Work it...

This video is more than a little weird, but after the slow start, it gets more impressive. I wonder how much practice this took?

The truth can sometimes hurt

What else needs said?

Drivers and Manuals

• NetGear WG-111 V2

Beat the stress with bubble wrap

How can you deny that satisfaction that comes from patiently working your way through a piece of bubble wrap? Ok, maybe you can, but it's still fun. Here for your popping pleasure is a virtual piece I lifted off the net.

The Wyzo experience...

lifted from the Wyzo website

Wyzo is an awesome new browser that focuses on optimizing your online media experience. Wyzo gives you easy access to all your favourite media sites, downloading media content and inform your friends about your discoveries.
BitTorrent™ Made Easy

We've integrated your torrent downloads inside our download manager, so downloading torrents has never been so easy! Now you can manage your web and torrent downloads from the same window. Start downloads with just one click.
Secure Web Browsing

Wyzo allows you to browse the web securely using the latest protection and safety technologies. Built from the ground up on the Firefox core, Wyzo will make sure your experience is smart, safe, and hassle-free.

I downloaded it and it seems ok, not all that it could be. I will play around with the torrent client more to see if that's really worth it. I also am trying out the FireFox plugin with higher hopes. Check it out for yourself at: http://www.wyzo.com/.

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

The title is shamelessly stolen from Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google. This guy is the consumate hacker, IMHO. Check out this paper he put out on the topic. http://www.norvig.com/21-days.html

Programmer, Developer or Hacker

What's the difference between a programmer and a developer, or even a hacker? A question no real hacker or even a developer would ask, but one I still hear from co-workers or friends in one form or another.

I've met and managed a lot of programmers, I've even worked with a bunch. It is not a bundle of fun. Programmers tend to be people who write code of some type in A language that they are comfortable with, for a paycheck. They are not known for independent thinking and are not known for passion about their work.

Developers on the other hand usually tend to be people who write in several languages, with a passion for whatever language is cool to them for whatever reason they have, rational or otherwise. They tend to look at the world as a problem to be solved and will argue, sometimes passionately, over their brand of right for the solution. They work well independently and sometimes with others. I have worked with a number of these types and I enjoy it a lot more. These are some of the more fun people to hang out with. They usually have a good sense of humor and are fairly well read.

Hackers are another breed. A really good dev may desire to attain true hacker status, but not be willing to make the time required due to a personal life. I have worked with and also managed a couple of real hackers. Of the three types, this is my favorite. Not because of the impressive social skills attained by 20 out of 24 hours at the keyboard, rather because they are generally so incredibly intelligent. I wish I could say I have attained hacker status, but it would be untrue. I have been called one, and while flattered, I have to say that at best I was an aspiring hacker. With the time I spend on dev work at this point in my life, true hacker status is a long way off for me. It has become a term loosely thrown around anymore and misused as bad as the word Diva in pop culture.

Legacy Video Games

I ran across a find today that will make any old gamers wax nostalgic. Check out http://www.everyvideogame.com/play-nes-Contra_(U).htm. Contra and a whole bunch of other NES games are available via an online emulator.

Plethora of web links

Another good find: http://www.alvit.de/handbook/

This is a page with links to all sorts of web content and developer tools and widgets. Enjoy

Blog Hacks

I have several blogs and online "properties" that I maintain and I wanted to share styles and content among them. I also wanted to minimize redundancy. To that end I am collecting most of the customizations here, with pointers to more detail in some cases.
First off, I needed to share content among my sites so I needed a file host. GooglePages fit that bill very nicely and can be found over at http://googlepages.google.com.

Shared Lib Includes:

These go at the top of every page / template I use

<link href='http://jking.net.googlepages.com/sharedBlogStyleSheet.css' rel='stylesheet' type="'text/css'/">

<script src='http://jking.net.googlepages.com/sharedBlogJS.js' type='text/javascript'>

These two files hold the shared styles that I can then customize further in individual site files.

Google Pages

I recently gave up my paid hosting account to give a go at using all free web services to create a new virtual site that offered even more functionality. One of the needs for this project was a place to store simple things like shared files, js libs and what not. I spent some time banging around the net until I remembered that google page creator offered just such a thing. Huzzah, problem solved and even better, staying on the base google platform.

Check out google page creator at http://pages.google.com/

Online Office Replacements

As I move to the online line mashup model, I have been looking at replacements for other applications that I use. What can I do using just a web browser? These links are for tools and sites that I have found useful for this purpose. This was originally posted on my main site blog, but here I will dig a little more into the guts I hope.

For now, check out the links below.

Google Docs

This site from Google has a decent word processor and spreadsheet as well as some other gadgets but it is not tops in functionality.

Zoho

This suite has the best setup I have found so far. I like the way the software works and the suite is robust.

CSS Based Slider Menu

Thanks to Stu Nicholls, over at CSSPlay I got a jump on making vertical sliding menus for my site from a standard, compliant data definition list. I was looking for a good way to make a menu that did not fly all over and was simple to use, while being compliant with existing standards. I took what he had as my foundation and modified it slightly for my use. You can check it out on my main site.

Attach an icon to anything

Through the magic of CSS, we can do so much more then ever before with web pages. One of my favorite recent tips is the ability to attach icons to links (or really anything) based on custom attributes. Rather then re-write the whole article, I am linking it here: http://www.hunlock.com/blogs/Attach_icons_to_anything_with_CSS.

Try it out and be amazed. The tip works on all new (2007) browsers but will degrade gracefully for older systems. They will simply not see the icons.