Working with overly complex Regular Expressions can quickly become quite an ordeal of trial and error. RegExibit is a fantastic tool for OS X users that allows you to see matches as you type. [Reg Exibit] [Download]

I always find myself constantly Googling the list of unix status codes (typically defined in sysexits.h). 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 0 # successful termination 64 # base value for error messages 64 # command line usage error 65 # data format error [...]

On average, I’d say I spend 65% of the workday in a terminal session. About 95% of that time is within the same same 4 directories. cd foo & cd bar can get old. AutoJump is a “cd command that learns”. It tracks shell history to detect which directories you spend the most time in, [...]

For the past year I’ve been employed at Clutch, Inc in Winchester, Virginia, as a Systems Engineer and Web Developer. I’ve spent most of my time there developing content-based websites and web applications in PHP, advanced JavaScript, Grails, and the like. I even had the opportunity to develop the occassional Python application for server-side data [...]

Today I released GistAPI.py v0.1.2. It features a highly-optimized Gist object model and API wrapper which allows you to consume Gists in your next Python application. GitHub just rolled out a miniature pre-release of the Gist API last month, so API functionality is pretty limited at the moment. More features will be added as soon [...]

I’m forced to use SVN at the office. It’s not THAT bad. OK, so maybe it’s absolutely horrible. But it’s more than understandable on their end. Those darn .svn folders drove me crazy. So, I use git-svn. Git-svn allows me to harness all the power of git with a subversion server. Perfect. (Or at least [...]

While listening to this week’s episode of The Changelog, I came across Tom Preston-Werner’s Semantic Versioning Specification. I love what I found. For many years, the open source community has been plagued with version number dystonia. Numbers vary so greatly from project to project, they are practically meaningless. This specification seeks to put an end [...]

As I read through 37Signals’ Rework, I’ll give small, sporadic commentary. There’s a new reality. Today anyone can be in business. Tools that used to be out of reach are now easily accessible. Technology that cost thousands is now just a few bucks or even free. One person can do the job of two or [...]

The distaste hackers and developers have towards the iPad was initially understandable. Now that it’s out, I think everyone should hold one in their hand before they make any outlandish statements against it. Eric Sink sums it up pretty perfectly. Computers, by and large, are still designed for geeks. This is why we all buy [...]

I decided to have a little fun today during lunch, so I wrote a WordPress + jQuery plugin for Crashing IE 6. Once activated, IE 6 will instantly crash on page load. Enjoy :)

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working on a Python tutorial series for beginners. They just went live. Give them a watch and let me know what you think!

Here’s a snippet for password protecting a directory served by Apache To set this up, just add .htaccess and .htpasswd to the desired directory being served by Apache . Make sure to generate your own .htpasswd file. For more `htaccess` snippets, checkout PerishablePress’ Stupid .htaccess Tricks.

Here’s a quick Apache .htaccess file for adding server-side data compression.

Amazon S3 is a fantastic data storage platform — I use it for everything. It’s perfect for sharing data with friends. The only disadvantage is the interface: there is none. You can manage your buckets files with REST requests, along with a number of desktop clients. That’s fine, but what about your visitors? The only [...]

The Ruby community has really been blowing me away lately with their array of indispensable web development tools. Ghost is no exception to this rule. It is a simple command line application for adding and removing 127.0.0.1 entries in your /etc/hosts file. I can’t believe I hadn’t thought of this sooner. Example Usage $ ghost [...]

I’ve always been a huge fan of Mokeskine notebooks & I use them for everything—from product ideas to mockup sketching. It all started when I was a student at George Mason University. The student book store had a small selection by the checkout counter. I bought a pocket-sized ruled notebook to keep track of my [...]

An incredible reminder to look at the other side of things. The squares marked A and B are the same shade of grey.(proof)

I’m all over Google Buzz. It’s exactly what I’ve been looking for. Imagine taking elements of Twitter, Yammer, Foursquare, Yelp, and other social services, and shoving them together into one package. Now imagine covering that package in a layer that looks a lot like FriendFeed. Now imagine shoving that package inside of Gmail. That’s Buzz. [...]

My small town of Winchester, VA suffered from over 3 feet of snow over the past week. Everything shutdown.

I spent about 8 hours last night obtaining a Premium Spotify account in the US, and I’ve never been happier. As you know, Spotify is only available in the UK, Spain, and France. So, the only way to signup for an account it to take a trip overseas… virtually. Step 1: Signup for a virtual [...]

For an extra $5 a month, Evernote lets you upload a file of any extension to their servers. This is a fantastic feature for developers who like to keep their random psd and 3ds files in sync with the cloud. Looks like Google finally took the hint. Within the next few weeks, they will be [...]

Today, Google unveiled their latest technology: AdWords for TV and AdSense for TV. This totally blows my mind. They are about to totally revolutionize the television industry. You can manage TV ads just like you manage AdWords ads for the web. You enter the amount you’re willing to pay per impression, and your daily budget, [...]

This is my minimal set of CSS Attributes that I use on nearly every project I work on. If you have any improvement suggestions, feel free to share.

Here’s a small list of 2009 New Year’s Resolutions for your startup. 1. Simplify Anyone can make something complex. It takes thoughtful planning, consideration, and discipline to make something simple. Simple = elegant. The same applies to your business. 2. Get some Humility Don’t assume you know what your audience wants. Find out first. 3. [...]

Ruby scares me. It’s not the language that strikes fear in my heart, however; it is the community. The Reasons They treat Ruby as the Messiah — there is nothing better. There is nothing else. Only Ruby. Community Leader Idol Wordship — did anyone catch the (online presence) death of _why? “Now we can finally [...]

I read an interesting article today on Apple’s marketing strategy. A certain section stood out to me, regarding their hardware manufacturing: Apple is an experience company. They’re a high-end marque; if they were in the automobile business, they’d be BMW, Mercedes, and Porsche rolled into one. They own about 12% of the PC market in [...]

Lets face it, cross-browser CSS can be a real pain. This helps.

The Problem MediaTemple servers run the Plesk Control Panel, which has a reputation for having useless backups. The Solution MySQL Dumps of all Databases and Tables All configured vhosts, zipped up Pushes it all to either S3 or FTP Stick it in /etc/cron.daily/, and you’ll be good to go. No more worries. No more headaches. [...]

Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror has developed a sure fire test to filter out good programmers from bad ones. It’s called the FizzBuzz test, and it’s a very simple problem to solve. Enjoy! If you’d like to learn more about programming, contact me for a one-on-one lesson. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 [...]

This is an absolute must watch for anyone interested in the social web and online promotion.

goo.gl and fb.me, respectively.

Google just launched a Public DNS Service, much like OpenDNS. Let me Try! To give it a try, change your computer (our router)’s DNS servers. DNS Servers: 4.3.2.1, 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4 I expect this to have significantly greater adoption rates than OpenDNS, since the IP Address of the servers are much easier to remember.

Yahoo, Inc just announced that it will integrate Facebook Connect for all accounts. I love this. Continuing its commitment to be the center of people’s online lives, Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) today announced further integration with Facebook that unites social experiences from across the Web to provide a place for consumers to enjoy meaningful content and [...]

Google Analytics now supports Asyncronous loads, which allow the browser to continue loading content while ga.js is being loaded. Now it’s safe to put the script tag in the <head> for you XHTML STRICT junkies. Here’s the new code to do so: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 var [...]

How’s My Code? is a new service for peer code review that is decentralized, and available wherever you are. Perfect for indie development teams. Oh, and did I mention Seamless GitHub integration?

Trey of lopsa.org wrote a fantastic article on the the techie vs. non-techie divide. If you are in the user-interface market, I suggest you read this. It sheds some wonderful light on this great divide. In Short Ordinary Users only see and understand content in a system. Developers and Techies implicitly understand the Metadata that [...]

Google’s super-star flagship cloud-based visitor tracking software, Google Analytics, released a new feature recently. It’s called Intelligence. What They Have To Say Your new hardworking assistant, Analytics Intelligence, can’t replace you or a professional analyst. But, it can find key information for you and your professional analysts — so that your team can focus on [...]

I had the opportunity to see a non-technical friend’s first reaction to Google Wave today. I can’t help but laugh. Also, If you’d like to experience this mess of an interface for yourself, please contact me.

SEO Tactics are typically a dime a dozen, written by people interested in BlackHat PageRank Hacking and Link Farming. Surprise, Surprise: an SEO Rap. Surprisingly, he knows what he’s talking about, and offers decent advice.

Apparently, groovy:spring:java as jabs:jquery:javascript. As if jQuery wasn’t short enough already. Jabs lets you write this jQuery code: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 jQuery(function() { var $ = jQuery;   $("[default_value]") .blur(function() { var self = $(this); if(self.val() === "") { self.val(self.attr("default_value")); [...]

The folks over at Mozilla Labs never cease to amaze me with their unique ideas. They strive to transform the way users interact with the web forever. Mozilla JetPack is a bit different, though. This tool allows web developers to make incredibly powerful Firefox Extentions with the layout languages they already know and love. My [...]

Want to try it? Go to google.com and paste this into your browser’s address bar: 1 2 javascript:void(document.cookie="PREF=ID=20b6e4c2f44943bb:U=4bf292d46faad806: TM=1249677602:LM=1257919388:S=odm0Ys-53ZueXfZG;path=/;domain=.google.com");

I’ve decided to provide you with a new data stream. The jQuery Snippet of the Week. Enjoy. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 // Read a page’s GET URL variables and return them as an associative array. function getUrlVars() { var vars = [], hash; var hashes = [...]

Word to the wise: blogs take effort to maintain.

If you’re a web developer who uses MAMP in conjunction with anything other than PHP, I’m sure you’ve had quite a large bit of frustration involving multiple MyQL instances. Not any more! This simple chain of commands will save you days upon days of troubles: 1 2 sudo rm /tmp/mysql.sock sudo ln -s /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock /tmp/mysql.sock [...]

Cloud computing enables us. Amazon’s EC2 allows anyone in the world to have instant access to incredibly powerful high-end servers that would usually cost tens of thousands of dollars for pennies on the dollar. Life is good. Of course, people use this technology for both good and bad. In fact, a few days ago, someone [...]

My Google Wave invite manna was just replenished!<br/><br/>If you’d like an invite, leave a comment and be creative!<br/>Don’t believe me? Then see for yourself! Update: As of 1:26 PM (EST), November 23, only 2 invites remain!

GitHub is currently down. And that is very sad. However, they have an Awesome Angry Unicorn. And this unicorn makes me smile, even though I can’t get to any of my projects. If you’re going to make a web application, give it some personality. This will not only keep your userbase entertained, but will serve [...]

1 sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 mysql-server phpmyadmin php5-curl php5-mysql

I’ve been a long-time user of meebo, a web-based chat client. I’m not going to use it anymore now. I found… { imo.im }

Amazon offers MySQL hosting now. Life is good.

On a site like ServerFault or StackOverflow, users will always be focusing on the task at hand: exchanging answers. If they see a box to enter text, they enter text, not read throughout the page. User Mytopia by Jeff Antwood

I’ve been a long-time fan and user of OpenDNS, the free and often-superior DNS Server. I’ve always noticed drastic improvements in my site loading speeds when using the service (due to drastically improved domain name lookups). There’s really no downside to using the system. It’s significantly faster than most ISP’s own DNS servers, and it’s [...]

Apple, Inc reported their highest earnings ever today. But, Why? Because they have proven that thoughtful design and attention to every minute detail will always win in the end. Because they have shown that designing with both developers and users equally in mind is essential. Because they noticed that being remarkable isn’t about being the [...]

I’m sorry for taking you for granted. You supply my phone number, email address, primary chat platform, site’s analytics, the ultimate rss reader, some money on the side. Almost all of the knowledge in my brain has been brought to me by (or through) you. Without you, I’d be so lost. Never forget that. And [...]

In case you don’t know, Zsh is the greatest command prompt of all time—but only after you configure it. Here’s my configuration. Updated regularly.

If you’d like to learn more about programming, contact me for a one-on-one lesson. 1 2 3 def utf8ify(list): ”’Encode a list of strings in utf8”’ return [item.encode(’utf8′) for item in list]

If you’d like to learn more about programming, contact me for a one-on-one lesson. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 import random   def randomMacAddress(): """Returns a completely random Mac Address""" mac = [0×00, 0×16, 0x3e, random.randint(0×00, 0x7f), \ random.randint(0×00, 0xff), random.randint(0×00, 0xff)] return ‘:’.join(map(lambda x: "%02x" % x, mac))   [...]

I live 15 miles away from a lovely town called Winchester, VA. We do not have cable where I live. We also don’t have DSL. That’s right, no highspeed. All that we have is Satellite. I’m a web developer, I need something a little more relable than a Satellite connection. 1000ms latency while you’re trying [...]

I have to admit, for a while I really disliked DISQUS. I’m a huge fan of WordPress, and do a signifiant amount of my development within it. I’d work on a new site, and then install the DISQUS plugin, and to my avail, commenting on my sites instantly sucked. Within the comment box, images rarely [...]

I live in the middle of nowhwere. My internet connection (when I’m not in a free-wifi café) sucks. Terribly. and Facebook doubly so. Thankfully, Facebook just opened up Facebook Lite, so my life just got alot easier. Here’s the side-by-side comparison… Regular Facebook: Facebook Lite: QED.

It’s official, Facebook Lite was opened up to the US public about 10 minutes ago. This slimmed down version of Facebook is wonderful for those of us on slow internet connections (or tethering from our iPhones), this is a dream come true. Reminds me of the good ol’ days, when I had to go to [...]

Dear Borders (and Starbucks subidary Seattle’s Best Coffee), You have a lovely book store. Quite lovely. I love the books you sell. I love the music you play. I love the coffee you serve. I love the Moleskine Notebooks you sell. Everything about your store tailors itself perfectly to people like me. You strive to [...]

Somebody needs to develop a text editor with the elegance of TextMate and completion power of Eclipse. Immediately. That is all.

Snow Leopard has been a huge item in the media lately. After months of media hype and build up, the day it was released, millions of Apple customers flooded the social web, telling everyone of their upgrade. It was all we heard about for days. And I’m still hearing about it. I’m typically quite an [...]

I’ve always been a self-motivated learner as well as a free thinker. I was never one to get involved in cliques or social ladders. Despite the fact that I was raised being constantly told that grades were the single most important thing in my life, I could never accept that. So I didn’t. I just [...]

Dear Amazon EC2 Customer, We are excited to announce the limited beta of Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), a secure and seamless bridge between your existing IT infrastructure and the AWS cloud. Amazon VPC enables you to connect your existing infrastructure to a set of isolated AWS compute resources via a Virtual Private Network [...]

I’ve been spending an increasingly large amount of time with some rapid development frameworks, primarily Django (Python!), Grails (Groovy / Java), and Symfony (PHP). I’ve been enjoying it. Alot. Life has never been better. DRY tactics. Code portability. Who likes to repeat themsleves anyway? It’s a great idea. My favorite concept to date is the [...]

A good friend of mine, @mrgandrews, is in the Louis Fabrizi band.  I’m loving the music so far! Here’s a few clips: Everybody Needs a Prayer Tonight Soon Why Wait? If you like what you here, then you should buy the album!

I am a DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) programmer. I’m not positive, but I most likely inherited my love for this concept from my intensive Python immersion. I’m so grateful for it. Anyway, DRY is an essential stage of any developer’s workflow. It drastically enforces good structure, and significantly increases your logical skills. As with everything [...]

Lately, I’ve been tossing some ideas around that I feel would benefit the Social Web as a whole. It’s been going through some rough times lately, and I think it’s time for a change. Or so I thought. My first idea was to create a site that was rather decentralized, allowing all of your content [...]

Blake, a PHP engineer at Squidoo, has a blog called The Why and the How. You should check it out, he writes really good articles and shares great My friend and coworker Aaron Collegeman decided to write a WordPress plugin that automatically replaces the built-in WordPress commenting system with Facebook’s. It is under active development [...]

Hilarious. Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: TextMate is one fantastic text editor. Now, I won’t bore you with my passion for it, but if you’ve been reading my blog for long, you know how I feel.I do the majority of my development in TextMate, so theme choice is pretty important (others beg [...]

As I’m sure most of you know, Facebook decided today that it was going to buy FriendFeed. My opinion might be a little biased… I just discovered FF recently, and I must say that I’ve been thoroughly impressed with the service so far. I’ve been spending an increasing amount of time on it every day, [...]

I wanted to make a new social website that tied the knot on every site that’s out there now – but it looks like it’s already been done! Awesome!

Disclaimer: I am not an Apple fanboy. Apple makes a fortune off of speeple. An Apple FanBoy blindly follows everything the cult leader, Steve Jobs has to say. They go out and purchase every iProduct that Apple realeases and does so with a smile on their face, not realizing that over the course of four [...]

Yesterday I stopped by the Apple store in Fair Oaks Shopping Center in Fairfax, VA and finally purchased a MacBook. I’ve been wanting one for quite a while – ever since I fell deeply in love with OS X after adopting an old 12″ G4 PowerBook I’ve been using for the past 5 months. I [...]

I was doing some routine poking around the TextMate Wiki tonight, and I came across an amazing mod. Amazing. After installing it, my favorite editor looked brand new, and I started hacking away at code for hours. Customized (yet clean) interfaces really help me focus on my work. Working in an IDE with a black [...]

Django 1.1′s Release Candidate was released today! Whoot. Here’s the official release: As part of the Django 1.1 release process, tonight we’ve released Django 1.1 release candidate 1, a preview/testing package which, hopefully, is quite close to what will constitute the final Django 1.1 release. As with all pre-release packages, this is not for production [...]

A couple of months ago, I took a position at a company that tailors Microsoft SharePoint solutions. The business model was very strong (and successful), the work was challenging, and there was lots of opportunity. At the end of the day though, I just couldn’t get past one thing: Microsoft and.NET. This is not stuff [...]

I no longer have an iPhone (for now), so lately I’ve been utilizing my good old Moleskine Notebook. Man I love this thing. I had been recording everything in Evernote, which was epically amazing (esspecially since I have so many computers). There’s just something about actually writing things down physically in one of these notebooks.

It seems like Microsoft base its entire product line nowadays on reactions. They will be apparently be opening Microsoft Retailer stores across the nation soon. Why? I mean, I know they have the Zune, the XBox, and, well, Windows. But why a store? It works great for Apple – But Apple and Microsoft are two [...]

To elaborate on my last post: Here’s an example of some wasted talent: I know a guy who says he wants to be an Engineer. He loves engineering, but, for various reasons, he is no longer attending Virginia Tech this semester. Very sad. So what is he doing now? He’s been applying for a job [...]

I’d say that 95% percent of the students that I met at George Mason University my Freshman year had no idea why they were even there. This is so sad. For me, going to college was more about getting out of the house than anything else. And it worked. I did get out of the [...]

Everyone seems to think that they are always right. It’s pretty funny when you think about it. Because they aren’t. At all. That’s why I’m a falliblist. I believe that others are often right, and since I’m human, and prone to error, I’ll always consider anything that anyone else has to say.But hey, I could [...]

What do developers want in a language? Lots of Available Resources / Documentation Large Standard Library Portability Speed of Development Easy to Read A Community of Developers Yes, Easy to read. You’d really be surprised how much this helps a developer. Well over half the time a C++ Developer spends writing code is actually time [...]

While I haven’t used many hosting services, I must admit that I cannot imagine any being much better than Media Temple. Alot of other people use terrible hosting that is less than $5 a month. Don’t waste your time. Why are you even on the internet if you are only willing to invest $5 a [...]

I’ve owned about 5 WIndows Mobile devices, 3 Palm Devices, and 1 iPhone. What we all need: Simplicity Power Reliability Speed Integration Palm OS (Pre-Pre haha): Simple. Very Simple. Does what it needs to do and doesn’t falter. Not much in terms of applications. Most certainly not designed for a mobile professional. It’s a glorified [...]

The world is full of people who wait for people to tell them what to use next. Especially on the internet. Find (or create) something great before it’s popular and show others – if your recommendation holds true, they will respect you for it. They will trust you. They will go to you when needed. [...]

A few months ago, I wrote a small article for ProgramerFish that was featured on SlashDot’s Front Page. It was amazing. Within hours, my post had thousands of views and hundreds of comments. People both loved and hated the idea. But what made my post so popular? The fact that I showed people how to [...]

I’ve been thinking alot about this cloud-computing “movement” that has been a buzz word for the past year and half or so. Being able to access anything from anywhere? Awesome, but I can do that now. I don’t really get it why everyone’s like “oh this will totally change computing as we know it”. I [...]

Again and again I’m really amazed at Amazon. I discovered Amazon S3 a few months ago, and was really impressed with the service. For mere pennies a month, you can have literally an unlimited amount of “cloud” storage. Phenomenal. After using the service for a while, I realized that they allow you to name an [...]

I want my thoughts to be heard. I want to share the things I find on the web every day. I want to be a part of a community. I want to lead the community. That’s why I’m here, and that’s why I’m writing this.

{ I’ve had some pretty extensive experience using every major OS for various forms of development and end-user work. And just like every other programmer in the world, I certainly have my opinions, likes, and dislikes of every platform (some are a lot closer to perfection than others of course). Text editors are the same [...]

Out of all the startup applications that I have ever used, Instapaper (from the creators of micro-blogging site Tumblr) is by far the most innovative and useful. I use it on a daily basis. It not only saves me hours upon hours of time, but it allows me to focus more on the task at [...]

A couple months ago, I wrote a real simple post on Google Reader, so you know why I love it so. Well, having an iPhone is wonderful, but coming up with great reading material isn’t the best when you’re trying to use mobile safari. What happens if you don’t have internet access?Problem Solved Byline is [...]

The social web is severely flawed. I like to fix it. Who’s in?

Designers and Developers around the world, I present to you the flaw prevalent in all of today’s commercial operating systems. This is not a security hole, nor is it a CPU-capping bug. It’s more of a world-view. We’re simply looking at things the wrong way. What ever happened to the days when a computer was [...]

Well, I’m thinking of doing a series of video posts. This seems to work pretty well for some people. I’m looking for some good topic ideas. Ideas so far: Gadget Reviews Emotional posts that just can’t be captured by words In general thoughts on the tech world I’ll see what I can do about posting [...]

While this is one of the stupidest Conan sketches I have seen in a very long while (at least since the writers strike), this is so utterly funny that I have to pass it along. Incredibly applicable as well.

As of yesterday, my second idea that I actually thought would work well was thought up by someone else. The first instance was a game that me and my friend @MikeXocon came up with. After reading up on some man laws one day back at college, we thought of the idea of making a game [...]

KennethReitz.com now has a new, rich theme, ready to take on a new life. And now iPhone friendly! My gloal? To become more well known that both Joel Spolsky and Chris Parillo. Nothing wrong with them, of course. I’m just as qualified though. And I think I might bring more to the table. Think I [...]

If you’ve worked with Django much at all, I’m sure you’ve had this problem: wanting to access the built-in development webserver remotely. Typically, this integrated mini-server ignores all requests from any IP Address other than 127.0.0.1 . If you run the following command, however, it will be accessible remotely. VERY useful for remote dev work../manage.py [...]

I am a huge fan of TextMate. In my opinion, it is by far the greatest text editor ever conceived by mankind. It has a couple of shortcomings, however. One of which is that it has no built-in FTP or SFTP support. Remote file editing is a bit of a bear here if you like [...]

If you’re in the mood to try a new operating system or two, I highly reccommend you try this little utility: uNetBootin. It is an image downloader that lets you easily select which Linux distro you’d like to install and it instantly starts fetching it from the cloud for you. Once the download is complete, [...]

Well, I’ve done it. I’ve crossed over. To .NET. I will continue to be a complete open-source junkie of course, but during the work hours, I will no longer be working with PHP and Python. I will now be working with .NET and SharePoint. I was presented with a rather good reason for this actually: [...]

While I have not had the opportunity to try the latest Windows 7 Release Candidate, I have done a bit of reading on the subject. In my research, I have made the following observances Vista was truly the worst operating system I have ever used in my life. It had some wonderful features, but everything [...]

Most developer job applications that I see have a “BS in Computer Science or equivalent experience” requirement. During my studies in Computer Science at George Mason University, though short, I learned a number of things. One of them was what a waste it was to learn such higher math in my field. I want to [...]

What would the ultimate RSS Reader have? Hmmm…. Features: Easy-to-manage import/export Available anywhere and in a variety of formats Easy access to both urls and inline-viewing abilities Customizable fonts Takes up less than 200 MB of RAM (this rules out all Adobe Air Applications) Auto feed sniffing from urls The ability to play podcasts and [...]

For the sake of us all, lets take a look at two major social networks on the web today: Facebook and Twitter. Twitter is an information-streaming application that is used by people in all walks of life. It functions, sometimes in roundabout ways, as an instant messenger, email client, alert system, and social networking connectivity [...]

Well, I decided to go ahead and do away with the old and bring on in the new. KennethReitz.com is now new. I the theme myself and implemented many new feature, all thanks to CoreyLib! I hope to see alot of great comments and discussions in the posts to come. :)

The campus allowed me to have a completely restriction-free place to live with peers of my own age, and millions of resources an average american could only dream of having free access to: Olympic-sized swimming pool minutes away Every restaurant under the sun within walking distance Free Kitchens and items promoting every brand under the sun You don’t go to stores – they come to you Free food. … Seminars from the Brightest Minds in Computer Science Professors willing to go the extra mile for you Dozens of cultures fused into one working student-body An incredibly Culturally-Diverse Campus (taco bell and mediation lounge in the same building) These are the things that I miss.

Google significantly increased my quality of life recently. How? Let me explain. While I am a firm believer that cloud computing should never be viewed as a replacement for the current desktop/ model, I must say that I am now a huge fan of storing my data on the internet. Not all of my data, [...]

The site even allows you take your color scheme and test it out on a test page for web design. You can do anything from sharing the exact scheme to your friends, to downloading it as a Photoshop of Gimp Color Scheme, XML, or plaintext file.

Have you ever had the problem of losing an installation CD? This happened to me the other day when I needed to install Microsoft Office 2007. I found an easy solution, however, and I’d like to share it with you: Direct Downloads of Microsoft Office 2007 in all flavors. Completely legal! All you need is [...]

Have you ever needed to parse through large amounts of text looking for a specific pattern? Patterns like “one capital letter followed by three numbers” or “dd/mm/yyyy”? This is known as Pattern Matching. Regular Expressions allow easy syntax for pattern matching, and is an invaluable skill to add to one’s toolkit, no matter what your [...]

Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a nice, clean installation of Microsoft’s Office 2007 Suite to run on your Ubuntu Linux Distribution? For some people, this is the only thing that truly holds them back from an all-Linux environment… But not anymore! We have compiled a nice, concise set of instructions to help guide you [...]

Newest update on the recession: To the George Mason University Community: For over a year now the global financial situation has steadily worsened, and many aspects of life have become more difficult for many Americans. There is little evidence that the world or national economies are rebounding or showing signs of an imminent recovery.We share [...]

I know that blogging isn’t your thing, and you could probally care less about my website – it’s just something that takes me away from you at times. … And when that one day comes, I hope to put a smile on your face.

It’s truly amazing what a little web 2.0 site like that can do to change things around for you. … And best of all, It shows me a pretty flow-chart of what I spend all my money on!

Twitter is by far the market leader of the so-called “micro-blogging” scene. Is this a bad thing? A number people think that Twitter is destroying us. Others seem to find it to be a wonderful marketplace and even a source for revenue, if allowed. In order for any of these things to come to realization [...]

As of today, Pownce will no longer be accepting new users or new pro accounts. And to the Web 2.0 world/micro-blogosphere, shame on you.

I wrote this article two years ago, before I found OS X. I wish I would have known then. As I’ve said before, I find many reasons to believe that modern commercialized software platforms are severely lacking in many, many areas. This should not come as a surprise to anyone. Perhaps basic utility-inclusion is not [...]

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, that’s right, the FBI, has just released a Code Challenge for hackers around the world! Here are the details: A relatively basic form of substitution cipher is the Caesar Cipher, named for its Roman origins. The Caesar Cipher involves writing two alphabets, one above the other. The lower alphabet is [...]