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Favorites

November 6, 09 //
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I use the web everyday for both work and fun. Given the amount of time I am on the web, my list of favorite sites isn’t really that insightful. I am sure everyone reading this will have heard of my favorite sites, but if you haven’t tried them or it has been a while since you last logged on, I suggest you give them a try. Below is a list of sites that I use on a daily basis to better enjoy the web.

Gmail

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Gmail is such a versatile tool. I like bringing in my email using IMAP and only going to the site when I need to look up old messages. Never having to delete an email is nice and being able to find any message using the powerful search in a couple seconds is even nicer.

Google Apps

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I primarily use Google Apps for email on my own domains (about 10 different domains). It is free and simple to setup and manage. I really like the ability to integrate Google App Engine (a topic for a later post) sites with your domain.

Google Voice

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Google Voice is currently my favorite site that I barely use. I am hoping for an iPhone app soon so I can start using the service. Being able to listen to my messages and read the transcripts through the web is fantastic. I also love being able to use SMS directly through the site.

Google Reader

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I recently switched from NetNewsWire to Google Reader because of the social features added to Reader. I love that I can see shared items from my friends and see which items are most enjoyed by the Reader community.

Delicious

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Delicious is my original favorite social application. I mostly use the site to discover interesting content through the recent popular items, but I also use the site to tag and store links I want to get back to in the future. For an idea of the types of sites I am currently viewing and the topics I am interested in at any given moment you can browse my saved links.

A few others

There are plenty of other sites I like and even use on a daily basis, but not that I couldn’t live without. Of course I am on Facebook checking my feed everyday (mostly on my phone) and Twitter (again, on my phone) catching up on the latest news, but I could go on without them.

I came very close to adding Amazon to this list because of their digital services. I rely on their file hosting and CDN for Swap-bot, I am a big fan of their MP3 Downloads and love the Kindle. In the end, however, I left them off because it isn’t a site I go to everyday.

After putting this list together, I saw just how Google-heavy it is. I was hoping that I could put together an eclectic list of unheard of sites, but I have to face reality that Google makes quality sites and I use them everyday. Anyways, check these sites out if you aren’t currently using them. They help me enjoy the web more and more everyday.

It’s Thursday!

November 5, 09 //
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Thursday nights are special in the Johnson house. It is the one night a week we order Japanese takeout and gorge ourselves on a smorgasbord of teriyaki chicken, rolls, soup, salad and more! We eat the meal while enjoying some of the finest shows on television. We call the night JPan on the Fringe – inspired by both the restaurant to which we owe the thanks for the food and the Fox sci-fi thriller.

Rachel told me that dogs know 100 words. JPan is easily Crusher’s favorite of the 100 he knows. When we say we are going to JPan he immediately runs to the door and waits to run down the stairs with us on our way to pick up our order. Once we reach the street, he is on a tear to walk the three blocks – I actually think it looks a bit like a tiny sled dog pulling at the Iditarod as he drives with his legs to get us there as fast as possible. While I am inside paying and picking up the food, he is struggling to get free from Rachel to come inside and help me.

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Once home, we settle in for a mix of comedy and the previously mentioned Fringe. While Fringe is the title show of the evening, I look most forward to the show that caps the night – It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. I have my brother-in-law Dr. Adam to thank for getting us hooked on the show. The uncomfortable situations the gang gets in to each week are amazingly hilarious.

I absolutely love spending Thursday evenings with Rachel in this way. She is so wonderful and hard-working all week long, but I love having one night a week where we put work off limits and just relax together. As we work together to make this new city our home I feel so lucky to already have our weekly Thursday night party.

First impressions using Git

November 4, 09 //
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Version control software is a must for any developer. A few basic features that any good version control system should have include:

  • Easy to use – shouldn’t get in the way of the developer
  • View previous revisions – when something isn’t right you need to see how you got to that point
  • Simple branching, tagging and merging abilities
  • A server component for remote storage – a must for multi-member team development, but still very nice for ever a single developer

I have been using Subversion for version control for the last six years because it accomplished all the goals above. I wasn’t in the market for a new VCS when I happened upon Git and got excited again about version control.

I discovered Git through a coding community website called github. I started noticing that all the open source projects I followed and many of the new ones I stumbled upon were publicly sharing their source through github. github adds a social aspect to code development – it’s kind of like Facebook for developers – and as the name implies is centered around Git. Because of github, Git suddenly became cool and I had to switch.

After reading a few tutorials and getting the basics of Git down I saw the real power of switching to Git. Git makes branching and merging even easier than any of the other VCS I have used before. Even though I think backing code off your development machine is very important, I like that with Git you can create local branches without pushing those changes to the origin server. Fixing bugs and developing new code in their own branch is a best practice that is not often followed (at least by me) because of the steps involved – with Git those steps are too simple not to follow.

I still haven’t switched all my projects over to Git. I am mainly using Git for new projects. I still use SVN for Swap-bot, but as I become more familiar with Git I look forward to making the switch.

An ode to my Kindle

November 3, 09 //
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I received a Kindle from my parents for my birthday last year. At the time, I was living in Eugene and thought it would be a cool device to have, but wasn’t really sure how much I was going to read. I only had a five minute commute to work and reading while driving was out of the question anyways, but would read it whenever I had some down time around the house.

A few months later we moved to New York and the Kindle completely changed my reading habits. I suddenly had about 45 minutes a day of waiting for and riding the train to and from work. I instantly became an avid reader. The Kindle has allowed me to always have a book (and a backup book) with me. One of the best things about my Kindle is that it fits so nicely in one hand which lets me to read with one hand and hang on to the rail with the other.

Over the last six months of very active reading, I have read a very good mix of books – a couple technical books, a few generic fiction books, two biographies and various other books. My favorite books to read so far have been the classics. Up until now I haven’t been much of a reader, so I have a lot of catching up. Besides being important texts in our society, these books are generally free either directly from Amazon or through various public domain book sites.

I am really looking forward to the next couple generations of reading devices. Adding more social activity, like book lending from the device, would really be amazing.

I really love having my Kindle each time I take the train. It turns my boring commute into a productive and enjoyable few minutes to escape before and after work.

Dvorak

November 2, 09 //
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A couple months ago Rachel was out of town and I needed something to do, so I decided to switch from the standard QWERTY keyboard layout to Dvorak. The appeal of shorter keystrokes led me to begin teaching myself this new keyboard layout. Learning Dvorak was much harder than I expected. Remembering where the keys were wasn’t very hard to pick up, but my brain kept wanting to type the key where it was on the QWERTY layout.

For the first week or so, my head actually hurt at the end of each day because I was concentrating so hard on just typing. The other unfortunate side affect of switching is that it is very hard to type on a QWERTY keyboard. I haven’t tried to really switch back, but whenever I have to type on Rachel’s computer, I resort to the hunt and peck method. Surprisingly though, on the iphone, I am just as fast typing with my thumbs as I was before the switch. My brain is able to quickly switch back when on the phone.

After about two months of using Dvorak everyday, I am now to the point where I want to be in terms of speed and mistakes. I definitely want to improve and know I will on both accounts, but am at least to an equal point to where I was with the QWERTY layout before I switched.

I haven’t done too much analysis of my typing, but I have noticed that most words seem to be comprised of letters mostly from the home row. The better I get at typing, the more I notice this too.

Go Ducks!

November 1, 09 //
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Living for nearly four years in Eugene turned me into a pretty big Oregon Duck football fan. The entire town is crazy for the Ducks which always struck me as odd because I didn’t think that hippies and football mix, but Eugene proves that they mix very well.

Living in Brooklyn this season has made it harder to catch all the games since they haven’t gotten a lot of national coverage so far this season. I have, however, been able to catch all the games so far. A few of the games have been on TV out here, but most of the games have forced me to turn to the internet. The quality isn’t great, but a combination of Boxee and justin.tv have allowed me to watch the other games over the internet on my tv. I was so excited to find that the games could be found live online.

Last night’s game was by far the most exciting game of the season. It was broadcast on ABC here and Rachel, Crusher and I watched the game as part of our Halloween party. The tenth ranked Ducks beat the fifth ranked Trojans 47-20. Rachel even got into the game enjoying the impressive rushing of “The Little One”, LaMichael James. I am not sure if that is a nickname James will want to stick, but until he gets a better nickname, that’s what we’ll be calling him in the Johnson house.

Crusher and Me at the game

For the party, Crusher and I put on our best Duck gear and cheered Oregon on to victory.

NaBloPoMo 2009

October 31, 09 //
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Regulars know that I haven’t been too consistent with my postings here, so during the month of November I am going to try and change that. Rachel has been doing National Blog Posting Month for a few years now and this year I am going to join her. Going from one post a month to one post a day is a little daunting. I am not sure I have 30 different interesting things to say, but I am going to try.

Feel free to leave a comment and request a topic for me to share.

RSS cloud

September 7, 09 //
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I’ve been following the recent developments with RSS cloud for a little while and after various announcements today about Wordpress blogs supporting RSS cloud I decided to give it a try. It was simple to install this RSS cloud for Wordpress pluign and then verify the <cloud> element by viewing my RSS 2.0 feed.

RSS cloud is basically a super simple way for content providers to notify subscribers about new content in real time. I haven’t played with the technology enough to detail my likes or dislikes, but when I have some time I am going check out how updates can propagate all the way to the end user. I can see how this method is loads easier than XMPP for server-to-server (s2s), but want to investigate how it works for s2c (client) when the client is behind a firewall or is using NAT – which is where XMPP really excels.

Anyway, feel free to subscribe using rss cloud to my monthly blog post. It would be a true shame if you had read my post up to a full hour after I posted. Although, in all seriousness, just think about how much bandwidth you would save both you and me if instead of checking once an hour all month long for just one post I told you exactly when I posted.

a few new things

August 15, 09 //
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I’ve been itching to learn something new (in the computer spectrum) for a while. My last round of new stuff centered around systems administration and performance tuning for Swap-bot. I taught myself proper deployment practices, load balancing, backup strategies and monitoring- among other things. I promised to write about them here and never did (not that anyone missed the posts), but I still plan to someday.

With those out of the way, I decided to dig into this Real-Time web that is getting so much buzz lately. I picked up a book on XMPP a few weeks ago and started into it last week after finishing free by Chris Anderson (super short review: I didn’t like it). By the time today rolled around I had enough XMPP knowledge under my belt to start writing some code. The book provided example code in Python, which I don’t really know, but I decided to roll with it. I found a good XMPP library (the one the book used didn’t seem to work for me), which made everything so much easier. This morning I started working on a jabber bot that accepted a search query and returns an image from flickr based on the term. I found a really good flickr library that made searching and parsing very easy. To my surprise, the project came together in just a little over an hour. The bot isn’t public, but I am sure I will release something related to today’s work sometime soon.

To add to my learnings I decided to bite the bullet and give the Dvorak keyboard layout a real try (while working on the python/xmpp project!). I’ve been reading about Dvorak for a long time and want to see if I can improve my typing speed and accuracy, but most importantly I want to see if I can type for longer periods of time without my wrists getting sore – all promised when switching to Dvorak. After a solid 10 hours of working with the new layout, I am starting to get the hang of it. While my current speeds won’t win any world records, I am starting to improve – I do blame any typos on Dvorak, though. I don’t think I’ll be good enough by Monday to switch for my real work, but hopefully after a few weeks of nights and weekends with Dvorak I’ll be ready to switch for good.

The Latest

July 27, 09 //
0

As I write this, Rachel and I are 35,000 feet in the air somewhere over Michigan on our way back to NYC. We’re returning from a long weekend trip to Southern California. My longtime friend and college roommate was married this weekend in San Diego (congrats Tim!) and in addition to the wedding we were able to get in a lot of good time with my family.

On Friday Rachel and I went to Disneyland with my sister and her husband. We went with the ambitious goal of staying from open to close, and I’m proud to announce we made it! We rode approximately 28 rides and in the process walked the entire park many, many times. Not to worry, I fueled my day with three churros (which are better at Disneyland than the subway, believe it or not) and plenty of other goodies.

On Saturday was the wedding. I had a great time catching friends from college, and getting to see Tim get married.

Sunday was highlighted with some delicious homemade biscuits and gravy for brunch (thank Uncle John!) and a fried chicken dinner at Knott’s Berry Farm. We’ve been going to Knott’s my whole life and it’s always a fun time and great food. I don’t normally eat fried chicken, but when at Knott’s you have to go with the original.

And that’s our weekend in SoCal (minus some sitting around and talking). I had a great time with my family and friends, but am looking forward to getting home. I can’t wait to pick up Crusher and get back to our weekly routine.

In other news, we have been looking forward to this upcoming weekend for quite some time in the Johnson household. M. Ward is playing Summerstage this Saturday night. This will be my first time to see Ward live and I am secretly hoping for an appearance by Zooey Deschanel, too.

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