Motivation

"Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small, and think about the details. Don't think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly over-designed. And don't expect people to jump in and help you. That's not how these things work. You need to get something half-way useful first, and then others will say "hey, that almost works for me", and they'll get involved in the project."

- Linus Torvalds

Really well said. I definitely suffer from over-planning-and-under-doing things. Once you build all these castles in the air regarding what it is you are going to do, it all starts to seem overwhelming and hard to achieve. If, instead, you just start doing something, then iterate, you end up achieving a lot without even noticing, and suddenly you have this big thing to show off.

Maybe I should just focus on something I can solve in a day, and then go from there.

Improvements

UPDATE (06/13/2008): Even more improvements here.

There were a couple links on Hacker News today that were to pdfs, and someone pointed out that the automatic scribd vacuuming of said links is kind of annoying. I agree, so I thought I'd add the option to my blacklist to disable that functionality. While I was at it, I added a search box for Search YC as well.

Oh and the UI got a facelift.



You can check it out and install from here.

Twinview

So after I got my monitor last week, I spent about four days fighting to get dual monitors to work correctly. I tried a litany of things before I solved it. Want to know how? Probably not, but going to tell you anyway. Get this: I unplugged the DVI cables and plugged them back in.

Crazy I tell you.

So after the creepiness of that voodoo wore off, I spent a few days just enjoying the warm glow of four feet of LCD screen. Watching movies on one screen while chatting on another is fun, and the brief bit I spent coding was great. I could have my code, the console, firefox and pidgin all visible at once... each of them big enough to be considered full screen on a lesser monitor.

Spent most of the weekend sleeping, cleaning, and reading. Got this awesome book called Revelation Space (by Alastair Reynolds). So far it's probably some of the best Sci-Fi I have ever read.

Before acquiring the book, move-related cleaning was in full swing. I've managed to organize and pack most of the office, with about two boxes to go. Most of the time was consumed by going through all my collected documents and piles of things and throwing away everything I could. Also finally rid myself of the magazines and extra clothes, which was liberating to say the least. It'd really be nice to get my personal possessions down to books, computer, and clothes. It's amusing how much more crap I have than Kathy. I think tonight I'm finally going to take an axe to the box full of papers from college.

For some reason, at the time, I thought keeping all my homeworks/notes/tests from all my classes would someday be useful for refreshing myself. Thing is, with the internet and wikipedia at my fingertips, there is probably zero chance I'll ever look at them again. I think I'll keep some stuff related to Spain and just recycle the rest.

Still coughing up a storm, but most of the sickness has passed. Hopefully that'll eventually go away too. I'd hate to end up with bronchitis.

Purge

Been sick since Saturday. It's pretty much no fun.

Due to the excessive sleeping involved in being ill, I am behind on just about everything. I did manage to go through my clothes before I got sick and pick out about two trashbags worth to give away. Upcoming move to Texas gives me an excuse to downsize my stuff a bit. I also have a stack of magazines about six feet tall ready for the recycling bin.

Usually when I go through my clothes, I end up keeping t-shirts with memories attached. I still have my shirt from Nerd Camp in 1999, as well as several high school related ones. I haven't actually worn them in years, so this time they got pitched. Something clicked and it just seemed silly to keep things I had no practical use for, even if they had memories attached. My next debate is whether to treat some of my other childhood knick-knacks the same way.

As for the magazines, I had been holding on to them because I had a complete series from 1995 to 2001. But honestly, nobody really wants to collect magazines. It's an interesting mental effect... having a 'complete set' of something makes it seem more valuable. Oh well, recycle bin here I come.

All the stuff going out is being replaced by more useful things. Got the new 8800GT last night, and it's working like a charm. Tonight I will hopefully come home to a new monitor and lots of new magic cards. Oh well, I already have a place for those things in the moving process.

Bring Forth the Pixels

So my stimulus money came yesterday. I celebrated by buying another 24 inch monitor and a video card. Got the monitor on ebay (unopened box, three year warranty) for about $125 cheaper than normal price on Dell.com (although Dell had it on sale too, so only saved about $50 over that price). The video card also felt like a steal. Got an 8800GT which, despite all common sense logic, is both faster and cheaper than the 9600GT I had wanted. All told, the damage came to $778.99... but $600 of that is Uncle Sam's money, and the rest was Grandpa's (I haven't spent what he gives me for Christmas in several years now).

Added bonus is that I don't even have to actually pay for it until March of 2009. Yay 0% credit card offers!

I look forward to the doubling of screen real estate I am about to experience. I have dual (19") monitors at work, and my single 24" at home actually feels small in comparison. I have become much more adept at taking advantage of the multiple workspace feature in X, but it's just nice to have lots of stuff visible at once. Video card will mean I can finally compiz at home too.

Looking forward to pulling an all-nighter tonight. Want to get a lot done before Tyler comes out on Saturday, and don't have a lot of faith in being productive on a Friday night. Besides, all-nighters are fun.

Disqus and Friendfeed

So the steady march towards Web 2.0 in my life continues. Yep, I signed up for Disqus and Friendfeed today.

Frankly I dislike the comment system here on blogger. For one, it's not threaded. Also, Disqus throws in a lot of extra niceties, like the fact that your profile works any other site that uses Disqus. They even made it really easy to switch over to the new system on new posts and leave the old system on older posts.

Friendfeed seems like a really cool system that could basically replace Facebook for me. You create an account and then link it to all your various accounts elsewhere (Flickr, Twitter, Your Blog, Amazon, even Facebook itself). It just aggregates all your activity on those sites into a nice convenient feed. It also does this for all your friends, and then you can comment on each other's feeds. The whole philosophy is to follow what your real friends are doing and share stuff. So instead of pasting some funny video around on AIM, just put it in your friendfeed. All your friends will see it and can watch and comment.

You can see my feed here. Feel free to comment on what I'm doing. It sounds like it could be cool if I had a few friends on it to follow. Also let me know if you like the Disqus comment system here.

The Slip

So several really neat things happened today.

First I woke up to an email from nin.com about a ticket pre-sale for the fall tour. They must have kept my email address from when I bought Ghosts. It was just really nice to be informed about a pre-sale by the band itself, instead of having to depend on other outlets. The pre-sale itself is also sweet, because every ticket requires a real name (which will be printed on it) to match an ID the night of the show. This means no scalpers (and no Ticketmaster)!

When I went to register for the pre-sale, I was also pleasantly surprised that a new album was released this morning. It's a free full-length album, offered in mp3/aac/flac/wav, and for once the high quality downloads are torrent files. Finally, someone gets it! When he released Ghosts he partnered with Amazon because of load concerns, and even then he had scaling problems. Either the mass public hasn't caught on yet, or (more likely) the torrents mean no scaling issues, because my experience was flawless. I had the music downloaded and was listening to it in less than a minute.

It would be nice if other artists embraced this model. Music is such a pleasant experience when it is offered DRM-free in multiple formats, easy to get, at a modest price. Today's release happened to be free, but I have gladly paid $5 for both Ghosts and Niggy Tardust, and I'll probably continue to do so. Paying $15 in a store for an outdated format that wastes valuable physical space (a CD) just doesn't compare. Today's release doesn't have the same tiered model that Ghosts did, but I hope in the future they all do, because I think that was brilliant too. I mean, he made like a million dollars in one week on that... you can't tell me the labels pay that well.

Anyway, go check out The Slip.

Brain Hurts

So uh, what have I been up to lately?

I finally broke down and got a Twitter account. At first I thought I would never touch the thing, but then realize I could update via jabber, which means I'll probably just talk to Twitter all day. My name is xich if any of you want to follow me. I'm a total twitter nub, so don't expect greatness.

Also been working on a sweet bookmarklet idea. It's coming along quite nicely. Found an interesting way around the XSS security in browsers for certain AJAX requests. If you want your bookmarklet to send data back to your server while on another site, normally you'd have to do a real GET/POST (which takes the user away from the site they are on), because XSS security doesn't allow you to make XHR requests across domains. However, if what you want to send to your server is short enough (fits in query string of a GET request), you can simply create a new image and set the source to that querystring. This will make the browser fetch the image (which does a GET request to your server), even across domains. I suppose if you wanted data back you could encode it in the image response and then binary decode it in the client. I haven't tried that, but sounds like it could work, provided javascript has some binary capabilities.

I think I might work on a jQuery plugin to implement this type of request, and if I do, I'll try to describe it better then. I wish I could claim credit for the idea, but I totally stole it from Paul Buchheit's implementation of voting on Hacker News.

Storm last night involved loss of power for a couple hours and water to come through our closed windows. As a result I didn't get a ton of sleep, and complete lack of anything for breakfast means my head is hurting. Thankfully only like six more hours until I can go home and nap.