Most likely to succeed

Earlier today a good friend of mine sent me a couple of pictures that had me laughing ’till I cried. I’m assuming these were taken when I was in 8th grade (1993), which would put me at ~13. I think the first picture shows me about as “dressed up” (come on, there’s some semblance of a collar there) as I got in those days (it was required for the shot, much to my opposition). I’m apparently still rocking the “skater cut” at this point, though it looks like I’m in serious need of getting the sides shaved (see second pic for a better example).

As a side note, the other most-likely-to-succeed person in the first picture is a good friend of mine and we actually lived together for some time during undergrad. The best(?) part is that both of us are still in school.  :)

That’s me on the far left.

Nice[r] titles

As a lot of you have noticed, I started using Nice Titles throughout this site a couple of weeks ago (so that those who hover above my “bits” will immediately see what I have to say about them, if anything). A few people have asked how I got mine to look the way that they do (i.e., the URI is not shown and the width of the background picture is a bit more predictable). If you prefer the way that mine look, feel free to use my hacked nicetitle.js file as you wish.

Smart Archives v1.01

I’ve just released v1.01 of my Smart Archives WordPress plugin. I strongly encourage anyone who currently uses the plugin to download this release as it takes care of nearly all of the issues that users have written to me about. The list below outlines the changes.

• Posts with a future date are no longer included in the list(s).
• Months that contain only posts deemed “private” or “draft” are no longer included in the list(s).
• Months during which a WP “Page” is created, but which contain no posts for that month, are no longer included in the list(s).

Aggregated beauty

As soon as I saw the 50 people see… photoset on Flickr, I was immediately reminded of Jason Salavon’s similar work, which I came across a couple of years ago (and from which the programmer here found inspiration).

I’m completely fascinated by the fact that the almagamation of so many disparate pictures, with nothing in common save their subject, can produce something so (in my opinion) beautiful. If I have time I might try to hack the source used to create the photoset so that it blends together every picture I’ve ever taken — I’d be real interested to see the ?ber-pics produced by different people’s collections.

We grow software

If you haven’t yet read DrunkenBlog’s interview with Brent and Sheila Simmons (of NetNewsWire fame), you’re really missing out. It’s an interesting peek into the world of an independent (and successful) software developer. My favorite excerpt from the interview is when Brent is explaining how working together with Sheila at home every day isn’t so bad.

…
It’s a little bit like farm life — but modern, urban, digital farm life. We grow software.

Using FeedBurner to gauge reader circulation

I’ve been playing around with FeedBurner for quite some time and just recently started redirecting my main content feed to my “burned” feed so that I could get a better handle on my [RSS] reader circulation (which, incidentally, FeedBurner handles wonderfully).

Circulation: An approximate measure of the number of individuals for whom your feed has been requested in the last 24 hours. Circulation is inferred from an analysis of the many different feed readers and aggregators that retrieve this feed daily. Circulation is not computed for browsers and bots that access your feed. Circulation is calculated by matching IP address and news reader combinations, and then using our detailed understanding of the multitude of readers and aggregators and bots on the market to make additional inferences.

You can obviously deduce this statistic yourself if you have access to the raw http server logs, but, uhh, why? Can you imagine trying to keep up with all of the new online aggregators out there?

If you’ve been thinking about moving to FeedBurner, but have some reservations, I’d be interested to hear what they might be as I can no longer come up with any. After all, you can transparently redirect your subscribers to FeedBurner — they’ll never see the change (unless of course they access your feed in a regular web browser and pay attention to the redirected URI). What is more is that FeedBurner now allows you to specify the original source URI of your feed (in my case, /syndicate) which it will then use in any external presentation of your feed (e.g., on the sign-up chicklets that users see when they stumble across your feed through a web browser and are shown the XSLT-styled, human-readable XML file).

You never have to inform your old, already-subscribed readers (or your new readers) of your FeedBurner feed, yet you still get to take advantage of all of their wonderful services — win-win.

On a related note, sometime in the next couple of weeks I think I’ll probably do a small write-up on the percentage breakdown of the different aggregators that are used to access this site as I think it’s quite telling of where this space is headed (hint: it’s away from the local client).

I’m still debating whether to use FeedBurner to splice my del.icio.us links into the main content feed (as I mentioned in Outsourcing This Website), but that decision will have to wait for another day.

You might use your TiVo too much if…

…,when you’re watching a movie at the theater, you unconsciously raise your hand to press the rewind button after a funny scene.

Introducing Smart Archives for WordPress

Smart Archives is my very first WordPress plugin and provides functionality similar to, but above and beyond, the nested archives I developed for Movable Type.

If you’re interested, a better description can be found on the project page, along with the source and installation instructions.

Just another nail in the iPod’s coffin

There’s really no denying that the future of mobile music is streaming. Just today, a very excited Russell wrote up a piece on the Virgin Mobile radio client, which allows you to stream [random] music to a 3G-capable phone. I, however, am more excited about things like accessTunes, which allow you to stream your music collection over the web. I swear, if someone offered something similar, but with the following additional features, I’d pay handsomely for their product:

• A web interface that is accessible to mobile browsers (e.g., Opera for mobile)
• The option to encode my MP3s at a lower bit-rate, on-the-fly, before streaming them (99.9% of my collection is 192+kbps, which current mobile data networks cannot sustain)

Windows smartphone as a bluetooth modem under OS X?

I’m going absolutely mad trying to get my i-mate SP3i to function as a Bluetooth modem under Mac OS X. I’ve obviously set this up many times before for a lot of different devices, but I can’t seem to get it to work on a Windows Mobile-based smartphone. Some might say that I’m a glutton for punishment in trying to make this happen, and, well, I can’t very well refute that.

If anyone out there has this working with any Windows Mobile device, please let me in on the secret — I’ve reached the end of the Internet trying to find a solution and am done hacking on it for a while.

SMS and me

The Short Message Service has become an indispensable part of my life these last few years. A brief sample of how I currently use SMS:

• Tell someone I’ve just left/arrived
• Remind myself of something from my Trumba calendar (it will send you SMS alerts for your calendar events; I hope the Google calendar speculation turns out to be true sometime soon)
• Get phone numbers and addresses from Google SMS (this is especially useful when your phone automagically makes phone numbers “clickable” so that you can simply click on them within the SMS to make the call); Google SMS is capable of a lot of neat things
• E-mail iCal reminders to number@cingularme.com, which arrive on my mobile phone as SMSs
• Driving directions from either Yahoo! Maps or MapQuest (Google Maps will certainly allow this in the future; you can actually ask for directions through Google SMS, but it’s a little cumbersome)
• If I’ve just sold something on eBay, I’ll use an IM client (or Internet-to-SMS gateway) to send myself the buyer’s address so that I’ll have it at the post office
• Have SMSs treated like IMs through my phone which is connected to my notebook over Bluetooth (when SMSs come in they’re shown on my computer screen and I can reply to them on the computer just like a regular IM; the computer sends my replies to the phone over Bluetooth and from there they’re sent over-the-air to the recipient’s mobile phone)
• Have airlines let me know if my (or a friend’s) flight is on time/delayed or if there has been a gate change
• Have mobile phone manufacturers send me settings for a particular phone/service combination (this is usually faster than finding the needed settings on the net and entering them manually)
• Have my online brokerage service send me alerts when my stocks have gone below or [hopefully] above thresholds I’ve set
• Have the mechanic notify me as soon as my car is ready