I was studying web site analytics related to the searches people conducted that led them to craigsmusings.com (or my other site vitter.com) and I stumbled up the following image of me from way back in 1982…
Me in 1982
On of my relatives has gone and scanned a large number of old family pictures and is posting them to their Flickr account. Fortunately this is the only one of my school portraits that seems to be up there for now.
Posted in Uncategorized
MetroMinder is a Web based application that I started as part of my initial efforts to learn PHP. The current iteration of MetroMinder has the following features:
The application gets its data from the Metro Transparent Data Sets API (using the RESTful services) and the Metrorail Service Disruptions RSS feed.
Today I finished making some tweaks to the layout to optimize the display on my Motorola Droid (the target platform is smart phones like the Droid). The one area of the design that I am not happy about is the graphic I created from the Stations function (see screenshot below).
If you have the time to check out MetroMinder I would appreciate any feedback you might have or offers of assistance in the form of a better station graphic.
I just finished watching the first episode of Ricky Gervais’ An Idiot Abroad and it is absolutely brilliant. I love the way that Ricky Gervais describes the show as ”The most expensive practical joke I’ve ever done.” Of course I am not sure in this episode if the joke is on his friend Karl or the people of China. In the end I think it is a little bit of both.
Verdict: An Idiot Abroad is a must watch for its combination of amazing locations and hilarity.
Posted in Television, Travel
I have been using Ubuntu 10.10 for three days and have learned a few things (maybe):
Overall I am really enjoying using Ubuntu but still have a lot to learn before I consider myself as proficient and knowledgeable as I am with the Windows platform.
There is a George Romero zombie movie I haven’t heard of? How did that happen?
This afternoon I was look through Amazon’s Video on Demand service trying to find something to use up some free credits I have when I stumbled upon George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead. Awesome. I love zombies movies, especially zombie movies made by the master of the genre, George A. Romero.
Survival of the Dead isn’t Romero’s best movie but if you are a fan of the zombie genre it is a must see. I especially liked how Romero picked up the story line of the National Guardsmen from his movie Diary of the Dead.
Overall I give it a 3 out of 5 stars for:
Last night I installed Unbuntu 10.10 in a dual boot configuration (with Windows XP SP3) onto my Dell Latitude D820 laptop. I have not really been using my laptop very much lately and have been wanting to play with Ubuntu for awhile.
My laptop’s 80GB drive had about 20GB free on it so I opted to uninstall a lot of applications I don’t really need and move a lot of files over to other hard drives. Once that was done I ran some cleanup utilities and de-fragged the hard drive and ended up with a solid 40GB of free space.
The Ubuntu install is very easy and the download page (http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/download) walks you through the few, very simple steps in clear English that just about anyone could follow. I am very impressed by the effort that was put into making the install user friendly. Beyond being user friendly the install worked the first time without hitches on my Dell laptop. The installer had no problem finding drivers that worked with my hardware and found my wireless network without a hitch. From what I can tell if you are installing Ubuntu on a mainstream desktop or laptop computer from the likes of Dell, HP, Sony, etc you should be set.
My only frustration was the amount of time it took to complete the installation (about 2.5 hours) but I think some of that is due to my machine and the DVD drive being slow. I had not expected the install to take quite as long as it did so some of the copying of files, etc. seemed a bit like watching paint drying.
Once the installation was complete and I had logged into the desktop I felt relatively at home. The Ubuntu environment is an interesting mix of Windows and Mac UI cues. I am not crazy about some of the interface choices right now but I think that once I settle in and use it for awhile I will find ways to alter the interface and make it feel right for me (much as I spend a lot of time configuring a new Window’s desktop to look and act like I want it to do).
Application wise Ubuntu comes loaded with most everything you need including Evolution for email, OpenOffice for word processing and presentations, Firefox for Web browsing, and quite a few utility applications for things like sound, video, photographs, etc. I downloaded Google’s Chrome browser and will probably be adding some development tools this weekend (Eclipse, MySQL, PHP, etc.) but otherwise out of the box Ubuntu has just about everything you need on a computer pre-installed.
Right now I am giving Ubuntu 10.10 a big thumbs up.
