Rex Flex

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:

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

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

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.

Those of you that know me in real life probably realize that I have a tendency to obsess about something for awhile, then sort of forget about it. Well, my latest obsession has been developing native applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

For those of you that haven’t heard, apple has released their SDK. This means that the development tools are available to easily create applications for the iPhone, with apple’s blessing. After I saw some of the applications that were created, I was pretty much hooked.

I decided to start looking into getting the SDK, then realized that it was only available to those running OSX. So, I looked into virtualization options for running OSX on a PC. I didn’t really find a whole lot. Sure, there’s VMWare, Virtual PC, etc; however I couldn’t find anywhere where these solutions supported OSX specifically. I looked into it a little more and found out that there is a clause in OSX’s EULA that states it’s not to be run in a virtualized environment. After finding this out, I decided to go ahead and just get a new Mac.

So, I’m now typing this up on my new Mac Mini (the cheapest Mac they had at the apple store). Apple also has a program called one to one, where you can schedule appointments to go in and learn how to use your Mac. The email they sent me states, “learn how to do everything you ever wanted on a Mac—with your trainer beside you every step of the way”, so I plan to take advantage of that and try to get them to teach me the basics of XCode. I’ve installed the SDK and I am now exploring, trying to figure out just what you have to do to create an application for the iPhone. From what I’ve found so far, there’s not a whole lot to it.

1. You have to learn Objective-C, which if you know any other programming language, really isn’t a big deal. From what I can tell, it’s very much like C with some syntax changes.


2. If you want to hook up your application to run directly on the iPhone, as shown in the roadmap, you’ll need to sign up for the beta and fork over $99. As I understand it now, they’ve only accepted a very select few people to start the beta, but will expand it to more people once it gets rolling. It sounds to me like apple’s getting their partners in early so they can have a little jump start, but what do I know, I’m just an infrequent blogger.


3. You need to be able to go in and make positioning, size, color, etc changes to the UI in the code. From what I’ve seen so far, the Interface Builder isn’t working for iPhone apps yet. Unless anyone can show me otherwise, I’m going to be doing these things by hand for awhile.

Coming from a C# (Visual Studio) background it is quite different. But I almost feel as though I’m getting back to my computer science roots. New things to explore and fiddle with.

That’s really it, I haven’t run into a whole lot, however I’ve only really created a Hello World program, which I basically copied from an example on apple’s site. I’ll be sure to keep my blog updated with things I encounter and create.