Clixby

Last year some time when Derrick and I started ubuntuisms, I was fairly excited at the prospect of having my own subdomain (matt.ubuntuisms.com - don’t bother going, it forwards you here!). I had tried to get a blog going in the past, only to realize that I didn’t have much to write about- leading to an inevitable downward spiral in my motivation to keep it up to date, which means that nobody reads it, which means it eventually disappears into the void of the internet- the search result pages on google that are more than 3 or 4 pages deep. (R.I.P., old blogs. R.I.P.)

I think my first blog-type thing was a Xanga page. I came across it a while back; there’s very little of interest there. I got a Blogger account at some point in 2005; around the start of my time at UIUC.  Looking at it now, it looks like I posted every little detail of what was going on when I was posting. How boring!

Anyway,when I got the ubuntuisms site, I promptly installed wordpress on it, and went hunting for a name. The first page I went to was here: http://folk.uio.no/alied/TMoL.html, the venerable Meaning of Liff. I stumbled across the word Clixby: “Politely rude. Briskly vague. Firmly uninformative.”  If that’s not a perfect tag-line for a rather aimless blog, I don’t know what is.  I named it Clixby, and promptly started posting at fairly random intervals.

At some point, I realized that I was posting there more than I was posting on ubuntuisms. A little bit sad, perhaps,  but we get hits there, and Derrick likes posting guides once in a while, so it’s worth keeping around. I contemplated the idea of buying the blog its own space; the obvious choice is www.clixby.com. Unfortunately, it’s going completely to waste (go look!) by some guy named Tim. There are 75 hits, and most of those are probably me going “man, I wish I owned this domain”. www.clixby.org is free, but I’m not an organization (not that it really matters), and it doesn’t have the same ring to it as the .com does. Oh, well. He got it first, I guess.

Seeing as it’s Winter Break, I figured tonight that I’d do some posting. Not sure what to write about, I went and googled for “clixby” to see if I could find this blog on there. Sadly, it takes quite a few results to get there. The #1 result, however, is that lame page with the facebook widget and the “i don’t use this site for anything” message.

A little farther down is www.clixby.biz. Go take a look, and see if anything strikes you.

Things that struck me:

1. He stole my blog name/idea!
2. He stole the tagline, too! Granted, it’s something that Douglas Adams came up with, but come on, dude! I had it first!
3. The page renders freakishly slow. What the heck? He’s got some mad transparency going on. Maybe it’s just my computer (tmbw.net renders pretty badly too, so there must be some common trait that does it)
4. He doesn’t have anything interesting up!
   1. I can’t really blame him here. I don’t either.

First off, a merry X-mas Eve to everyone! I hope everyone’s holiday (and, for all of us university kids, finally a break from school!) is going well. Mine’s been great, and full of family. It’s interesting how easy it is to go from spending most of my waking moments at a computer, like I do at school, to spending almost no time here. Honestly, it feels good.

I recently set Gmail up to grab email from all of my accounts, and let me send from any of them. I was getting sick of the inconsistencies introduced from using a desktop-based e-mail reader, when I go to different computers, etc. I’m sure you all know the drill, especially because almost all the Gmail users I know did this a long time ago. Anyway, I can receive email from 3 different accounts now, and send it as any of 5. I have a few more to do, too.

It’s been wonderfully efficient. Going into Thunderbird has started getting frightening, especially because it pulls my Gmail account, which in turn pulls the other accounts, so I get doubles of everything. My T-Bird inbox has become useless. It was still good for reading RSS feeds and the CS newsgroups, but alternatives to both of those have turned up. Will has a great newsgroup reader in the works for the iPhone/iPod Touch, so I’ve been reading groups on that. Now that we can post (hooray!) it’s fairly useful.

My final barrier was the RSS feeds. I regularly read several; slashdot, the meebo blog, the Fridge, as well as feeds from Confabuler, Shouzer, dtzLife, etc. Seeing as I’ve eliminated Thunderbird’s usefulness for 2/3 of it’s usefulness, I gave in and ported all my RSS feeds into Google Reader. At this point, almost anywhere I go, I can get to all my stuff. It’s sorta nice, except for all those somewhat worrying issues involving Google owning people’s private data.

The last week or so around our apartment has been extremely hectic. Derrick, Jordy and I had a project that was due on Sunday, which was procrastinated until last Wednesday. It was the semester-long project for our User Interface Design class (CS465).

The premise of the class is that we work on a project all semester, using the principles we learn in class to guide our development and planning. After doing lots of prototyping, we finally hit the development stage- which had 3 weeks allotted to it- and did the entire thing in 4 days.

Our project is called Glasnotes (a pun on `Glasnost’, a policy implemented by Gorbachev in the ’80s that means “openness”), a website that allows for collaboration on creating music.

Like I said, we spent all of Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and into Sunday working on it, and frankly, I’m pretty proud of the way it turned out. We learned quite a bit in the process- I spent some time a few weeks ago designing the databases with MySQL, and learned PHP to provide an interface to the databases. We used PHP for almost all of the layout/content of the site, with some Javascript (in the form of jQuery) to tie it all together. We used a lot of CSS to do the visual aspects of everything- after all, it IS a user interface design class. Going into the project, I had never used MySQL or PHP, and my Javascript was fairly limited. I’d done a little CSS before, but mostly on the order of font sizes and colors- nothing too impressive. Now, I’ve got a fairly solid understanding of most of those languages. Needless to say, it was a fairly intense few days.

We still have quite a bit of work to do on it, e.g. most of the interesting music-related functionality. You can sign up, see profiles for users and groups, etc. We’ll have it done by December 5th for our presentation to the class.

Looking forward from here, I have a 391 project that’s due on Thursday, although we’ll probably use our freebie extensions to bump it back past thanksgiving. Meebo comes on Thursday (hooray!), so I’ll be dropping in on their info session (5-6:30pm in DCL). I’ve been e-mailing back and forth with their recruiter, Kathy, helping to get them some info about UIUC and helping them plan the logistics of everything. I offered to show their guys around campus and/or chill with them after the info session, so hopefully they’ll take me up on that. They promised a t-shirt for me (and all of my roommates) for all the help- pretty cool.

I’m heading back up to DP on Sunday, after taking a day or so to clean up the apartment and generally let the stress fade a little bit. Of course, Thanksgiving is going to be an unnecessarily busy break, mostly because we’re going to be pushing our 391 project back to fall during the break. It’ll be good to be home, though.

I saw the sun rise last night because I was up working on 391- I think it’s time for a nap.

It’s largely agreed around here that the beginning of November (maybe late October) is the prime time for a break from school. Thanksgiving is great, but it’s really pretty far into the semester- and the typical burn-out time is right around Halloween. After hitting that burn-out point for the 3rd year in a row, I’ve gotten fairly used to the fact that school is relentless. Once that “ugh, this sucks” feeling passes, round 2 of midterms usually sets in, and this semester has been no exception.

Last Thursday was my ECE391 (Systems Programming) exam 2. The first exam was a pretty good exam- I got a solid B on it, after a lot of studying. I could have tied the high score if I had been more careful about caller/callee saved registers with the C calling convention, but what are you going to do? Be careful on the final, that’s what. Anyway, the second exam came at a fairly good time, because I had very little else going on that week. I was able to put in some decent study time prior to the test, but really, I didn’t study as much as I should have. I decided the night prior to the test to turn in early (around midnight, instead of the usual 3am) and hope that the extra sleep would do me some good.

All in all, it did me plenty of good. I got a 78 on the exam, which was the highest score in the class. w00t! The average was around 47 with a 14.5 standard deviation, so (according to all the Stats I’ve learned this semester, heh) I should get around a 96% after they curve it. Not too bad.

Unfortunately, I have two other exams coming up tomorrow; ECE329 (Electromagnets) and Stat400 (intro to stats/probability). 329 has proven to be one of the most horrible classes I’ve ever taken- it’s about 75% calculus, and 100% suckage. I’m not a big fan of the EE side of ECE, and ECE329 is no exception. That being said, I feel better about the material on this test than I did on the first one- and after the horrible scores on the first one (50% average), they’re going to be “easing up a bit”. We’ll see what that means.

Stats is the class that I’ve put off all semester. Lectures are almost worthless, so I learn almost everything by doing the homework - and my retention rate isn’t that great after 2 hours of doing the homework every week. I need to do a lot of sample problems before the exam, and I haven’t done many yet. I’m waiting for that moment of inspiration, and it hasn’t hit me yet.

After Tuesday, though, it’s going to be fun from here on out. I have two final projects (ECE391 and CS465), both of which are a lot of fun to work on. They both have large checkpoints due in the next week or so, which means I’ll be fairly busy from Tuesday night -> Monday. After some text-message conversation, Roxy may come visit this weekend, which would be a lot of fun. Not sure if she can make it out yet, though.

Meebo comes to campus on the 15th, so I’m definitely going to be at their info session. A job with meebo would be incredible- I’ll be revising my resume prior to the info session. I also left a comment on their blog saying that they should get Papa Del’s pizza for the event - and, sure enough, they’re planning to. Pretty cool.

Ah, well. Back to the books.

Will mentioned in his blog (see the Blogroll) a wordpress plugin called WPhone, which optimizes the wordpress experience for iPhone (or, in my case, iPod Touch) users. I’m posting this from my iPod now, and I have to admit, they’ve done a great job with it. The interface mimics native apps very well, giving it a very intuitive feel. Hopefully this will inspire some on-the-go posting

Well, I’ve moved this blog to its new home on my domain, www.m-sack.net. Not that there was anything wrong with the ubuntuisms page (http://matt.ubuntuisms.com), but I bought this fancy new domain through DreamHost and moving the blog here seemed like a logical step.

I haven’t done much updating recently, mostly because school has been extremely stressful. I’ll try to start writing a bit more, now that I’ve got the new site.

Hopefully you’ll hear back from me soon.

Well, I haven’t gotten around to posting about school. Instead, here are pictures of my apartment:

www.flickr.com

The short version is that school is hard, I’m busy, and I’m working for CS225 as a lab staffer.

Anyway, Apple announced the new iPod Touch today. Basically, if you haven’t seen, iPod touch = iPhone - phone capabilities. Also, minus $200. It ships out the 28th of September, so I’ll have it shortly after- hopefully by October 2 or so.

I was driving to American Science and Surplus today (to pick up a few things that you can’t really find in one convenient store; speaker wire, a pirate flag, headphones, and a book for Murphy), and I saw a bumper sticker that said:

Remember who you wanted to be.

I think that’s a great little slogan; I remember as a kid, I wanted to be a Palentologist, because dinosaurs were (and still are) completely amazing.  What did all of you want to be when you were younger? Anyone still doing it?

Well, we’re on our last night in Europe. We’re all pretty tired, but I know that I’m about ready to head home. We got up early, flew from Oslo to Heathrow, had a fun time walking like a mile across the Heathrow airport, then flew from Heathrow to Dublin. After a bunch of public transportation here and there, we had checked in and headed downtown. Downtown Dublin is pretty cool, but it’s incredibly crowded and everyone smokes- it’s pretty gross. We got pretty tired and cranky fairly quickly, and came back. Tomorrow morning at about 10:30 our flight leaves for Chicago- 8 hours of fun!