Hotashi - Jack’s Blog

It’s been a really long time since my last post. Just haven’t had the urge to blog these days. It’s getting really busy at work with a bunch of different projects. That probably adds to my laziness when I get off work.

No, I’m just kidding. I’ve been doing quite a bit in the past little while actually. Aside from the regular house cleaning and cooking tasks, Ams’ and I have started planning our wedding. We even set up a little wedding blog for it!

You might notice the wedding blog is a Django site (so says the little button at the bottom). It’s coded by yours truly, Mr. Jack Hsu. I’ve actually released the code on Google Code with the New BSD License. So if you have Django running somewhere and wanna check out the blog app, please feel free to do so. It’s still a work in progress, and I’ve been working hard the last week or so to get the code ready for public consumption. The documentation is coming along as well!

I <3 Django!

I just love watching Robocup. This one is especially impressive. I love how the goalie for Osaka dives to block shots. I laughed quite a bit while watching this clip.

Everyone in my team at work (Front End developers) just got administrative access to their PC today. It’s ridiculous to thing about working as a programmer and not have the rights to install things, but that’s what we had. This got me thinking about the post on The Programmer’s Bill of Rights over at Coding Horror. I went and had a quick look to see if it mentioned admin access. To my surprise the post said nothing about such thing. Maybe it’s just too stupid to even mention not having admin access? Or was I spoiled during all my co-op terms?

In any case, giving programmer the right to do their work properly is very important, and it should definitely be include in our bill of rights. ;)

If you work as a programmer then you know as well as anyone that you just can’t work so many hours in a row. For myself, I usually have to take a break after 2-3 hours of working max. Programming takes tremendous amounts of brain power, so have to take a breather every once in a while. I spent most of my free time reading blog posts, and I find it easier to use an RSS reader so you only have to go to one place to get all your blog-reading fix. I personally prefer using Bloglines, their interface is great — especially the new beta version. Another good choice is Google Reader, which you can actually incorporate into your iGoogle portal page. There are many others out there, so find one your like and use it. Now for the good part. :)

I’m gonna list the blogs I frequent the most, ordered by my visiting frequency.

1. Lifehacker: Hands down my favourite website to read. You get “tech tricks, tips and downloads for getting things done.” Some tips require a more technical-minded reader, but overall the instructions are pretty straightforward. This is IMO the #1 website to increase your productivity in life.
2. Racialicious: A blog dealing with racial issues in the US. Although the focus is mainly on American issues, most of it applies to Canada too. And it’s always good to know what’s going on in our neighbour south of the border.
3. Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters. This is purely a geek site, so if you’re not “into” the whole geek thing maybe you shouldn’t visit ;). It many topics, including gaming, new technologies, and politics. I find that I skip over most of the stories, but there are some great ones on there. Be sure to check out the comments too, I actually enjoy reading those over the actual articles themselves a lot of the times — RTFA!
4. Gizmodo: A website dedicated to gadgets. I think that pretty much says it all. It’s a place I go to, to see all the cool, shiny gadgets that I probably wouldn’t be buying. Did I mention they’re shiny?
5. Coding Horror: A must-read for an programmers. Jeff Atwood writes about coding horrors that programmers create, aka the “human factors.” He provides great insight into many problems, including ones that seem trivial at first glance, like writing an algorithm to shuffling a deck of cards.
6. Joel on Software: Joel is one of the most well-known programmers out there. He heads Fog Creek, the company that makes FogBugz. The must-read post is his talk on Computer Science and Software Engineering that he gave at Yale (parts 2 and 3 too!).
7. Ajaxian: Probably the best blog to read for any developers working with Javascript, and of course Ajax (as the name suggests).
8. RedFlagDeals: Deals on many different products for the Canadian buyers. They have have many deals added everyday, including deals on many electronic products.
9. The Daily WTF: Readers submit their WTF stories working in the tech industry. Mainly just for laughs.

All of the above sites provide RSS feeds, so you can subscribe to them using your favourite RSS reader.

I finally got around to installing Greasemonkey and Stylish for my Firefox. For those that don’t know, Greasemonkey is an extension that allows you to run custom Javascript scripts for pages that render in your browser. Stylish is basically the same thing, but for CSS not Javascript.

I haven’t gotten around to doing anything with Greasemonkey yet, but I’m pretty sure a week from now I’ll have a bunch of scripts running. :P The very first thing I did with Stylish is to hide all ads on the website. I think the social ads was a horrible idea for facebook. I’m so tired of seeing an ad in my newsfeed that tells me so and so is a fan of x and y. This little script below will eradicate all known ads on facebook!

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document domain(”facebook.com”) {

#ad_0, #ad_1, #ad_2, #ad_3, #ad_4,
#ad_5, #ad_6, #ad_7, #ad_8, #ad_9,
#ssponsor, .advert, .ad_body,
.ad_capsule, .ad_media,
.comments_ad_image, .sponsors,
.sponsor_absolute, .social_ad,
#new_stuff_content, .nextstep { display:none !important; }

}

Quick and dirty does it! Goodbye facebook ads!