Converting caffeine to code, shooting pics, and cruising the roads of life.

Archive for the ‘Site News’ Category

Happy Holidays!

Thursday, December 27th, 2007

Hey guys! I know this is a bit late, but I would like wish all of my remaining readers a happy holiday season. I know I’ve been a bit busy lately, but I’m going to try to keep this site updated again.

So let me give you a run down of just what has been going on. My last post (before the iPhone how-to) was February 20th of last year. A lot has happened since then. My absence initially started with a teacher at school drafting me into the Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA). I was to compete in the Networking Concepts category. It was a 100 question multiple choice test on various networking topics. I took 1st place at both regional and state levels, so I qualified for the trip to compete at the FBLA-PBL nationals in Chicago last summer. I went. I had no chance, being more into coding than networking, but I guess I’m not half bad at it. :) From the people I talked to that competed against me, every single one of them had some form of networking certification.

While I was in Chicago, I snuck off from the group and took a taxi to the Apple store on Michigan Avenue a.k.a. the Magnificent Mile. I got there right as the store opened, so I walked in and bought my iPhone in under 5 minutes. (The big wtf here is that the Cingular store had a line around the block…) Once purchased, I had a 3-4 mile hike back to the hotel. It was pretty fun. :)

So the rest of my summer break after I got back from Chicago was spent on IRC trying to hack the iPhone. Yep, I knew most of the hackers and even was one of the first to start a serial dock for the thing, I just suck at soldering. I didn’t get to do much before I had to do summer assignments for school. It was fun while it lasted though. I got to meet many cool people, including Captain Crunch.

Now, we’re getting to the exciting stuff. A few weeks after school started I got offered a job at a startup in Silicon Valley doing PHP coding. The startup is called Qubescape. We’ll have a sweet product out shortly, that’s all I’m going to say. It’s been awesome so far. I work with some really good people.

That brings us up to what’s going on currently. Currently, I have very little time thanks to school. AP US History and AP Physics B are keeping me slammed with work. My AP US History teacher has an insane passing record and intends to keep it that way — which I’m cool with because I enjoy the class. On the other hand, my AP Physics teacher just can’t teach. He’s a good guy, he understands it, but he *cannot* explain it; so, I’m left to figuring it out on my own.

Time is going to get even more rare as I am involved in FBLA once again this year. I will be the first from my school to compete in the Internet Application Programming category. It looks incredibly easy. The project requires a website to track class averages and GPA with simple user authentication and a presentation explaining areas of your code the judges are interested in.

Anyone else that read this blog heard of FBLA? It’s nationwide, but many people don’t seem to know about it.

Setup KDE4 – Alpha on your Mac

Wednesday, January 17th, 2007

As some of you may have heard, KDE4 is going to be a major upgrade for the K Desktop Environment. They plan on releasing libraries to allow their applications to run on OSX’s aqua, X11, and win32. Besides those few major upgrades, there has been much work on improving the UI and graphical elements of the system. Today, I will show you how to setup a KDE4 developer snapshot for OSX. This will allow you to run all of the KDE applications without any X server. (Beware: this is a snapshot, so there *is going to be* bugs).

The first thing you need to do for this kickass setup is to make sure you have room on your harddrive. I downloaded the ‘everything’ package which was 1.96gb. (There are alternate packages though, listed below). To get these packages, you’ll need a bittorrent client, which I’m not going to go into how to use, then you’ll need to grab the torrent files. You can choose between the following torrent packages:

Note: All links labeled #1 are from the official mirror which is linked to at the bottom of this post. All links labeled #2 are my own personal mirror. Also, these files are only for OSX 10.4

Also, as quoted from the official page:

You must install at least Qt, kdesupport, and kdelibs for any of these packages to work. Also, kdepimlibs and kdebase are recommended since a number of things will want them. (…and it has Konqueror)

Once you have downloaded these packages, installation is a breeze. It’s just like installing any other OSX application. Double click on the dpkg, then click on one of the mpkg files provided inside the Finder window.
Finder window listing the KDE4 installers

From here, just continue installing the files until you have everything you want. They will be stored in /opt/kde4. (It’s a Fink distribution). According to the official snapshot page, you need to launch these applications from a terminal window. Now, I did not need to do this, but I do not doubt the knowledge of the developers. (My shell setup is *way* modified compared to the default OSX release.) So to take care of these few issues, you need to run the following in a terminal window:

export PATH=”/opt/kde4/bin:/opt/kde4-deps/bin:/opt/qt4/bin:$PATH”
eval `dbus-launch –auto-syntax`

As I said, according to the main page for these files, it says to try to launch them from the terminal. If launching them by double click does nothing, here is how you can start them:

/opt/kde4/bin/kwrite.app/Contents/MacOS/kwrite

These directions are based off the official ones which can be found here. I would just like to take this time to thank the KDE developers for what they are doing. They are really taking a stand to improve the desktop interface overall. This project really shows the strength open source can have if harnessed properly.

Note: I’m still a gnome guy.

Here are a few screenshots for you:
Kwrite:
Kwrite

Konqueror:
Konqueror

25 days after the switch to a mac and RESTful fun

Sunday, December 10th, 2006

So here it is 25 days after I made “the switch”, but not just any switch, I switched from Linux. So what are my thoughts? I’m loving it! OSX is an amazing OS, especially running on a core 2 duo. Obviously, there are some things I miss, such as complete POSIX compliance and compiles working out of the box, but I’ve been able to get everything I needed to work to actually work. I’d have to say my productivity has increased since the switch, probably due to better tools (Textmate).

Last weekend I got phpSysInfo’s Darwin support almost up-to-par with the other OS’s it supports. I still have a few things left, but I’ll be submitting them back as a patch here shortly. :)

Today, I spent most of the day working on ThreadBound when I should have been starting my huge project for school that is due on Friday. Besides setting up a bug tracker and doing the usual bug fixing, I actually added a completely new feature to ThreadBound — an MVC based REST API system. It’s actually pretty complete and shouldn’t change much from here until the site goes live, since all I do now is create new class files and methods. Right now, it only has clones of Flick’s flickr.test.echo and my own version of flickr.test.null. Of course, all of mine go by threadbound.* instead of flickr.*.

This site may go down for a few hours sometime within the next 3 days. I’m transferring the domain from enom.com to godaddy.com. Hopefully things will be fine when the transfer is done.

I’m off to bed now.

ThreadBound.com

Monday, August 7th, 2006

Well, we came up with the new name and the teaser page is up. Have fun. ThreadBound.com I’ll make a logo soon as Alpaca gets back from Canada. Fill out the form if you want updates.

Myspace theming without the ads

Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006

Okay, I’m going to make it very clear before I even write the rest of this. I am not a fan of myspace.com. In fact, I think it is the sludgepit of the internet. So no that we’ve made that clear…

So we’ve all seen the disasters of pages created by millions of teenagers (like myself :/ ), that are impossible to read or even look at without giving yourself a seizure. To top all of that off, they have annoying flash ads that even talk without a mute button. So, today I set out to get rid of them and create my own, special, page.

First off, here is a screenshot for you to drool over:

moomoo Hosted on Zooomr

So to start, the first thing I did was see if I could escape the tables. Once I did this, I knew I could get rid of the ads and every other piece of junk I could. So in the About Me section, I had the following:

</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</table>

This allowed me to get out of the table-hell layout that is myspace.com, but I had to do one thing to make it not display the rest of the page. I had to reopen the tables. Code is below:

<table>
<tbody>
<tr><td>

Knowing this, I just added the CSS/HTML and images that can be found in the zip below to the About Me section.

Click here to download the zip file.
Click here to see the myspace live.

I hope that helps some of you.

NOTE: This *WILL* violate your agreement to the Myspace.com Terms of Service. Until they allow the iframe, we have no way to show their ads.