markmcb's Articles, Page 1 of 15

If you’ve watched any NFL football game in the last year or so, you’ve probably become of fan of the ultra slow motion, high resolution video replays of receivers dangling in the air and being crushed mid-flight by defensive backs. It’s fascinating to watch every muscle flex and every facial expression slowly form.

As I watched the Super Bowl though, I couldn’t help but wonder if it makes sense to give this sort of footage to referees? And it’s not because I don’t think referees should have all the information they can get, but I think this footage distorts reality. For example, consider the linked video. That all probably occurred in less than a second, two tops. But the video makes it last a full minute. In decisions where a player is being questioned for control of a ball, or other things where time matters, it seems that slow motion gives a warped view of reality. In one of these clips, a player may seemingly cradle a ball for 30 seconds, but in reality he only held it for a quarter of one second.

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I just received an email from Google that brought a tear to my web-developer-eye:

“In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. … As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar."

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Welcome to OmniNerd Version 5. We’ve implemented a completely new color scheme, changed the header and front page layout, and even added a little dose of Twitter into the mix. We got a lot of negative feedback regarding the v4 layout to include things like “not intuitive,” “too blue,” and “too much going on.” Our response is v5, which we hope is more intuitive, color balanced, and simple.

Shades of Orange and Brown

I’m a web design guy. I’m good at structuring data, talking to databases, and caching everything I can get my hands on. Choosing colors, well, let’s just say it’s more of a guessing game than anything. Moreover, with every combination I do find, when I show it to people it seems it’s always split 50/50 (or worse) in terms of love it/hate it. But this time something strange happened. When I got these colors up on our development site the feedback was primarily favorable. There were a few that thought it was “ok” and only one person I know that actually gave me feedback that they didn’t like it at all. Score 1 for the out-of-his-league web guy.

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I had been planning to upgrade my home network for a while and finally decided to do it over the weekend. On my network was an older 802.11 b/g Apple Airport Express that just wasn’t very useful anymore. Aside from being older, it’s not an 11n device and we just can’t have that, now can we? The bigger issue was that I live in an older house in San Francisco (we’re talking 1908 old) and it’s just not very “wired” friendly. My goal was to move my existing Time Capsule from out of my bedroom (this is the only place in the house the cable modem can plug in without significant rewiring) and into my office. From the office it would connect wirelessly to whatever new device I put in my bedroom to be the router. The idea being that an 802.11n bridge would be a sufficiently fast alternative to running physical cables. With the Time Capsule in my office I would be able to wire my laptop into it directly for very fast Time Machine service. Moreover, my Linux server, which is also currently residing in my bedroom, could move into the office and I could avoid having to put a wifi card in it (it has to be wired in, which is why it’s lived in my bedroom until now).

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I love my iPhone. Probably the greatest feature of the iPhone is the App Store, which allows you to download and install 3rd party applications. Over the past year I’ve grown quite fond of a handful of applications and just thought I’d share. Obviously my picks tie heavily to my preferences, but since you’re reading this on a site called OmniNerd, I figured you might like them too.

Tweetie 2

If you’re not using Twitter, then you’re probably over the age of 30 or not famous. For those that are using it, you know that it can be quite addictive and a little hard to keep track of. Not with Tweetie 2 for iPhone. Multiple accounts, intuitive layouts, and tons of configurable options make it the best Twitter app out there in my opinion.

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I recently grabbed OS X 10.6 to install on my Apple MacBook Pro, which is a few years old now. My laptop started out with Tiger (10.4), was upgraded to Leopard (10.5) and then I just upgraded it again to Snow Leopard (10.6). The upgrade went well, but there were some things that just felt a little broken. Connections to my Time Capsule were slow, the time to put the computer to sleep was long, blue tooth devices wouldn’t power down, and certain operations just seemed slower than I expected. I thought maybe I should do a fresh/clean install, so I went to the online forums for guidance.

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A few weeks ago, a loyal OmniNerd posted an article asking if the Nerd Rank system was broken. Upon further review, I decided the answer was both yes and no. It was “no” in the regard that it was technically giving credit to users as it was intended to do, i.e., if you generate high volumes of quality content then your Nerd Rank will reflect that. However, it was “yes” in that while I like the secretive nature of the system, its total lack of transparency makes it a bit hard to follow.

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I guess it’s true when they say, “they don’t make ’em like they used to.” (And in this case I’m really glad.) The video below is a controlled head-on collision between two Chevrolet vehicles, one from 1959 and the other from 2009.

The crash was conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), which was celebrating its 50th aniversary. The IIHS press release has additional photos.

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I recently built an all-purpose server and one of the things I wanted to do with it was turn it into a media hub/server. Before exploring my options, I had some specific requirements in mind. A good solution would have to:

1. be free
2. run in Linux, preferably Gentoo (because that’s what my server is running)
3. be open source
4. allow my primary laptop to act as the “master”
5. allow any other computer to access the music

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Some time ago in the late 2002 timeframe, I downloaded a copy of Gentoo Linux and installed it on an old Dell laptop that was excess hardware I was trying to put to good use. Gentoo was cool because it compiled all of your software using custom “flags” that you specify. This meant that your software was highly optimized to match both your hardware and your utilization of it. If you were just running a web server, you could easily ensure hundreds of packages didn’t get installed. Aside from package avoidance, you could ensure that what you did install wasn’t bloated with support compiled in for features that would never be used. In theory, Gentoo was every geek’s dream.

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I’m the type that always makes fun of people who “waste their time” doing “stupid” things that any “intelligent” person would avoid by doing more meaningful activities instead. Video games, television, etc., have all been labeled by me as a waste of time at some point in my life (despite the fact that at some point in my life I was totally hooked on those things). Well, thanks to Epic Pet Wars, I have to retire that beloved past time and become the target of these types of derogatory comments.

The game is so simple. You pick a pet, arm it with weapons, and fight your way to victory. Except that the game never really ends. You just keep playing mindlessly as you really accomplish nothing. So what’s the hook you ask? Why did I suddenly get addicted? One word: iPhone.

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Rails is a nice framework because it does its best to keep things simple. However, even the simplest framework can get cumbersome as an application grows. As I was tweaking some of the Rails code that powers OmniNerd, I was wishing I had a simple command line script that would draw a picture of OmniNerd’s model associations for me. Well, I wished for about 5 minutes and then I fired up TextMate and got to writing. The image you see is the result.

Each line or “edge” between nodes calls out a relation between two “models.” In Rails, models define various objects that ultimately get stored in a database. As you can see, there are a lot of associations.

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A few days ago I posed a question asking how you keep up with your social networks. Well, I gave it a few days and then came up with a solution (though I don’t know if I’ll ever really keep up). I thought I’d share my answer as it makes use of Google’s AJAX-based Feed API.

I’ve had the domain markmcb.com forever. It was a blog before there were “blogs,” but now given the plethora of highly specialized sites it was losing its utility. But rather than give in altogether and make something like Facebook the place to connect with me, I decided to transform markmcb.com into a hub for both myself and others.

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Maybe it’s a sign that I’m getting old, but the social network scene is beginning to present me with diminishing returns. I mean seriously, right now I’m actively using OmniNerd, WordPress, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, LinkedIn, gTalk, AOL IM, and IRC. When you throw in text messaging and email, I suddenly find myself more bogged down with the overhead of all these systems. In other words, these things are supposed to be saving me time, not vice versa.

What about you? What social networking systems are you active on? Have you found clever ways to keep up on them all, or do you simply maintain a narrow scope?

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I have a scatter-brain approach to things. I start a zillion tasks, and with each I probably think about the details way too much. My problem is that about the time I get through thinking deep about the 6th or 7th thing, I’ve forgotten what the first is! Since I don’t see my list of things getting any shorter, I’ve started using task tracking software to help manage my load of to-dos. I’ve specifically started using Things for Mac, but it falls short in the network of real life, i.e., sometimes I’m on my computer, my phone, etc. Sometimes I want to give someone a task AND be able to track it. I’ll spare you all of my specific needs, but hopefully you get the gist of my question: what do you use to organize your life and do you feel it really aids in being more productive?

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