Modifier Keys

Stumbled upon this gem today in OS X

System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Keyboard tab -> Modifier Keys button

This would've been handy over the past 5 years switching between the laptop keyboard and various PC keyboards.

Kayaking

Scan a series of days with flexible dates for a multi-city trip on Kayak. Doing this in the browser is pretty tedious so here's a Ruby script to do it.

depart_between = ['2010-06-13', '2010-06-16']

airports = ['SFO', 'CDG', 'ARN']

durations = [7, 7]

plus_or_minus_days = 1

Date.parse(depart_between[0]).upto(Date.parse(depart_between[1])) do |d|

(-plus_or_minus_days..plus_or_minus_days).each do |i|

(-plus_or_minus_days..plus_or_minus_days).each do |j|

url = "http://www.kayak.com/flights?mc=y&action=doflights&basicmode=false&basicprofile=&cabin=e&datelimit=#{Date.today.strftime("%m/%d/%Y")}&depart_date0=#{d.strftime("%m/%d/%Y")}&depart_date1=#{(d + durations[0] + i).strftime("%m/%d/%Y")}&depart_date2=#{(d + durations[0] + durations[1] + j).strftime("%m/%d/%Y")}&depart_date3=&depart_date4=&depart_date5=&depart_time0=a&depart_time1=a&depart_time2=a&depart_time3=a&depart_time4=a&depart_time5=a&destcode0=#{airports[1]}&destcode1=#{airports[2]}%2F9880&destcode2=#{airports[0]}%2F13852&destcode3=&destcode4=&destcode5=&destination0=#{airports[1]}&destination1=#{airports[2]}&destination2=#{airports[0]}&destination3=&destination4=&destination5=&fid=&oneway=m&origin0=#{airports[0]}&origin1=#{airports[1]}&origin2=#{airports[2]}&origin3=&origin4=&origin5=&origincode0=&origincode1=#{airports[1]}&origincode2=#{airports[2]}&origincode3=&origincode4=&origincode5=&personality=&po=&r9debug=&r9secret=&recent=N&screenY=900&tab=flights&travelers=2"

%x[open "#{url}"]

sleep(30)

end

end

end

PowrFone

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2104-product-blog-update-bring-your-highrise-data-to-iphone-caller-id-screen-new-android-app-for-basecamp-etc

I'm normally a fan of all things on this blog, but why are the actions not hyperlinked? Instead, a URL shortener is used to add clutter to the screen.

Add note or task: http://bit.ly/3SFoyD
Edit contact info: http://bit.ly/1wCTt9

Could be

Add note or task
Edit contact info

Chicken and Waffles

First Snoop Dogg's Father Hood introduced me to Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles

Then I went to Farmer Brown's Little Skillet

And now Melanie came through:

MMOD

Watching NCAA's March Madness on Demand, which is pretty good. However, every time the microwave turns on, the buffering begins. It's a little scary. The commentating is bad. Not as bad as boom goes the dynamite though.

I'm noticing a lot of Swedish in commercials right now between Budweiser (Conan & Bud Light), DirecTV (with LA Kings goalie Erik Ersberg), IBM (random girl saving 20% of something), and Volvo (god morgon!). Maybe Volvo doesn't count.

Times are tough

From the recruiting mailing list

Come by Gates 104 on Wednesday, February 4 from 5:30PM-6:30PM to learn more about Cisco and to find out why it was recently described by The Wall Street Journal and NPR’s Marketplace as one of the companies most likely to withstand a recession.

Yeah

Office VPN is down. In other news, Crunk Energy Drink is a client of ours and I didn't even know. I feel cheated.

OpenArena

Why is there no server on the west coast? A 100ms ping to Georgia is going to kill my lightning gun.

couchdb

Installing couchdb from sources left me with the following error on startup


[martin@aquaman apache-couchdb-0.8.1-incubating]$ couchdb
Apache CouchDB 0.8.1-incubating (LogLevel=info)
Apache CouchDB is starting.

{"init terminating in do_boot","libjs.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory"}

Crash dump was written to: erl_crash.dump
init terminating in do_boot (libjs.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory)


Searching for this error doesn't give much. The most useful hit I found was in Japanese, so just in case anybody else isn't able to use binaries from a yum repository and get the same error, try


ln -s /usr/local/spidermonkey/lib64/libjs.so /usr/lib/libjs.so
ldconfig


Liten Värld

At a party this past Thursday, I met a girl who was born in the same hospital as I was (Danderyds sjukhus), grew up in the town next to mine (Enebyberg), moved to the US in 1995 (same time my family did), went to college in North Carolina, moved to the bay area 3 years ago (ditto). There can't be that many other people out there that have lived closer to me over time.

Last week a few of us got on the topic of Scantron tests. Michelle commented that the school she attends makes the students to pay for the sheets. Then...

Melanie: Martin, remember those blue books we had to buy for essay tests?
Martin: Yes, I heard about them. I never had to buy one.
Melanie: Yeah, me neither.

Cartoons

Melanie's love for 80s cartoons has rubbed off on me. This site has all the shows that matter. The intros are cool--now I need more.

The Truth

What is Will doing on Valleywag?

It would be great if websites used an agreed upon access key to bring focus to the main search box, the same way I can hit cmd-K to jump to Firefox's search bar.

March 17

March 17, 2005: I'm in the middle of an IBM internship. We're celebrating St. Patrick's Day at Vincent's place in Chapel Hill. He started a blog in honor of his address at the time: 231 Erwin Road. Vincent always throws good parties. He wrote a blog post to recap things. It was at that party I found out I'd gotten into Stanford.

March 17, 2008: I'm in the middle of a project fair. We're demonstrating class projects from CS247 and CS377s. It's the last requirement for the last course needed to fill my degree requirements. Alles Klar!

-- Martin

LinkedIn

Recently, I've been getting quite a few "invitations to connect on LinkedIn." One from this morning looked like this:

##### ##### requested to add you as a connection on LinkedIn:

Martin,

I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.

-#####

View invitation from ##### #####

Fact: More people have joined LinkedIn than live in Sweden

Obviously I went through the trouble to try to protect the person's identity, but what's even more ironic is that the person's first name is "Harsh."

Quartz Composer

...is pretty neat. Some blogger was raving about FlickrFan, which lets you display images from an RSS feed as your screen saver. It sounded pretty cool, but needing a whole application seemed like overkill. I really wanted Google Photos Screensaver, but it requires Windows. I tested out Quartz Composer instead, which is like Yahoo Pipes. It lets you start from a screen saver template that's a simplified version of the "RSS Visualizer" screen saver. I got something working according to the testing interface though when I view it through Desktop & Screen Saver in System Preferences, the caption display isn't synchronized with the image.

If somebody is bored, would you mind putting
http://martin.davidssons.com/Image%20RSS.qtz in ~/Library/Screen Saver and testing it out to see if you get the same results? Try http://static.flickrfan.org/ap/rss.xml as the URL. Thanks

God Jul

Merry Christmas — CajunSwedish-style

JO on The Office

I never thought Jan-Ove Waldner would get a mention in any mainstream US media. Today I found out Dwight and I share at least one hero.

insta-deck

Earlier this year at Startup School I noticed quite a few speakers using very simple slide shows, namely a piece of text and a big image of sorts. One speaker even admitted that he created his slides on a whim by searching Google Images. I told myself I'd create a quick-and-dirty utility to create this type of presentation.

This is where I was going to say that last I checked, Google Images doesn't have an API but it looks like they have an experimental one now (more info). Anyway, Flickr has an API, and you could argue that it has more "interesting" images. The other part of the equation is the slide show framework itself. There are probably plenty out there, but I went with S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System by Eric Meyer. Put the two together and you get insta-deck. It needs a better name, but it's quick-and-dirty, as promised. There's no edit functionality, because that would just slow you down. I'm sure there are plenty of bugs in there instead.

Here's an example of what it produces. Share your creations/problems in the comments.