Update coming soon!

Now that I’ve graduated from school, I’ll have a little more time and energy to put into my blog! I plan to do an update; add some content, change some of the looks, etc., so come back soon.

In the meantime, I’ve been regularly Tweeting, so be sure to follow me there.

Set mailto to use Gmail in Chrome

Who doesn’t use webmail these days?  I use Gmail, and I’m sure most everyone else does too.  I also use Google Chrome, yet for some reason all those ‘mailto:address@email.com’ links don’t shoot you over to Google’s Gmail, they try and open your desktop email client!  Anyways, I remembered changing this in Firefox a while back, and just now decided it was time to change it in Chrome.  I found several articles online telling me to download and install GMail Notifier, which constantly runs and notifies you on your desktop of any new emails.  I didn’t want to download and install anything, much less something that’s going to constantly run.

NOTE: The following requires you to edit your registry

 

1. Open your registry editor: In Vista, goto the Start Menu and type ‘regedit’. (XP users type ‘regedit’ in Run)
2. Goto HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\mailto\shell\open\command
3. There should be a ‘(Default)’ variable of type ‘REG_EXPAND_SZ’.  Right-click on it and select ‘Modify…’
4. Copy and paste the following string into the value:

C:\Users\Nate\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe -app=https://mail.google.com/mail?extsrc=mailto&url=%1

 

WARNING: Replace ‘Nate’ in the string with your user name

 

There you have it, now when you click on an email address while browsing a new Chrome window should open to GMail’s Compose window.

 

Twitter

It’s been a while since I’ve been back here to my good old blog.  I’ve recently signed up on Twitter, so if you’ve got an account follow me!

There has been several things I would’ve liked to “tweet” about, yet the 140 character limit has prevented that; maybe it’s time to make some more blog posts?  Who knows…

The Penguin has fallen out of the Window

Long story short:
I gave up on Linux and bought Windows Vista.

Go ahead, lets hear it…

I know I know, how could I, right?

Long story:
For the 6 months I’ve had it it was great…mostly. I ran into the most trouble during my Graphics course, specifically with my 3D-rendering capabilities. Basically, there was none. Sure I have the HD ATI graphics card to perform 3D-rendering, but once again, the fault lies with the drivers. ATI hasn’t had quite as much success with their linux drivers as NVidia has, but I thought since I ordered the desktop from Dell with Ubuntu installed, something like 3D-rendering would work.

After plenty of Ubuntu forum-searching and (mostly) helpless IRC asking I couldn’t find a solution to my problem. I’m sure there’s some way to get it working out there, but I don’t have the time to find it.

I wish this wasn’t the case, I really do like a lot that linux offers; nothing beats the power of the command line! I’m hoping that I can find a replacement in cygwin.

Anyway, I’ve ordered Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit with SP1 for System Builders from Newegg, it should arrive tomorrow. I was fortunate enough to easily find the necessary 64-bit drivers for my hardware available from Dell; I shouldn’t encounter any driver issues with Windows.

…Famous last words!

The Factory Pattern

The Factory Pattern applied:

(From xkcd)

Watch This

Another odd find – trust me on this one. Check out this awesome video for the new Wario Land: Shake It game for the Wii. It’s only 0:45 seconds, watch it.

Internship In A (Large) Nutshell

How It Came To Be

This summer (Summer ’08) I had a 3-month internship with Thetus, a semantic knowledge modeling and discovery software company based in Portland, Oregon (my home town).

How I got the internship was amazingly unexpected.  During Winter term last year I had a CIS course in which I made a good impression on my professor.  Towards the end of the term I was looking around at internship opportunities, but unfortunately most I found required someone to be further along in the CIS degree; it was looking like I was going to have another summer of video games (bittersweet, huh?).  I then recieved an email from my professor asking if I was interested in a summer internship in Portland.  How perfect!  He was friends with the founder of the company and they came to him in search of an intern.  As I had made a good impression on him, he thought of me.  Of course I said yes, and he got us in contact.

I then had to make 2 trips up to Portland to meet with my “boss,” or the developer who I would be working directly underneath/with.  During our hour-long meeting at a Portland coffeeshop we ended up talking about music and University of Oregon professors and classes.  As it turns out, my “boss” was a recent graduate of University of Oregon (where I am currently a student) and even has the same major and minor that I do.  So we had a lot in common, we had a comfortable talk and we discussed my skills and knowledge for about 15 minutes total.

It turned out well as they asked me back again a few weeks later for a meeting with one of the founders.  We met at the office so I was able to check the place out and meet some of the other employees.  The meeting wasn’t as smooth as my first, but nonetheless was successful.  A few days later my “boss” called me and told me they were pretty excited about bringing me on board but still had to get the okay from the real boss.  Several days later I recieved another phonecall, this time from the real boss, to tell me congratulations and discuss details.

The Happening

So, summer came along and I immediately went to work for Thetus, from June 23rd to Septemeber 23rd.  Aside from various small things, I spent most of my time writing server-side and client-side applications.

I used Adobe Flex for client-side applications, Java for server-side programming, and JSON for communication between the two.

I wrote these applications to get experience with semantic technologies, abstraction, and ontologies. My applications were mostly for in-house use – not something that would be given to a client. For instance, I spent about 2 months working on an application that displayed a family tree (in a detailed and abstraction-supported way). The company offered several courses on how to use the knowledge and software they provide, and this application was to be used in the demonstration to provide a visual, interactive component. The courses use a family tree as an example, particularly the Kennedy family tree. So for 2 months I learned about the Kennedy family while writing this application.

For the last month or so, I began working on another application that was to be given to a client as an example of the services provided by Thetus. At one point, I was given a list of features that I needed to implement by the end of the week, and furthermore, the application was going to be demo’d to the client by the boss! That was an incredibly stressful time as I had to work late and come in early, and even after all that I failed – I couldn’t get all the features implemented fast enough! I had to give screen-shots to the boss to demo – man, what a feeling of failure. Apparently the demo went fine anyway, and not having the application working wasn’t as big of a deal as there was already a second demo planned. I wasn’t going to be around for that, so another developer was to pick up my application and finish it.

Aside from those Flex/Java applications, I wrote a couple other programs. One was written in JavaScript and was to be used in tutorials to present code snippets, and another was written in pure Java as a command-line tool to read through a set of (real-world) locations, query a geo-coding service, and write the latitude/longitude to these locations. I also had some experience with Ant for Java build-scripts.

In The End

All-in-all, I learned a wealth of information that I couldn’t while sitting in a classroom and doing homework. Despite being the youngest (both in age and education) intern they’ve had, they were pleased with my performance and asked me back as an intern next summer, or as an employee with a position and salary. Wow, that’s quite a good start to my career. I will definitely be returning in the future. I can’t thank my professor enough for thinking of me.

Relive the Classic! Watch Star Wars Through Your Terminal!

Here’s an odd find – watching Star Wars: A New Hope (the first original) in ASCII art through your command-line terminal.

Yes, ASCII art, like Kirby: <(‘-‘<) (>’-‘)> and my favorites: t(‘-‘ t) (flip-you-off Kirby) and Q(‘-‘Q) (boxing Kirby).

Anyways, to watch the movie you need telnet, so you Cygwin users make sure you’ve got it. Those linux users should already have it.

To start the magic, type in your terminal: telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

And if you manage to watch the whole thing, come back and let me know how it ends.

Broadening My Horizon…

Well, not really broadening my horizon, but broadening the topics covered in this blog.  There’s more to me than computer science, and much of that I’d like to share –

• Metal (music)
• Guitar
• Fantasy

On another note, you won’t believe how hard it is to find a theme that isn’t 2 inches wide.  All my code and embedded photos are cut off.  But at the same time, I’m tired of the bland look, so I’m changing it.  Now that WordPress hosts images I no longer have to go through an external photo-hosting service to get images on here, and hopefully when I upload those images they’ll be properly displayed.  This means I will probably have to re-upload the few photos that are in my posts (if they’ll then be properly displayed).

To-Do

I’ve got to get this thing up and running once again.  Here’s a checklist of what I’d like to do to the site before I begin to add new content:

1. Change the title and description.
2. Re-do my Categories and Tags to more accurately reflect the content of the post.
3. Re-organize and update my links. (Decided wasn’t necessary)
4. Re-do my Books page to include photographs of the books.

These should take me no longer than a few hours.

I also would like to add more visuals and enhance the look.  Since the last time I was posted pictures WordPress has added the ability to upload photos from my computer.  This will make it much easier to add photos as before I would have to log in to my Photobucket account, upload my photos, get the URL to the image and paste the URL in my blog post.  So, hopefully I’ll let my creative juices flow a bit more and we’ll see some more visuals up here.