1. Its Easy to Change the World

    When you think about it, its so easy to change the world. The tough part is changing the world, and making money.

    Changing the world. Who doesn’t want to do it? To change the world is to truly achieve, which is what many would argue (myself included) is the real point of our lives. People always dream of being that person to change the world, to leave an eternal mark on the history of the human race.

    Changing the world is so easy.

    Seriously, think about it. Take any one thing, and just work at it forever. Spend your entire life solving a problem. There are so many problems out there that exist not because there is no solution, but because there is nobody selfless enough to apply the solution for free. The problem can be anything, big or small. Whether it be an awesome free operating system for the masses (shameless promotion for a personal want ;) or world hunger, if one person truly dedicated their life to making that difference, or imagine, if many people dedicated their lives to making all those differences imagine the world in which we would live! So many problems would be solved. We could live in such a better world.

    The problem is, there is no money to be had in this. The tough part is changing the world, and making money. The society in which we live demands that we have money to be able to survive. However, most people don’t “need” the amount of money that they have. Everyone wants that big house, that nice car, the big screen TV. Instead of spending all the time gaining that money for those nice things, what if that time was instead spent on your “masterpiece”. Spend your time changing the lives of others, not bettering your own.

    Maybe you’re wondering right now why the world is the way it is? Why don’t we do this already? Well obviously…its in our nature the be selfish. We look out for number one first, because we see that most important. People have long questioned why human nature is the way that it is, and why it seems to tear us apart at times. I’m not a religious person, but what if our purpose is, as the human race, to overcome our own faults? What if we were intentionally given flaws, so that we could eventually become mature enough to overcome them, and once done make a world for ourselves that is better than we could have ever believed through the aforementioned selflessness.

    Here is my message to you: rethink your life, and the idea of life as a whole. All it takes is a few people to start this beautiful trend. Live your life at a subsistent level, keep yourself alive and keep yourself happy, but only there. Spend the rest of your life spending effort on all the important things, working on that project that will change the world. I think you’ll find that, in the end, the true satisfaction you will receive in the end will make every moment of it more worth it that you could have ever comprehended.

  2. Getting into Web-Desktop Integration and GUIs

    Lately I’ve been not so much changing, but expanding, my interests when it comes to programming. Up to about 2 months ago, I would have told you I was a web guy for life. I was strongly opinionated when it came to programming for the desktop. I would have told you, “The Web is the future, why should I program for the desktop? Its dying. Everyone would rather have a web application than a desktop application.”.

    Its funny how opinions change.

    Well what I said may be true for trivial things, there are still many things that I would much rather use as a desktop program over a web application. Mostly, development things and a few other things too. I find it funny, actually, because one of the desktop applications that I use that gets used over anything else is Tweetdeck, which is an example of a desktop client being used as an alternative to the web application. I am currently collaborating on a project that has a tight integration between the Desktop and the Web, and it is really getting my into the whole idea.

    The extensibility of the web, with the convenience of the desktop.

    With this newfound interest in Desktop programming, I have begun to look into popular GUIs, and also what I think makes a GUI. It seems to me, that I may either be different than the general opinion, or I may care more about functionality than appearance.

    I really don’t like the GUIs of the Adobe Suite and iTunes, which are two very popular desktop applications. I feel that their GUIs focus too much on appearance and not enough on usability. iTunes 10 simple has some fundamental issues, such as the unified color which makes it difficult to quickly discern different buttons or tabs. The Adobe Suite, I feel, has too much of a learning curve. Many important things are hidden from view with no instructions. They say “The best design is one that requires no instructions”. The user should simply know how to use it. I feel that the Adobe Suite GUI could not be further from that. I also feel everything requires too many clicks. I feel that only one click should be required to do just about anything. Only rare events should require two, and two should be the max for any operation in a program.

    A GUI that I really love is a much lower profile application called SmartGit.

    It’s simply a graphical interface for the traditionally command line GIT versioning tool. While I’m not crazy about the opening splash screen, I feel that the layout is marvelous. All things that I would want to see at once are easily viewable. The working directory, the file listing (including a bunch of information about them), and a side by side comparison of the file on the disk and the one in the repo. Its excellent! All important commands not only are one click away, but have big buttons at the top of the window. Each, with a clear purpose and a descriptive icon. And most importantly, the GUI is exactly what it needs to be, and nothing else. It uses the default shell, which is something that can not be said about iTunes or the Adobe Suite. Why does an application need to have its own “brushed metal finish” on the GUI? Don’t give me that! Keep It Simple Stupid!

  3. Update - May 2010

    I’ve been pretty much knee deep in work lately. School is about to wrap up, which is nice. But it seems like nobody is giving me a free ride to the end of the year, I have one or more “end-of-the-year project”s for just about every class, which will undoubtedly delay the progress of my personal projects and my freelance site/web-dev blog which is now like…4 months in construction. I would really love to wrap it up and make it live.

    I am wrapping up my sophomore year of high school right now, and will be going in to my junior year. This is pretty exciting, I’m a bit nervous about my academics. I honestly struggled a lot this year with my grades. Some things will get better, like not having to take a foreign language anymore (which has consistently been my worst subject) but things may also get worse, my schedule for next year isn’t exactly looking forgiving either. I am also told by my parents that I need to get a job next year…yay, less time for me to pursue what I love. My only thoughts about that is that it either needs to be computer related, or really easy. I don’t care about money, I’ve survived with my allowance for this long so I would be fine continuing the way I am. They just want me to get the experience of a working environment, I can see their point but if things end up the way I have been working my whole life to achieve then I won’t need this experience, I’ll never have any use for it.

    I just finished teaching myself jQuery. Its actually really simple, after I memorize the functions I will be able to write it more fluently but for now I still have to look things up in the jQuery API listings. Its what I did with CSS and now I know all the properties without thinking. It will come soon enough. This summer, I intend to learn Perl. This is going to be a bit different than what I have previously learned, the style of programming is different in a lot of ways. I have selected Perl for several reasons.

    • It can be applied to Web development in many ways
    • It uses the little bit that I know about dynamic scripting languages in it’s syntax
    • It is a great entry level language into future languages such as Python or Ruby

    Depending on how difficult Perl is for me, I may or may not attempt to learn another language before I go back to school. If I do, I am leaning towards Python right now. Python is widely used and is known for “remarkable power with very clear syntax”. A clear syntax is something that is very important to me. I can’t get motivated to learn and code if it looks like I’m learning gibberish.

    I have started, what is now like my 3rd attempt, reviving Quesomanrulz Tutorials on YouTube. I think I can give it a good run this time because summer is starting up and I’ve begun to create a decent balance between bettering myself as a programmer and helping my fellow computer (one who does the action of computing, not the device). I have decided, however, to let quesomanrulz.com die. The domain expired tomorrow actually (from the day this was posted) and I have made the decision based on several points.

    • I never update it
    • I don’t want to update it
    • When I did update it, it only consisted of the embedded video and extended description. Just go to YouTube…
    • The design was horrendous and I have no interest in putting in the effort to design a new one
    • It’s a waste of my time and money

    Hopefully it doesn’t get cybersquatted, but if it does its not a big deal to me. What matters to me is creating videos that other people enjoy and can benefit off of. YouTube partnership is not nearly as important to me as it once was, mostly due to YouTube deciding that they only want to sponsor videos that are proven successful, after all of its release views are gone, which is completely idiotic, so real YouTube partnership hardly exists for anyone who was not already a partner before this change. But, this may be for the best, less of my focus is now on making money and more of it is on creating quality videos that are helpful and loved by my subscribers. That is what is really important.

    That’s about all that is going on right now. I’m just gunning for the end of school and hoping to have a great summer.

  4. Come on Baby Light my Fiber!

    The Google Fiber sensation is sweeping the nation, city after city is jumping in trying to get their community’s broadband speeds up to a legendary 1 Gigabit per Second (gbps). First, for a second, lets look at just how fast 1gbps actually is. If your internet speed down (meaning for downloading) is 1gbps, you are downloading at a rate of 1,000 Megabytes per Second (mbps). Most MP3 files are between 5 and 10 MB in size, that means that an mp3 download would take you 1/200th to 1/100th of a second to download, an 800MB movie would take you 1/8th of a second to download. Well thats all well and good, but whats really the big deal? Mp3s don’t take that long to download right now as is, and movie’s are all streamed (unless you are downloading illegally, which you shouldn’t be) so you can watch and download at the same time and you don’t really notice the file size, the thing is though, this comes in real handy for really large files.

    I went to download the FreeBSD 8.0 image the other day which weighs in at about 1.75GB, the download took quite a long time on my 300kbps (Killabytes per Second) download speed, several hours infact. Had I had a 1gbps broadband connection the download would have taken less than 4 seconds! That is absolutely incredible. Now its easy to understand why people are getting so excited over this. Currently Topeka, KS, Greenville, SC, Sarasota, FL, Baltimore, MD, Austin, TX, Charlottesville, VA, Greensboro, NC, Portland, OR, Grand Rapids, MI, Indianapolis, IN, Ventura, CA, Columbia, MO, Davis, CA, Huntsville, AL, Buffalo, NY, Baton Rouge, LA, Rochester, NY, Fresno, CA, Cincinnati, OH, and San Luis Obispo, CA have expressed interest in the Google Fiber project, just to name a few. I know I would love if Google picked my town for their experiment, 300kbps really sucks sometimes for a power-user like me, I like to consume a lot of bandwidth fast. Is your city trying their hand at woo-ing Google? How do you think google is going to base their decision?  Let me know in the comments.

  5. Why We Need Ogg Theora, Not H.264 for HTML 5

    One of the latest subjects of tech chatter lately has been about  HTML 5 video killing flash and becoming the next web standard. With YouTube, Vimeo, and some other web streaming sites beginning their transition to HTML 5 this seems like a real possibility and is certainly welcomed by everyone. However, it seems that the video format that the HTML 5 video tag will indicate is still up in the air. The two formats fighting for the spot are H.264 and Ogg Theora.

    H.264 is technically a proprietary format. Which is the deal breaker for many, including me. While its not nearly as proprietary as flash, H.264 is a property of the MPEG standards organization which puts it somewhere between proprietary and public and it’s use is not free but is currently being used royalty free by HTML 5 until 2016. It’s a contender though because its well maintained and extremely common, and most people already have the ability to view H.264 encoded videos without installing codecs.

    The Open Source contender is the Ogg format, specifically the use of Ogg Theora video and Vorbis sound. The Ogg format is completely open source. It offers no less video quality than H.264 or any other popular format. Infact it looks a hell of a lot better than youtube does:

    We need to use Ogg as the web standard, if we do we will end up being a lot better off in the future, we never have to worry about having to change everything just because someone decides we have to pay to use H.264, which may very well happen in 2016. With Theora, we get a beautiful quality compression standard as well as further spread of knowledge about Open Source as well as peace of mind. Also, H.264 has a large proprietary-like license while Theora has only a few lines and ends with: no charge and without restrictions of any kind. More about the licensing. Want to try Ogg in your browser? If you’re using Safari or Chrome you can use HTML 5 video right now. Check it out: Big Buck Bunny 480p OGG (You probably want this one for lagless playback) Big Buck Bunny 720p OGG Big Buck Bunny 1080p OGG What do you think about the formatting for the future of the web? Should we stick with H.264 or start the use of the Ogg format? Comments are always read and appreciated!

  6. The “Robots Meta” Plugin for Wordpress

    There’s no easy way to add meta robots tags to WordPress pages, unless of course, when you install this plugin.” When messing around with trying to improve SEO for this blog I read an article about the importance of restricting spider access to certain places as well as the use of nofollow links. To do this I attempted to create a robots.txt file for restricting spider access, unfortunately, later that day Google Webmaster Tools alerted me that I had created my robots.txt incorrectly and was blocking the spider access to my posts (which is obviously a problem). So, being the noob that I am, I looked around for an easier method. I found a wordpress plugin called “Robots Meta” and I’m very glad I did. This plugin is a complete suite for controlling robots on your site, you can generate a robots.txt by selecting answers to questions and you can also directly edit your robots.txt and .htaccess files from the plugin’s options page. You can even select whether to index or not index individual posts as well as choose whether the spider should follow or not follow the links of the post. With all these options, the spider will stay on your site longer and you will preserve more of your “link juice”. Download the Robots Meta plugin from Joost de Valk here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/robots-meta/

  7. Google Buzz…Okay?

    Google Buzz…for those of you that don’t know Google Buzz was released on February 9, 2010 (the day this post is published) and is, simply put, a social networking tools such as link sharing and status updates through G-mail. It is virtually a social network integrated with G-mail. I tried Google Buzz today, and my first reaction is: Why?

    Right now we’ve got virtually two social networks worth their salt, Twitter and Facebook (No, MySpace died in 2003). I’m a twitter guy myself but facebook is fine too, so why would we want another one that does the EXACT same thing as twitter integrated in G-mail? I see no point, literally no point at all. It offers no originality and offers nothing that is not offered by others. Another important point, is that while you should be using G-mail, not everyone does. I actually use Google Apps myself for my email. And to use Google Buzz, you must have a G-mail account, and if you want to use buzz but don’t have a G-mail account you have to create one and have buzz be one tab in all the G-mail features. Now maybe Buzz isn’t meant to compete with Twitter and Facebook and be its own social network, but why then does it exist? Does it really offer anything and if so, why does anyone care about this at all? Why is Google hyping it? Sounds more like a new Google Labs app to me, but this is getting the whole tech world’s attention. It seems to me that the big players online are trying to be all in one. Google Mail goes social, The Facebook social network is rumored to be starting their own web mail (consider the source: TechCrunch). I think web apps these days should have their own niche and excel in it beyond all others and offer something new to users. Do you agree or disagree? Comments are always welcome! Regardless of my opinion, Buzz is taking up quite large amounts of popularity so I will use it periodically and more if it gains more popularity. Follow me: http://www.google.com/profiles/benkulbertis

  8. Why I am Currently Inclined to Say “No” to The iPad

    Before you take one look at this post and say “Just another Apple hater” just wait a second. I am aware I have been a notorious Apple hater in the past, but I’d like to justify that and take an honest look at what I think of the iPad, and why I think what I do. First lets talk about why I have a tendency to hate on Apple. Its not Apple themselves so much as the Apple fanboys. I have no problem with Apple’s products, they’re not for me but not everyone is me. I doubt I’ll ever recommend an Apple product but again that’s me. But I would not go out of my way to insult them. However, Apple fanboys tend to do the opposite. They bash anything that’s not Apple for no reason, and with no evidence to back up their claims. And when you call them on it they just start listing off reasons why their Mac or other Apple product is better than everything else, so to combat this I have to explain why they’re wrong, and that often comes off as a personal insult to the Apple products themselves. So I have nothing against Steve Jobs or any Apple products, they’re just not for me. But I can’t stand Apple fanboys who love to size up their gear.

    With that in mind, this is an honest and un-bias judging of the iPad. I asked myself that if it was produced by Microsoft if I would feel the same way and I honestly can say that I would. Right now, I have to say that I find the iPad to lack a purpose, and it has several deal breaking drawbacks. Its beautifully designed however, but that’s not really what makes or breaks the product for me. The iPad is, and is designed to be, something in between a phone and a computer. In the past, Apple has made great successes by guessing what people want, but they don’t know it yet. Honestly, I’m guessing they made this guess and it wasn’t all that accurate. It lacks a general purpose, and can not accomplish hardly anything in a better way than an already existing device, and the few things it does make more convenient to do are hardly worth paying $500 for. I can see if you have money to burn, but most people, if they are going to buy a piece of unnecessary technology will spend it on something else. My only other gripe about the Apple iPad is the lack of flash and multitasking support. I realize these two drawbacks are beaten to death but these are serious deal breakers in my opinion. HTML 5 in most likely going to replace flash, and lord know I can’t wait until it does. But for now, flash is still an important part of the online experience and something that really shouldn’t be ignored. Multitasking will most likely be released in a future software update but for now its a problem that completely compromises the usability of the tablet. Paying, at the very least, $500 for a device that can’t play music while I read is, in no lesser terms, stupid, in my opinion. Like I said however, the aesthetics of the device are, like all Apple products, really attractive to a user. It will look very pretty on your coffee table, that’s for sure. And the software looks very nice. In conclusion, the Apple tablet is not what I, or many other from what I understand, expected. It leaves a little too much to be desired for it to grab my interest. I’m personally looking forward to the next generation of the device. I think that the necessary changes will be made and it will be a popular product. What do you think of the iPad? Do you think it has what it takes to be a successful product? What pros and cons do you find in it? Comments are appreciated!

  9. Firefox Add-on “Session Manager”

    If you’re like me you often have a load of tabs open simultaneously when working on something. Recently I started development on my first Wordpress theme, and so far I must say its going along well, but when designing I have a bunch of tabs open such as the development blog itself, the back-end for the development blog, several from w3schools (my savior), and other helpful sites like CSS-Tricks and Smashing Magazine. This is all well and good and it helps me accomplish work much faster, but I’m obviously not going to finish all this work in one day, so what happens when I want to be done with development for a while but I don’t want to lost all the tabs I’ve got open, I just want to be able to start where I left off when I come back. Well I could and did just use the built in Firefox session saver, or an Add-On called Save Session (which is essentially the same thing but with a toolbar button), but what happens when between development sessions you want to do other activity in Firefox, you’ve got to work around those other tabs, and then you might forget to close out all your current tabs and save the old ones again, and if you don’t everything was for nothing anyway after all that. I found this quite annoying and thought to myself, what if I could save the sessions to files and then open them with Firefox and have all my tabs back? Well turns out, an add-on already exists that does this and A LOT more.

    This little hard working add-on is called Session Manager and it does everything. You can save your session using the little toolbar icon and give it a name. Then you can reload it later and it will be like nothing ever happened. It will automatically back up your current session so if your browser crashes, you lose power, etc. you will have all your tabs. I had to use it once and it was perfect, like nothing ever happened. You can open up the folder where the session files are stored and copy the files to, say, a flash drive, and then open them in another Firefox install with Session Manager (perfect for Firefox Portable). It also remembers all the tabs you close, so if you want it back you don’t have to dig through your history to find it. And if you do restore a tab it also has you history from that tab remembered so you can use the back button. It does so much, I find myself using it all the time now. Its perfect for coordinating multiple projects. If you want this amazing add-on (I do recommend it) you can grab it by going to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2324 in Firefox and installing it. Its great, be sure to check it out. If you want a complete guide to using this add-on visit it’s Mozdev page. If you like this add-on leave a comment explaining why its useful to you. If you have any other awesome add-ons be sure to let me know!

  10. Apple and Google: Friends or Foes?

    Two of the biggest three technology companies today, Apple and Google are both beginning to reach critical mass. We knew this was going to happen but the question is, are they going to coexist peacefully or compete? It seems that several recent events have sent us, the public, mixed messages. Up ‘till now it seems that Apple or Google have had decent relations. They’re kind to each other, they don’t mud sling. They seemed to have no problem getting along. When the iPhone was produced, their was tight integration of Gmail, Google Maps, and the Google Search Engine set as default. Heck, there are reports that the reason the Nexus One (including the latest version of Android) doesn’t include multitouch in the OS is because Apple asked Google not to.

    Lately, and currently developing, are stories about how Google and Apple just aren’t playing nice like they used to. Over the past year we’ve seen signs like, the Google Voice app for the iPhone App Store being denied and the mini legal battle that ensued from that, Eric Schmidt also resigned from Apple’s Board of Directors due to that fiasco. Now, there are alleged reports that Microsoft and Apple are actually teaming up (GASP!!!) to take Google out by completely removing all Google applications from the iPhone and replacing them with Microsoft products, including making the default search engine on the iPhone Bing! Its no surprize really when you think about it that Microsoft and Apple want to team up to defeat a common enemy. For the longest time Apple and Microsoft had their own private war, now a third player wants to enter the game and has quite a bit already. Is Google the new kid on the block thats going to get bullied around by the other kids? Does Google have enough strength to take on Apple? And if it does can it handle Microsoft as an ally to Apple? Comments are welcome.

    Sources:

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