Spoon – Got Nuffin

I was watching an episode of Chuck called “Chuck vs. Operation Awesome“.  Besides the silly humor and marginally interesting plot, the show has some REALLY great music.  The theme for the show is Cake’s “Short Skirt, Long Jacket” – the extremely contagious instrumental track for it that is, with some sound effects – here’s the [...]

Posted on: 12 February 2010 | 6:53 pm

My favorite smell

I was just browsing Reddit, and saw a discussion about people’s favorite smells.  Unfortunately, it looks like my favorite smell is also the overwhelming winner on Reddit.  I don’t know if I should be happy, or if I should be sad that my favorite smell seems to be a lot less original than I thought. My [...]

Posted on: 28 January 2010 | 8:27 pm

My Mac OS X essentials

I’ve recently had to copy my development environment over to a new MacBook due to the fact that my old one developed severe wear and “shut down at random times by prompting me and assuming I said Yes to the shutdown prompt with any keystroke”-disorder.  Yes, sad, but I do put my laptops through a [...]

Posted on: 18 January 2010 | 11:06 pm

Reading CHM manuals on Mac OS X

Using Mac OS X as my primary development platform is great since I can emulate my LAMP production environment a lot closely than I ever could developing on Windows.  One thing I missed for a while is being able to load the CHM (Compiled Help format used on Windows) manuals for PHP and MySQL quickly [...]

Posted on: 24 November 2009 | 7:46 pm

NextJump’s Overwhelming Offers Blackberry App

My brother Konstantin has been working on a BlackBerry app for NextJump’s Overwhelming Offers site.  Looks like the app got some press coverage today, on PCMag’s TechSaver site.  Way to go Konst, too bad the article doesn’t mention all the hours you’ve poured into that application.  Oh well, the developers behind the product rarely get [...]

Posted on: 16 November 2009 | 3:09 pm

Explanation of a Flash chip’s storage management routine

Hats off to Louis Gerbarg on his excellent write-up of how a Flash chip manages reads, writes, and most interestingly – deletes.  I have a relatively comprehensive understanding of how file systems work from classes back at CMU.  But back when I was taking those classes, Flash storage was basically non-existent in a file system [...]

Posted on: 8 August 2009 | 4:48 pm

Nobody (even Jonathan Abrams) remembers sixdegrees.com anymore

I was just pointed to an article where Jonathan Abrams pretty much claims that he invented friend requests and possibly even social networking. He takes pride in his claim to inventing the idea of requesting and accepting friendships online. But because he’s been around it longer than anyone, he’s also getting sick of all the friend [...]

Posted on: 23 July 2009 | 12:44 am

Official Wordpress App for Blackberry

Wow, I was just stuck on a train from Philly to New York, and for lack of anything better to do, I looked up the progress of the official Wordpress App for the Blackberry. And I’m proud to report that its out, works great, supports multiple blogs, and looks great! You can download and install over [...]

Posted on: 12 July 2009 | 6:54 pm

A different kind of Twitter timeline

Its been about a month since I started using Twitter, and I have to say the thing I’m most disappointed with is the fact that its so easy to miss interesting information.  Depending on how busy I am, I may have the time to spend half a day catching up to stuff on Twitter, or [...]

Posted on: 6 June 2009 | 11:10 pm

Sustainable business models, and why ABC has LOST their way

If you’re wondering about sustainable business models, bear with me while I rant about ABC’s free episode streaming, or just skip the first bunch of paragraphs to the Sustainable Business Models heading.  Ohterwise bear with me, I’ve got a couple lung-fulls to spend talking about why I’m not having the best time I could be [...]

Posted on: 27 May 2009 | 10:45 pm