Proper Posture

For the amount of time I sit at my desk, I should care about the manner in how I sit there. Computer Ergonomics was the first article which I checked. Following the guidelines:

• I put 2 books under my iMac, raising the center of my monitor to be directly at my eye sight looking foward.
• Raised my chair, so that my belly button is elevated at the same level as my desktop.
• Pushed my iMac back, allowing my arms to fully rest on my desktop.

After about 2-3 weeks of doing this, I’d say it’s helped. I’m already used to sitting at my desk for hours on end, but I feel less stressed maybe, less cramps while doing so now. Recommended advice I already follow is to get up every 20 minutes or so and wander around my apartment. Keep the blood flowing!

Twice As Good

The second article, LCD Monitor Arms, had been in my mind for awhile, but I didn’t have the funds to support it. I’ve had two LCDs screens available to me for a few years now and I would never go back. However, on my current setup, desk space is at a premium and I can’t space items out as far as I would like. That means that positioning a 2nd LCD on the right hand side of my desk was interfering with my right handed mouse. The solution was a desktop mounted arm.

The Ergotron LX desk arm is awesome. I mounted my old 20″ LCD onto the arm and now I can free up the desk space beneath the LCD, along with position the LCD exactly where I would like it. It’s not cheap, around $125 with tax for me, but a worthwhile investment for the time being. I’m quite pleased with it.

My desk situation is quite comfortable right now, although I will have to wait another year before I buy the Aeron. I would highly recommend to take sometime and evalute your own situation!

A friend of mine, Drew, maintains a set of Perl scripts on CPAN to parse and help analyze your iTunes library XML file, aptly called Mac-iTunes-Library.

I installed the package via CPAN:

install 'Mac::iTunes::Library'

Then coded up up a script to pull the top 50 artists based on the number of tracks. Assuming I listen to these tracks, it’s probably a good statistic that I like this artist.

#!/usr/bin/env perl                                                         
use strict;                                                                 
use warnings;                                                               
 
use Mac::iTunes::Library;                                                   
use Mac::iTunes::Library::XML;                                              
 
#full filesystem url of your itunes xml file
my $library = Mac::iTunes::Library::XML->parse('iTunes Music Library.xml');
#hash of <Artist, numTracks>
my %artists = $library->artist();
my @sortedArtists = ();
my $count = 0;
my $artist;
 
#sort function
sub numerically {
        $artists{$b} <=> $artists{$a};
}
 
#sort artists by the number of tracks, then grab the top 50
for my $artist (sort numerically (keys %artists)) {
    if( $count < 50) {
        push(@sortedArtists, $artist);
    }
    $count++;
}
 
#Now take the top 50 artists sorted by number of tracks,
#and sort alphabetically, and print
foreach $artist (sort(@sortedArtists)) {
    print "$artist, ";
}
 
print "\n";

Now, I’m a beginner with Perl, but from a quick parse of the results, there are still some case-sensitivity issues that I’m looking into; “Boards of Canada” and “Boards Of Canada” are seperate artists, but that’s also a problem with iTunes not caring much about case either when saving data. With some minor formatting to the output, you should be rewarded with a list something like this:

311, Aphex Twin, Armin Van Buuren, BT, Bear McCreary, Beck, Cake, DJ Miko & Mini Me, Daft Punk, Deep Forest, Depeche Mode, Dieselboy, Eels, Eminem, Foo Fighters, Frank Klepacki, Hybrid, Incubus, Infected Mushroom, Jack Johnson, Johnny Cash, Juno Reactor, Korn, Machinae Supremacy, Massive Attack, Metallica, Moby, Muse, Nine Inch Nails, Orbital, Pink Floyd, Placebo, Prodigy, Queen, Queens of the Stone Age, Radiohead, Rammstein, Scooter, Stabbing Westward, System of a Down, The Chemical Brothers, The Crystal Method, The Offspring, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Smashing Pumpkins, The Strokes, Tiesto, Weezer, Yo La Tengo, Yoko Kanno

Hurray data!

SFO-NYC

Following WordCamp, I had my last week of internship. I said my goodbyes and got some great advice before leaving. I went to a wedding in Los Gatos and reunited with some friends college. What stuff I couldn’t carry with me on the plane, I packed into boxes and mailed out. I dropped off my bike at my bike shop and had them deal with mailing. Then I was off, a Sunday morning around 7am. Flying Virgin America across the country was one of the best experiences I’ve had flying in a long time.

NYC

I spent about 4 days wandering around NYC once again. It had been awhile and I missed the city. I stopped at the Met, Guggenheim, and MoMA for some cultural experiences, while literally just wandering the rest of the time. I ate all my favorite food again and loved it. I had some beer in the East Village. I read a book in Battery Park for a few hours and took in the sun. NYC is a lovely city.

Rochester

Rochester is not a lovely city. I try not to be too scathing in my review of this city, but the longer I spend here, the more miserable I get. My work ethic toward has improved greatly, mainly in part to not wanting to go out at all. I’ve eaten everywhere, seen all the hobos and landmarks, and driven the streets too many times. 6 months of 70 degree, sunny California weather makes me happy. 6 months of snow, rain, and freezing weather doesn’t.

It’s week 3 of classes currently and I’m chugging along. I’m doing some good programming in C, finishing up some personal work from the summer, and ready to move on. I have a full year left at RIT, I’m going to make the most of it, but I will be very glad when I’m done.

Early Morning

I showed up to the Mission Bay Center around 9am and was pretty amazed, it was my first time over by SOMA. Lots of apartment buildings and construction going on, that area is going to be amazingly once it’s all completed. I checked in and found out that talks had already started! The breakfast food was delicious, with bagels, fruit, and Peet’s coffee. There were 2 conference rooms, upstairs and downstairs, which were the User Track and Developer Track respectively. After looking at the entire schedule, I settled on most of the developer talks. The majority of the talks were only 20-30 minutes long, which was a bit disappointing. Not enough time to dig into anything really. My highlight of the morning talks was on LOLCats from Ben Huh. Ben gave a very straightforward talk about the viral nature of LOLCats and presented things in a serious matter, which I was surprised about considering the nature of his content. I also enjoyed the talk on Microformats from Tantek Celik. Microformats have caught my interest since Kevin Marks demoed them at Google IO, I hope they continue to gain interest, I think they have a lot of potential.

Lunch and Afternoon

Buffet style BBQ with macaroni and chicken, vegetarians be damned! Long lines at first, but they subsided quickly. Another meal done well. I headed into more talks and was quite happy to hear Nginx mentioned by Chris Lea. Nginx is a Russian developed webserver that is substantially faster than Apache or Lighttpd, but due to be Russian, it’s always been hard as hell to find docs for it in English. From what I heard, the situation has improved now, so maybe it’s time to switch back to Nginx now! jQuery was demoed, the Wordpress APIs were shown, and BuddyPress, a Facebook-like version of Wordpress was shown, to be public by end of the year.

I found there was a very distinct difference between users and developers, I could tell which side people were on immediately. Users just created content and have no clue about anything else. I applaud them for pushing forward and having a passion, someone needs to poke the developers to be productive. One of the other interesting aspects with the crowd was the rampant use of flickr and twitter. Everyone in the room was twittering nonstop. I would post a picture to flickr, mention it on twitter, and watch it appear on 8 laptop screens instantly. It was a unique social experience.

One other cool thing were several tattoo of wordpress that were lying around. They asked us to apply them and mentioned prizes. I added the tattoo to my foot and then ended up winning a WP Moleskin notepad! Very cool contest and prize.

WP Tattoo

WP Moleskin

Evening

Things died down by 6pm, but not before a performance by the SEO Rapper aka Chuck Lewis and it was awesome. I wandered around for a bit and then wound up early at the after-party at Pete’s Tavern with some other folks from the day. We chatted about the iphone, blogging, and tech stuff in general until 9pm when the open bar hit! After that, bourbon warmed my belly and I mingled for the rest of night.

It was a well run event with plenty of volunteers and good food always within reach. Good talks and good company all around. Matt Mullenweg was the informal moderator of the entire event and was always hanging around the edges of the room. From here, I will try to get more involved in the wordpress community and contribute to wordpress development. Hopefully, I can attend again next year!

Thursday

We arrived around 6PM in LAS and checked into our room pretty quickly, just dropping off our things and then heading out to dinner at the Treasure Island hotel. Walking around outside in the Vegas heat is interesting, it’s like a hot sauna or something, but the dry heat isn’t that bad for short periods of time. We continued partying and enjoyed the night someplace, I don’t even remember.

Friday

I woke up around 10 or 11am and showered and headed down to the first day of talks. Plenty of good info and interested people. The rooms and talks were crowded, but well managed. The goons, people in redshirts running the event, took charge when needed and herded people properly because even for the all smart people there, we all become stupid in a crowd. I attended talks until 5pmish, then we headed out to dinner someplace I forget, then went to a party at the Hard Rock Cafe around 7pm. Getting drunk and realized it’s only 8pm is such a weird Vegas moment. We hit up a few more parties all around, there are just so many, it’s so fun to have them all be free pretty much. It was a late night and I ended up sleeping at the Treasure Island hotel somehow too! I find when I’m drunk, I love to ramble about how awesome wordpress is.

Saturday

Didn’t wake up until noon and after pampering, headed to more talks by 2pm. I attended the EFF panel, which was informing people about a bunch of MIT kids received an injunction over a talk they were going to give, my friend Drew has more info. It was interesting to get the info first hand and hear people chatting about throughout the conference. Talks ended around 6pm and we headed to the Star Trek Experience for warp core breaches and really good dinner, which is surprising for a place like that. The Star Trek yearly convention was also going on at the Hilton surprisingly, it was cool to see the other nerds wandering around in full costumes. The people dressed as Klingon’s were fully in character and quite impressive.

I attended a few talks Sunday morning 10am talks before we headed to airport early and just hung out for a bit. There are around 3,000 slot machines in the airport, you can gamble constantly. Overall for the conference, it was an awesome time to meet so many cool people interested in learning and sharing together. I had attended Google IO a few months back, which is more of a programmer and web development gathering and the overall themes were quite different. IO was all about building new things, imagining what is possible and how to accomplish it. Defcon is more like “stop doing it that way, you’re doing it all wrong” and being very technical and thorough about knowledge. Just a different way of doing things and it was interesting to get that perspective. I have to go back next year!

For the immediate future though, I’m heading to Defconf 16 this weekend in Las Vegas, a well renowned hacker and security convention. I’m also attending Wordcamp 2008 next weekend. At the very least, I should share my thoughts from these events! I’m definitely looking forward to a fun couple of weeks!

Google Reader lets you setup a shared items website, which then has a few neat themes, including ninjas and ice cream! This is awesome.

Obama Shirt

My shirt came just in time for his victory!

The trick is that FB has an RSS feed of your last 10 Notes, whether you wrote them on FB or imported them from elsewhere. WordPress allows you to import RSS feeds. Find the RSS feed on FB that your 10 last Notes and save it locally to your computer, then import it into WP! To access your FB Notes past the first 10, delete the Notes you just imported off FB and your RSS feed will update to 10 new notes. Repeat until all your data is off FB and onto WP!