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Jason Haslup
jason at haslup dot com

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Wed, 18 Oct 2006

Google Doing Everything
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I'm a pack rat. Just ask Mystique. I have school papers from Kindergarten that have travelled from Phoenix to Austin to Phoenix to Bozeman and back to Phoenix. How often do I look at them? Let's see... five times. Once per move.

I have one letter from a penpal I had in 3rd grade. His/her name is Kjell something. I never asked if she/he was a boy or a girl. She/he did in his/her first letter, but I thought it was awkward to ask someone that question (even when I apparently should have), so I never knew. I avoided anything gender-specific. We talked about soccer and smurfs.

But I digress. I'm also a pack rat when it comes to data. We need a term for that. I'll go with data-rat. My name is Jason and I'm a data-rat. I have trouble deleting files even though I absolutely know I'll never need it again. But just in case... I'll keep it. I have a program I wrote for the Audrey over four years ago even though I'll probably never power up Audrey again, let alone run that program.

It gets worse. I have content for stuff I tried to sell on ebay over a year and a half ago. I don't know why I have it. I think it didn't sell so "just in case" I decide to sell it again, I have the pictures. Not that anyone will be suspicious when I'm selling something from Phoenix but there's snow in the background of the picture...

I also pack away random data I collect. You all remember my weather project from a few years ago. I still have that. I have the temperatures from four sensors around the house (both Phoenix and Bozeman) stored away in a MySQL database somewhere. I think I recorded the temps every 15 minutes. I've got it all. Don't know why... I'm pretty sure there are more authoritative sources around if I ever needed that data.

I've actually thought about keeping a GPS device with me at all times to track where I've been. I think that'd be awesome. I'd also have some way of taking notes (voice and text) where I'd log random thoughts and have searchable access to it at anytime. I could answer things like "where was I last Thursday" and not only pull up a map with my location, but also any random thoughts I had at the time. You don't get any cooler than that. I'm glad I'm already married... she's stuck with me.

Anyways, this isn't purely a confessional post (although I do feel much better, thank you). I found something new at Google that caters to my data-rat tendencies. Not only does it keep my search history (which I've known about and opted-in to), but now I can see something similar to Google Trends for my own searches! I love it. My top queries of all time:

1. Weather 85225
2. ion3
3. greasemonkey
4. ruby on rails
5. google notebook
6. vmware player
7. sawfish wiki
8. python curses

Hmm... apparently I'm a dork. No surprise there. I also need to learn how to bookmark, as well... I think that's the only reason I searched for ion3 and google notebook so much.

Which leads me to the next discovery that I sort of new about but didn't pursue... Google's Bookmarks. I used to use del.icio.us a lot, but I've stopped doing that for some reason. I'm actually using Google's Notebook a lot because I can drop in some contextual text. I'm tempted to use Google's bookmarks because they'll actually show up in my search results. So, for example, if I ever bookmark the sawfish wiki site (which I apparently search for a lot), the site I bookmark as 'sawfish wiki' would show up in my search results. Bad example (because there's really no other site that would show up for that search), but you get the idea.

One thing of google's I haven't switched over to is their new and improved RSS reader. I like the looks of it, but I still can't tear myself away from bloglines. Bloglines still feels faster (especially now that they're updating the left pane using ajax), and I like their mobile version a little better (great for my Nokia 770 or Zaurus). It'd be nice to get it all under the Google umbrella, but I guess keeping some things independent is nice, just in case those conspiracy theories are true :-)

That's about it, really... check out your search history, it's pretty cool. Compare Reader and Bloglines and pick whichever one you like better. Just make sure you're using some sort of RSS reader!

Thu, 05 Oct 2006

Bummer
blog

Well this is a bummer... the Diamondbacks lost their play-by-play guy, Thom Brennaman. You can't really blame him, he's going to go join his dad in Cincinnati, plus he's on Fox's game of the week. I always enjoyed the games he broadcasted. I hope they get a good replacement and Mark Grace stays on for a little while.

Mon, 02 Oct 2006

Some Notes
blog

Just some random notes that have been piling up in my head...

I've been doing some .NET development lately... backend stuff, thankfully, no UI. UI makes my head hurt. Anyhow, I've been using the emacs keyboard layout for VS2005's editor, of course. One thing I couldn't figure out until recently, though, was the random odd behavior I'd see for certain commands. After a week of being frustrated, I finally stumbled upon the answer. VS2005 (and I'm guessing it's older siblings) does not handle the continuous state of the control key being down. Sometimes it's ok, but sometimes it's not. For example, the following sequence will not work correctly if you keep the control key down for the entire sequence:

1. C-space (control + spacebar, sets the mark to begin a region)
2. C-a (moves the cursor to the beginning of the line)
3. C-w (shouldkill your just-selected region to the clipboard)

If you do this sequence, I think it incorrectly copies the region to the kill-ring, it doesn't kill it ("clipboard and "cut" to non-emacs users).

To get the correct results, you need to let up on the control key and push it down again before the final C-w. Kind of annoying, but I'm really, really glad to have finally figured out what was going on. I'm a bit ashamed it took such a long time, but that's life.

Other than that minor annoyance, I've actually enjoyed doing a bit of C# + .NET. It's also nice having a debugger again... I've been pretty impressed with VS2005's debugger. It certainly made creating my app a lot easier in that I could explore some of the data held in library classes while the app was running instead of just looking at the code to get an idea of what was supposed to be going on.

Not much else going on other than the standard stuff. I've been over some at-home project ideas in my head for a little while... one of them should be familiar to my loyal readers: I'm tempted to start writing my own window manager in lisp or a very large module for sawfish. I'll leave the details for another day, once I figure out what I'm going to do.

If you're not using bloglines as your RSS reader you should check it out sometime. I keep mentioning it, I know, but I have yet to find any better way of reading all my RSS feeds online. I've tried just about everything and I keep coming back to bloglines. I even tried the latest Google Reader and it still can't compete with Bloglines. Bloglines is fast (moreso now that they've thrown in some ajax to get rid of an annoying page refresh) and it also includes a mobile version that works great on my Zaurus PDA or Nokia internet tablet. Kudos to Bloglines.

That's it.

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