I’ve decided to give iPhone development a try. I have a few ideas for cool mobile apps that I’d love to implement so that I can learn a new platform, a new language, and maybe make some money on the side… However, I’ve remembered what I dislike most about programming – configuration.
Archive for the 'tech' Category
iPhone Reference Errors
February 28, 2009Free Speeches Online
February 24, 2008I just learned about this cool website: www.ted.com. TED is an organization that asks famous/interesting people to give 20-minute speeches and records them. Now, on their website, you can watch speeches that they’ve collected over the last 24 years. A lot of this content is probably available on YouTube, but the signal-to-noise ratio is much higher on TED because of the limited format and the high barrier to entry.
This morning, I watched a talk by J.J. Abrams, and yesterday I watched a theramin concert and a speech on aging by Aubrey de Grey (whom I’ve read about, but had never seen before). If you have twenty minutes to spare, you should check it out.
Dancing for Engineers
January 6, 2008Now here’s a topic I’ve been thinking about for a while. I started going to salsa dancing lessons fairly regularly this fall, but am having a hard time remembering the long sequences of complex moves that I learn in the MIT lessons (which are great, by the way). Even when I can remember them, it’s hard to do them on the dance floor with a girl who doesn’t also know what is coming, while staying on the beat, etc. etc. So, at some point this fall, I thought to myself that there must be a better way to learn enough sequences of moves not to bore a good follower to tears. Read the rest of this entry »
The Results Are In – makeyourownjeans.com
August 23, 2007UPDATE – May 30, 2010 – anti-spam reaction
In the almost three years since I wrote this post, it’s constantly been either the first or second most popular page on my whole blog. I haven’t ordered from makeyourownjeans.com again, though I still wear their jeans almost every day. The shirts eventually wore out and I had better ones, so they’re long gone.
However, I’ve been getting more and more annoyed with their sketchy business practices, and I can therefore no longer endorse them. They’ve tried to spam this page with positive comments numerous times, they used my pictures below without my permission, and just today I searched Google for ‘blog.mpdaugherty.com’ and found out they’ve been using my review when spamming other websites. The last one is the last straw for me, because not only do I have no control over it, but it also hurts my reputation. I would never add comment spam to someone’s blog or website, and I don’t want them (or Google) to think I do. If you’ve come here through one of those links, I apologize.
On the other hand, if you really just want to read the review I wrote so long ago, go ahead. It’s unedited below.
—- Original Post —-
A while ago, I wrote about makeyourownjeans.com, a website that sells custom-made clothing, that I thought might be the answer to the tall (or short) person’s dilemma. It’s been a long time, but on August 6, I finally went ahead and placed an order with them for two items – a pair of jeans, and a formal shirt.
A Post Free-Web-Hosting World
May 30, 2007I’ve been trying to decide what to do with my online presence after graduation for a while now. I had a few choices about what I could do once my MIT hosting disappeared:
- I could give it up and suddenly not be online.
- I could use generic services like GMail and Blogger to maintain a basic web profile.
- I could host my own server either with a dynamic DNS entry or with a static IP address and dedicated hostname.
New Theme
May 28, 2007As some of your may have noticed, I have a new theme for my blog. This one is basically Vertigo Blue by Brian Gardner. Thankfully for me, he released the theme for free for people to use. All I had to do was make new versions of the header graphics and slightly modify the sidebar (I didn’t like how the links displayed), and I was off.
Unfortunately, soon after changing the theme, I noticed a sharp drop in visitors on my Google Analytics reports. Since my readership is so low anyway, I first attributed this just to people being busy and/or not noticing anything. However, after three days of zero visitors showing up (even when I tried to make visitors show up by visiting myself), i realized something was wrong. Turns out, I forgot that the display of WordPress blogs is entirely decided by the theme, and the way I had gotten Analytics working before was to put the javascript code into the theme footer. So, when I changed the theme, I also eliminated all the tracking code from my website. It’s back in there again (you can check), so everything should be back to normal.
So, in conclusion, let me know if you like the new theme. I’m a little worried that I won’t be able to keep it over the summer when I will probably host my blog on wordpress.com for free, but I guess I’ll figure that out when it’s absolutely necessary.
Useful Guitar Hero
May 21, 2007
When I bought my MIDI cable a while ago, I had assumed that mostly I’d be recording myself play piano, and I have done that a bit. However, it turns out that there is more to having a MIDI keyboard than recording. You can also play games with it.
One of my favorites is Synthesia – a Guitar Hero clone, but for piano. I love the concept of this; Guitar Hero is such a fun and addictive game that some people will play for long hours to become good at it. Why not use the same format to teach people a useful skill?
Apartments and KML
May 19, 2007I’ve been looking for apartments lately, so I’m constantly looking at Craigslist postings, finding the addresses, putting them in Google Maps, and trying to estimate how far they are from the T-Stop, whether it’s a good location or not, etc.. However, this morning I realized that Google Earth is a great tool for this. You can add more than one address, check distances, etc.
So, I decided to play around with KML a little bit and make a map of where I want my apartment to be. Now, I can just put the address in Google Earth and see if it makes it into my desired area quickly. Check it out:
Midi is Great
March 3, 2007Well, my new Midi-to-USB converter arrived in the mail today, so now I can use my Casio WK-1630 keyboard as an input to my computer. Combined with GarageBand, I think I’m going to have a lot of fun. I love the fact that I can transcribe the music I play as I play it, even when I’m just improvising. Far too often, I make up something that I kind of like, then I forget it and can never get it back. Now I can.
So far, however, I’ve only recorded one piece – it’s just me making stuff up without a plan, so there are a few shaky parts. Perhaps now that I have it transcribed, though, I’ll go back and improve upon it… Listen if you wish.
Home Cooking
February 23, 2007One of the great things about Burton Conner is the kitchen in every suite. Not only can we save money from not having to eat out every day, but I think it provides an opportunity for students to become more independent. Learning to cook and stock a kitchen will certainly provide rewards later in life.
Some people, however, aren’t really sure where to start or what to make. Other times, we all run out of ideas and can get a little sick of eating the same pasta night after night… To combat these problems, though, there are a number of resources that home cooks can look to for inspiration.
The Reluctant Gourmet is a site specifically devoted to home chefs. They have some great articles on general cooking techniques that you can use with whatever ingredients you happen to have (I’ve made some delicious sauces after reading their feature on pan reduction sauces).
Epicurious.com has a huge selection of professionally edited recipes that you can search through based on ingredient, and a number of other criteria. They also have a cooking dictionary that’s useful when trying to figure out what a term like “al Forno” means.
Finally, AllRecipes.com has an enormous number of user-submitted recipes. The quality of these recipes can sometimes be a little spotty (since they’re user submitted), but people also rate them, so you can at least see what others have to say.
