Letter Sweep

Following suit with the likes of Tim Bray and Eric Meyer, I figured I'd throw together my browser's letter sweep tonight.

• [A]dmin Site. Yeah, I guess I would be visiting the admin panel for this. Quite frequently.
• Mirascape's [B]log. An infrequent haunt of mine, but fairly obvious.
• [C]MON. Cluster Monitor for MySQL Cluster, something I almost always have open.
• Google [D]ocs. This one is painfully obvious, I use Google Docs extensively.
• [E]ricMartindale.com. Okay, that's a gimme. Does this make me egocentric?
• [F]acebook. I'm actually fairly ashamed of this one. Why can't I have a cool F site? *sadface*
• [G]mail. Three accounts linked using Google's Multiple Sign-in. Open [almost] all day.
• [H]ighcharts JS. A pretty kick-ass Javascript library for generating charts on the clientside.
• [I]nternal Discussion. A site for communication with my team. :)
• [J]Query Mobile Demo, 1.0 alpha 3. I've been spending a lot of time toying with jQuery Mobile, seeing where it's going compared to Sencha Touch.
• [K]r.github.com. Keith Rarick's GitHub redirect. Total ass-kicker.
• [L]inkedIn. Pretty straightforward, between hiring for our team at @Mirascape and the travel to and from various conferences and Meetups lately.
• [M]irascape. The augmented reality platform I'm responsible for.
• [N]oxBot. A nice PHP-powered IRC bot with various plugins. A bit out of date, but very powerful. Been using it for a couple things lately.
• [O]K, QR Me!. A QR Code-generating link shortener I built.
• [P]ostmark. Best Email delivery service I've used. Nice RESTful API, flat rate for emails sent.
• [Q]uora. These guys nail Q&A, and they're doing it pretty well. Check out all their buzz, too. But for some reason, I just don't stick.
• Google [R]eader. “From your 1,040 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 21,549 items, clicked 274 items, starred 853 items, shared 37 items, and emailed 8 items.” -- </stats>
• [S]erver Stats for Mirascape. Powered by Munin, it's how I keep track of the status and metrics of all my servers.
• [T]witter. Not surprising. I love their webapp for my personal use, but own and manage at least five accounts using SplitTweet.
• [U]serVoice. Pretty sweet tool I use for giving the communities I manage a good way to build a consensus on what they desire most. Examples I run: for RolePlayGateway, and EVE UserVoice for EVE Online.
• Google [V]oice. Allows me to use SMS from my computer, read (as opposed to listen to) voicemail. Great tool. If only it supported MMS.
• [W]achovia. One of the places I do banking.
• [X]DA Developers. An indisposable resource for getting rid of carrier-installed crap and running my own choice of software on the hardware I purchased!
• [Y]ouTube. Another big namer. No surprise.
• [Z]ecco. Where I trade most of my public stocks. :)

Surprisingly populist, and there's a lot of Google-owned properties in there. I'm also using Chromium, so I think it prefers the roots of the sites I visit instead of searching through my history for individual pages.

Fixing Textareas with Padding

Ever run into an issue where you need a <textarea> to have a width of 100% and some non-zero padding?

Use this:


textarea {
    -webkit-box-sizing: border-box; /* Safari/Chrome, other WebKit */
    -moz-box-sizing: border-box; /* Firefox, other Gecko */
    box-sizing: border-box; /* Opera/IE 8+ */
}


Problem solved.

New Laptop :)

So, I bought a new laptop from System76. About damn time, I say.

The specs:

• 15.6" HD+ LED Display @ 1600x900
• ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4570 Graphics with 512MB GDDR2 Memory
• Core i5-520M Processor ( 32nm, 3MB L3 Cache, 2.40GHz )
• 2 GB - DDR3 1066 MHz (DDR3: zoom zoom. ;])
• 250 GB 5400 RPM SATA II (I considered a bigger hard drive, but I have a NAS at the house and honestly plan on taking advantages of synchronized OSes like ChromeOS in the very near future, so I decided against it)

So far, I'm absolutely lovin' it. The hardware is very clean and Apple-like, with no disgusting third-party stickers plastered all over the thing. There's a System76 logo sticker on the back, which I could easily remove with some isopropyl if I so chose. Part of System76's sales pitch is pre-built Ubuntu boxes (which is what sold me, to be honest), so it came with Ubuntu 10.04, my day-to-day operating system of choice (especially since Backtrack makes things oh-so-awesome.)

I do have some minor complaints:

1. I had a dead pixel on my LCD. They won't replace it unless "there are more than 6 dead pixels. :(
2. As a result of the hinge design, the screen won't fold back more than ~35°. A bit of a pain in specific use scenarios.
3. A lack of one-button volume controls. The volume controls are only available through function keys, sadly. Some buttons on the top right for volume up, down, and mute would make this already awesome laptop perfect.

I don't know how much control System76 has over these hardware-design issues, but fixing them would seal the deal on any of my future purchases. ;)

Mobile is Dead or, The Future of Augmented Reality

Mobile is dead. It's just a bridge on the way towards our future, which is building on top of our real world with technologies like augmented reality.

Some key points:

• The world is not flat. 3D is the future.
• Our environment is constantly changing. Let's build on that.
• Mobile is dead. To break through this wall, we've got to innovate.
• Immersion.

Let's build something. :)