The Bloglines Factor

My pick for this year's best productivity booster is probably Bloglines.com. Bloglines is a free RSS feed aggregator. Most blog and news sites provide RSS or Atom feeds. With a Bloglines account, you can "subscribe" to as many feeds as you wish to follow and Bloglines will track new articles and present them to you as "unread" articles. It is presented in a way very similar to how we see our unread email.

No longer do I have to manually visit each of my regular sites and determine what information is new and what I've already read. Although this sounds like it doesn't take much time, it does add up. Now, I can just go to bloglines.com and all of the new articles are there for me to scan at my own pace. Feeds are scanned regularly and new articles are displayed automatically.

You can select to view articles as titles only, summaries or in their entirety. Hyperlinks to the actual article are provided as well. Articles can be marked as unread, etc., similar to managing email.

Not only does this save time from not having to navigate to multiple web sites, new articles are pulled regularly and it makes it easier to avoid unproductive web surfing. For busy people that frequent multiple news or blog sites, a feed aggregator is a must.

What sets Bloglines apart from other aggregators is that it presents new articles like unread email, rather than as a list of articles without old articles screened out. It can be used to follow any site that offers a feed, including photo sharing accounts (i.e., Flickr.com), shopping sites (i.e., dealspl.us), career sites (i.e., dice.com) and many others.

Mmm... Homemade Ice Cream!

We finally tried our new Cuisinart automatic frozen yogurt / ice cream / sorbet maker. I had the mixer bowl in the freezer for a few days to get it nice and cold. It's recommended to have it in the freezer one or two days before using it for best results.

Thanksgiving seemed to be the perfect day to try it out. I mixed the ingredients, turned on the gadget and poured the mixture into the mixing bowl. In 30 minutes, it was nice and creamy. Since we like our ice cream on the firmer side, I transferred it into an air tight container and stuck it in the freezer for a couple hours.

After dinner, we had our ice cream. It was still a bit soft for our liking. But, the taste was good. There was still more than half that we could save for later.

The next night (tonight) it was firm and much better overall. Reminded us of Breyer's. I am very impressed by this homemade ice cream! Looking forward to eating more! There are other recipes we can try too.

Halloweenie Weekend

Alice, her dad, Emma and I drove up to San Francisco for Halloween this year. Alice's dad has been staying with us again after my mom went back to Hawaii in late September. He's been watching Emma while Alice and I are at work. As always, he's been a great help and still cooks for us regularly.

Halloween this year was on a friday. Since I've been working my schedule to get every other friday off, we left for San Fran after work on Thursday. Well, not immediately after work. By the time we were ready and all packed, it was 8:45 p.m. On the bright side, we didn't hit much traffic. The drive went smoothly and we arrived at Alice's parent's home at 3:00 a.m. Since Sean and Luke had school that day, we were able to sleep in until around 11 a.m. or so.

On Halloween night, we walked a few blocks around Alice's parent's house on Girard Street before going to Alice's cousin Johnny's place for their costume party. Emma was dressed in a cute bumble bee costume that we purchased at Babystyle.

It rained all day on Saturday, so we ended up hanging out at the house. We didn't step outside, except to show Emma the rain. She loves water.

On Sunday, we ate lunch at a Chinese restaurant near Henry and Mary's apartment in the Sunset District. As it turns out, instead of heading back to L.A. after lunch as planned, Alice went back to her parent's to play some Mah Jong while Sean, Emma and I went over to Henry and Mary's to play Guitar Hero World Tour. Emma took a nice long nap too. At 8 something p.m., we were back at Girard Street packing. We started our drive back home at 9:50 p.m. and at 3:20 a.m. we made it back to our apartment in L.A.

San Diego Road Trip

On Friday, October 17, we drove down to San Diego. We had tickets for Sea World's 2-Day promotion, so we went on Saturday and Sunday. That was nice, because we didn't have to cram everything into one day. The Doubletree Hotel was less than 10 minutes away from Sea World and Old Town San Diego. We went to Old Town twice for some good Mexican food. Mommy also bought Emma a cute little poncho. We returned to Los Angeles on Sunday evening.

Started on a J2ME App

I started on a Java Micro Edition (J2ME) mobile application a few weeks ago.  Since I've been doing C programming at work for the last few years, I wanted to do something in Java again.  I miss object oriented programming.  And having an educational Java app for my phone would be a great way to learn a new language while on the go.

Since time is a limited resource between daiper changes (still there, although not as much as when Emma was a newborn), feeding Emma and spending QT with the family, I drew some GUIs and data structures on paper.  I started it in Dia, but paper and pencil allows me to roam about the home.  Drafting on paper can be more transparent anyway.  No clicking on the UML "class" icon, dragging, switching from mouse to keyboard, labeling, etc.  I'll add it to Dia later on when I'm done with the papers.  It's always good to have some diagrams to reference while coding.

Implemented audio playback and image viewing.  Also using kXML to parse an XML document and populate my data structures.  Pretty smooth sailing so far!  

Just learned about LWUIT (Lightweight UI Toolkit for J2ME) a few days ago.  Very sweet!  Last night I started converting my app from lcdui to lwuit.  Not too bad, but I'm glad I found out about LWUIT sooner rather than later.  Some thanks goes to Bloglines.com for helping me follow my news/blogs in an effecient manner.  It started me on a mini hunt for more technical blogs.  Found a few more excellent J2ME blogs that I added to my feeds.

Emma Started Walking

Emma started taking steps before she was 11 months old.  She first worked her way up to 2 or 3 steps before falling, then 5 to 7 steps at a time, then 10 or so steps.  However, on her 11 Month birthday, I was surprised to come home from work to see her walking around the whole apartment!  She's about 11.5 months old now and she still falls down, of course.  But, her walking is getting faster (gulp) and better.

Hawaii Vacation 2008

We went to Honolulu from May 30 to June 11 to visit family and attend my cousin Gavin's wedding.  We purchased two airline tickets and took Emma as a "lap baby."  Flights between Hawaii and the West Coast are about five hours or so.  Emma was really good during the flight.  She was fine during take off and landing, except that when we were returning to LA, she threw up during the descent after drinking her milk.  

We had a fantastic time in Hawaii.  Emma warmed up instantly to Grandma.  It was the first time seeing Grandma in person since she was about two months old.  She was used to seeing Grandma via webcam.  Emma was also happy to see her Uncle Clay at the airport, who she previously saw only through the Internet.  Emma also fell in love with Grandma's cats, Frosty and Tabitha.

Our vacation was fun and relaxing!  Gavin and Taryn had a beautiful wedding!  Hawaii food is onolicious!  

Wireless Troubles

The wireless network adapter worked in PCLinuxOS for a few days. After that, I couldn't seem to bring up the connection again. From reading some posts in the PCLOS forums, it sounds like upgrading to the latest kernel would help me with my problem. However, since I don't have an Internet connection, it's sorta difficult to download and install the latest kernel. Maybe I can download the files using Windows first.. if I ever have time..

I also tried the latest release of Ubuntu linux (8.04 Beta). The adapter works pretty well after following some steps I found in their forums. However, Ubuntu seems to have a problem with my system and will occasionally lock up and force me to do a hard reset. I've had some serious problems with Ubuntu in the past. That's why I've been using PCLOS. Unfortunate, because Ubuntu is otherwise a nice OS.

So, I'll probably use Windows XP until PCLOS comes out with its next release. (Unless I want to give the recent MiniMe variant a spin, which is a minimal version of PCLOS.) Even in Windows, my new Linksys wireless card has issues. For some reason, it'll frequently take minutes to initialize the card after booting into Windows. It's like it's trying to wake up from a long slumber. Pretty annoying when it takes over 10 minutes to be able to get to the Internet.

Configuring Wireless Networking in PCLinuxOS

After moving to our new apartment, we no longer have our computers in the same room. Instead of running an Ethernet cable through the place, I bought a wireless network adapter. First I bought the Linksys USB wireless network adapter. However, it didn't work well and kept dropping the connection. I exchanged it for the Linksys PCI wireless network adapter. Here are the steps I took to get it working in PCLinuxOS 2007 Gnome Edition:

Install the Linksys WMP54G PCI wireless adapter in Windows
Locate the Linksys drivers in Windows (probably under C:\Program Files\Linksys\WMP54Gv4)
(The driver files can probably be found directly on the Linksys CD as well)

Reboot into PCLinuxOS
Add "ndiswrapper" to the /etc/modprobe.preload file (as root)
Reboot PCLinuxOS

Go to Control Center -> Network & Internet
Remove the existing RaLink wireless interface
Select "Set up a new network interface"
Choose "Wireless" and click Next
Choose "Use a Windows driver (with ndiswrapper)" and click Next
Choose "Install a new driver" and click Next
Browse to the "rt61.inf" driver file
The setup program will then scan for wireless networks and show the list
Select your network and click "Next"
Enter appropriate login info
Choose "Automatic IP (BOOTP/DHCP)" and click Next
Leave DHCP selections checked and click Next
Check "Allow users to manage the connection" and "Start the connection at boot"
Start the connection :-)

In Memory of Nicole

I just found out about a coworker and friend that passed away in a hiking accident on Saturday. It's hard to believe that she's not with us anymore. She was young and talented, with a bright future ahead of her. We'll miss her a lot. Another coworker forwarded an email with a poem. The end of the poem is worth remembering:

FAMILY
Are you aware that if we died tomorrow, the company
that we are working for could easily replace us in
a matter of days.
But the family we left behind will feel the loss
for the rest of their lives.

And come to think of it, we pour ourselves more
into work than into our own family,
an unwise investment indeed,
don't you think?
So what is behind the story?

Do you know what the word FAMILY means?
FAMILY = (F)ATHER (A)ND (M)OTHER (I) (L)OVE (Y)OU

KFC With Bullet Proof Glass

After going to the laundromat, I stopped by the Hawthorne KFC since it's along the way home. I noticed that the drive-thru window had a box that looked like it was made out of bullet proof glass. The line was kind of long, so I parked and went inside. To my surprise, the front was covered with bullet proof glass from counter to ceiling. I gave my order and passed my money using the tray, just like at the bank. Then, to get my meal, the employee put the bag in a big bullet proof box that went through the glass wall. The box had doors on each side. I couldn't open my side until he shut the door on his side of the box. I checked the bag's contents. "Can I get some fiery buffalo sauce?" Out came the sauce through the magic box.

That was really strange. I tried to take a pic with my phone, but my phone messes up the photos a lot of times so it didn't come out. I don't think I'll be going back to that KFC. That area isn't that great, but I didn't think it was that bad either. Or maybe it's the Colonel's secret recipe that they're trying to protect.

Got Sony PSP Over The Nintendo DS

I got a Sony PSP on Saturday as a birthday gift from my wife. Originally, I wanted to get a Nintendo DS Lite. But, the DS Lites have been out of stock practically everywhere since Christmas.

The DS would be cool because it uses a touch pen, has two screens and is very small. The games tend to be geared more toward kids, however. My wife's coworker cued me in to this hardware hack for the DS, which I was thinking of using to play music and videos. It also provided organizer software so you could use the DS as a PDA. The hack would also allow programmers to write their own "homebrew" software for the DS. Very cool, but now that I think about it, I wouldn't have time to learn the DS hardware architecture and then write C programs with the DS libraries and tool chain.

My coworker later informed me that the PSP has built-in support for playing multimedia. It also has better graphics, games geared for more mature audiences and has built-in WAN support for Web browsing.

There are too many details to mention here concerning the two systems. The funny thing is that after I decided to get the PSP over the DS, I went to the electronics section of a Target store we happened to be at and saw that they had a bunch of DS consoles but no PSP consoles. I ended up getting it at a GameStop in the South Bay Galleria that same day.

The PSP is a neat toy (that actually came out a few years ago). I loaded a bunch of audio files, photos and some videos (mostly of Emma). I had to use a tool to convert the video to the correct mp4 format. So far, I got to play Disgaea (a PSP game that I bought at the same time) for about 1.5 hours. Not much play time yet, but I'm sure it'll come in handy sometimes.

Download Music from Amazon

There's a cool new song on the radio called Apologize by One Republic. So I thought about Amazon's new digital download music store that I read about in the news. I visited Amazon.com last night (Thursday) and quickly found the song. It was an easy purchase. Just click "Download mp3," accept the terms, and the song was mine, free of digital rights management.

I was wondering when I would be asked to pay for my 89 cent purchase. Even after I downloaded the file, there was no mention of payment. I figured they may have charged my card on file with them (without really mentioning it). A visit to My Account purchase history and I found the transaction in the Digital Downloads category. Yup, it went to my Amex card. Smooth transaction; a bit mysterious, though.

Although I could have found the song for free on the Internet, I wanted to buy it legitimately. For 89 cents, it's not bad at all. After all, people should get compensated for their hard work. (That goes for software developers too!)

Taking Java Mobile with Java ME

Last night I was able to download some free Java applications and install them on my Motorola SLVR L7 cell phone. I also figured out how to transfer mp3 files via USB and play them on my phone! This is awesome, because now I can listen to music or audio books on the go without carrying an extra mp3 player. (My phone doesn't seem to support mp3 files higher than 128kbps.) I've also been wanting to write some educational software (which I already started writing in Java) and now I can port it to Java Micro Edition (Java ME) and run it on my cell phone.

I tried copying music to the phone before, but the phone didn't seem to see the files. The step I was missing was to hit the menu button to switch sources from the phone to the memory card. Similarly, to install the MIDlets (Java ME apps), I have to choose the memory card and then select "[Install New]" to install the MIDlet from a .jar file.

A Sharp Air Purifier For Our Lungs

On sunny days, we can usually see dust particles floating around as they're illuminated by the sunlight shining through our apartment window. Sometimes, the amount of dust is rather scary. But, dust is just one of the things in the air we breathe indoors. The best thing to do is remove the source, and there are many of them. After that, an air purifier can help remove particles from the air.

My first thought was to get another Ionic Breeze from Sharper Image. The one we have is old and makes noise too often (indicating that it needs cleaning). But, after a little research, I decided to buy a Sharp FP-P60CX Air Purifier. I ordered one from newegg.com on Wednesday. Amazingly, it was at our door on Thursday with free UPS Ground shipping. That evening, I opened the box, read the manual (yes, I read manuals) and assembled the air filter. It uses a pre-filter, an active carbon filter and a HEPA filter. It also uses plasmacluster technology to clean the air. Various indicator lights tell what mode it's in and how clean the environment is. It also comes with a remote control, etc. Very nice.

It supposedly takes a little while to measure the air cleanliness. When I first turned it on, it said our place was clean. Shortly after, it said it was slightly impure. Being in Auto mode, I could feel the fan get stronger as it worked harder to clean our room. It's still very quiet.

Today, after returning home from work, the indicator still showed that our air was slightly impure. After dinner, however, it showed that our air was clean. Sweet. I'll see how long it stays clean. From what I've read, air cleanliness may waiver due to many variables. Later, I'll move it to another room.

I hope this will improve our air quality at home, since we spend so many hours indoors. There's a debate about whether early exposure to impurities causes or prevents allergies in children. Either way, I'm sure our air will still have its share of impurities. At least having the purifier should remove some of the toxins and allergens from our indoor air.

Hosed PCLinuxOS 2007, Installed PCLinuxOS Gnome

Last night I attempted to upgrade all packages for my PCLinuxOS 2007 distribution, since I haven't done so since installation back in May. I've read that it's usually a painless process. I loaded Synaptic and started the download, but I went to sleep before it completed (probably about an hour to download all packages). The next morning, I saw that there were error messages saying that there was no space left on the drive. I discovered that the partition was 100% full.

Hopeful, I tried again. Still error messages. This time it warned about having duplicate libraries. Not much I could do here. I rebooted (uncommon for Linux), but found that my system was messed up. I couldn't shut down without logging in as root, couldn't open Firefox, etc.

I had to go to work. During my lunch break, I searched the web and PCLOS forums, unsuccessfully. I don't feel like posting my problem and waiting for help. I found out that PCLinuxOS Gnome 2.12.2 was just released on 12/29/07. Great! I was thinking of trying it out anyway. Now is a good opportunity. When I got home, I downloaded the cd image and installed it over my old PCLinuxOS 0.93a partition (which I didn't use anyway). I currently reserve two partitions for Linux and one for Windows.

Installation was a breeze. I did have to add PCLOS 2007 to the boot menu, but the installation GUI made the task simple. In under 30 minutes, I was running PCLOS Gnome. So far, I am very pleased. The distro has a polished theme. The Gnome desktop is very clean and responsive. The preselected set of applications look good. I'll try AbiWord, but I may need to install OpenOffice instead. All my drive partitions appear to be mounted successfully--even the FAT32 partitions.

I haven't spent more than an hour exploring this new distro, but so far I have a good impression of the Gnome version of my favorite Linux distribution!