finally the above image was grabbed off of Flickr, which has a great pool of photo’s from the event.

Flickr's Inauguration Pool

Welcome to another four years.

/Nat

Art in Everything

2008-12-09T00:00:00-08:00

Apparently I have a strange view of life. It’s not overly cynical, nor does show how to rule the world. It is not centered on video games, tools, food or technology. These views can be found elsewhere.

What I see is art. I don’t see art in everything, but I do see it in a lot of things. Today as I was listening to music, I felt that I should share that on my blog, because, where else do we share these sorts of things?

So what I want to talk about is Album Art.

I know this goes against the time honored statement of “don’t judge a book by it’s cover” but let’s be honest, you often need to enjoy a whole package, wrapping paper and all. I feel that this is incredibly true when it comes to music. I love music, and for those who have visited my room (or looked at my last.fm profile) notice that I almost always have music going. When iTunes added support for album covers, I started making sure that all of my music had the correct covers. This forced me to research artists more, often taking me to their websites, Wikipedia pages, myspace profiles and other reaches of the internet.

So I would like to take a moment to post some album art. It’s not my favorite album art, but it is good album art. At some point I think I need to write more about new albums I get, or something, but I’ll just put these images up. Please try to enjoy them for what they are, good pieces of graphic design.

Well before I sign off, I would like you to take notice of another thing about these covers. They all try to portray a general mood about the album. “The Man Comes Around” was one of Johnny Cash’s last albums, notice how the man (Cash himself) looks worn yet proud? Blu and Exile’s “Below The Heavens” was their debut album. Look at that smile, like a freshman’s first day of school. Nine Inch Nails defined grunge. And look at that “With Teeth” cover, if that doesn’t remind you of industrial-ness I don’t know what will. Finally Iron and Wine’s “The Sheppard’s Dog” is a calm album that has a panting yet warm and happy looking dog on the cover. This is a folk-rock album, and while it isn’t a perfect fit, I do beleive the dog works.

Anyways, just some pretty pictures for you folks.

/Nat

Communities

2008-11-25T00:00:00-08:00

I just read an amazing article on Kotaku titled “I,Gamer”.

This article really spoke to me, because I find more often than not, I am more interested in the community behind a topic or trend then I do the actual topic/trend. It’s not that I don’t enjoy and love said topic, because otherwise I would never have initially gotten involved with the community.

Some examples of things this has happened:

Linux: first NBLUG then CPLUG

World of WarCraft: The diversity of people, guilds, and the forums. I’m more of a watcher of this community, mainly because I’m not nearly as hardcore as most, but I enjoy the culture non-the-less.

Jedi Knight II: O how I loved this game, in fact it’s probably the game that got me hooked on FPS, and I never beat it. Want to know what happened? I fell in love with The Jedi Academy. This was an amazing place that promoted teaching others cool things in the game. In my mind it was basically a never ending online Bar Camp.

Web 2.0/Social Media: Bar Camps, Twitter, the whole community behind it. Here’s to someday maybe getting invited to FooCamp.

Wordpress: This is what actually got me hooked on Web 2.0. Back when 1.2 hit I spent a lot of time on the plugin forums learning about PHP and helping others.

Case Modding/Computer Hardware: Let’s not even talk about this. I was very active in a few communities, namely Hardware Geeks, but I visited and posted on probably around 20 different forums and followed around 50 different blogs.

There have been a few other communities I’ve been active in, namely MegaTokyo and Penny-Arcade, but my involvement there is similar to my involvement to WoW. I follow what happens in the community, but I rarely participate.

Anyways, I’d like to end with a quote from the article:

"it's not because we're gamers. It's not even because we're hardcore gamers. It's because we're such fanatical culturalists that we forget about the middle ground."

/Nat

The Categorical Plan

2008-11-01T00:00:00-07:00

So I was reading John’s Post and I started to think about my life plan. Needless to say, it’s not really a plan, but more of an idea. This idea being “make others happy, be happy, and stay happy.”

I’ve tried writing this post a few different ways, but I think John’s little list got me to at least make my own list, so I can avoid writing the epic novel that would be my outlook on life (not to mention the fact that it’s ever changing…). But none the less, john made a list, so I figured I would make a list.

This list is not in order in any sort.

Develop a web-application that is used by 10,000 people
Get my name in the credits of some piece of art (not sure if I want to include software as art, if so I've done this, more on that later...)
Eat
Sleep
Hike the John Muir Trail
Live in Boston
Live in Europe
Visit Japan
Turn 21
Be Happy
Volunteer
Become a Teacher
Visit every National Forest in the USA

Anyway, that’s my list. What’s your list?

/Nat

365

2008-10-09T00:00:00-07:00

So I decided, with a little persuasion from my roommate, to do this Project 365 thing. The concept, is very simple. You take a picture of yourself once a day for a year. This concept, in implementation is much more than simple. Problems so far a) Remembering. That’s kind of a given. I was pretty sick right after we started, so taking care of myself took priority. b) Taking photos at night. Since I’ve been forgetting left and right a lot of my photos have been at night, which my camera does not handle well. c) Speaking of my camera, I love it, mainly because I can take it anywhere and it takes a beating like a champ, but I am starting to realize how much the image sensor sucks, which is annoying.

But whatever, I’m having fun. I’ve included a slideshow above of what I’ve done so far, and my three favorite photos, so far, below.

Portal Typography

2008-09-18T00:00:00-07:00

I don’t want to turn this into a favorite video’s blog, but I really liked this one:

Portal - Still Alive typography from Trickster on Vimeo.

And this was also amazing. Apparently one of my co-workers used to skate this hill (although not in such a bad ass fashion):

Adam Kimmel presents: Claremont HD from adam kimmel on Vimeo.

Hit Me!

2008-09-11T00:00:00-07:00

I want a band with me at all times now.

Scratch.

2008-09-05T00:00:00-07:00

I am not happy with my blog. I really have just lost enthusiasm with this whole domain really, so I think I need to reboot it. So here is what I’m thinking:

Switch to Habari. I've been a long time reader of BinaryBonsai and I've been following Habari's development on and off. I think it's reached a point where I'm ready to switch over.
Code my own Design from scratch. I've switched between hand-coded designs and using other people's designs for awhile. I think when I make the switch to Habari will be the right time to do this. I'm looking for a mix between BinaryBonsai, Ma.tt, and Subtraction.com I think. I also plan on making natwelch.com simpler. Start having it pull from different content streams on this site and others. That way new posts here will fill in that site more.
Finish coding Ideaius. Seriously. My original plan was to release Monday, which is not happening. So I'm gonna aim for Christmas and pray no one makes something better before then.
I'm not sure how much of this site I'm going to save. After I lost all of my posts two years ago, I gave up writting on this site. I think if I commit to one good post a month and port just my favorite posts from here, I'll be happy.

Anyway, that’s just a heads up.

/Nat

Advice for Possible Engineers

2008-08-26T00:00:00-07:00

Ok so a friend sent me a message asking to help her brother decide if he wanted to go into engineering.

Hey, if you guys are in Santa Rosa, my mom was hoping that you could come up to my house and talk to my brother and his friends about engineering and computer related majors. They'll probably want to know stuff about classes and success. The usual. There are two dates up for grabs, either sept. 8th or 10th. There will be food provided, of course. It will take place in the evening. Please let me know which one you would prefer if you can make either. If you cannot make either at all, what would be one piece of wisdom you'd like to pass on to my brother and his friends? Thanks a bunch if you guys can do this!!

Here was my response:

I sadly will be unable to make either of those dates. But words of wisdom? Man, I’m full of cough shit cough cough wisdom. he he. All seriousness though, Engineering is awesome, for some people. So instead of just giving one piece of advice, like a good instruction following person, I’m gonna share my views on engineering.

First, the bad things about engineering:

Engineering is tough. It requires a decent amount of math (varies depending on school and major) and science (also varying). A lot of schools give you a path that you must follow, which can feel restricting compared to your liberal science brethren who are going all willy-nilly taking all of these cool random classes. Your classes will stretch the way you think about things and expose you to just about every aspect of the world (except women, that’s what parties are for). Becoming an engineer is a commitment, a commitment which will require you to take some classes you despise and some classes which you love, and all will take up more time than you ever knew you had.

Second, the good things:

Engineering classes teach you really cool things. This sounds kinda lame, I know, and it is very hard to express, but imagine learning the coolest aspect of something you’ve always wondered about. That’s engineering. Example: I’m a computer science major (engineering at some schools, math at others, watch out if that’s your thing) and near the end of last year we had a lecture where we learned how to take advantage of the inherent security flaws that our society has. Then we practiced exploiting those flaws in a safe legal environment to learn how to protect our systems from such problems. Also, another example, a friend of mine likes cars. She joined one of the performance racing teams on campus and now builds race cars from scratch. This summer she got to spend two weeks with her team in London racing the car they built. Another guy I know took what he learned and teamed up with a professor. Together they started a company which was recently acquired by amazon.com.

Thirdly, Summarization:

If you become an engineer, and I recommend it, your mind will be put to the test during college. But afterwords you will be the one who your peers will come to when they need an innovative way to do something, whether it be a new type of engine, software program, bridge, nano-machine, or space station. O ya, and you’ll get paid more than anyone else to do it (I make $28 an hour as an intern at Adobe Systems).

Hope that helps. I offer two final things: One, if you are interested in going to Cal Poly I will gladly give you a tour, and a place to stay if needed (my couch is comfy :p ). Second if you have any questions about Engineering, English (my other passion), or Computer Science (my specialty), leave a comment below.

/Nat

p.s. modified that last line, ;)

Dr. Horrible

2008-07-19T00:00:00-07:00

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog is the greatest musical recently. Don’t believe me? Check out the screen shot of the iTunes Music Store to the left.

And while I loved the show and was thoroughly entertained with all of the great plot twists and funny songs, what really got me was the marketing scheme. When I say that the market scheme got me, I mean it reeled me in like a free bottle of beer and a beautiful brunette. Why does this series of three fifteen minute movies have me tripping so? Let me explain how I digest media.

Come across something cool, let's say a new movie. (Discovery)
I watch the trailer, listen to music samples, check it out on Wikipedia. (Research)
Digest. If the movie is new enough and I'm not totally broke, I'll go see it. If the album isn't from a band I have obtained at least two albums from before, or if the movie isn't available for rent cheaply, then I will probably obtain it in less than legal means.

Now how did Dr. Horrible throw a wrench into this tried and true formula? He abused two simple facts about my life.

I had to leave for the train in fifteen minutes, and I still had to eat breakfast.
It was less than five dollars.

I clicked subscribe on iTunes and sync’d Act 1 to my iPod. Half an hour later I was watching it in my seat on CalTrain. It was amazing. I wanted more, but I had to wait a day for the next episode, which I had already paid for.

What can wanna-be producers and marketers take out of this? Joss Whedon explicitly said that working with iTunes was painful, but worth the effort, since he was offering it free online. Marketers, if you make something of quality (you need to care about your work, kinda crazy eh?) and let me consume it in whatever way I want, I will. My generation grew up with Napster and Kazaa. We know how to get what you don’t want us to have. So give it to us with an affordable price tag and we’ll buy it.

/Nat

Music + Techno-Crack = Last.FM

2008-07-18T00:00:00-07:00

So you know what my favorite web 2.0 website is? Last.FM of course.

They recently pushed their beta site design live, and it’s beautiful. I’ve been using it to listen to music at work which has been amazing. I enjoy it more than Pandora, mainly because it isn’t so ad heavy.

My history with Last.fm is strange to say the least. I started using their services back when they were AudioScrobbler. I really liked the concept of the data collection they were doing. They logged every song I listened to on my computer, on multiple media players. Since then the site has been was merged into Last.FM and I’ve loved it ever since.

Some of the features Last.FM has added recently I really like:

iPod Scrobbling (they track the music I listen to on my iPod as well as my computer)
Full Tracks, not just the 30 second clips they used to have
A powerful API. There used to be a decent API from AudioScrobler, but it has since been upgraded by Last.FM and they have added a cool app gallery.

The app gallery should really be highlighted here. Mainly because it allows access to historical data of what you have been listening to for a long period of time (four years for me I think).

Anyway, check Last.FM out if you haven’t already. If you want to add me as a friend or see my musical tastes, it is located here.

Happy Weekend, /Nat

p.s. check out The Perfect ringtone

p.s.s. In case you didn’t know, my dream job is to work for these folks. That has nothing to do with this post though. :p

Ugh.

2008-07-09T00:00:00-07:00

I know, I know. I said I would be posting here more often. I'm having trouble finding the time I guess. But for those of you interested, I'll give you a little update about my life.

I lost the Innovation Quest Competition, which put a small hold on Ideaius development. I've been working on it when I get a chance, which is another reason this blog isn't getting updated.
I'm working at Adobe with the Dreamweaver Team again this summer. I've posted a picture of my commute above.
I am going to PAX again this summer. Super psyched. I would post links to my co-conspirators, but they refuse to have websites...
CalTrain still doesn't have WiFi. Booooo.
I officially am renting a room in a house in SLO. To commemorate the occasion, I bought a Popcorn Hour. Totally Stoked.
I'm starting to get the hand of JavaScript and AJAX. It's kinda neat, although my <3 still belongs to server side languages.

Anyway, I’ve got four Draft posts that may make it on to here at some point, and I’m trying to figure out a way to write on a train (maybe buy a light weight laptop?)

/Nat

Devolopmentary My Dear Watson

2008-05-08T00:00:00-07:00

Ideaius. The name sounds kinda silly I know. Well it is, at this point in time, going to be the first product I release from my “company” devCloud.

But first I am going to try to get some money to start this little business venture. I am doing this by applying to Innovation Quest. IQ is a competition held at my school where anyone can submit an idea, and the winner gets $15,000.

Well, I’m a finalist. This means I need to make a presentation in front of a decent sized group of people explaining my idea and why they should invest in it. But I’m hopeful, since I was picked out of 75ish groups to be in the top 15, which ups my chances just a wee bit. Sadly though, they want a lot of information in their presentation. So I need your help, could you please fill out the survey at the bottom of this post? I need to provide some statistics about people to show that the world actually wants this product.

Click Here to take survey. It’s short, don’t be shy.

Thanks for your help, /Nat

Awesome Infographics Music Video

2007-10-16T00:00:00-07:00

Royksopp - Remind Me

Awesome music video. Maybe Youtube posting will work this time…

iPod Touch, Facebook searching, and the Internet

2007-09-07T00:00:00-07:00

I love the internet. If possible I want to be able to touch it all times. I want to be able to see a billboard, find it interesting, and plug the company’s website into a hand held device and find out about them. I want to walk past a cool t-shirt, or other product and place an order right there, or at least post information about it to either an online to-do list or twitter or something. I want information at my fingertips 24/7. This doesn’t mean I’ll be using this information at all times, but the possibility so that when something comes up I can know the answer to what glycyrrhizin is. This is the information age after all.

One item that was announced Wednesday, will, I hope, promote this. September 5th at an Apple press conference, Apple announced some very interesting things that has the blogosphere buzzing. The big news is that the iPhone is now $200 less, but whatever, it’s the price they pay as early adopters (update, jobs is a crafty bastard and is giving them $100 in store credit). The slightly less big new, but very interesting in my mind, is the release of the iPod Touch.

I love the concept of the touch because it has the two things that I need, wi-fi and an mp3 player. Apple goes even farther by adding a browser. Now of course you will tell me that the iPhone does all of this. But the iPhone only has 8gigs of music, where my computer has 40. Plus I don’t have the money to upgrade my service plan to support the phone at $20 a month minimum.

The touch does everything I want, at least until I am brought back to reality. The touch has only 16 gigs, while my computer has 40, and my 3 year old iPod has 20. Plus what I really want wi-fi for is SSH, which Apple says won’t happen, since there is no SDK. I also can’t use flash on either the touch or the iPhone. O ya, the touch also doesn’t support email or iChat or anything else besides a basic browser and Apple’s music store.

Well you know what my solution to all of this? Ignore the huge gap in size between the touch and the Classic (what if I want 40, not 16 or 80 Apple? You guys suck) and buy the Classic. So last night at the opening of the new Los Gatos Apple Store, That’s just what I did. I’ll have a review of the Classic up sometime this weekend, I hope.

The other news that I want to mention is that Facebook is planning on opening it’s entire directory to search engines. Why is this good? because now when someone types in your name into Google, if you deem it so in your security settings and you have a Facebook account, a very simple piece of information will present it self, your name, your picture, and the ability for the person to join Facebook and add you as a friend and/or message you. This is a genius marketing strategy, and will probably get many users onto Facebook. This will also, I hope, promote more Facebook users to pay close attention to their security settings, because the default ones are somewhat open. The cool thing about Facebook though is that you can very easily lock down your profile so that only people you approve can see anything about you.

Anyway, that’s all for now. The blogosphere has been pretty active as of late, so much news I don’t have time to write about it ;)

Hasta,
/Nat

p.s. I think the iPhone’s a scam, but none the less Scoble’s right. We need an SDK. If there were an SDK I would buy an iPod Touch in addition to my Classic (but I would not pay $100 for the SDK…).

p.s.s. It seems like I’m not the only one in this iPod predicament.

PAX '07 Followup

2007-09-04T00:00:00-07:00

So I’ve been a little slow to write this, mainly due to the fact that I’ve been having trouble catching up on sleep. But two weekends ago, I had an amazing weekend, because I spent the weekend at PAX in Seattle. Now I should have cool and interesting reveiw of PAX, but now two weeks later it doesnt look like it’s gonna happen. Why? because I have NADD.

here are some good reviews though:

PAX at Slashdot

Tycho + Gabe on PAX

Ars Technica’s Post

I’ll post some pictures eventually too.

Hasta

/Nat

p.s. read the article I linked to on Nerd Attention Deficit Disorder (NADD). It describes me so well it’s scary.

updated 8pm 9/6/07

BarCampBlock

2007-08-21T00:00:00-07:00

I attended BarCampBlock this weekend. I only attended on Saturday, and for what I attended, it was amazing.

For those of you who are lost on what BarCampBlock is, I’ll give you a quick once over. BCB is a BarCamp, which came in response to FooCamp, an invite only event held at O’Reilly’s Sebastopol offices. The concept of both conferences is basically take a normal conference and cover it in web2.0 and chaos. The web2.0 because the attendees are the ones giving speeches. Everyone is expected to give some sort of talk, or at least contribute to the discussions. The chaos comes from the fact that the schedule is as the attendees make it. You show up, put your topic in a time period and go. But somehow it all works out, and everyone learns a lot. As Tara Hunt said at the opening of BarCampBlock, BarCamps are what you make them.

So, what did I do at this little shindig with over 900 people in a little corner of Palo Alto? Well I showed up around nine am on Saturday with Andrew Yates, originally planning on helping out at the front desk. The help didn’t seem to be needed, so we grabbed a cup of coffee and then helped put the infamous grid together.

Then there was a little opening ceremony and the gates were figuratively opened and the grid was bum rushed as people went to get their topics up on the gird. Mass chaos ensued. It was awesome. :)

Due to the fact that I really just want to get this article out, I think I’ll just give you a list of cool things from this event.

Met Ethan of opensermo.com. Interesting college student out of UofFlorida who runs an interesting news videopodcast on his site.
Met Nathan Schmidt, the CTO of PBwiki. Nathan was a lot of fun to talk to and kept me rather entertained during Ross's Wikiality session.
Went to a very interesting session on "Craft 2.0." This was actually my favorite session, mainly due to the variety of topics we covered including the shift away from geographical based styles to preference based styles, and the mashup culture.
Ate pizza.
Went to a session with a much different topic than I had originally thought it would contain, but it was awesome none the less. This session was on BarCamp Sponsorship, and instead of speaking on how to get sponsors for BarCamp, the session was a discussion between two evangelists for Microsoft(Update: Anand Ayer and Jas Sandhu were their names) and four of the BarCampBlock organizers (Chris Messina, Tara Hunt, Ross Mayfield, Tantek Çelik).
Attended an amazing session on exactly what is needed in web2.0, an app that actively tells you what other networks your friends are on. (this is a great review of the session)
Also attended what ended up being a Q and A about OAuth.

Some nice reviews of the whole shindig

And some photos

My photos of all of the nerd conferences this summer that I have attended this summer
the Flickr Group

Till next time (whoo PAX is this weekend :p ) Hasta,

/Nat

Hackers, Bags, and History

2007-08-17T00:00:00-07:00

So today was kind of crazy, but it had a few highlights.

Meeting two employees I had seen on the net, in person I met Dominic and Ken in person at Dreamweaver’s Frumpy Friday. Dom I had been following on twitter, and Ken I had found on Flickr.
Read a good review of one of my favorite companies. I love Timbuk2. They make amazing bags, and their new Hacker bag looks pretty schweet. Laughing Squid has a great review of the Bag. And I think that this bag will sell very well of the SF based company. But I do have a little hatred to send Timbuk2’s way. My hatred is in the from of their pricing. WTF. $120 for a bag? You guys make great stuff but this is a total stretch. If someone can justify why they can charge so much for their bags, and other lower quality bags are one third the price, then all hush up. But $120, plus another $20 for shipping is ridiculous. Now I say lower quality, because they are, but I don’t see why the upgrade in quality is worth triple the price. Also, hit me if I’m mistaken, but if it’s not a messenger bag, it’s not even made in the USA, one of the big reasons they charge extra. So ya, WTF Timbuk2.
Came across one of original “inspirations” I spent another ten minutes browsing the Laughing Squid Archives, and came across a link to Jacob Applebaum’s photography of two recent hacker conventions. Jacob has a special place in my heart, although he doesn’t know it. My freshman year of high school, I moved to Santa Rosa and started attending NBLUG meetings. One of the early meetings I went to was a presentation on Wireless networks and the security related to them. Jacob was the one giving this presentation (he had black hair at the time) and was one of my bigger inspirations at the time to spend more time jerking around in Linux. So it was neat to see him on the front page of Laughing Squids blog, and taking amazing photographs, something I have also gotten into since high school started (although not because of him).
Finally my experiences on the train today. This morning near Redwood city, a car was stuck on the tracks. So in the brilliance that is CalTrain, they shoved everyone off of the train and said buses would show up. Two showed up in an hour. Sadly two buses cannot fit the same capacity as a fully packed express train. So after an hour waiting in the sun, a local train picked us up, and half an hour later, we got to sf.

Then this evening, I got on the wrong train. And CalTrain does this stupid thing were they close the doors two minutes before they leave. So when I realize that I’m on the wrong train, I can’t get off. So I’m stuck adding 45minutes to my train ride. So lame.

And with that, I sign off. /Nat

Cyberpunk, Gibson, and the Consumerwhore

2007-08-14T00:00:00-07:00

What’s this? My favorite Genre, Author, and state of mind, all in one post? Hurrah!

Ok, I discovered a wonderful thing last year, right before the infamous wipe of my archives. This wonderful thing was a new Gibson book. I was so happy in my discovery I created a Wikipedia post on it, and then forgot about it. Right before Harry Potter premiered, I checked up on the article, only to find it was coming out a few days later. Huzzah!

But at the same time I had started my internship at Adobe, and thus it slipped again from my memory. Thankfully though, Michael Heilemann showed me the light, when I stumbled across his post. Praise the gods, Spook Country has been released and I will be going to buy it tomorrow.

So yes, That is my first piece of consumerwhoreism. Also tomorrow I will in theory be ordering my new computer, and possibly picking up some manga. Basically I will be left overjoyed, and my bank account will be crying like a rape victim.

But enough of my bad analogies and metaphors. If you haven’t read any of Gibson’s work, I highly recommend his writing. The best three books that he has written so far I believe are Neuromancer, Burning Chrome, and Pattern Recognition.

In other news, my server is running like a drunk fat twelve year old. Needless to say, all of my sites are suffering from his choice to break the law and drink. No alcohol on the job kid!

/Nat

p.s. I never did mention this but I read and loved the latest Harry Potter. I have a half written post just sitting here as a review, but meh, Just go read it yourself.

SuperHappyDevHouse19

2007-08-13T00:00:00-07:00

You know what I love? Hot Coffee. You know why I love Hot Coffee? Because thanks to the whole lawsuit thing, Hot Coffee doesn’t remind me of the wonderfully delicious drink, instead it reminds me of coding and the nerd culture as a whole.

This weekend I attended SuperHappyDevHouse 19, known affectionately as shdh19. Shdh, is at it’s core a place for geek, nerds, designers, and developers of all kinds to meet, greet, and possibly even get a few personal projects pounded out in code. This time, shdh was located in Los Gatos, which was awesome because it was near my house. I originally went with the goal of programming, but ended up spending more time meeting people, which was better for me, I think, because I really don’t know a ton of people in the area with the same interests as me. This of course is due to the fact that I haven’t attended more of these events, not because they don’t exist. Because in all honesty, finding computer “enthusiasts” in Silicon Valley is like finding people with bad teeth in fifteen century Britain.

Anywho, here is a list of some of the people I met:

Jessica Mah - Really cool girl. I was amazed at all of the stuff she had done, made me feel kinda lazy :p
Tom Harrison - The guy who proclaimed "I live here." Didn't talk to him too much, but I introduced myself, so I figure that counts
Amit Patel - Had a really cool project using e7, the make controller, and legos
Mike McDonald - A really interesting guy. We talked a lot about his acting career. I hope to see him on the big screen sooner rather than later
Andrew Yates - A younger guy pursuing the silicon valley dream with an interesting startup to create something close to an online bank.
Conrad Rushing - A flash developer, he chilled with us in the hot tub for a long time. Seemed to have a very realistic view of the world
Albert Mao - Bio-engineering(or something close to that) student. He seemed like a very competent programmer for his age.
Joël Franusic - One of the main greeters. He lives in SLO, which is awesome. I kept forgetting he was out of school though, which made me look like an idiot, but whatever, he seems like an awesome guy.

I met way more than this, although I have the memory of a ninety year old woman. A few others I have buisness cards sitting on my desk at home, which I’ll add soon, I promise.

There was also this CNet reporter, whose name I forgot to write down. I described my project to her, and I am a little worried about how she interpreted it. Also, I probably shouldn’t have mentioned what school I went to, but whatever. If i am lucky I won’t even end up in the article. She did take a good picture of me though, which was cool.

Anyway, my photos are up on Flickr, and all of the photos taken by everyone at the event are tagged SHDH19. It was a blast and I can’t wait till my next geek event this summer, BarCampBlock.

The Future of the Bird

2007-07-30T00:00:00-07:00

Thunderbird that is. According to this post by Mitchell Baker, the Thunderbird product is not getting enough love, and I totally agree. Having thought about the topic a little, I think one of the better solutions is to break Thunderbird off and create the Thunderbird Foundation. Although I don’t have a buisness background, or even a deep connection to the Thunderbird movement, here is my reasoning.

Thunderbird is a powerful product but the shadow that Firefox and the infamous Outlook cast is dark and long. While many know of Thunderbird's existence, it is not a mainstream product the way Firefox is. Creating a separate foundation will, in theory, promote much needed hype and help Thunderbird establish itself more as it's own product and not the bastard child of Firefox.
In terms of Outlook, Thunderbird has heavy competition. Outlook is one of those applications that works well enough, but it is so widely used, especially in the business world that many users aren't realizing it's potential. I believe that if Thunderbird gets moved to it's own foundation, it could have the opportunity to have more money and people thrown at it, not too many mind you, and become a more professional app.

There are some downsides to this too, and if you see any I miss, I would love your input. For example, depending on how this split works out, the association with the well known name Mozilla may disappear. This could be good or bad. from a power user standpoint, I know that there will be good developers coming from a strong team to keep the project going. But if for say a government group or a large compan unassociated with the technology spectrum were to think of adopting it, some might be scared because of having no big name backing it. We must remember that there are companies that still believe in the idea that since microsoft makes it, it must be good and everything we own will stop working if we don’t use there products.

Overall though, I think Thunderbird has a shot as long as something is done. While I feel creating a new foundation will help Thunderbird’s largest problems, overall market share and general use in the professional market, there is a possibility that the other suggestions Mitchell made will do a better job. Discussions need to happen, and a decision needs to be made, sometime this year hopefully.

Thanks to the infamous Matt for bringing this to my attention.

And as a side note on how big Firefox’s shadow is, look at the Mozilla Home Page. The page is 85% Firefox, and 15% Thunderbird. Along with that, if you are on the Thunderbird page, and click on the link to add-ons, the add-ons page that shows up is the Firefox add-ons page. There isn’t even a link to the Thunderbird add-ons page. Plus a few of the other links on the Thunderbird page refer to Firefox stuff.

Hasta,

/Nat

Wizards, WordCamp, Wordie, and More

2007-07-19T00:00:00-07:00

I have a disturbingly large amount of broccoli on my plate this weekend. First off, Friday night, Harry Potter. I don’t know how much needs to be said about Harry and his wacky adventures, but I’ve been reading this since the first book came out in Britain, and I am hooked. It amazes me how much this book sucks me in. I normally get sucked into books, but I swear I’m addicted to HP and all of it’s goodness. What’s even funnier, I don’t like Harry too much as a character. Sure he’s interesting and angsty and all, but the two things that suck me in are Harry’s past (you know the whole, good morning Harry, your life sucks, time to go be a wizard thing) and the supporting characters. Ginny, Hermione, Ron, the twins, Neville, all of the professors, etc. It’s just how well developed the world is that J.K. Rowling writes about. I feel as though I can reach out and touch it, yet not too much is described so my mind can wander.

On Saturday, I will be attending WordCamp. In all honesty, I would much rather attend Sunday, but more about that later. I am really excited about the general idea, and I’m hoping the event will get me excited enough to get me writing more often. As I said, I had hoped to also go on Sunday, because I love the developer side of Wordpress, I’m even thinking I might finally release the few plug-ins I “wrote” (as in I wrote them, but they suck), so the extra help would have been nice, but oh well. So why can’t I spend Sunday in the city? Because I’m running in Wharf to Wharf. Yes, I’m stupid, I know, leave me alone. So pray for me, and lend me your athletic ability while you sleep till a reasonable hour.

Finally, here are a few sites I have been loving as of late.

Wordie - Like Flickr, but for words. My profile.
LibraryThing - Kinda like GoodReads, but not. My Profile.
And as a few of you know I've been keeping Flickr and Twitter alive recently, so go check it out.

I also have very good news, which I almost forgot about.

I got my tickets to PAX! Hurrah!

Hasta,
/Nat

China Debriefing

2007-07-02T00:00:00-07:00

Hey there readers. For the 4 or so of you still visiting my page, welcome. As a few of you know, through twitter, Facebook, or just general contact, I have recently returned from a trip with my immediate family to eastern China. I visited five wonderful cities, Beijing, Shanghai, Xi An, Guilin, and Shou Zhou, each incredibly different, and all relatively large.

I’ve been staying away from the details of exactly what we did, mainly because it’s pretty detailed. But I’ll give you guys a little run down of the trip. We landed in Beijing, and i got food poisoning from the buffet dinner we had at the Hotel. While my parents and brother spent the next day touring the Forbidden Palace, Temple of Heaven, and Tienanmen Square, I got used to pucking ever half hour. The next day we hit up the Great Wall of China and some tombs. And the next day we visited the Summer Palace and took a plane to Xi An.

I learned a lot in Beijing as it was my first time in any Eastern country, let alone any country that truly was a developing nation. Call me sheltered if you like but the trip was definitely a wake up call. Never before did I so carefully think about how things were prepare, think about not eating the ice cubes or drinking the tap water. But while this all made me think a little, I also grew great respect for the Chinese people. The majority of work was done by hand and many crafts that have long been lost in western countries were still being refined. Plus the majority of road work was and construction was done and they were still faster than CalTrans. The sheer amount of people that could be put towards a task was amazing.

As I said, from Beijing we visited Xi An (pronounced She On… I think), which was one of the prettier cities and more interesting places we visited. Deeply different from Beijing, the city was only eight million compared to Beijing’s sixteen and had so many more young people walking around. Plus the ghetto of the town(which has to be driven through when coming from the airport) looks like a communist block, which was interesting to say the least. Xi An is home to various temples, universities, and tombs, plus the Terra-Cotta Warriors. It has a beautiful city wall and very nice people, plus a large Muslim community.

After two nights in Xi An we flew over to Guilin. Guilin was the smallest town we visited, nearing 600,000 people. It had many pretty hills, which weren’t really hills, more of limestone tower, but tomato, tomata, right? We took a cruise down the Li River which showcased all of these hills, as did a car ride through some of the smaller surrounding farming communities.

The limestone towers also create beautiful caverns, and we visited one of them. We also took part in various tours of areas around the city, each with it’s own charm. After two nights in Guilin we took a 9 pm flight to Shanghai.

Shanghai is the New York of the Orient. Incredibly westernized it contains buildings from every part of the world. All I can say is that you should visit the Bong, a large promenade on each side of the city, and you should leave yourself a day to walk around. It’s amazing. Also, see the acrobats.

Finally we took a train to Shou Zhou. Another eight million person city. On this day we relaxed, enjoying the city filled with gardens. Sadly here we had our worst lunch, but everything else was so nice it didn’t matter. I feel that this is probably a good time to mention how badly they drive in china. The only two laws that drivers follow in China is the sped limit and stop at stop lights, but even those are broken very commonly. Traffic lanes, right of way, and general courteousness when driving is all ignored. How so few people die i do not know, but i was scarred for my life every time i crossed the street, let alone get into a car.

But overall I did have a great trip. I tasted many exotic foods(avoided the roasted bulls penis though), explored many ancient buildings and had a lot of fun. The 11 hour flight was totally worth it, plus I technically lived the 30th twice, so it was all good.

Have a good night people,

/Nat

p.s. you can view my photos from the trip on flickr, and my families photos are available too.

Internet Identity And Appearance

2007-05-18T00:00:00-07:00

I am currently taking a class called Engl 149, or Tech Writing for engineers. This class has, for the most part, been interesting. It has gone over how to properly present materials depending on audience and content. I feel that I have learned a few things, and overall had a good experience with the class.

But the one thing that really hit home was while showing my teacher a resume cover letter. My letter had a list of three websites, she said she would look at this one. No reason given, she just said she would look “at that pseudoweb one” which gave me mixed feelings. For one, I’m glad that this isn’t two years ago where this website was full of bad jokes and angry statements towards my school’s administration, but it also signals a stage which I think many of my generation are coming to, and it is biting them in the ass.

The stage I speak of is where you have to become a respectable member of society, and everything you do is now judged by two parties, your peers, and those who might wish to make you a peer. My generation has grown up with the internet, and thus everything we have done since we were children is somewhere on the internet. We were in the midsts of the Napster battles and the Kazaa arrests, we rode the internet social networking wave, leaving a trail of destroyed websites in our wake. We left our emotional dramas and teen angst on LiveJournal and Xanga, we made funny pictures and got hunted by sexual predators on MySpace, we made weird movies of our friends and put them on YouTube, and finally we put our parties and drunkenness on Facebook. A search for your name on Google shows up some interesting stuff, old pages from when you were twelve, weird antics, and your ramblings. The internet knows all.

But here is where it gets scary. When people employ you these days, it is a very common activity to Google your name. Sometimes that will come up with something neat, like your web page or resume. Other times it might be an embarrassing photo or post on some forum.

So these last few days I have been making the transition. Cleaning up my name, finding old stuff and deleting it. Adding new content which portrays me better and even signing up for new sites, meant more for those in my age group.

One of these sites is a social networking site for business professionals called LinkedIn. It provides an easy way to make connections and find out who knows who. This seems like it would be incredibly valuable for finding ways into a job, plus it’s always fun to see who my parents and my friends know.

Anyway, it’s been interesting, and I won’t lie about the fact that this post is just one of the things I want to do to keep my site active. You can also check out the changes I made over at natwelch.com. I hope to eventually get a code portfolio going over there too, but that will come with time.

Well I’m off to bed, Hasta.

/Nat

Apple Tv, yargh?

2007-04-06T00:00:00-07:00

The Apple TV has been hacked. You can now run the full mac OSX on it, plus enable USB and add functionality to frontrow You can even enable SSH.

But what is making this whole thing amazing is the fact that Apple doesn’t care. I mean there have been a lot of smart and dumb moves in terms of hacking hardware, and this is definitely one of the smarter ones. I feel that this device may flop, but still it has potential.

And while this is all very cool, what is the best news is that companies are starting to release unencrypted versions of their songs on the iTunes music store. Possible in a response to Steve Jobs letter proclaiming the DRM music was the reason for low sales of music. I am really excited for this, because the more open standards, the more chances we have.

The New Year and Internetphobia

2007-02-09T00:00:00-08:00

Paper Gate by Nat W

I am scared. I mind you, have no real reason to be scared, but the last few days have pushed me to the point where i should be scared. You see, I believe 2007 will be the year of the Internet Revolution. The Internet Revolution in my mind is where there is a dramatic shift in how things are done on-line. There has been a slow shift towards the dynamic over the past years. Things like RSS, Flickr and Del.ici.ous have allowed this dynamic Web 2.0 to grow. Web 2.0 is a group of software that promotes content that delivers itself to the user in the way the user wants. The user can lay out the page with AJAX the way he or she wants to see it, and only the information they want to see is there. (example: Netvibes).

This is evolving though. Things like YouOS and JS/UIX are entire operating systems built on this Web 2.0 idea. But while these are all very amazing, the big thing that is happening is the push of streaming video over the Internet. YouTube is the site that is winning this war. But I beleive the war is just beginning and Google, YouTubes owner, knows it. The big deal, as Cringely points out, is that 50 percent of the Internet’s bandwidth is being used by five percent of it’s users over Bit Torrent. According to Cringely, Google is building these gigantic data centers (and they are gigantic) so that Google will be able to hold up the infrastructure of the web when it collapses due to the extensive use of Bit Torrent and other video downloading services. How will it work? very simply, you will be looking for a file, lets say The-Pirates-of-the-Carribean-2.avi from http://torrentwebsite.com and Google will be one of the highspeed providers when you look to download the file. Google will essentially be cacheing all of the popular data in one region in the local data center allowing for faster downloads and less overall bandwidth on the network.

But Although Cringely beleives that Google and he are the only ones who realize what is happening, I can assure you, that the ISP’s know what is going on. How do i know this? the Net Nutrality Act is back on the agenda. This act, at least as i understand it, is an act to allow companies such as AT&T to charge companies such as Google depending on how much bandwidth they use. This in my mind promotes “Anti-Competitiveness.” It makes it so server based applications such as google, flickr or web hosts would have to pay to exist. On top of that it would make developing and starting a company expensive, which would hinder all of the small startups. Which would hinder innovation and probably kill most free high bandwidth sites (youtube, itunes music store, etc.) But there is a positive side to all of this. We can hope that if the bill is passed then the backbone of the internet might be rebuilt, prolonging when the big crash might happen.

On top of this though, there are major battles happening to decided copywrite laws. Steve Jobs for instance, is calling for music to be free, or at least unencrypted. This idea follows the whole idea of standards, which has helped many companies, including apple and Google to rake in the dough and be popular with their users. The only problem with standards, is that when it comes to the entertainment industry, standards are only good if you own them, and apple is advocating the move away from this. Acording to the Washington Post though, the RIAA is not pleased with jobs letter. But this is an ongoing issue that i am not sure i can even comprehend with out much more research, and i sadly do not have the time for such.

In the end though I just don’t know what to think. I whole heartedly beleive though that this will be a very interesting next few years.

P.s. There is also an interesting article on Internet Bandwidth here.</p>

Everyday

2007-02-01T00:00:00-08:00

Grey by Nat W

Man, i know i am getting on this train late in the game, but i wanted to share with you the greatest online video i have come across.

Everyday on vimo Everyday on Youtube

This is a compilation of 2365 photos, one photo everyday, for six years. It is really eerie to watch time go by.

movie frame by frame aka 2365 pictures of noah Wikipedia page

Another project that was done, this one is eight years though</p>

Today in the news i didn't read

2007-01-24T00:00:00-08:00

Cracked Glass by Nat W.

Breaking news! Two days of posting in a row! Read now!

…

That was overly dramatic. Anyway, new WOW patch is in the wild, which supposedly nerfed my character, but it doesn’t matter to me that much, but if you have a high level hunter you may be crying in your dark room, or it is very possible you just don’t care.

In other news Steve Rubel claims The World is Ending, or at least history is repeating itself. This could be very bad for Silicon Valley, but i have a feeling it will be no where near as bad as it’s previous encounter. What makes this one so special? Web 2.0 didn’t get time to build itself up. You know the phrase the bigger you are, the harder you fall? Well it works in reverse too, the smaller you are, the less anyone cares.

Hack-A-Day, one of my favorite sites, released an article, about you you can mod your wiiMote to kill people.

John Kerry will not be running for presidency, Hallelujah, although i don’t know if i can support a woman who believes Jack Thompson. Record companies are offering free music to students, but they are stupidly following Microsoft’s broken and unpopular encryption scheme. I’m not sure about the rest of you fools, but the one thing Microsoft doesn’t get, it’s students, and this, while a move in the right direction, is still not quite what is needed.

Finally, the president is moving to reinstate the “No Child Left Behind Act,” which i am very opposed to, although i can’t honestly come up with a better idea. I mean i really don’t think standardized testing allows schools or students to flourish, but how else do we set up a way to test whether students deserve their diploma? The Other problem i have is that this new version allows the government to override state law, which i am never okay with…

Anyway that’s the news, or at least what i found interesting. I honestly did read those stories, I am just a chronic liar.

heh heh, Hasta.

/Nat

Water

2007-01-23T00:00:00-08:00

Water by Nat W.

Oi, I am tired.

Life these last few days has not been kind. I picked up world of warcraft (which is awesome i might add) but i can’t play it due to large amounts of work.

What large amounts of work you ask? Well I had a program due Monday at 5pm, didn’t meet that deadline. I could have turned it in today at 5pm for a B, didn’t meet that deadline. Now i have till 5pm tomorrow to get a C, which i will do, i am nearly done, just have to figure out why my computer won’t add things right. But still, it’s a heavy weight on my sholders that i want to fling off, and it’s just getting heavier every second i wait.

Anyway, lots of new photos up on Flickr, and speaking of which i need to write an article about my new camera :p

Also site is still in progress. Once i get a free weekend or heck a free day, i’ll bust it out and i also plan on starting to write quality again some time soon.

Hasta

Living and Breathing

2007-01-18T00:00:00-08:00

Neighbor Porsche, by Nat W.

So I’m still alive, don’t worry too much. I’m rebuilding this site again, so things may not work and stuff may be missing. If you see something broken just drop me a comment. I am now using a modified version of Simplr, although you won’t be able to see most of the modifications till I upload them (sometime this weekend). I promise to start posting again soon…

/Nat