About three weeks ago I released PlaceMint v1.0. It has what I view as a full set of features and works very well.
Now my work has been recognized and added to the Softpedia listing. PlaceMint has been tested and deemed good and safe for use.
It’s been quite here for quite some time. I can answer all questions of what I’ve been doing since I last came by with one word. Programing.
From January to June I was working at Citrix working on Provisioning Server. If you are too lazy to watch the demo, it’s a system that will let you boot an OS streamed from a server. This lets you have a bunch computers all boot off one hard drive image on a server with out needing a physical hard drive in the computer. Not really a product used by consumer, but it is really cool.
I also did a bunch of work for the lacrosse website. That’s now running pretty stable and won’t need much work to keep running. And since I’ve played my last season with the team, I’ve handed control of the everyday work off to others on the team.
From there we go to my latest creation. PlaceMint is a tool that will allow you to arrange windows into defined slots based on window title. Slot are configurable by the user to ensure the windows are position to each users specific needs. Allows for drag and drop swapping of windows between slots. It has turned out really well and I’m glad that I spent the time writing it. It forced me to learn a lot about programing in C# and utilizing the Windows API, which are two things that are good to be able to get your head around.
Now I’m keeping busy by fixing/adding things mentioned by people that are beta testing PlaceMint. I’m also starting to do the planing steps for my Capstone project. This is the major project that I have to do before I can graduate, where we make something and then show other people and try to convince them that our idea is better than everyone else.
Lilly, I expect your revenge to be swift and vicious.
PRESENTS!!! I LOVE GETTING THINGS!!!!
Hands down best present is the complete Twilight Zone series on DVD. A total of 28 discs featuring 156 episodes that would take just over 3 1/2 days to watch without interruption.
In addition I got the following DVDs:
Futurama Season 3 (completing my set)
Bender’s Big Score
SNL Season 1
Simpsons Movie
The surprise out of the group was SNL Season 1. I’m not sure I’ve even seen a full SNL skit that was made before 1985. But it should be really fun to watch all the old classic comedians perform.
And since watching DVDs isn’t enough, I go some games for my Nintendo DS. Most notably Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass. Plays like a visually spruced up version of the first Zelda games. The touch-screen stylus interface works very well for clicking on items and moving around the map.
The strangest gift was two books featuring pictures of my hometown. At first glance this seems like a generic gift that would get flipped through once or twice before it is placed on a shelf. What makes it interesting is the fact that two other members of my family received the same books.
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A few years ago I noticed that my cousins had very limited access to good music. Since they live in a town that is somewhere between rural and suburban, they are essentially limited to what MTV decides to show. Based on this I decided to give them CDs as Christmas presents to “help” them on their way to good music.
This Christmas it became extremely apparent that one of my cousins has terrible taste in movies. The two movies he received this year were Deck the Halls and 1408. I unfortunately saw 1408 in theaters and watched Deck the Halls Christmas afternoon.
I’ve got a lot of work to do.
In just over 5 months since I mentioned I was designing a website for the lacrosse team, the day has come that it has been unveiled to the world. As usual, a bunch of things were found to need fixing in addition to the things I knew still had to be done.
Go check it out. Northeastern Men’s Lacrosse
I’d say try everything out, but I don’t think the captains would appreciate the random emails they would get if the contact for was used without really being directed at the team.
… eight to go. It’s official, I broke my right pinky finger. For future reference, if you are going to try and stop a lacrosse check with just one finger, don’t use the pinky. It doesn’t work.
In keeping with my habit of not actually posting about something when it happened, I waited about 2 weeks to get this up. I had a big splint on it over the weekend when it happened, which was pretty awkward. But now it now just keeping the last joint from bending (where the fracture is). Going back sometime next week to see how it is coming along. On the whole it could be worse. I can’t write, but I can do most other things with my right hand. Common task that is surprisingly hard with your weak hand: wiping your butt. Non-common task that I am surprisingly good at with my weak hand: Wii Sports.
Last week was my birthday and to celebrate my friends and I went to see Queens of the Stone Age. The show was very good and was the best way I’ve celebrated a birthday in recent history. In an intriguing twist of fates, it was also the bassist’s birthday and according to Wikipedia, we were born in the same year as well. But that’s enough about that, let’s talk about the good stuff.
Joshua Homme is an underrated guitarist. It’s ok, I didn’t know his name either until just before the show. Queens of the Stone Age works essentially on the same level as Nine Inch Nails. It’s Josh’s band and the people he plays with is in a semi-constant rotation. That fact makes the following comment even more amazing. The band as a whole was very tight and always in time with each other. You could see that they were always looking around to catch one another’s eyes to make sure they were in pace with each other.
I went in expecting it to be an Era Vulgaris (newest album) show. I was happily surprised that is was not that at all. They even played some songs that I had not heard before. One of the best songs was Better Living Through Chemistry. It’s one of my favorites of the band, so it was great to hear it live. The lights they used the most were yellow-green and blue strobes that pointed at the audience. The lights were all programed to switch right on the beat of the song, which added to the tightness of the music. While this is a minimal lighting set-up, the performance of Sick, Sick, Sick had one of the best lighting effects I’ve seen. For this song, they added two lights that were pointed at Josh as he played. These two lights would strobe in opposition of each other so it looked like he was turning back and forth every quickly, almost as if two people were standing there.
Other comments on the songs they played go as follows. I would have preferred they use the slot for Feel Good Hit of the Summer for one of their stronger songs. I would have played Suter Up Your Future instead of Make It Wit Chu, but that song went very well so I can’t complain.
On the whole, great show and a great way to celebrate a birthday. Hopefully I’ll be able to top it next year.
…is not up yet and it is not my fault. My end of the website is done. There are a few subjective style changes that could be made, but everything runs.
The reason why the website has not been published yet is because Northeastern Club sports is being slow in giving the team access to server space. Last Monday I sent an email asking for server space. Of the two people that received this email, one emailed me back saying that it was the other person’s responsibility, as he is our supervisor. The reply also stated that all our supervisor had to do was fill out a form online so that the request could be processed.
I did not have any other contact with the team supervisor until I went to talk to him last Friday. He clearly wouldn’t have done anything if I hadn’t gone to see him. He seemed to just vaguely remember that I had sent the earlier email. While I am in his office, he fills out the form and says “next business day, it should be ready”. Next business day means Monday, so I have to wait a few more days.
Monday comes and goes. Tuesday comes and goes. Still no response from our supervisor. On Wednesday I sent an email asking for an update on the status. Again there is no response, so I sent another email Friday morning saying I would be coming by his office to talk to him. He was not in his office at all on Friday.
I am alive. I have just been very busy lately with school. All my classes are good and interesting, with the exception of Technical Writing. It’s not very interesting and thus the homework takes lots of time to do. The light at the end of the tunnel is it is my last writing class. Then I will be free to do just programing and engineering work.
There are a few ideas for posts that I’ve had, but pushed off. I’m going to force myself to go threw with the latest one, I just don’t have time now. But I think it will turn out well.
The lacrosse website is going through the process of being published. It will be nice to see it up and running after all the time I spent this summer putting it together.
That’s it for now. I promise to be back soon.
This was the message I was met with when I went to Dell to see what I could do about my laptop. But I’m getting ahead of myself, let’s start from the beginning.
Thursday morning I was reading some blogs while I should have been getting ready for class. And then, black. The LCD of my laptop had become completely unusable. Faint outlines of where windows should have been could be seen, but even the simple task of following where the mouse was on the screen required much concentration.
Within a few minutes I had told my computer to restart. (Well, actually, I thought I had told it to shutdown. I ended up clicking the wrong button.) As Windows was booting up, the screen worked as it should. Within a minute, the screen had returned to it’s darkened state. Another minute passes as I try again to locate the shutdown option and this time succeed. I head to class considering the fact that I might be the owner of a new computer in a few days and the joys that would come with Vista. (Laptop screens cost around $400+, so it is often not worth it when that money could be used for a newer, better machine.)
The saving grace here is the fact that I have a second monitor attached to my laptop. This meant I could still use my computer, I just had less area to work with. Without the extra screen I would have been out of luck as working around the problem would have been much harder.
I get back from class and start searching for anything that could find that might let me resolve the issue of the broken screen. After scanning some “If you send us your machine and your first born son, we can fix it” websites and one “Ok, these are the steps you want to take to completely dissemble your laptop and do stuff to it” website, I went to Dell’s website.
Nosing around the My Account section I see those magical words listed above. My laptop is just a month away from the end of it’s three year warranty. I hopped on Dell’s instant messaging support service, had a relatively short conversation explaining my situation. They told me they would be shipping a replacement screen to their Boston office and to expect a call in 1-2 business days to schedule an in-house replacement. The call never came on Friday, which is fine, it came promptly Monday morning. We agreed that 3-4 on Tuesday would be a good time for both of us. Four o’clock that afternoon I get a call from the Dell service guy. “I’m sorry, I’m running a little late. I will be there in an hour.” I explained the misunderstanding and moved on as this was the worst thing done by Dell throughout the whole ordeal.
Tuesday comes and the technician arrives with my new screen in hand. I then watch, like a worried mother, as he begins to do surgery on my computer (which would be the one thing I’d grab from my room if the building was on fire). The procedure was fairly simply, lots of tiny screws and some cracking sounds as the plastic case popped apart as it was designed to.
The new screen has been working fine as I count down the next 23 days hoping that if something else is going to break, that it happen sometime before the 17th of August.
