Some of the software I use

A friend of mine recently purchased her first Mac - a gorgeous Macbook Pro. Having used OS X for sometime, I thought I’d share with her, and with the webernets, what software I use.

• Application Launcher: Quicksilver
• Feed Reader: NetNewsWire
• Chat (other than AIM and Jabber): Adium
• Bittorrent: Transmission
• Disc Burning: Burn
• IRC: Colloquy
• FTP/SFTP: Yummy FTP
• Text Editors (I use different ones for different tasks)
  • General (and collaborative editing): SubEthaEdit
  • CSS: CSS Edit
  • Local and SVN: TextMate
• Twitter: Tweetie
• Notifications: Growl
• Embedded Desktop Information: GeekTool
• Live System Info: iStat Menus
• VNC: Chicken of the VNC
• Remote Desktop: CoRD
• Network Security: Little Snitch
• MySQL Databases: Sequel Pro
• Audio/Visual (anything Quicktime won’t play): VLC

Tiling Video in Quicktime

Recently, I was playing around with some time-lapse video software using multiple cameras with different views of my room, and I wanted to take each camera view and create a single video. I’ve figured out how to do this using only Quicktime.

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Another Semester Finished

Fields and Waves - not as deathly insane as many people complained. I won’t dare say it was easy but you get a lot of bang for your buck with the course which is nice for a change. It gets counted in my book as one of the few courses in which you actually gain something. I really think this course, or at least a watered down version of it (less math), should be required for all engineers. I think too many people don’t really understand, even in a rudimentary sense, how electricity works and how our modern technology functions.

Introduction to Microcontrollers - this was a moderately interesting course. We went over the basic architecture of a microcontroller and then immediately dived into programming them with assembly. Too much felt like magic in this course. It didn’t provide the depth I would have liked. What does this code really do? What is it doing at the low level transistor level, and how is it that adjusting the software changes the behavior of hardware? Why does it work, how does it work? We never really discussed that, it just works. Things just happen.

Hebrew 2 - this course is one of the few taken this semester that lived up to the hype. It is the second year of hebrew. I might have a different perspective since I went into the course with a fairly decent background of the culture and language. I enjoyed learning a few new tenses and verb forms as well as learning a few more of the unique qualities of the hebrew language.

Circuits 2 - Oh boy this class was not fun. I’ve rarely had a class kick ass and take names as this course did. High probability that 30-45 percent of the students failed the course. A good 25% of the students in my class were on their second attempt this semester. Most would think this course is an electrical course, and those people would be terribly wrong. This is a class of analysis. Look at a picture, generate differential equations, solve. Wash, rinse, repeat. Let’s not discount the fact that our professor was absolutely amazing, as she is every semester. With a solid 30% of students failing every semester it is not a course to be taken lightly.

I’ve elected not to enroll in any courses during the summer. My mind just needs a chance to relax for a little while. I need to drink those drinks with the little umbrellas in them and just chill - at least mentally.

Bacon Plague

I have the bacon plague.

You read that right, but it isn’t what you think it is.

A few days ago, my good friend Darius, hit me with a package of bacon at a local Walmart. Shortly thereafter, I started to feel pain in my lung, like I had broken a rib or something of that nature.

The pain grew more acute, until finally, I gave in, and contacted my local medical professional. No, not the indian healer down the street, but rather the doctor of western medicine a few miles away. Turns out, because of my exposure to a sealed package of bacon, I got pleurisy.

I think the term “bacon plague” is funnier and more amusing than “idiomatic pleurisy”. The former sounds like a joke, the latter sounds rather like medi-babble.

Twitter Search API in PHP

The SCCC sent out an email to all the campus leaders encouraging them to use twitter for their campuses. The email also mentioned that state level twitter accounts were being created. It occurred to me that it would be cool to be able to have multiple people posting to a central account without passing around passwords.

I realized that having a script find tweets from certain users with specific hash tags, and then retweeting them as original content would be the perfect way to do this. Tweeting from PHP is pretty well understood. There are numerous libraries and classes to help you do just that, but I haven’t really seen very many PHP libraries for searching twitter.

So I wrote one.

It implements the entire search API as it exists today. And was fun to write too! I got to play with method chaining, something that I haven’t really gotten into before. Surprisingly simple to implement.

If you’re code inclined, feel free to check it out at the twitter search api page here on my very own site.