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In the span of one academic summer 3 projects were created and released into the public. This sets a new record for most productive summer yet.

1. Adium – Objective-C addition that will be merged into the main project sometime in the near future. This was the most interesting project since it was part of a greater project which happens to be used by
   thousands of people all over the world.
2. mySemester – Since freshmen year I have been musing over executing this project. You would think that will all the tools out there there would be one for creating a schedule that looked good, was printable and sharable with others. After doing word, excel, and html schedules to share and print I got fed up and created this site just for that. It has all the bells and whistles to be a 2.0 site : )
3. Time Tracker – In order to accomplish 3 projects in one summer tracking how I spent my time was of essence and for that I had the urge to create this nifty project. It is in fact a simple copy of Harvest Time except its free and simpler to use. This is meant for a single user who has many projects and tasks with due dates and a limited amount of time to give. Couldn’t be any simpler to use.

I have, ever since I purchased my MacBook Pro, moved away from using a desktop computing as a main computer. The Pentium III, 2Ghz, Wallmart branded PC has now for a bit over half a year been used as a file server. I managed to set the server up, initially, in under an hour. Quickly I was using iTunes on my mac with the music being stored on my server.

Recently however, due to many Ubuntu updates, my installation broke and I was forced with reinstalling a Linux distribution on it. Since I felt more comfortable with Linux I decided to try something new. What a disapointment.

First was Debian. I was impressed at how simple and extremely fast it was. It made my 5 year computer feel like new. What I found dissapointing was the fact that my NTFS partition simply was not recognized (even after trying to install special drivers).

Second was SUSE. In another extreme, it was extremely slow. The installation took for ever, the video card was never properly identified and it was just too slow. On the pro side, it had a very nice Gnome look and feel.

Finally I tried Fedora, after all I wanted something stable. Installation was so-so. It does boot up fairly quickly and the files are very well organized. Configuration was a barable level of Linux pain. But this by far does not mean I’m satisfied.

Conclusion, I’m still not satisfied with my half working Linux home server which its entire purpose is to server my MacBook. Samba works but only because NFS didn’t. Apache works well but I’ve got no sound. Oh well.. There really should be a Ubuntu version for home servers.

Not thinking much about it I summited two proposals to GSoF and although initially rejecte, due to things outside my control, I was accepted! I shall be working this summer with Adium expanding its functionality. I’ve always wanted to be involved in an open source project but never had the motivation or time. If all goes well I might become a permanent help to the Adium team.

PS: The money incentive was a nice addition. Apple 30” LCD here I come.

The final issue of C/C++ Users Journal arrived today at my house, and it is somewhat shocking. The magazine has been around for nearly 30 years: that’s a lot when you talk about a magazine which focuses on such a precise group of readers. I personally was raised with my father telling me about how great the articles used to be, and 2-3 years ago I managed to build my skills in C/C++ to the level of being able to understand the magazine. It would be impossible to list all the things that I learned by reading this magazine, there is so much stuff that one day you wonder about and then you get the issue and there you have the article on the exact topic you were thinking about. And the most special parts of the magazine are the tricks than seem totally wacky until the day you are writing a program and you think to yourself “Didn’t I read how to do this in one of the issues of C/C++ Users Journal“? It’s a great feeling to have that happen. Well that’s the end of that, I can only wonder what the next big magazine will be, the one that perhaps I’ll tell my children about as if it had the meaning to life.

So after 2 years using Movable Type to run this site I decided to make the switch to WordPress. Reason being that, Movable Type corrupted all half of my site after upgrading and so I decided to try something new and different. I look forward to using all the cool things that WordPress has to offer.

Version 2 should be good.

Problem If you are like me and haven’t been able to load iTune’s music store (IMS) for days on end, here is the solution for you! Every time I tried to open IMS I recieved the mind boggling message that went along the lines of “Check that your internet connection is active”. Except that every other program on my computer was finding the internet connection quite active.

Solution

1. Open the C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts in notepad (If you are using w2k this file will be under C:\winnt\…)
2. Inside this file you should see a line or two starting with 127.0.0.1 followed by some text. Change the text on those lines to localhost

1. Restart iTunes and now IMS should work like a charm

Today marks the first year of this site, yay! I’m not sure where this is going but I hope the site becomes something I can actually show to others and not be ashamed of it.

But a much more important birthday was 2 days ago. Happy birthday Brienne!

I love how so many people read this site and yet no one told me how disgusting it looked. How nice of you people. Well, its fixed now. Be mean, see if I care.

While fixing this and later tonight while talking to someone, I decided to fix or rather complete Widgets! It was an eureka moment but now it actually works (although not yet released). What about a widget to keep track or be a diary of a relationship. You can log your fights, outings… its sort of weird but might be an interesting thing to try out.

If you wonder how I’m doing this its all quite simple: I did no homework today. I needed time to practice what I like: programming.

UPDATE: Look at the side bar, 100% dynamic widgets! It actually works now.

Do you ever wish you had that cool ‘thing’ that the guy that runs that site has? Or do you wish you could put a cute little picture of the book or music you are currently listening to on the side of your site that is always up to date? Well, I have been meaning to make a easy to use widget system for that purpose, and since this is “Spring Break” (when all college kids go down south to get drunk and high) and I have nothing better to do, I finally made it. Widget!

You have to register, and then you can start using the first two widgets I made: one for Amazon items, and a weather one. Its really self explanatory. This is new so all suggestions will be appreciated (specially ideas for other widgets).

One thing is to (re)design my site over and over, but its a totally different thing when you do it for someone else. I really like to do this, sometimes I even consider this a possible career, and this was my first time that I did a site for someone else.
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