A Curious Collection of the Musings of One Jeremy Wise

I’ve held off for some time on upgrading to an iPhone.  The tax for leaving Verizon was too high, and AT&T’s network is not desirable, especially around West Michigan.  So I was rather pleased when Verizon announced the coming of the Motorola Droid.  I was excited because I’ve been an avid user of Google products (Google Apps for your Domain, gmail, Picasa, etc), and because it’s an open platform with a fairly simple development environment.

I’m learning Eclipse now, and bringing my Java memories back to life.  The hardware is quite impressive, and it’s nice to have a modern phone with me.  The downsides:  The camera isn’t the quickest (or highest quality), and there are still issues syncing with Microsoft’s Exchange servers, but for a first round, the Droid is awesome.

Looks like Microsoft finally got the picture. After installing Windows Vista this week, I got an interesting popup bubble for the Windows Customer Experience Improvement Program:

Which Programming Language are You?

Well, AJAX seems to be sweeping the web right now. Everyone’s doing it. Well, I can’t get left behind!

I AJAXified the calendar control over at the Faith Baptist Church website. Now it loads events and updates itself without page refreshes. Topher said it would be a pain in the neck… Topher’s learning Sajax ;-) Now I have to update the calendar page and the announcement roll so EVERYTHING is run through AJAX. Did I mention AJAX enough in this post?

AJAX AJAX AJAX.

Sitting in church this evening, while many people were … yeah, listening to the sermon? I was stuck in my mind, writing PHP and javascript. As you all know by now, audio sermons are available on our church website. The notes for each sermon will be coming shortly. But Pastor Bob has a great way of tying powerpoint presentations into every sermon. I’ve thought several times of ways to incorporate them into the website… listen to the sermon while watching a replay of the powerpoint slides. But low bandwidth.

Enter AJAX! I write a javascript function that fires off every second. Fires back to a PHP function. If a new slide exists for that second, then its content (HTML) is fed back to the page and the slide is updated. When the show is done, everything stops. Because things are asynchronous, it may take a second or two to load a slide, but it will never drift off any more than that. Now I just need to figure out how to easily convert PowerPoint into good looking HTML. Maybe drop some images and just go straight text? We’ll see :)

Have a look-see: http://www.fbcgreenville.com/slideshow/

I mis-spelled address.  Typed addresss instead.  The fix?

s/sss/ss/;

Nifty, eh?  Yes, it’s one of those days.

At the recommendation of Topher, I’ve finally moved my blog from Springthrough’s back-room web server to a more widely-accessible hosting solution — Dream Host.  The features available at Dream Host are incredible, including FTP/SSH access, multiple domains, email (with support for SMTP across a port other than 25), one-click-installs for WordPress and other neat software, PHP/MySQL support, and much more.  The service will cost $10/mo, but I can do a little side work and develop some websites and cover that in a hurry!  Thanks, Topher!

I bought a new PDA a couple weeks ago. My old faithful Clie’s battery finally crossed the line, so I figured it was time to upgrade. The model I got is the HP iPAQ HX2495. It comes with 802.11b and Bluetooth built in, so I can surf the web, send and receive email, pull Avantgo content, etc. whenever I’m at a hotspot or within 65 feet of my laptop (through Bluetooth). I know PDAs are on their way out (though no one knows what will replace them yet), but I find mine invaluable for scheduling and Greek translation.

It’s been some time since I’ve seen something truly awesome on the web. I posted a few days ago about Writely, but here’s something that’s light years better than even that. EyeOS is an operating system (OS) built into your web browser. It has a modern GUI with a desktop, moveable, resizable windows, etc. There are several applications already, such as a calendar and a calculator and even a web browser. Go have a look at something awesome. :-)

Oh, and for what it’s worth, EyeOS is open source and appears to be written in PHP. There is also a .Net version (.Net 2.0). Very cool stuff.

It’s that time of year again. Every several months, I have to reinstall Windows on my development machine. Somehow it still seems to eat itself up from the inside out, and spyware and snotware seem to seep in and take over my poor computer.

But alas, I now have a fresh, clean machine. It boots fast. It runs fast. It loads programs into memory very quickly. I love this point in a computer’s lifetime. Unfortunately, when you run Windows, it’s a very short time indeed. Linux just rocks :)