The World is Pixels!

A nice greeting waiting for me at my sublet :)

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:20:57 -0800

A nice greeting waiting for me at my sublet :)

Video

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 20:19:00 -0800

Start of the video blog!!! Hope you enjoy

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 22:09:24 -0800

Start of the video blog!!!

Hope you enjoy

Javascript... the new Java

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 02:05:46 -0800

It seems like Javascript has just been growing at an unprecedented rate these days and that there are frameworks and tools that allow you to do just about anything you can image, immeasurably better than you could’ve done on your own.

Java used to be the hot shit on the block, like in the nineties or something… and it was the programming language of the future. Incredibly secure and robust with its own VM, and perfectly portable so everyone who’s anyone can enjoi the fruits of the Java gods. With a slew of tools and libraries to do just about anything you can imag… Well you get the idea. All of this bequeath upon the world from the generous bossom of Sun (now Oracle) for the good of all person-kind. Except that they kept the doors closed on their magic box of wonder (lets be real, that’s all the JVM really is) to protect the people from themselves.

Enter Javascript: A bastard language that was throw together from all the leftover parts of forgotten languages to try and combine all of the uniqueness of computer science up until this day and age, oh, and to be a practical tool to hack together the computer of yesterday’s tomorrow… the WWW. Fast forward to -> the future (e.g. now! we’re livin’ in it. ya know. the future.) where the web is king, the browsers of today are valiant knights of the court, and the general public is a naive conglomerate of peasants. The knights protect us from the other evil doers from other kingdoms (domains of scary XSS) all in the name of the glorious king (the free and beautiful web).

With a race constantly in flux between all the major browser vendors, the technology has grown at breakneck pace and each has their own engine (Google’s got a V8… vrroommm vrrrrooommmmm) that is powering the language of the future’s yesterday, JAVASCRIPT!! The power that lies in the language emerges out of it’s universal portability (from it’s VM) and acceptance, an cornucopia of libraries and frameworks, and security? (a stretch, I know. but hey I thought I’d give it a try). Things are starting to sound very familiar. What Java has done for the Enterprise world of the nineties that powered server farms and desktop application, Javascript aims to do for the web.

The difference: Javascript is open to the world through countless open source projects and libraries that can be molded and modified by the people who use them. Instead of one king who thinks he knows what is best for his people and provides a very nice API for accessing that, Javascript is a democracy, a nebulous force that is no where and everywhere.

Computing has fundamentally changed, both in how we understand it and how we perform it, and the future lies in the clouds somewhere… or our heads are in the web… err we live in a distributed world of distribution…

Soon enough the kingdom of Java will be barren and waifish and all the people of the land will flock to the prosperous lands in the distance. Here’s to the future, and getting there the fastest on chariots of fire.

Meetup vs. Google! It's a showdown

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 13:27:46 -0700

Meetup vs. Google! It's a showdown:

Oh Google… you and your Googleplex

An Asynchronous Life

Sun, 04 Sep 2011 14:42:15 -0700

So many people have recently been diving into asynchrony as hot new technologies are coming into the limelight such as Node.js, event driven programming (Twisted and EventMachine), and parallelism (of any form). This phenomenon (the asynchrony) has also been greatly accelerated by distributed networks and cloud programming since time loses some of its (traditional) meaning when your process depends on 100s and 1000s of separate and (dare I say) autonomous machines all working together.

But asynchrony and its perils are not new, and not specific to computers and networks. A funny little thing happened to me the other day: On Saturday morning my friend asked if I had any plans for the weekend and at the time I had none. Shortly thereafter another friend asked me if I wanted to have lunch on Sunday, and I had a little bit of a data race. I just told my friend I had no plans, and worried that she started planning something to do with me (possibly on Sunday) I told my other friend the only thing that seemed reasonable at the time: “I might have plans with another friend, but I am not sure, but I really want to have lunch with you, but its not that I am trying to get out of it, but maybe, but maybe not…”

I wish I could have just told her that my total order is all out of whack. So when multiple autonomous agents each have their own clocks and, while each might be perfectly ordered according to themselves, the timeline of events can exhibit anomalous behavior when the agents are not properly synchronized. Oh… my asynchronous life.

LOLZ

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 15:28:42 -0700

LOLZ

Bloom Programming Language

Sun, 21 Aug 2011 22:03:19 -0700

Bloom Programming Language:

It has been a while since my last post, but in my never ending quest for new and exciting programmin languages I have stumbled upon <~ bloom!

<~ bloom combines my love of Ruby with my newest fascination with concurrency :) Check it. if you are into the bleeding edge of bleeding

Bodhilinux

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 17:47:09 -0700

Bodhilinux:

This is exactly what I have tried to achieve with a standard Ubuntu distro, and confirms my hypothesis: If you want something different/more out of your software… chances are someone has already done it, done it better than you ever could on your own, and has made it available for free.

I will call this the Unnovelty Conjecture.

TurnKey Linux: the Panacea to my network managing woes

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 16:02:11 -0700

TurnKey Linux: the Panacea to my network managing woes:

I have just discovered TurnKey Linux and do not know what I have been doing for the past 2 years without it.

(via why’s (poignant) guide to ruby :: 6. Downtown)

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 11:34:40 -0700

(via why’s (poignant) guide to ruby :: 6. Downtown)

20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web

Sat, 04 Jun 2011 20:51:10 -0700

20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web

The disease spread over his father’s form and marshy weeds covered his father’s hands and face. The...

Sat, 04 Jun 2011 20:17:29 -0700

The disease spread over his father’s form and marshy weeds covered his father’s hands and face. The moss pulled his spine up into a rigid uprightness. So thick was the growth over his head that he appeared to wear a shrub molded into a bowler’s hat. He also called himself by a new name - Quos - and he healed the people he touched, leaving a pile of full-blooded, greenly-cheeked villages in his wake as he travelled the townships. Many called him The Mossiah and wept on his feet, which wet the buds and caused him to weed into the ground. This made him momentarily angry, he harshly jogged his legs to break free and thrashed his fists wildly in the sky, bringing down a storm of lightning shards upon these pitiful.

(via why’s (poignant) guide to ruby :: 5. Them What Make the...

Sat, 04 Jun 2011 15:48:42 -0700

(via why’s (poignant) guide to ruby :: 5. Them What Make the Rules and Them What Live the Dream)

The Manifesto (much better put than I ever could)

Wed, 25 May 2011 12:05:06 -0700

The Manifesto (much better put than I ever could)

Turning any user into a developer!

Tue, 24 May 2011 12:05:05 -0700

So a fun little feature of Joli OS is the ability to create your own applications with the click of a button.

This allows you to link to any web page and essentially turn it into an independently running application of your computer. But not just any webpage, any URL.

A fun little hack that my friend and I discovered is the ability to turn any flash game into its own program! Simply go into the source of the webpage running the flash game and copy the .swf file link. Turn it into an application to instantly create your own game! That runs as its own process without all the ‘chrome’ of a webrowser or ads or hassle. And for a lot of flash games it can save your progress! which means that you have just used the benefits of flash (yes there are a few) and the innovativeness of Joli to publish your own game (in a way).

And with any user created app, you can share it with the Joli community to allow everyone to benefit!

Mi Jolí

Mon, 23 May 2011 12:05:06 -0700

Mi Jolí

What is... 'Joli OS'? Correct for $0!

Sun, 22 May 2011 12:05:06 -0700

Joli OS can transform any old computer (provided it is not using a PPC processor) into a sparkling new cloud desktop. Joli OS has taken all of the good that Google aspires to achieve with Chrome OS and all of the goodness of the Linux revolution with Ubuntu Netbook edition and sandwiched them together to create a most perfect hybrid baby.

Joli OS lays its own unique desktop environment built with HTML5 that leverages Chromium for most of its processing on top of Ubuntu Netbook edition (but you can still switch to GNOME if it carries a special place in your heart). What does this mean… it means Joli OS has utilized all of the benefits of the cloud computing revolution to lighten the load on your processor by letting some big server of whichever cloud website you are using to do all the hard work of photoediting, or music playing, or email sending, or you get the point. But it also means that your computer is not some brick of plastic and metal as soon as you leave a WiFi zone or get disconnected from the webs.

The Linux kernel and UNE (Ubuntu Netbook edition) allow you to (if you so desire) compute locally on your machine to save files locally, work without an internet connection, connect to local file systems and servers, and remain secure. As well as do things like use a terminal to access the innards of your computer or ssh, and FTP.

So the short of it all, Joli OS uses the ‘cloud’ to lighten the burden on your computer for most everyday tasks and everything you would typically use a computer for, while keeping all the benefits of a traditional OS for use with more specialized and possibly advanced tinkerings to allow full control over your OS.

why’s (poingnant) guide to Ruby… how we can all...

Sat, 21 May 2011 18:30:21 -0700

why’s (poingnant) guide to Ruby… how we can all learn so much from this man. And this his his book that should be a seminal piece in CS courses at top tier universities across the globe (c’mon Stanfurd). Give it a read (or look), it has cartoons! and is really good. Like really.

Oh!, and it teaches you Ruby along the way. But not only Ruby, it teaches you how to live in harmony with computers.

Joli OS, doing what Chrome OS has always dreamed of

Sat, 21 May 2011 12:05:05 -0700

So Chrome OS has gotten a plethora of media attention and hype (possibly due to the high profile of its corporate creator) leaving some superior competitors in the shadows. Chrome OS is nice in theory, and its hyperbole excites the estranged modern artist inside of me, but in practice it falls short on so many levels.

For one, Chrome OS has no local storage or applications… which works great if you are always connected to the internet and are perfectly comfortable with no real control of your computer or files (everything lives in the ‘cloud’). But what if I happen to go into a tunnel (maybe even the Chunnel) or happen to only be in an unsecured WiFi zone. In the case of the tunnel, your Chrome OS netbook turns into one of the ‘most expensive paperweights’ (to quote a tech shows host) and if you are in WiFi no-man’s-land all of your computing could possibly be snatched up by cloud pirates.

And while running Chrome browser as your entire OS is great for speed and what not, but what if you want to connect and mount an external filesystem (such as a simple USB) or connect to a server. Well I’m afraid you are out of luck.

And what if you have an older computer that would benefit immensely from the blazing speed of Chome OS and all you really need it for is web browsing? Chrome OS has not been released for general consumption by the public and is only available on Google’s exclusive Chrome Netbook beta test (or on a open source offshoot from a hobbyist) and may not even function on anything short of the latest and greatest of the netbooks.

The solution… well I believe you are looking for Joli OS my friend!

*I have not used the lasted Chrome OS (unfortunately I was not selected for the beta test) so the claims about Chrome OS could possibly be outdated and erroneous. But to the best of my researching knowledge, this is how I see it all.