Ceaseless Student

So I was going through Lifehacker and I happened upon a little blurb about Flock. Flock describes itself as a social browser. Aight, I thought.

I downloaded it, started it and found that it had a lot of shiny stuff and then Firefox as a browser. As it turns out, that’s pretty much exactly what’s up. Flock is a Mozilla based browser. The stuff it offers is a huge emphasis on rss feeds, blogging, uploading pics etc.

The blogging interface is really not worth it. I guess I could hit either of my blogs from a single place, but it opens in a new window so it might be a longcut for me (I keep both blogs open in tabs all the time). It does have a neat right click menu with a “blog this” option. This would be great if I had a quicker blog like that; however, there are Firefox extensions that do this (eg JustBlogIt).

So that was lame. Then it has this media stream thing going up top, which displays your flickr stream or equivalent from some other site. Pretty cool, but eats screen real estate. So I tried the upload functionality. This was wonderful. It was magnificent. It gave me so much control for so little effort. Oh fantastic. Auto resize (important due to the limited monthly bandwidth thing), easy naming. Really great stuff.

In short: lame browser; great flickr uploader.

When I logged into Flickr (for the first time in a long, long time. I found a message telling me that I was now one of the Olin flickr groups admins. OK. So I posted an effortless 27 pics and then added them to the Olin group (yay Flock). Here’s the pathetically lame part. This makes me the second biggest contributor (48 pics). It’s really easy guys.

Upon a teacher’s suggestion, I downloaded vvvv to help with some image processing I needed to do. It’s a visual programming language that’s pretty awesome at a/v stuff. I’m just going to toss in some pics instead of ranting for too long… I should note that it’s kind of an annoying program and that most of my, uhmm, code(?) is just variations on code that others put online.

This program is hot. The parts of the image that look a bit messed up are because the camera is out of focus and has been substantially tampered with physically. Now this isn’t actually what I need I think, but it’s close. I need to differentiate color not brightness. This might be easier in the YUV colorspace instead of RGB… I need to look at if vvvv has support for such a transform and I need to look at the code of the effect node. The effect node is the one that has a bunch of inputs in the bottom left. It’s the one that sets the brightness threshold and outputs the appropriate color. It’s evidently the only node that you can easily get to the source for (a .fx file).

Sweet.

In case anyone wants to replicate this: I used this main patch, this effect file and this effect patch. I’m pretty sure that the second patch is a demo you don’t actually need, but I didn’t want to check and I wanted it available if it was needed.

Oh man. Highrise is yummy. Thanks to the people who suggested it to me!

I’ve got only like 20 contacts up so far, but I should get much faster at this as I get a bit more practice and actually establish a system. I’ve had to do every single entry like 5 times because I keep adding things when I think of them. “Oh yeah… photos!” also phone number formats, labels, and, this one is key, birthdays.

This works really well as a tickler for birthdays or, hell, anything. I’m going to chuck all of my single task to-dos here and keep Mindmeister for projects and other more complex things. The ability to have tasks linked to people is rather awesome.

Complaints: Well I do have a lot actually. Inputting people is slow. I can’t add a photo or put on a label until after the initial creation.When I add a label I have to click OK instead of pressing enter. Little things, but things that shouldn’t exist in a serious site. I mean, I have on my list of to-dos for Olindocs “make OK pressed by enter.” Honestly. Not pro dudes. Oh. I also wish I could label contacts en masse. But I can’t. Lame. This requires much more forethought. Or going back to fix things. Or both.

That all being said. This is one-time. I can more than deal with it. It’s notes are awesome. I’m not sure if i talked to anyone who reads this about one of my original plans when I first got a Moleskine. It went like this:

I’d meet someone. I’d get their name. Then I’d pull out my Moleskine and scribble something. I’d then have a normal conversation with them; except for the part where I’m writing stuff in my notebook every 5-15 seconds. Well. Highrise gives me a reason to do something like this. Except not until after the conversation and only with people I don’t see all that often. Not quite as cool but hey.

The free version of Highrise has this limitation about having a single case. This means you can only have 1 foldery thing that keeps different things related. OR. I could use either labels or an additional contact to keep a project together. Pretty hackable.

In short: Highrise = cool. I will report on any changes in my opinion if it goes to pretty good or less or OMG this is the mostest awesome! or more.

It pains me to say this, but I no longer use Netvibes.

Netvibes is beautiful. Netvibes is functional. Netvibes has a ton of features and gadgets that you can toss onto it.

Alas. It’s functionality has been losing ground to a variety of sources for a while now. I enjoy using new things (new to me not necessarily new in general) so changing methodology is fairly common but I really thought I’d be with Netvibes longer. It was my killer app. I used it for my to-do lists, I used it to keep track of plans, I used it to do a good bit of the standard recommended GTD stuff. I used it for my RSS feeds. I used it for podcasts. It was, without a doubt, my home on the internet.

But as time went by I started using stikkit for some kinds of lists. Then I started using MindMeister for more near-term lists because it allows me to display more information faster. And then the dagger to the heart: Google.

You might be wondering: “If you liked it so much, why’d you stop using it?”
Well, at this point the only functionality that I was using Netvibes for exclusively was RSS.

Google homepage, I mean iGoogle, sucks. Hard. It’s RSS is clumsy. You can’t read items in the cute little frame; it doesn’t expand, it links. You don’t have a lot of control; it’s lame. It’s gadgets generally don’t seem to be worth the trouble, the community is less developed than the Netvibes ecosystem. Basically, not a cozy home. The coolest thing about it is the little image that changes with day and night and stuff.

And then there’s Google Reader. It’s not as pretty as Netvibes. But it’s too damn good for me not to switch. All items view is downright sexy. Every item, expanded, in an otherwise spartan page; kkeyboard shortcuts that let me get my reading done fast. So effective. I could’ve replicated something like this with Yahoo pipes and all of my RSS feeds and Netvibes, but if it’s not the best tool for the price it’s got to go.

I love Netvibes, but not as much as I love efficiency.

So I forgot to bring a CD over to the AC today. Luckily I’d made an iso so I just mounted it and I was good to go. People were quite infatuated with the idea so I thought some of you all might like it.

I use two free programs to make an iso and then mount it in a virtual drive.

The first is called LCiso Creator. This program just reads a cd and makes a copy of it into a .iso file for you - super easy to use.

The second is called Virtual CDRom. This involves doing a little bit more doing, but the readme is quite easy to follow. It might take a couple of minutes the first time; whatev.

You can get them both from me here. Enjoy!

OK so back to some Python. Here’s the general setup I have (if you’re just tuning in, you’ll want to start here):

I have every document in a series of directories such that its location is …\semester\class\prof\author.

Single Directory Database

This is mostly what we did yesterday (undersores represent tabbing b/c I seem to be having some trouble putting tabs in right in blogger. Stupid html):

def prelim(location):
_import os

path_file=open(’/…/OlinDocs/path.txt’,'r’)
path=path_file.read().replace(’C:’,”).replace(’\\’,'/’).split(’\n’)
for location in path:
_prelim(location)

First it imports the module for looking at directories. Then it gets out all the metadata that we previously embedded in its location. by splitting the location at every /. Then I just assign each portion of the location to the variable it defines. You’ll notice that I use negative indices so that I don’t have to wory about how many directories in I’m looking. This works just as well from C:\\ as it does from C:\\~\~\~\~\~\ (that’s actually a little bit of a lie b/c windows sucks, but we’ll get to that later). I have a little if statement to skip adding part_db.txt to the database; this is a file that I’m using to build up a database and not something that needs to be on OlinDocs. What goes on next is just writing out a text file. I do end up doing dome cool things like having the text file have some html (I have <> in the real program) so that the metadata can include links. Then we close the file and we’re done. We have a database that describes all of the documents in the directory. It’s actually not in its final format because I just wrote the data for each file in a new line instead of doing the one line of names and one line of metadata thing. This is really easy to change later so I’m just keeping this step simple.

Cool. Now all of our directories have a file called part_db.txt that tells us about the documents in it, but it’s in the wrong format and scatter everywhere. This is getting long, so we’ll merge these databases and put them in the right format tomorrow.

All right. I’m finally going to talk a bit more about OlinDocs. (btw, I’m sad that I haven’t gotten, like, anything)

Let’s talk making a database with Python. In order for this site to work, I need to put variables that define the documents and their metadata into an easy to access array. My setup is basically one line gets all the names and one line gets all the meta data. For example:

data_names=['my car','my pen'];
// brand,name,weight
data=[['Honda',''Accord','like a ton'],['Pilot','G2','something in ounces']];

I think I’ll talk about some Python stuff today and put it all together tomorrow. That being said, here’s a link to the text file for my generator. And if you want to get the .py file you can right-click here and save it.

File management in Python:
-First we need to import os. This let’s us use all the other commands that we’ll need.
-Now try
location=’/Documents and Settings/’
for file in os.listdir(location):
print file

Nice. This lets us see files. We can pretty much do anything like copy files, remove files, make directories, rename files etc. but I won’t put that all here; that’s what the internet’s for.

Making files:
Making text files in python is useful for myriad reasons. For example, they’re persistent (thus useful for saving data) and usable by other programs. The way you make a text file is just by opening it:
new = open(location+’/newfile.txt’,'w’)

The w means open it in write mode. You can also open it in append mode or read mode (a and r respectively).

Now that it’s open we can put stuff in it:
new.write(’Hello World’)

If you need tabs or new lines use \t or \n. If you need a \ you will have to escape that to \\.

If it were open in read mode, we could do new.read() or new.readline() to get a string that has the entire file or the next line of it.

String Tricks
This is likely old hat to a lot of you but strings can be manipulated in a lot of powerful ways. For example we can use replace to find a string and change it with another string by using string.replace(’s1′,’s2′). And there’s also one of my favorite things in Python: string.split(’s3′). This returns a list of items that were separated by some marker (eg comma-separated value files [.csv]). These can be used in-line to give you a lot of firepower for very little real-estate. A cute thing that my program does is
path_file=open(’/Documents and Settings/bdieseldorff/My Documents/OlinDocs/path.txt’,'r’)
path=path_file.read().replace(’C:’,”).replace(’\\’,'/’).split(’\n’)
This baby takes a text document that has a path with all the directories I need to look at in a form that I can copy and paste from Windows explorer and turns it into a list of locations that python understands. -First it reads the whole file
-Then it replaces C: with nothing to leave just \dir\subdir\subsub etc.
-Then it changes all of the \ with / (remember \ is escaped)
-Finally it makes a list of locations with every line break defining a new location in the list.
Pretty neat. So much stuff in so little space. Sweet.

Cool now my program nows where to look and we know how to write stuff in files. Tune in tomorrow for more on how we get from this to a complete database.

In other news I played a little bit of soccer today. I am incredibly out of shape. I’m gonna start running daily (starting tomorrow evening actually).

I have burned through far too much money since i got to Olin for the summer. I’ve purchased cutlery, plates, bowls, mugs, pitchers, salt, pepper, a pillow, etc. but I’m counting these as startup costs. Actually, even some of the consumables are kinda like startup costs: 18 packs of hot cocoa will last a long time. I’ve also started buying groceries to eat and stuff; it’s messed up.

I’m also getting new glasses; I just feel like I’m buying stuff for being old. It’s a little bit saddening but I temper it with bouts of playing Magic and Smash Bros. Oh yeah. I also purchased a Smash Bros. cartridge.

Anyhow, I’m excited to see what NASA has in store for us on Friday. We’re currently just learning stuff about x-rays and imaging and the beginning of the universe and whatnot. Also some modeling. I got to model some circuits today: hooray circuits!

———————-
To make this more lifehackerish like I like it, let me tell you about portable apps. These rock. They’re stand-alone executables which means you can run them from anywhere like, say, a USB drive. They’re super-handy! There’s a few that make this suite priceless:

-LCISO Creator > tell it what drive you want to make an iso from and your done. so simple. so beautiful. my cd carrying baggy thing will soon be obsolete. (I suggest you get VCDrom to mount the iso files so that you don’t need to use your cd drive again!)

-Deepburner > not quite Nero, but way better than the junk they package with new computers

-OpenOffice Portable > that’s correct. a full office suite on a stick.

-explore2fs > incredibly cool. browse your files stored in linux from windows!

-wireless keyview > see WEP keys that are registered on a computer real fast-like! great for when you visit someone and they don’t know they’re own WEP key. Also good for being an extremely lame hax0r!

-7zip > uncompress anything and get some lean mean compression.

-Firefox, Filezilla, Gaim and you are online!

-foxit reader and vlc media player mean you have better ways of seeing pdfs and every sound and video format imagineable than comes on a normal computer.

+ a lot of programs to look at your computer’s inner workings (processes, registry etc.)

You can also have antivirus stuff etc to get ppl out of fixes…

I love these b/c I can use them on the computers of people too lame to have decent programs.

I’m really quite good at this whole procrastinating thing. Instead of any work today, I’ve been all sorts of other things. I’ve played lots of Magic and Smash, eaten like 5 snacks, watched TV, and, of course, wasted as much time as is easily feasible on the internet. Part of what I worked on was my internet image.

Lifehacker had an article on the googleability of one’s name. Mine returns 50 hits (w/o quotes); the first 22 are me. I love my name. I claimed my blog on Technorati, pinged some sites using Pingoat, and set up an account to get site statistics for my blog at StatCounter.

I’d wasted a couple of hours pretty well, but I wasn’t done. No ladies and gents. I searched for every variant of my name imaginable. “I wonder how well do I show up with just my last name?” etc. Oh man. I was there forever. Also (for any hippies out ther) I came across an environmentally-friendlier version of Google called Blackle. The idea is that people save energy by reducing their monitor’s energy output. Cute huh?

I ended up finding out that some dude with my last name (Stefan Dieseldorff) was on IMDB. He evidently produced a 60 minute film called Kreator: Hallucinative Comas. It doesn’t seem like that movie was well-received. Actually, it barely seems like the movie was received at all.

Anyhow, Technorati alerted me to the fact that my blog had been linked to by a sneaky member of the Olin community who’s blog is not on PlanetOlin. Speaking of PlanetOlin and other rss readers, I doubt my blog counter will end up getting anyone other than me… oh well.

And now folks, I leave you to do some work. Before I go to sleep I will have finished Signals & Systems work. This means that, after my final at noon, I will only have one class left. Meta. Oh Meta. History paper. Communication paper. Final deliverable. Presentation. I might be missing something? *sigh* I feel sadly unmotivated… Time to get to work. I’ll do The SigSys project writeup. That seems awesome still. I’ll problably be posting something about that either soonish or around expo time.

So I haven’t posted in a while. I’ve been being really lazy/recovering from school. Oh wait. it’s not over. back to work. But before I get back to work…

MindMeister rocks hardcore! This webapp is great! you can make lists of lists with details into a nice mindmap that can collapse or expand etc. Super-nice. And useful since I’ve got lots to do. I’m currently working on the circled part (click to make it bigger if this is as illegible as I expect).*sigh

Me and Mr. Red Bull have some work to do.

ZOMG. I hear my blog is the third hit on google if you search “cascodes.” *searches…

Oh man! It’s true!:
That’s insane. Haha.