11 posts tagged “nerdy”

Gmail.app is out at jinsync.com.

Gmail.app

Instead, I use 30b for my calendaring, Zoho Writer, and even search on Yahoo once in a long while, to balance things out.

This week, I realized that using Gmail locks me into an all-or-nothing proposition wrt Google's Personalized Search. Either I'm logged into Gmail from Camino and Google stores my search history /or/ I log out from Personalized Search and thus get logged out from Gmail.

Ugh, what gives? I don't want to opt-out of Personalized Search completely (deleting my search history), I just want search privacy to be the default.

This is actually why I finally got to putting together Gmail.app today (thanks to Mayosoft Studios for the icon, as pictured above). It lets me run Gmail in one app, while being signed out of the Google Platform by default on my regular web browser.

Continuing in the short tradition of iusethis, here-be yet another list.

i(use)this:

• osx.iusethis.com
• cssedit
• PDFView

• voodoopad
• ultrastar
• 30boxes.com on your dock
• why's (poignant) guide to ruby and his delightful codestuffs too!
  

Two weeks ago, I went into an Apple Store to say goodbye to my MacBook Pro.

She had a bad fan, said the overworked Mac "Genius", and went into the shop.

During that week, I realized this, that absence makes the heart grow more OS X.

And so, after I got my baby back, I started to take her into lab every single day.

Hot OS X apps:

I'm watching Mike Pinkerton on That Other Video Site talk about Camino. I love Camino, even if it doesn't support Firefox extensions, most importantly gestures, colorful tabs and Firebug. So I browse in Camino and webdev/proxyswitch in Firefox 2 dot ugly oh.

It's nice to hear Mike say what I had suspected for some years, that the Mozilla community didn't bring in the hacker community as much as they might have hyped or liked, for reasons that might include XPCOM and C++.

Plainly put, hacking on Mozilla is hard. Firefox extensions seem to have drawn a small dev crowd, but extensions seem to not mix too well, break, and that kind of thing.

Looking forward, I think Mike might be onto something when he talks about how Leopard might help Camino shine. As webapps start to Suck Less, I think we're going to see (or we should see!) OS X native apps that embed Camino and sparkleflash with CoreHotness and the like.

But beyond the browser-as-platform, and think we're going to see (or again, should see) the growth of web-as-platform, in a way that's accessible to designer/coder hybrids. Adobe and Microsoft have hedged their bets here, but I'm going to push for open standards, tech, and source here, and see if I can't go-with-the-flow and see if the world is down with what I have had the chance to visage in my webby dreams.

As I write this, besides being annoyed that there doesn't seem to be an easy way to embed arbitrary HTML in Vox, I realize that Vox seems to be missing a fairly important item for easy insertion: events.

You can easily insert photos, videos, and books, but events? evite | eventbrite | upcoming | google calendar? Not as far as I can tell.

If such a feature did exist, I'd use it to say that I was going to http://www.communitynext.com/ next month, February 10th, here at TheFarm.

Or that I attended this last Women 2.0 mixer.

On an even geekier note, I have to say that _why('s code) is totally hot.

My 中文 final went well -- I think -- and this week I've started to hack some scripts in JRuby and, along the way, started to clean up, organize, and fill out the JRuby Wiki.

I definitely see a bright future for JRuby, and it's nice to be able to contribute to a youngish project that seems as if it's destined for deeper impacts.

I came up with a possible name for the mini-project I started worked on, inspired by the Chinese measure word 斤 (as in 千斤, qian1 jin1). The last couple days I worked on it to the point where it's barely useful, but I know that a more functional version would have fairly wide appeal.

I'm thankful that I'm in a place now where I can contribute in a meaningful way to a community that's now small (JRuby users) and imagine contributing, more generally, to a community that might even larger still.

At GetJar, I finally found a J2ME text editor for my Samsung SGH D807, which runs but does nothing.

J2Sch and MobyExplorer both install/run but don't seem to do anything either.

MIdpSSH almost works, but fails to get Writer permissions for javax.microedition.io.Connector.socket.

I'm guessing you need to enable the right system properties to touch the network or the file system, but it might be that this model just doesn't let you enable certain midlet permissions.

A student blurted out, as I passed him on wheeels yesterday afternoon,

...on perpendicular skates?!

Hahaha.

Taking a break from learning the nuances of Jython (for research) and 学习汉语, I tried to see what I could do, programmatically, with the Samsung SGH-D807 I bought at Berkeley.

I had started using mobile gmail -- written in Java ME -- and wondered if I could write my own apps.

It seems the answer is yes, but trickily so :).

First, I develop an app in something like NetBeans Mobility (or Sun's toolkit), then emulate and test with something like mpowerplayer.

Given a JAR, I create a JAD. The JAR has the source and data, while the JAD seems to be installation related metadata. For example,

MIDlet-Jar-URL: Code.jar
MIDlet-Jar-Size: 2313
MIDlet-Name: TheRose
MIDlet-Vendor: Me
MIDlet-Version: 1.0.0
MicroEdition-Configuration:CLDC-1.0
MicroEdition-Profile:MIDP-1.0

(Skipping a field seems to generate an 'attribute missing' error, and sometimes the sizes mismatch when you grab other people's MIDlet JARs you find online. Also, you might need to wget the URL and change the MIDlet-Jar-URL if it points to a http:// address.)

On my MacBook, I drag the JAR and JAD to "Bluetooth File Exchange", to beam it to my D807.

To install, you type *#9998*5282# pw: 235282.

According to a sysinfo midlet I ran, the D807 supports CLDC-1.1, MIDP-2.0, MMAPI-1.0, WMA-1.0, and Mobile 3D.

My cell phone has a 1GB flash drive in it... what can I do with that? :)

I fell off my skates today, taking a hill too fast.

I didn't think I was injured, but I can tell now that my neck is slightly sore.

At least I didn't cut my foot like I did yesterday. Skating with sandals is a wee bit risky :).

I'm studying a bit for comps right now, in Gates.

"...Formally, this splitting scheme is a fixed-point iteration with iteration function... whose Jacobian matrix is... Thus the iteration scheme is convergent if the spectral radius p(G) = p(M^-1 N) < 1..."

MarissaM gave a talk on campus tonight. It was pretty fluffy, but I learned that Google News supposedly uses k-means clustering. A mighty simple technique, that one.

google gig-ga