OkCupid wut?
October 26th, 2010Per a friend’s prodding, I recently got on free dating site OkCupid. Even though I am already seeing someone, it’s still fun to answer the questions and find my real-life friends. The site is full of surprises, like this email that I received today.
(I deleted my personal info from the email. No stalkers for me!) 
This left me thinking, “Well that’s nice wait wut?” Take from this what you will…
Kind of related, OkCupid does a bunch of cool (geekish) data crunching and publishes the findings on their OkTrends blog..
Another novel (and silly) use for Roomie
October 11th, 2010I’ve been working (rather obsessively) on Roomie for the past week. In specific, I have rewritten the XML-based protocol that allows the desktop client to communicate with the web service. (Say “hi” to it here.) The new library (which I call WebCommunicator) is sooo much easier to use than my old one, but still has all the nifty (and important) encryption and anti-hacking features. I will eventually publish the protocol as an independent library. (Give me a bit to use it more and work out all the kinks.)
But enough technical talk. Lets get to serious business. Here I have a little RoomieScript that I wrote, just as a proof of concept.
<RoomieScript>
<ZWave.PowerOff DeviceName="Coffee Pot" />
<Core.Loop>
<ZWave.WaitForChange DeviceName="Coffee Pot" PollInterval="5 Seconds" />
<ZWave.PowerOff DeviceName="Coffee Pot" />
<RoomieBot.TextDavid Text="No coffee!" />
</Core.Loop>
</RoomieScript>
Pretty Picture: Torg Bridge
October 11th, 2010I took this picture on August 27, 2010 while waiting for a friend outside Squires Student Center. You can see Torgerson Bridge in the distance.
Sneaky Chrome updates again
August 21st, 2010Chrome is a true Google product. Google, whose point of view is the Internet and constantly-updating content, updates Chrome silently. Restarting Chrome very well might yield new features, which is what just happened to me. My initial reaction was, “Ah, very cool, but wait what did it used to look like?” So here’s a screenshot of Google Chrome 5 versus 6:
Roomie gets some CSS schooling
June 24th, 2010This week I have been furiously re-writing a few key elements of the Roomie website. Specifically, I scrapped the old device button controls, which you can see here. They were ok, but they were very rigid in use, offering only two different pictures to back the buttons. Zooming on mobile devices didn’t work so great either, since the images were PNGs, raster graphics. Now I have created a button framework entirely in CSS, HTML, and ASP.NET controls. Because of this, I can easily create new kinds of controls completely in code, and they even zoom cleanly as well. My original vision for this was to enable the user to create “virtual device controls”, which would display next to the regular device controls.
