Rosy not working

As you may know, I recently got my Google Wave account and I have wanted to use some of the web-bots to make it cooler. The one that I'm interested in the Rosy, the instant translator. Rosy was designed so that translation can happen with any combination of the 40 most spoken languages.

My Gmail account has the default language of Italian. I do this, because I speak Italian and kinda like to stay current with the technical terms of Italian. I've been trying to get Rosy to automatically translate my wave posts into Italian, but I can't get it working? I think that maybe I have a bad link to the web-bot. When I add it, about 100 blips are added to my wave for any character that is added to the wave. It's hairy and has a lot of bugs. I'll keep working on it, but it's a Google product and that's why it's currently Beta, like everything that Google creates.

I'll keep you posted.

Google Wave and getting used to it.

I just recently got my Google Wave invite. I was really excited about it. Especially because I signed up to do a presentation on Google Wave and still didn't have an account the week before it was due.

Google Wave is a new collaboration, web-based protocol for better and "awesomer" communication. This was designed to eliminate the multiple copies of emails, frustration with instant messanger, and multiple documents for the same topic.

One of the things that I had to get used to was how to comment, edit, and reply to waves. After watching a few YouTube videos and messing around a bit on my own, I could really find the usefulness of Google Wave.

I'm really looking forward to using this more. For example, my wife and I and a few friends are really into emergency preparedness. It's a lot of fun to have interesting articles, comment in-line to others comments, and other things. I'm looking forward to getting the "Web-bots" to work.
Stay tuned.

New Magic Mouse by Apple

One of the perks of working at the Merrill-Cazier Library is my supervisor wants us to stay ahead on current technologies. At the library, we try to do quite a bit with Apple computers. Just recently, Apple released it's new mouse, the Magic Mouse. For those who are familiar with the trackpad on all new MacBook Pro's are familiar with the "gestures" that can be used to navigate web pages, applications, etc.

The surface is sensitive to touch. It still has the regular features of any mouse including left-click and right-click. As for actual buttons, there aren't any. There are not scrolling features. To scroll, you just drag your finger as if there were a wheel to track with. One of the features I really like is the "Swipe" gesture. You can use this to move forward and backward in iTunes coverflow, web browsers, etc.

As for ergonomics, it's fairly flat, but I like that because it's more relaxed and I don't have to "perch" my wrist like I do with other mice, or playing piano, etc. If I were a reviewer, it's give it 4 or 4.5 stars.

Upgrading my xbmc

When I first took on the challenge of softmodding my xbox, I knew that I would want quite a bit of room on the xbox to store my music, movies, etc. When you get an xbox, the stock hard drive is only about 5-8 GB big. To do this, you need to get a hard drive to replace it as well as the software necessary to clone the new hard drive. I bought a Western Digital 500GB IDE hard drive from Newegg.com. The one I got only cost $70. Once I had that, I just needed to download the necessary software. To clone a xbox hard drive, I use xboxhd maker. This is a terminal-based program that is used to format, partition, and clone the old hard drive onto the new hard drive. The tutorial that I used was found at here: http://www.techfreaks.org/articles/modxbox2.shtml. As the tutorial shows, you first need to backup the C and E drives as well as the eeprom.bin file. This is used instead of the HD password on xbox hard drives. Once you have these, you can restore your xbox no matter what happens. After that, you run a batch file that will create a linux.iso that is used as the boot disk for xboxhd maker and the necessary files to clone the hard drive. I loaded the new hard drive into a computer and fired up the boot disk and when through the instructions. After formatting and partitioning, it only took about 12 minutes to do the entire clone. After all of this, you just lock the hard drive and then swap out the hard drive into the xbox console. Voila! you have a 500 gb HD in your xbox. It was interesting using old tools like Midnight Commander and such to clone a hard drive. Looking at what I have now, I somewhat do have an old computer that you hook up to your TV. Feels like those old Commodore computers.

XBMC

I finally got it working. For the past month or two, I've had a "back-burner" project that I've been working on off and on. I'm sure if I dedicated a day to it and had all the necessary tech, I couldn't probably crank it out in a few hours. I'm talking about Xbox Media Center. This is a cross platform media center that you can use for all sorts of awesome stuff. I basically turned my brother-in-law's Xbox classic into a linux machine that I can stream tons of movies, videos, music, etc.

This is the tutorial I used. http://www.techfreaks.org/articles/modxbox.shtml

Basically, you need to copy a linux installer on the xbox hard drive (as a gamesave) and a game specific gamesave. In my case, I used Splinter Cell. Once you do that, you follow the directions. Basically, this bridges two connections on the motherboard and breaks the encryption that Microsoft put on the Xbox console. It's pretty nerdy.

Once you've done this, you have a "modded" xbox that you can load stuff on. I went further and installed XBMC, so that would be my default dashboard. Most people would stop at this point and be happy. Not me. I continued and installed a 500 GB hard drive. I like having a hard drive 100 times larger to store my games, music, videos (all legal) on the Xbox. More details to follow on my next post.

Dropbox

Right now, I'm taking an ASP.NET class. I have my files, source code, e-book, etc all on different computers. This causes me grief sometimes because I'll have different versions of the files on my different computers and this can get a little annoying. I signed up for Dropbox which is a free utility for online storage. Basically, you download it on your computers, link them through an email address, and you basically have a network folder, but not really on any network. It's nice because I don't have to worry about running out of room on the USB drive or accidentally uploaded incomplete work to Blackboard/Instructure. So far, I've only set it up, but now, I can basically go to class with only a pen and I'm set. I don't "need" my flash drive, laptop, or book (because it's an e-book) and I'm all ready to go.

I would suggest you look into it. http://www.getdropbox.com/
It's also available on iPhone too.

iPhone development and Apple Tech Day

Tomorrow on campus will be our annual Apple Tech Day. This is a nice day with workshops and the like. I've been looking forward for this for a long time because I'm in the middle of developing a Mobile Safari Web App for the Merrill-Cazier Library. I chose to do this, because it will be easier to program as a web app and then program it in Objective-C for the iPhone.
The SDK I'll be using is Dashcode. This is a really neat development tool that Apple developers use everyday. To program in Dashcode, all you need to know is HTML, Javascript, and CSS. Once you have that, you're ready to program for it.
Tomorrow, one of the seminars is on iPhone development. I'm excited to get people on campus involved in developing for mobile devices. Here's my iPhone app so far. You'll notice that it already looks like an app, but it's actually a web page. There are some CSS libraries and Javascript code specific for iPhone that one can implement to give users the feeling that the app is a standalone application. This is one of the topics that I'll be posting a lot about because this is what I really like to do. Stay tuned.

Merrill-Cazier Google Gadget

The Google Gadget I have been working on is now up and running. It was pretty fun learning how to get it to work. Basically, it's an XML document that has to have certain things in the Module Preference headers with contact information as well as screen-shots and such. There is some JavaScript required as well. Basically, once you've made the gadget how you want, you simply submit the XML document to http://www.google.com/ig/submit. Once you've done that, you can distribute the gadget around on people's personalized web pages (such as iGoogle) or embed the code directly in your websites. So... without further adeiu, here it is:


Coming soon, Mobile-Cazier Library iPhone app.

CJ

GetHuman.com. Never wait on stupid telephone menus again

This is one of my favorite sites on the internet. I recently switched carriers from T-Mobile to Verizon and had to talk to an actual human to get what I wanted. The way I did it was with GetHuman.com. On this site, you can get instructions about how to bypass/hack through the caller menus to get to a human immediately. You can also add to it (I've done this and loved it) so if we get everyone doing this, we can save lots of time.

Check attachments for viruses against 40 different anti-virus programs

Ever get an email from someone you know, but are still a little nervous about opening the attachment they sent? There is an easy solution to that. One of the cool things I learned about at Computers in Libraries was www.virustotal.com. This is a website where you can upload a file that you downloaded and it checks it with several different anti-virus and anit-malware products. Once the checks are complete, it shows you a report of any suspicious files found. It's really cool. So... easy steps, when you click on the attachment in question, click "Save" not "Open." Once it's saved, go to VirusTotal and upload the file to their servers and run it. If it finds nothing, it's probably safe. I use this site all the time.

Google Gadget for Merrill-Cazier Library

Back in April, I attended a Computers in Libraries conference in Washington DC. It was a really cool experience and I had a lot of fun with it. One of the seminars that attended was on mobile development. This comprised of Gadgets, Widgets, and Apps. Gadgets are small little programs that run in someone's personal webpage like my.yahoo.com or iGoogle.com. Widgets are the same thing, but they run on your PC's desktop or Dashboard on your mac. Some good examples of these include weather and stock tickers.

One of the things I've been working on is developing a Google Gadget for the library catalog, serials/journals, and Google Scholar. Eventually, this will be available for download to people's personal webpages as well as embedded in useful pages throughout USU's websites.
It's been really fun working on developing something like this. It's basically an XML document with XHTML elements for retreive the information from the website. Now, once a user puts in the search terms, it will automatically forward it, perform the search, and redirect to the search results page.

Upgrading to Mac Snow Leopard

First of all, I have a few things that I needed to move from a journal to this blog so I could include screenshot. This will be explained in a minute. I work at the library and most of the computers I manage are Macs. Since the release of Snow Leopard, our department has been installing it our our iMacs and MacBook Pros. It seems really nice and faster at opening applications. One of the things I use my Mac for is for mobile development for the library. I've been working on an iPhone app for a couple months now, but since I upgraded to Snow Leopard, I can't get my apps to build in my iPhone simulator. I'm working on getting that up and running again.

Chuck Norris

So, I saw this and had to share.

Go to Google, search "find chuck norris"
and then click the "I feel lucky" button.

The results are so true.

Things I like

So I work as a Systems Adminstrator. I like the job and I get to do a bunch of different things related to Management Information Systems. We have over 100 databases that are managed, web sites, and servers. I get to manage a few servers, (mostly with Interlibrary loan, and Course Reserves.) I also manage the library Intranet/Blog which is Drupal-based.

This will get better with time. I'm looking forward to this.

CJ