She’ll be a Full Nerd Before Too Long
April 20th, 2008My wife has a blog now. http://fiddledeetee.blogspot.com. I couldn’t be prouder.
Albertsons Online Shopping Review
January 28th, 2008With my wife getting closer to her due date we were excited to try the Albertsons Online Shopping where they offer to shop for you. They’ll either deliver ($9.99) or you can pick it up ($4.99). However, our experience shows that maybe it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.
Screencasts from Linux
December 12th, 2007Looking into ways to do screencasts from Linux I tried Wink, Istanbul, and Recordmydesktop. My requirements were that I could record both video and audio within the same tool. Wink 2.0 isn’t released for Linux yet and it’s the first version to support recording sounds, Istanbul tried to record but didn’t save the sound (and never really wrote the entire file out), but Recordmydesktop did it’s thing beautifully.
Getting Used to a Prototype-based Language
November 21st, 2007My current position at Move Networks affords me the opportunity to learn more about Javascript. I am quite familiar with class-based object-oriented languages. For some reason it is taking me more effort than I’d like to wrap my brain around using a prototype-based language like Javascript. I mean, I get it but I still don’t see the full usefulness of it (unless really the whole deal is to make it easier to manipulate objects directly; is that really all there is to it?).
Anyway, in my search for understanding I’ve come across a number of ways people use Javascript in class-like ways. But what bugs me about doing this is the inconsistency in how you define your objects or classes or whatever you want to do. Adding methods to an object’s prototype to make them public, switching to object-literal notation, etc. It all just looks ugly to me. So I’ve come up with the following. It’s a mix and match of various methods I’ve seen out there (which are mainly summarized in the comments on a YUIblog post (thank you Eric Miraglia and all those who replied to his post!). I certainly hope people who know more about javascript can comment on whether this looks like a good or bad practice.
XvMC, MythTV, and my nVidia Geforce 7300 GS
October 16th, 2007I got some pointers from http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/XvMC for my Kubuntu Gutsy-based MythTV box and wow, the CPU usage dropped way down.
Ubuntu Gutsy, amarok, and wavpack
September 26th, 2007I looked all over the place and couldn’t find a good way to get wavpack support in amarok for gutsy. It looked like what I really needed was wavpack support in xine-lib (libxine1). As it turns out libxine1 is built without wavpack support for some reason. So I built my own, instructions below. (Next to see if this works for MythTV’s mythaudio plugin. Does it use xine-lib?)
To be Civilized
August 17th, 2007To be civilized is to restrain the ability to commit mayhem. To be incapable of committing mayhem is not the mark of the civilized, merely the domesticated.
- Trefor Thomas
Rush Still Rocks
August 9th, 2007I took the opportunity to attend the Rush Snakes and Arrows Tour show in Salt Lake City. I am so glad I did. What a great night.
More MacOS Apps
August 2nd, 2007Here are some more that I’ve come across to solve my various personal incompatibilities with the default Mac OS interface. I’ve also included an update on what has changed with the original list.
Mac OS Necessary Apps
July 27th, 2007They’ve given me a Mac at work and this is my first time really using a Mac as my primary work machine. So I’ve started to look for applications that I consider necessary in order for me to function without getting frustrated all the time. These are basic applications that I use daily that I had to download separately. I always regretted not keeping a list like this for Windows. I’ll try to keep this updated as I find more applications. At this point I think I’ve found what I need for the basics.