I.D.E.A.

I’ve been slowly moving all of my domains to be served from WebFaction. I was on Dreamhost and things were kind of slow. I opened up an account at WebFaction and was using Alertfox to test load speeds between the two hosts (I had setup similar software on both sites). WebFaction was probably ~20% faster than Dreamhost. Dreamhost load times for my WordPress blog ranged from 700 – 1100 ms. WebFaction load times were 500 – 800 ms. So, generally faster.

I’ve finally moved this blog, the last bits to transfer, to WebFaction. The performance of my WordPress blog is faster, but it’s still not instant. I guess that’s to be expected from shared hosting.

Anyhow, Dreamhost was good to me, but I thought it was time for a change. I’ve also been looking at things such as Slicehost and Linode for VPS hosting. I might try those out just to play around with the administration of virtual servers. I want to give WebFaction a go for a year.

Rachel just used the Google laptop to buy tickets online for “True Grit” and needed to print a confirmation. She discovered that we had to use cloud printing to print from the Google laptop to a Windows laptop connected to a printer.

Here’s what we did…following these instructions:

1. Because I don’t have a PC, I started Parallels on my mac. I then setup my HP printer on my XP virtual machine.
2. Install the Chrome browser in XP (I installed 8.0.552.224).
3. Go to Settings (the wrench icon) -> Options -> Under The Hood tab.
4. The instructions said that I should see a Google Cloud Print section on the bottom.  I didn’t. After some searching, I found this post in the Chrome forum and the key is to enable this option first by entering “about:flags” in the browser address bar!
5. Type “about:flags” in the address bar…you’ll see a list of flags/features that you can enable.  Enable the Cloud Print Proxy flag. Then click on the button at the button of the page to restart Chrome.
6. Once the Chrome browser has restarted, you should see the Cloud Printing option under Options -> Under The Hood.
7. Configure the rest by following the steps from the instructions page.  Basically you need to sign in to your Google account so that when the Google notebook sends a print request to the cloud, the Chrome browser running in XP can pull it down from the cloud and then print to the printer attached to that machine.
8. Print a test page…and voila!

For me it’s not ideal because I have to launch the XP virtual machin in Parallels on my Mac, but I have a way to print from my Google laptop.  Yay!

UPDATE

I just found out that if you install the Developer version of Chrome all of this would be easier.  I didn’t try it but I suspect that the Cloud Printing flag would have already been setup.

http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/p/cloudprint.html

I got a nice surprise on Monday night after I got home from our work holiday party. My neighbor dropped off a package that he signed for me. It felt pretty substantial. It was approximately the size of two pizza boxes stacked on top of each other.

When I opened up the outer box the inner box had an exploded view illustration of a mouse driven contraption. It took me a few seconds and then it clicked…it was the Google laptop that I had applied for as a beta tester!!! I was totally excited.

Its case is designed similar to the black Macbook. The finish is also similar…a bit rubbery. I really like the feel. I powered it up and started to play with it. The trackpad was the first thing that I noticed…because it didn’t work that well. I’m still trying to get use to it. I think the setting is too sensitive and there’s not a lot of configuration that can be adjusted in the settings. As part of the beta testing program you’re suppose to submit comments, bugs, etc. So, I think this was one of the first comment that I submitted.

All in all it’s pretty cool. This is Google’s foray into hardware that ties to their apps in the cloud infrastructure. I’m excited to be one of the first users/testers of this concept. I’ll be posting more…stay tuned.

Specs:
12.1″ screen (1280×800)
16 GB Drive (SSD)
2GB memory
VGA port
1 USB port
1 headphone jack
webcam
SD card slot

Details from here:
Processor: Intel Atom Processor N455 1.66GHz 512K Cache
Chipset: Intel CG82NM10 PCH
Motherboard: Tripod Motherboard MARIO – 6050A240910 – MB – A03
Ram: Hynix 2GB DDR3 1Rx8 PC3 – 10600S Ram

Read Only Memory: ITE IT8500E Flash ROM
SSD Drive: SanDisk sdsa4dh-016G 16GB SATA SSD
Wireless Wan: Qualcomm Gobi2000 PCI Express Mini Card
3g Adapter: AzureWave 802.11 a/b/g/n PCI-E Half MiniCard
Bluetooth: Atheros AR5BBU12 Bluetooth V2.1 EDR

Just had drinks with Justin and Scott last night at the Brooklyn Inn. We geeked out and now I’m going to try to learn python again. Found this article, by Red Sweater, about learning python using the mac. They made a little app that contains a web browser in one pane and a terminal in the other. The web browser points to the python tutorial page written by Guido van Rossum (the author of Python).
The article mentions Nodebox…a Processing like environment which uses Python as the language. Cool!

Used a pressure cooker for the first time today.
Made a Chinese “Red Bean Soup”.

Ingredients:

• 1 C of adzuki beans (red beans)
• 6 TBSP of brown sugar
• 8 C of water
• 1 TBSP of small tapioca pearls (they’re about 1-2 mm in diameter)
• 1 TBSP of vegetable oil (i think that this reduces the amount of foam in the pot…if it foams too much it can clog the vent pipe…and there would be no pressure release and you would have a dangerous situation on your hands!)

Steps:

1. Add all ingredients into the pressure cooker.
2. Place lid on pressure cooker and lock into place. For my pot I place the lid on and rotate until the handles match…that seals it. (warning: follow directions for your pressure cooker. I’m listing the steps that I used for mine)
3. Place the pressure regulator on top of the vent pipe at the center of the lid.
4. Heat until the pressure regulator starts to rock. (On my pot, there’s a lock valve that lifts up when the pressure builds up in the pot.) Turn the heat down a bit, but make sure the regulator still rocks.
5. Cook for about 5 – 6 minutes. (I followed the directions in the pressure cooker cookbook and cooked for 3 minutes and the beans were al dente. For the soup, it needs to be a lot softer.
6. Turn the heat off
7. Let the pot cool down by itself on the stove. When the lock valve drops back down, that means there’s no more pressure in the pot. You can now safely open the lid buy rotating the lid. (warning: again, follow the directions for your pressure cooker)

I came across this in Don Koberg & Jim Bagnall’s book “The Universal Traveller”…

A creative problem-solver is a “designer”; a person intending to improve what exists or to find clear paths through dilemmas or challenging situations and arrive at satisfying solutions

I think this is one of the best descriptions of a designer that I’ve seen. This can be applied to any field, whether it’s industrial design, interface design, experience design, etc.

Keep this in mind when you try to explain what you, a designer, do at the next holiday cocktail party!

I just started using the Things app on the iPhone. It supports GTD concepts. Let’s see how long I can keep this up. It seems like I’m more productive already. I’ve been adding items to Things as they come up, and I’ve been checking things off. I think it will take time to adjust to this way of doing things. I’m use to keeping things in my head, but now I will need to trust that I have this system to help me so I can use the extra brain bandwidth on other things.

I was just digging around my theme editor trying to insert a piece of HTML from my hosting service that says that my site is Green, because the hosting service Carbon Neutral. I decided to add the HTML to the footer of my theme. When I looked at the file there were tons of links embedded in a div that had a style of ‘display:none’ !!! I looked at the header and same thing, there were tons of hidden links. I of course deleted the divs from each file and all is well now.

It turns out that people’s WordPress themes are getting hacked for some reason. Here’s an article about it.

Here’s a game on par with the Rice Game that donates/takes action when you play the game.

I have to admit that I’ve tried to use the MVC pattern for coding projects in the past and have never committed fully to using it for all UI objects in the project. Sometimes MVC just seems like too much work for a simple button, for example. Maybe, I just don’t understand how to apply the pattern, but I’m pretty sure I understand the concept. To me, the MVC pattern still has points of tight coupling. For example, your View subscribes to Model events. The Controller holds onto references to the Model and the View.

I’ve just found PureMVC and am trying to understand their implementation. It seems like their architecture is based on really loose coupling. Objects subscribe to messages (not tied to an object at all), and other objects broadcast messages. Subscribers and Publishers don’t know about each other. It sounds like a good idea to me. I’ve seen examples out there of eventmanager objects (subscribers and publishers interact with the eventmanager via the subscribing and publishing of messages) and have used them in projects before and PureMVC sounds like it’s built around this flexible way for objects to communicate with each other. One down side could be that there may be too many message flying around the system. I’m still trying to get my head wrapped around this so let’s see how well this works. I’m following this tutorial.