Life's Too Exciting Not to Be Awesome!
Engineering
Java QuickStart and Linux?
Jul 28th
If you have Ubuntu running and would like to use Webex (or any other program using a java plugin) install the package “sun-java6-plugin” from your package manager. Hope this helps… (why its not part of the core I don’t know).
Google Makes Image Search More Spiffy
Jul 21st
Google has given its image search a new look Tuesday in hopes of helping people weed through the vast number of images to find what they’re seeking. On the main search page, photos are moved closer together to let you see more results on a page and the instant scrolling between pages lets you see up to 1,000 images on a scrolling page.
They have really done an awesome job. All the images are not preloaded until you scroll further down the page to save your bandwidth. On hovering over the images you get a preview as well as some information, and then when you click on an image, the full size is loaded in the foreground while the relative content is in the background (just like lightbox).
Check it out at http://images.google.com
I love linux :)
Jun 18th
Turns out M4a’s work just fine on linux’s MPlayer…
I don’t think it’s supposed to 
Google Caffeine: Promises of being awesome.
Jun 9th
Google just announced that they are improving their search results to be more up to date than ever. This time they are using some sort of proprietary blend of scouring the interwebs and new indexing technology to bring more current and useful information to our browsers faster. This is a huge step as people are getting more and more comfortable with blogs, twitter, posts and other form of immediate publishing. If you look at the web compared to just a few years ago, we can see that web pages are no longer created by the few and the powerful. In the past most web pages were created in the Encyclopedia style of creation, where one page was a comprehensive source of information on a subject. Now, we have literally clouds of millions of people posting random thoughts from around the world every second. Where I believe this information could be really useful is for spotting trends immediately in posts, search and tweets, and I think that maybe the true reason for developing Google Caffeine.
Some of the stats of this amazing new software are shown in the following paragraph from the source link
“Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.”
Also I believe this one sentence is pretty important: “As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index.” This is pointing out a design change that they have decided to go with, probably because computers and their software has become faster and better than before. Evidently it looks like they were not able to insert into an index in the past, only able to refresh or update it.
Every two weeks just doesn’t cut it anymore, good play Google.
Lets see how quickly they pick up this post 
Galileo Probe into Jupiter
May 13th
According to NASA, the probe we launched into Jupiter sent back a total of 3.5 Megabits over the course of just under an hour. At first I was like, holy shit thats nothing! But now lets break this down a bit. There are several amazing facts about this project (the probe as well as the Galileo Project in general).
The Galileo Project was launched in ’89 and the probe separated in ’95. Ok so what you might ask? Well after it separated it traveled a full 7 months to slam into the side of Jupiter all the while the Galileo ship had to manuever into orbit over the probe so that at the time of impact it could recoard the data and then send that information all the way back to earth. This is all after the whole shuttle / mission traveled BILLIONS OF KILOMETERS! (The full life of Galileo was over 4 billion kilometers).
The probe was going 106 thousand miles per hour when it hit Jupiter’s atmosphere, and then it had the audacity to pull a parachute! Once it lost it’s heat shield it started to collect data for 58 minutes. During this time it went from -143 C (really damn cold) to 153 C (hotter than your mom and boiling water). Also it hit a pressure of over 22 times earth’s atmosphere. That’s almost equivalent to diving down to 720 Ft in the ocean! That’s crazy!
From where the probe hit earth’s atmosphereic pressure (the pressure at sea level) the probe continued to decened 143 more kilometers into the abbyss that is Jupiter. That’s about twice the distance to the International Space Station, whoa. All this while traveling at an average speed of about 160 Km per Hour.
You try and send back 3 and a half megs of data under these conditions. Oh, and you can’t use any electronics made after 1989.
Way to go NASA.
For more information on Galileo, check out the official site at NASA’s Galileo Legacy Site
Printing Only File Names
Apr 30th
I recently needed to print out only the file names of all my files under a directory. Now, I’m sure there is a useful command directly out of find but I think its just easier to use a find / sed combo punch!
find -name "*.mp3" | sed 's/.*\///g'
This will find all mp3 files and pipe them to sed and replace all occurences of any characters followed by a ‘/’ pretty nifty, and works great.
Winscape Virtual Window!
Apr 15th
I’m not going to lie, I just copied this from engadget, but it is really amazing!
http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/15/winscape-virtual-window-features-wiimote-headtracking-absolutel/
We have not modified the above picture in any way — Scout’s Honor. That’s a real baby, wearing a real IR necklace that interacts with a real Wiimote. What’s not real, of course, is the view of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. That is generated by Ryan Hoagland’s DIY virtual window, a brilliant pastiche of interior design, RED ONE footage and Johnny Chung Lee-style headtracking, all directed to your eyes by a Mac Pro feeding a pair of plasma screens. As the viewer moves around, dual 1080p images move the opposite direction, providing the convincing illusion of looking out a real pane of glass at the incredibly detailed scenery beyond. Exciting? Then you’ll be giggling like Jr. when you hear it’s for sale. After spending a year figuring out how to mount, drive and cool the whole shebang, Hoagland would like you to have one too; he plans to have basic kits ready by July for under $3000. Watch baby-powered plasma in motion after the break, as well as a sweet time-lapse video of the build process.
[Thanks, Andy, ArjanD]
Mount an FTP host as a Directory on Ubuntu!
Feb 20th
Let’s go little penguin save me again!
So I have all my music hosted on my home server, but I haven’t mounted that server at work yet! So I followed the instructions on the following page to setup my Ubuntu solution to mount the ftpfs (FTP File System) on a local folder so I can trick my music programs to thinking these files are local.
http://blog.damontimm.com/how-to-mount-a-sftp-folder-ssh-ftp-on-ubuntu-linux-using-sshfs-fuse/
Buzz and online privacy
Feb 17th
Honestly people, what the hell is going on with all these allegations that Google is spreading people’s privacy and they should be repremanded? For the love of god, if you don’t want to be social, don’t fucking join a social networking site! When you load up Gmail, it clearly asks you, plain as day, “do you want to use Google Buzz?” just say no and stop complaining. UGh. There’s even a setting to turn it off right from within Gmail, a one click, delete all button!
This goes double for those facebook users who made them rewrite their entire engine just so they could have the option of who to show their information to. If you don’t like a product (yes, its still a product even though its free and really awesome) then don’t fucking use it.
But chances are, if you don’t want to share your information and are just going to complain about it, then you probably don’t have any friends anyway, so you really don’t have anything to worry about because nobody will care. You could post all day, and still nobody would care about you, not even your own mother, who says she loves you, but really she doesn’t. Because you are annoying.
That was just a note to the complainers, everyone else is cool in my book, except for murderers, they suck too.
Obviously The Onion has a great solution to this
Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village
