Rex Flex

It’s going on nine months since my last update… I’m horrible about keeping my blog up to date.  Since I haven’t come up with a New Year’s Resolution, I’m going to go ahead and make this blog it.  Keeping it up to date and gaining readers.  ”But… we’re already five months into the year…” you might say.  Shut up, I’ll do what I want, is my response.

So, what have I been up to for the past nine months?  I got a twitter account, and you should probably follow me!  I’ve also been working, quite a bit.  Back in October we got a new project and it’s been quite an experience to get it finished, however it should be done in the next couple of weeks.  I had a chance to use some new things in this project, the different things we used are:

• ORM
• .NET 3.5
• LINQ
• WCF/JSON/jQuery
• CodeSmith with .netTiers
• SQL Server 2005
• SnapDragon Framework

I’ve had a few people ask me about one of my earlier blog posts about some heart problems I was having.  I’d like to go ahead and update everyone.  I haven’t had a heart palpitation in over a year, things are going really well since I started staying away from caffeine.

I’ve signed up for a paperMoney account at thinkorswim and I’ve been playing around in the stock markets.  It’s only a simulation, but it’s pretty fun to keep up with.  So far I’ve managed to turn $100,000 into $116,500, too bad that’s not real money.  I’ve been thinking about putting some real money down on the line, but I don’t want to start until I have a somewhat decent amount to start with.  I’ve met Anthony Davian, a hedge fund manager in Akron, Ohio, through twitter.  Anthony and Keith Barna host a happy hour show every week where they sample beers and talk about the markets.  It’s very interesting to attend and learn new things.  There’s also a newsletter that you can subscribe to for a monthly fee which will provide you with different trades that you can look at and see what they’re currently buying/selling.  If I were to actually go into the markets, I’d probably subscribe to that so that it’s not just me out there calling the shots, there’s someone else doing all the research and I just get to piggyback for profits!

I’ve been pretty busy with work lately, but it has been very interesting. The past couple of days I’ve been working with the AES/Rijndael to encrypt sensitive user data in the application I’m currently working on. It has been pretty interesting and has proven to be quite a learning experience.

The main reason it has been a challenge is that some of this data that we’re encrypting needs to be decrypted and searched through for reports. We have already decided on using SQL Server Reporting Services (which I haven’t worked with before) to handle these reports, however there was the question of decrypting these fields through SQL Server. Luckily we should be able to create CLR User-Defined functions to handle this.

I have also spent some time cleaning up the solution. This particular project has been going on for the past year and a half (or so) and has had quite a few hands touching it. I went ahead and organized the projects in the solution and fixed the dependency problems that everyone had been just dealing with for the past year or so. I think taking care of these issues will make my life a lot easier in the long run.

After looking at PodiPodi yesterday there was an obvious problem of context, which brought up a very valid question, “why would someone want to do a google/yahoo/whatever search while on your page and have the results displayed as an overlay on top of your page?”  There’s just no real point to it or value added to your site, so it seems really useless and as Ryan said, “just meant to be a flashy addition to a website.”

I found another program called Devo that solves this problem.  Well, sort of… I’ll get to that later.  It’s a Firefox extension that gives you basically the exact same UI (you press Shift+X or set the trigger command to whatever you want it to be instead of it always being Shift+Space) and allows you to search google, yahoo, flickr, wikipedia along with several other sites.  There are also a few other cool features like annotating a site through SharedCopy.  Those are all cool, but what I think really makes this stand out is that it allows you to create your own commands.

So, back to the contextual problem; I still see it here.  These commands are only available when Firefox is open.  What if you boot up your computer and you want to immediately do a google search, without having to open Firefox?  What if you want to use that same UI to do something in another application, like notepad, iTunes, or internet explorer?  I think that ultimately Enso solves the entire contextual problem because it’s a small program you download and install on your computer.  This makes it computer-wide, so you can use it within any application you want to.

As for the features that Enso packs, it has all the web searches you could ask for.  There are media controls to control your music (which Devo also has, however you must have the FoxyTunes Firefox plugin).  There’s the spellcheck command which will do a spellcheck on any text you have highlighted, and since this is computer-wide it brings spellcheck to every application on your computer, which is pretty damn cool if you ask me.  There’s also the launcher commands which, if I’m remembering correctly, crawls your computer for applications to run and adds them to the launcher so to open the calculator you can type, “open calculator” or “open calc” since the auto-complete will fill in the rest.

I really like these command based UI’s that allow users to do what they want to do quickly, without losing focus of the task at hand or having to reach for the mouse, keeping the UI pretty (not like a command shell), and keeping the commands easily readable by humans.  I think that once more and more people start using these, they’ll realize how helpful these tools can actually be.

I was browsing around on the internet this morning and I ran across a website plugin called PodiPodi.  Basically it looks like they took Enso from Humanized, ported it to the web and now offer it as a service to webmasters, allowing them to add it to their site.

On July 7th they entered “public beta” (aka you can use it now and it’s going to be an ongoing project that will never actually have a real release, much like every other web 2.0 site.)  Looking at their updates on the main page it seems like they’re coming out with new features for it somewhat regularly.

When you come across a PodiPodi enabled site, you can hold shift and press space. You’ll then be presented with a text box in the top left corner of the page that looks similar to this:

Empty PodiPodi command box.

You can then type a command into the box and hit enter, in this case I’m searching Flickr for the term “nature”:

Searching Flickr for nature through PodiPodi

After this, hitting enter will execute the command and the results will be displayed in the middle of the screen:

PodiPodi Flickr Results for the search term 'nature'

The features currently supported include:

• calculate (calculates a simple mathematical expression)
• find (finds text on the site)
• flickr (searches flickr)
• google (searches google)
• google images (search google images)
• open (opens a section of the site)
• send comment (sends a comment to the web master)
• twitter (gets the 20 most recent updates for a twitter account)
• yahoo (searches yahoo)
• yahoo images (searches yahoo images)
• youtube (searches youtube)

If you’re looking for a quick way to “integrate” your site with all of these different services and also add a few neat (read somewhat useless) features to your site, this offers that, along with a very nice and unique user interface.

I have just upgraded this blog to the latest version of WordPress.  I really like where WordPress is going and hope they keep up all the good work.

And as always, DreamHost made the entire upgrade process a simple one-click step.

Well, it’s finally launched. After a very intense and stressful two months, we’ve created a social networking site from scratch. The company I work for, PROACE, partnered with the ROT Rally to create a site where bikers can communicate year-round. There are still quite a few new features that we’re planning on implementing, however since it has finally been launched, we’re finally able to settle down and take it easy for awhile.

Please, go sign up and let me know what you think. The site is, http://www.riderrally.com/

Speaking of the launch of RiderRally, Josh, Drew and I made it out to the ROT Rally last night, and it was crazy. I put a few pictures up at riderrally.com and you can go check them out here.

A couple of weeks ago, a co-worker of mine showed Drew and I a site that he was using to listen to music called Muxtape. It’s a pretty cool site that allows users to upload up to 12 songs to create their own mix tape, which is then public for everyone to hear. Last week Drew began going through a bunch of them and found some good music from bands I had never heard of before. So, for the past week or so, I’ve been listening to a mix of MGMT, Gogol Bordello, The Decemberists, and Of Montreal. I think that getting some new music has really helped me be more productive during the day (once I look up the lyrics of the song I’m listening to and start singing along :D).

These are a few muxtapes I’ve been listening to recently:

• 1989
• Omar12 (Omar)
• Rexxx (mine)

The past few weeks have been pretty fun. Last Sunday, Monday and Tuesday night I was having heart palpitations, which were lasting for about an hour to an hour and a half. When these happen for me, my heart feels like it’s racing out of my chest. I’ve been having them for the past year or so but never really thought anything of them since they’d go away after a little bit. What made these a little different is on Wednesday night I was having some chest pains as well. So, I decided to head to the E.R. After waiting for a few hours, they got some blood to run some tests and came back telling me that nothing looked abnormal. They gave me a holter monitor to wear for 24 hours so they could try and capture a recording of one.

The day after I drop it off I get an urgent phone call from the doctor saying that while I was sleeping my heart would stop beating for about 4 and a half seconds, making very low beats per minute. Soon after that I’m scheduled to see another cardiologist that specializes in heart rhythms. After talking with him he said that:

1. The pains were probably heart burn
2. My heart stopping while I sleep is probably from me snoring so much
3. The palpitations are most likely caused by an extra electrical connection which causes the electrical signal to pass through and back into the heart continuously in an endless loop. (Supraventricular tachycardia)

I have to wear another monitor for about 30 days to see if I can record a palpitation. After that they can make sure that it is actually supraventricular tachycardia and we can go from there. From what the doctor said it’s not very unhealthy to have it, it’s just annoying to feel. There’s a procedure to fix it where they go in and singe the extra electrical connection. There are also some pills you can take to control it, but who wants to be constantly taking pills?

That’s what’s been going on with me lately. 21 years old, dealing with heart problems ;) . Nothing new on the iPhone development; I am having a lot of fun with the Mac, though.