Posted Wed, 13 Dec 2006 15:50:14 GMT to Posted in Geek, Reviews Tags analytics, google
Like other people I know, I have been testing Google Analytics. There are some good things about it, but overall I am not really impressed.
Read more...Posted Sun, 19 Nov 2006 17:29:03 GMT to Posted in Life, Geek Tags presentation, rails, ruby
Over the last few years I have been asked to present something at various local conferences (mostly just CEOS). This has always ended up with me saying, “sorry, I don’t have the time”. Recently, I have come to the realization that I am likely going to always be “busy” with various other things. So I made a decision.
More recently, I have been asked to give a talk at DevEast. Rather than my traditional “sorry I don’t have time”, I decided to give in and accept. I am now going to be giving a talk about Ruby on Rails that will encompass a lot of the basics, as well as sharing some of my own experiences with it over the last year.
Win, lose, or draw, at least in a few days I will be able to say I’ve tried.
Posted Mon, 15 May 2006 21:35:46 GMT to Posted in Geek
So….... I have noticed a few people have been searching the internet for ‘rails on torch’. So, I thought I would answer this question for them.
The Easy Answer:
It is already installed! Just start developing following any of the many, many tutorials out there. Or alternately you can just download, configure and run one of the many pre-existing projects in existance
Read more...Posted Sat, 15 Apr 2006 17:48:29 GMT to Posted in Geek, Reviews, Entertainment
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine showed off Metroid Prime: Hunters on his Nintendo DS. Playing it for a few minutes, I have to admit I was hooked. Using the stylus to aim and select things just seemed so SIMPLE, the gameplay itself was good, and it has multiplayer capability!
I picked up my own copy shortly after finishing up Compiler Construction, and I beat the game today. A few things of note:
Haven’t really had a chance to try out multiplayer (don’t have wireless), so I can’t really comment on that. Overall, I am really liking the game though. Nice amount of exploration with some fast and furios bounty hunter on bountry hunter action. Now all I have to do is figure out what ???? is …....
Posted Sun, 09 Apr 2006 12:37:24 GMT to Posted in Life, Geek
Back when Oliver and I submitted the Roomba to MakeZine, I noticed that Make was accepting proposals for projects to present at Maker Faire. And by accepting, I mean ‘oh, proposal deadline is in 3 hours. Maybe we should send something off quickly?’. So we did, and we waited expectantly for the March 21st approval date. Said date came and went without any word, so we thought that nothing had come as a result.
Until Oliver got an e-mail today asking for a picture that they could put on this site. So we were apparently accepted and have a table there. And there are less than 2 weeks to said event. And we are just finding out now, due to the original e-mail disappearing somewhere somehow.
So…... we’re actually going to see if we can make it down. We just need to put together enough funds to travel there, find a place to stay, put together an actual presentation…......... sounds possible considering we should probably get back to them in 48-72 hours, right?
Ah…... end of term can never be simple, can it?
Posted Wed, 22 Mar 2006 11:14:33 GMT to Posted in Geek, School, Ideas
As many of you might know, a while back Mike Smit started taking a hard look at TurnItIn.com a while back. For those of you who follow his site, he has more recently begun an information campaign, pointing out failings, problems, and concerns with the service. Even outside of his site, the issue has been getting a lot of attention, including being covered in the current issue of the Dalhousie Gazette.
Read more...Posted Tue, 28 Feb 2006 00:06:56 GMT to Posted in Geek, Programming
So, lately I have been spending some late nights on campus. I mean LATE nights, 1….. 2….. almost 3 in the morning. Have I been spending late nights working on my schoolwork? Ok, you can stop laughing now. No, instead I have been doing some hardware/software hacking with a Roomba. My friend Oliver and I have been busy putting the Roomba together and doing cool stuff with it. Ok, ok, Oliver did most of the hardware work, I just provided ideas and suggestions along the way. End result: A Roomba being controlled using a USB Gamepad over the wireless network in the Computer Science building. Over the break, several individuals from tech support came to take a look at it cause it sounded cool, and we even showed it off to the high school students that showed up at the Open House last Saturday (they also thought it was cool. Right now, we have the movement controlled via one of the analog sticks, though we have a lot of cool ideas (which I am sure I will write about as they are accomplished).
More information (as well as pictures) can be found at Oliver’s site here
Additionally, Make Magazine has already featured it in their Make Blog. How cool is that?
Posted Sun, 05 Feb 2006 23:51:15 GMT to Posted in Life, Geek, School Tags acm, dal, debian, hacking, linux, roomba, xen
So the Dal-ACM hosted another Installfest on Saturday. Rather than be a simple spectator of cool stuff and mooching off the nice spread of snacks, I decided to be an actual PARTICIPANT this time.
Read more...Posted Wed, 04 Jan 2006 02:58:55 GMT to Posted in Geek, Reviews
A few weeks back I bought myself a Nintendo DS for my birthday. Now, normally it is usually hard for me to play anything more than ‘twitch’ games on my main PC, due to my regular busy schedule. However, I noticed that I generally have down time between tasks that is spent just sitting around or aimlessly surfing the web. I figured I could use this time to play games with one of the current gen portable consoles. But why the DS and not the PSP? Several reasons really: I have fond memories of my old Nintendo products. Nintendo seems to innovate in gameplay more than the competitors (and dual screens seem cool). Oh, and Final Fantasy and Shining Force (in various incarnations) are/will be available for it. Coincidentally, the Mario Kart/DS bundle came out shortly before my birthday, and my friend has been going on about how awesome that game is, so I got that too.
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Initial impressions:
Right now the dual screen doesn’t do much (in Mario Kart). Then again, I used to hate pausing to view a map, so we will see how future games handle it.
I hate the fact that there is no battery indication. I hate playing a game and all of a sudden my DS going dead. I mean, they have a flashing light for testing Wi-fi connectivity, why not have one of them flash steadily when the battery is low? At least then I would know that I need to wrap things up, maybe save, and then exit gracefully.
Range of the Wi-fi connection seems a little slow, and I have had some problems getting connectivity over the internet, but some of that might have to do with the set up of the access points I have been connecting to over the DS itself.
Doesn’t support the GBA link mode. For example, in Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced you could link two GBA units and do co-operative and competitive missions and get extra stuff. Not so with the DS. The rest of the backward compatibility works fine, but I thought doing this for the DS over WiFi for GBA games would have been a no brainer. I suppose the most likely cause is hard coded hardware information in the GBA cartridged, but it still would have been nice to have.
All in all I am enjoying my purchase. Mario Kart is a blast and I am loving going retro and playing some of my favorite older games. The fact that Final Fantasy 3-6 are coming out (4 is already out) only strengthens my decision in my own mind. Suddenly, waiting doesn’t seem as boring any more…......
Posted Fri, 02 Dec 2005 22:21:37 GMT to Posted in Life, Geek
As time goes on, I feel that I should give this, my little piece of the internet, a real home with a real domain name. A place where I don’t have to worry too much about anything. A place where I can actually see my own log files. A place where I can actually have more than one mysql account that has my name. But, honestly, I have no clue on a) what hosting services are good (though I could get this baby hosted on the Dal-ACM production server and get all of the above). b) What domain name to get. Since I want it to be somewhat professional, and my name is already gone six ways from Sunday, I am aimlessly kicking ideas around.
Anyone have any thoughts/comments either way?
