Centauri's Thoughts

I spent another long day learning some graphics tricks for web design. The biggest lesson I learned is that graphics are really fluff, and that content matters more. Not only does content matter, but HOW it is constructed and how concise it is matters too!

I found some awesome sites today, that show examples of good design without being complicated graphically.

Its comforting to know that we have moved beyond the flash and glitz, and that the content and wording itself is what matters.

I have so many links, that it is not practical to list them ALL here, but I will list a few:

for colors

tutorials and good info

web design, CSS, graphics, tutorials

GIMP tutorials

This is a bit like the #followfriday in that these are people I follow and my reasons:

This list is the merest hint into all that are out there!

For StarTrek:
@wilw (Wil Wheaton) because he is his own geek and knows it! (too cool!)

@levarBurton – Because he has a charm all his own.

Blogging:
@lizardoid (LittleGreenFootballs blog) – I've been following Charles Johnson for years.

Funny:
@theEllenShow (Ellen DeGeneres) - She cracks me up, but she has good things to say.

@KrisColvin – a web designer with a head for biz and other aspects of life.

Humor and science:
@badastronomer (Phil Plait) - I've been reading his stuff since the FoxTV moon hoax.

uplifting:
@tonyrobbins – Great Motivational speaker I first learned of in the movie “Shallow Hal”

B2Evolution supports a Twitter update plugin via leeturner

If it ends up too spammy, I may turn it off, but I tend to tweet most blog entries as it is, so this should save some effort.

Lithium Ion batteries can be made to charge MUCH faster by changing part of the process of how they are made

A prototype battery made using the new technique could be charged in less than 20 seconds - in comparison to six minutes with an untreated sample of the material.

This is a factor of 18, so a laptop that takes 2 hours to charge now would only be 6.66 minutes. A large Lithium Ion battery (say for a hybrid or EV car) needing an 8 hours charge would be reduced to 26 minutes.

The whole article is here and another reference here.

Update: now up by factor of a 100

Now Kang and Ceder have found that coating each ball with a thin layer of lithium phosphate accelerates this process even further, perhaps because the coating is an excellent conductor of lithium ions, swiftly transporting them to and from the surface of the nanoballs.

If cellphone batteries can be made using the material, they could charge in 10 seconds flat, the researchers calculate (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature07853). Bigger batteries for plug-in hybrid electric cars could charge in just 5 minutes - compared with about 8 hours for existing batteries - though this would require a very high-powered charger.

Reference: newscientist.com

I can barely believe its been only 10 days since I create a twitter account and jumped right in! In this span of time, I have found people, conversed, learned of special web sites and analytical tools all made specifically for twitter and to track tweets.

I now see all the various uses that can be applied, and how groups of people can interact. A very interesting thing indeed.

Its everything from the most practical: family members to track a caretaker, to random thoughts, to special interest area updates, and anything else one can imagine a broadcasting platform could carry, in addition to total interactivity in that group.

There are those people out there following and being followed by nearly 40,000 people. Managing this would take (in my mind) software other than the twitter interface, which shows all people you are following is strict chronological order.

Some special tools are being developed to watch for keywords, which might be better suited than following 1,000s of people who speak specifically to things of interest to you on occasion (along with everything else). I just cant imagine reading the tweets of 20,000 – 30,000 people and getting use of that. There are tweet aggregators which can make this process easier.

That being said, twitter is still a new and interesting new social app, and as such, you just never know where the social crowd will take it.

I have seen Tag Clouds in use for about a year or two now, but I believe they have some interesting potential for a visual reference of content in many more ways than is being seen.

One recent app I saw was based on the bio's of your twitter followers: http://twitpwr.com/5vk/

So, armed with that knowledge, I made my own small app that text can be pasted into. It strips common words like a, an, of, the, by, for and so on.

Give it a try at http://www.centaurihome.net/cloud.php

Twitter, short blogging (140 characters or less), random thoughts.. hmmm.

Twitter has been around for a while now, and I hear more and more of it as of late. A few of the cases I knew of it a few years back were one of the Egyptian Blogger Alaa (AKA the Big Pharaoh) being held. Many people use it, according to what I see, some famous, some not, and some that became famous, for one reason or another, if only for a short time.

It definitely has it uses in small social circles or even for temporary groups of associated people in coordinating events.

It does take on a larger life though, it seems, in others.

I suppose following the tweets of another, purely as a social experiment, has its values. We shall see.

See all of twitter at twitter.com and see my own wandering thoughts (though not too many yet at twitter.com/Centauri7)

I have been reading Dilbert for a number of years (even have the stress ball personifications of the crew), but reading the comics, and reading the blog of Scott Adams adds a whole new dimension into the person behind the comics.

Even though I have been reading dilbert comics since the 1990s, I only discovered the blog around 2002 (more or less). He comments on all sorts of things, and his perspectives on various topics are thought provoking. Its been an interesting journey, to say the least

Since I am a programmer, I can totally relate to the cubie lifestyle, and what goes with it in corporate life. Although I dont have any co-workers exactly like Wally, Alice or the others, bits of many types of personalities are indeed captured in his characters.

I have been a programmer for many years, and when I was first learning computer languages, I thought I could solve all the worlds problems in this language I was working in. After all, I was proficient in it, and could see many uses for it.

After some time and few more languages, I began to learn that each language has its strengths and weaknesses. Although I can make most any language I am familiar with, do what I need it do to (with some coaxing), I lost those magical goggles that said any one language was perfect for all things.

That brings me to the power of scripting and pipelining. lets say you have something like this:

grep mystring Myfile | sort | cut -f1 > newfile

grep could be a C program, and sort could be a ruby script and cut could be a perl program. Of course, in this example, they would most likely ALL be C, but the point is they don't have to be.

Its a matter of using the best tool for the job. Some are good at string processing, some are tooled for the math, some can deal in arrays and hashes extremely well. The point is to understand the strengths (and weaknesses) of each language, and make the best decisions you can on this (given that you understand each language sufficiently well).

I suppose this is why I explore so many different languages, and try to do my standard program project in each one to learn the basics of the language (my standard project is to make a rolodex, which incorporates the entry and edit of name, address, city, state and zip, phone number into a collection of records, with full add, edit, update and delete abilities)

Thousands of Microsoft's Zune media players - the software company's answer to Apple Inc.'s iPod - unexpectedly conked out Wednesday and showed users an error message, prompting references to "Y2K for Zunes." The problems appeared when people tried to start up their devices.

Frustrated users lit up Microsoft's online support forum for Zunes with more than 2,500 messages by Wednesday afternoon.

Late Wednesday, the Redmond, Wash.-based company said the outage affected only the 30-gigabyte Zune models and was caused by a problem with their internal clock. Microsoft expected the problem to clear up as the clocks ticked over to Jan. 1, though users will have to jump through some hoops to get their Zunes back to normal, including letting the batteries die down completely before the devices will restart successfully.

They cant even do a leap year, and they want to put their software in cars?

Reference