Web Based TODO List: TaskFreak!
For the past year or so I have been keeping a digital copy of the list of things I need to get done (aka my todo list). Originally, this was simply a text file that I stored on the computer science lab computers at my college. This was handy because I could always access the computers via ssh and retrieve my todo list. Eventually, that became too annoying to manage and I installed the program gtodo on all my computers. I use sshfs on all my machines so that I could store the todo list on those same computer science machines. This was a great system, but now I must graduate from college, which also means that I have to leave my account as well. Since I recently purchased a domain and web hosting I figured a web based solution would be perfect for my needs. That’s how I discovered TaskFreak!
TaskFreak! has exactly the features I need and one or two extras. Those features are: it lets me enter a new item, associate it with a category, give it a priority, give an optional deadline, and indicate when it is finished. On top of all that TaskFreak! lets you give a description of the task, which can be displayed when clicking on a given task. TaskFreak! lets you sort your tasks however you choose simply by clicking the first cell in each column of the table. Setting it up was fairly straightforward as all I had to do was create a new MySQL database on my web server and tell TaskFreak! how to contact that database.
At the end of the day TaskFreak! is exactly what I need it to be and not much more. I wanted a simple, web based way to access my todo list. TaskFreak! delivers perfectly. I should also note that there are multi-user versions of TaskFreak! if that is the kind of solution one desires. Finally, I leave with a screen shot of the UI (as rendered by FireFox 3):
Screenshot of the UI (Click to see full size)
Back Home Again
Well, it seems as though the school year is basically over. I am still waiting to get grades in two of my classes, but I don’t expect any surprises from either of them so I guess that means I will graduate! I’m glad that I was able to get through college in 4 years. About half way through I decided to add Math as a major in combination with Computer Science. During the time I had to deal with the coursework, I second guessed my decision, but I am glad that I choose to do that. Certainly I plan to find a computer science related job, but I think the skills I have learned from my math classes will come in handy depending on what I do with computers. Even if they don’t, learning mathematics has taught me to think much more logically than I used to. As many programers know, being able to think logically is quite helpful when writing code.
The feeling of being “done” with school hasn’t fully set in though. I’m sure it will eventually, but I can’t really predict when that will be. Right now it just seems like another semester has ended and I have gone home to try and figure out what to do for the summer. Though, in my case, it’s what to do in terms of a job. I still have some time from now until there are a couple senior events and then graduation. I hope to make some more posts and work on my personal webpage in that time. Those plans aren’t really set it stone though so I may up doing something else instead.
It’s good to be back on Lightflame (my desktop computer) again. For the past weekish I was using only my laptop since I wanted to bring the motorcycle back to school and needed to bring Lightflame home when I had the car out at college. It was fun having the bike at college though, so it was worth forgoing the full power of my computer for a time.
New Domain
This is just a quick note that I finally got around to registering jintoreedwine.com and I plan to host my blog there. Since I already have this wordpress account and am continuing to use wordpress as the platform on my domain I will probably post all of my articles to both places at once. If you are a consistent reader it would probably be best to simply view the blog at the new domain. Finally, here is the URL: http://jintoreedwine.com/blog/
I know I haven’t written much lately, but hopefully I can find some time to write something interesting in the next week or two. I have a long list of topics… just need to find the time to write about them.
Google Street View — Cool or Creepy?
Most people reading this are probably familiar with Google Street View. Indeed, Street View has been around for a while now, at least in internet terms, but I have just gotten around to summarizing my thoughts on it now. Basically, Google Street View is where Google goes around in fancy cars and takes lots of pictures of the surrounding area, and then allows users to view a 360 degree view of the area just off the road. Some of the advantages to this sound appealing: such as being able to figure out exactly where a restaurant you are going to is located, or trying to view a particularly nasty intersection in advance. Still, I tend to find Google Street View to be more an invasion of privacy than anything else.
Certainly I am not the first person to point out the privacy issues with Street View. Clearly it would be infeasible for Google to go through and edit everyone out of the pictures in Street View so they just leave them all in there. This might not seem like a problem as what you do in public can be seen by anyone walking around anyway. That happens to be the argument of some, but I think it is flawed. That is, if you do something stupid in public only the people in the immediate area have even a chance of knowing what happened. With Street View, you picking your nose could be immortalized for all internet users to see.
Google responds to privacy complaints by saying that as long as you let them know which picture you don’t like they will take it take down. Honestly I think that is kind of lame. There is no way one would have time to go through the ever changing pictures to make sure there were not any unwanted photographs of them. Even though Google’s offer sounds all well and good they must know that very few people will actually have the mix of time, dedication, and luck to find the pictures they wish to be removed from Street View.
Finally, the argument has been given that someone, like a thief, could use Street View to plan their next robbery. At first I was 100% on board with this point, but now I am not so sure. Let us try and reason this out a little bit. First off, if someone is going to use Street View to plan this out we can assume they are already more advanced than the average robber. Next, if someone is going to rob your house it is likely that they are already near by, within short driving or walking distance. If they are not then it would be too much hassle to rob you when they could go somewhere closer. Since they are already close to you they could simply drive by your house and take their own pictures. After all, if they can use the internet we can assume they can use other forms of technology such as a digital camera. Therefore Street View doesn’t really aid a would be robber that much. Maybe it can help them decide whether to rob your house over your neighbors house, but chances are that they could have done it just as easily without Street View.
At the end of day I don’t really like Google Street View because I don’t think Google has solved all of the privacy issues with it. If there were a way for them to blur out all the people in it, or just remove them than I wouldn’t have any problems with it. However, it is unlikely Google would be willing to do that. Regardless of my feelings on the matter it doesn’t seem like Street View is going anywhere. I guess I will just duck if I see the Googlemoblie driving by… 
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A LaTeX User in a Microsoft Office World
It has been quite a while since I wrote my last post, but school has been keeping me as busy as always. Thankfully I have had more free time this semester than in past years, but I still seem to keep myself quite busy, and too burned out at the end of the day to write anything terribly thoughtful on the blog. However, I still keep a list of topics to write about for when I have the motivation .
Today I wish to write about a recent trouble I have had relating to my usage of LaTeX. I have been using LaTeX for a little over 3 years now and I love every minute of it. The level of control that it gives me over documents is perfect for my needs. Table of contents, works cited, picture placement, and many other time wasting tasks are mostly automated by LaTeX. As such I can focus in on the true content of my document, which is usually all I care about anyway. Also, with the use of packages such as LaTeX Beamer I can also do PowerPoints with LaTeX. Finally, the fact that you can define custom commands is another huge time saver, and for a programmer, who loves functional decomposition, this is a wonderful tool.
So, now we have established why I use LaTeX, but here is where the trouble with LaTeX lies: most people don’t use LaTeX (shocker… I know). In many situations this does not matter due to the ubiquity of the PDF file. However, there have been times when I have been expected to simply have things in .doc (or these days .docx) format. For instance, a couple of weeks ago I wrote a history paper in LaTeX and right before the due date our teacher said that we needed to send our paper, in .doc format, to someone in the class for peer review. Thankfully it was only a history paper and didn’t need much modification to get into OpenOffice. Still, it was an inconvenience and it was due to the assumption that “everybody uses Microsoft Word”. In another instance, I have seen companies that will only accept your resume in .doc format, which seems a little funny considering these are all technology companies I am applying to and I would hope they could accept a PDF file at least. Luckily I had known this in advance and have my resume typed up in OpenOffice.
At any rate the point of all this is that it seems I may be forced, at some point, to use either Microsoft Word directly or preferably something like OpenOffice. It is not as though I cannot use these tools, but that I think LaTeX is far superior to them. This is a disappointing realization, but hopefully I will still have chances over the years to use LaTeX so that my skills won’t grow dull. I realize that LaTeX looks intimidating to new users, but it is quite empowering once one gets the hang of things.
Well, that’s all I have to say for now .
My Impressions of KDE 4.2
I have actually been meaning to write this post for a while now, but as usual school takes away most of my ambition to do things such as write to this blog or write fun code.
I have been using KDE 4.2 on both my Gentoo systems (laptop and desktop) since about a week after it was released. I still run it now and plan on running it until the next big release of KDE.
KDE 4.2 really took my breath away on many fronts. First of all the Phonon sound system works properly. This also means that I can use Amarok 2.0 which is a HUGE plus for me. In 4.1 I had all sorts of annoying problems getting Phonon to even play sound, and when it did it would block any other applications from using the sound card. Not so any more!
Also, the Plasma widgets are running much cleaner and faster. In KDE 4.1 they seemed to resize slowly and imprecisely. Now, not only do they resize correctly, but if you stick them off the screen in a strange way or place them in some funny manner they try to arrange themselves in a neat fashion. For someone as OCD as myself this feature is wonderful!
The fact that you can now use a Desktop View widget as a desktop is probably good news for some because it means easier access to icons. Personally, I don’t really care about that because I hate desktop icons to begin with. I launch all of my programs through the Run Command interface anyway.
I started using Kopete recently as well, and that has seen huge improvements since the last time I used it. I’m not sure when they changed the interface around and added all the animations, but Kopete has now replaced Pidgin as my default messaging client.
In terms of looks… well KDE 4.2 looks very much like KDE 4.1 or even 4.0. They updated the default theme a little bit, but it is still the same fundamental idea. This is fine with me. I love the new Oxygen theme and it gives a fresh look to my desktop.
As far as running KDE on my laptop is concerned I like 4.2 much better for basically one reason alone… The battery meter widget shows the time remaining now and is also aware of different processor throttling states. This is a great improvement over what I experienced in 4.1 and it makes KDE completely useable on my laptop. Also, since KDE is now more aware of dual screens and screen settings it made it nice to use while I was giving presentations with Okular (the new KDE pdf viewer) on my laptop. I’ve yet to play around with the GUI for changing the display settings (I use xrandr from the terminal) , but I hope to give that a try some time in the near future.
Dual screen support in terms of my desktop setup seems to be about the same as it had been, but I think that is because I am using the proprietary ATI driver and not the open source one. It works well enough that I don’t have any issues. I really like the feature where if you have a maximized window on one screen you can just drag it over the other screen and it stays maximized. Maybe other versions of KDE had this… but either way it is real handy.
I can hardly say enough good things about KDE 4.2 and I am really looking forward to the 4.3 release and some additional bug fixes.
Now that I have gone on and on about the positives I will list a few bugs and whatnot that I have found, but am confident they will be fixed in later releases. The first is that the “Run Command” feature seems to crash if I have KDE running for too long. I typically leave my system running for days at a time so I don’t like it when stuff like that breaks. Also, when I first installed KDE 4.2 I had to clear out all my KDE 4.1 settings before it would run correctly. This is only a minor annoyance, but if you have a bunch of settings that took forever to set up it would be a bit of a bummer to reload them all.
Overall I am extremely happy with KDE 4.2 and would reccomend it to those who have been holding off on account of stability issues. I use it everyday for doing school work and I have not run in to any problems that have caused me to need to downgrade to 4.1 or to switch away from it entirely. Great work KDE team!
Just Begin Curious? Or a Skeptic?
Well, it is no secret, especially to those who know me, that I often like to inquire as to why people think in certain ways. At times this results in further discussion or debate, and at times I simply find their response interesting and that is the end of it.
As it turns out not everyone finds this to be one of my more charming attributes. I can’t really say why I am always interested to engage in deeper conversation about a particular topic with people. In fact it seems that it only gets me in trouble with some people. I find myself wondering if I should maybe abandon hope of attaining a reasonable explanation out of people for how they view the world. Today one of my friends responded with “Fine Tim, dissect my statement, I’m just full of crap” after I asked him to explain why he thought the tootsie roll ad campaign was one of the most successful in history. I don’t know… but I was genuinely curious as to the grounds by which he was basing that statement. It seems that many people would have me just take that sort of statement for granted and immediately say something like “Yeah, you’re right” and indeed, if I did think that I would have gladly responded with something to that effect.
I am wondering if people think I am constantly looking for a way to debate with them, which would cause defensive statements such as the one mentioned above to come out instead of what I was actually looking for. I don’t try to be argumentative with people, but I can’t deny that a lot of my friends think I come across that way. I have tried in the past to “stop arguing”, but I always find that even things I consider light discussion turn out to be debate for some people.
Even after all this consideration I am left wondering what the best course of action is. Do I try my best to change and not attempt to ask people to explain the reason they feel certain ways, or do I pass it off as being an issue that only certain people have, and just avoid getting in to debate with them? After all I have met people more than willing to have a good debate with me about things. When is there good enough reason to debate with people and when should one let things drop? This is where I have trouble drawing the line. To me, sometimes a question I find to be very innocent is taken to mean that I am looking to start a lengthy discussion about some “trivial matter”.
On a more humorous note it is tough for me to have a discussion with people about my argumentative nature because as soon as I ask for more details about what they are saying I receive the response similar to “There you go again, this is exactly the problem”. Basically, if I try to defend myself that turns into the other person’s main argument against me.
Still, after this level of introspection I am left in a state of confusion about what the best course of action is to take. Certainly, I don’t want to be irritating my friends all the time. If that were the case I could hardly consider myself a good friend by any stretch of the imagination. On the other hand, what do I do if they have led themselves down a path of thinking which is just flat out illogical or otherwise incorrect? Do I let them continue living with that issue, or do I try and let them know that I think there is a problem?
Well, I still don’t have the full solution to my troubles, but it is nice to sit down and lay out my dilemas.
My Experiences with Mozilla Prism
I have been quite busy lately trying to keep up with my school work, but I decided that I had time for a quick post to the blog.
Recently I have been playing around with the Mozilla Labs project known as Prism.
Prism allows one to easily turn any website into what appears to be a standalone application. The advantage of which is that you can ditch things such as the menu bar and forward and back buttons which typically take up an unnecessary amount of screen space just so you can do something like… edit your WordPress blog.
So far I have only used this for WordPress and for access to my GMail account. It is nice to be able to just click on an icon and load up either WordPress or GMail in a nice and contained format. This is especially nice for GMail since I almost always have that open in a Firefox tab and now I don’t require all of Firefox just to check mail.
For now I had to install it by downloading the tar.bz file and just unpacking it. You don’t need to do any special installing because it can simply run as a normal user. For ease of use I just put the files in a .prism directory under my home directory and sys linked that to a directory which is include in my PATH variable.
Presently when you run prism you just enter the website and prism turns it into an easy to run desktop icon and then from that point on you use the icon.
Use This To Create a "New App"
After doing this one gets a nice desktop icon:
GMail Icon
Once you click on the icon the application is run:
Notice the lack of navigation or address bar
It should also be noted that there is a Firefox extension to do this same thing, but I couldn’t get that to work even after playing with it for a good deal of time.
If you would like to download and play with Prism for yourself you can check it out here: http://labs.mozilla.com/projects/prism/ . I should also mention that Prism is still in the testing phases so it might not be too surprising if there were some bugs.
I have many more things I’d like the write about especially my awesome experiences for KDE 4.2, but those will have to wait until my motivation and free time have increased .
fglrx Drivers — Getting TV Out to Work
About six months ago my friend sent me a link to Hulu.com and one day I simply stumbled across the service Joost.com. Since then I have been hooked on internet television. I rarely use the normal form of watching TV, and why should I? I can watch the shows I want to watch WHEN I want to watch them. Additionally, both Joost and Hulu offer subtitled and dubbed anime, which is far more than I can get on TV. Anyway, that’s not the point of my post, but rather the reason I became interested in getting the TV Out on my ATI Radeon 9800Pro to work. As a final note I am using the ati-drivers (fglrx) version 8.561 . For you Gentoo users it is currently masked in portage so you are going to want to add “=x11-drivers/ati-drivers-8.561” to your /etc/portage/package.keywords if you plan to use them. I don’t know what version they started supporting the features I am talking about so it might work with your current setup just fine.
Sadly I must use the closed source driver, for now anyway, because Spheriosity will not run properly for me on the open source driver. I used to switch between the two drivers, but that became terribly inconvenient because I needed to maintain two Xorg.conf files since each driver has its own little nuisances. I kept reading that the closed source driver (fglrx) supported TV-Out, but I was failing to setup the Xorg.conf file correctly and I noticed that xrandr didn’t seem to work. Eventually I noticed here (scroll down a bit) that fglrx does not support the randr extension. At that point I was ready to give up, but I noticed the aticonfig tool. This has a few options that can be changed on the fly, which is exactly what I wanted. Normally I run a dual monitor configuration with big desktop and only on occasion do I want TV output. With the aticonfig tool it was quite simple:
aticonfig --query-monitorThis shows what monitors are seen by the drivers. Here is what mine looks like:
jinto@lightflame ~ $ aticonfig --query-monitor
Connected monitors: crt1, tv, crt2
Enabled monitors: crt1, crt2
To enable the TV you simple issue the following command:
aticonfig --enable-monitor=tv
OR
aticonfig --enable-monitor=tv,crt1 (if you want tv and a monitor)You may have to replace crt1 with whatever output you get from --query-monitor, but hopefully you get the idea. KDE 4.1 did seem to have some minor annoyances while switching between configurations so when I watch TV I simply use a failsafe login to avoid my plasmids from getting all messed up. Also, there are ways to adjust the size of the image being output to the TV using the --tv-geometry flag. aticonfig will complain about not being able to edit the xorg.conf file, but it seemed to change it for me on the fly so I’m not sure what the story is behind that. If you want to understand how to use --tv-geometry just issue aticonfig --help | less and it is near the top. If you are interested the tv geometry I use it is:
aticonfig --tv-geometry=43x55-1+1What you need to use probably varies from TV to TV so unless you have a 27″ Sony Trinitron you will probably have to tweak that command 
.
Oh yeah… and if you want to go back to your original configuration just issue:
aticonfig --enable-monitor=crt1,crt2Or whatever monitors you wish to active. If you only have a single monitor then all you need to do is issue the previous command without the “,crt2″ part . Good luck!
Video Game Music
It’s no secret, at least to those who know me personally, that I love listening to the music from video games. Now, I have my limits. If the game has terrible music then I simply don’t care to listen at all. Recently there has been some stunning work on video game sound tracks. The sound track to Mario Galaxy and Super Smash Brothers Brawl were absolutely breathtaking. The industry has come a long way in terms of audio. I still have a soft spot in my heart for those classic NES tunes, but I sure do like the way things have been improving.
There are even some games for the SNES that had rather amazing sound tracks. The obvious games there are Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy III (Well VI actually, but released as III in America), and Secret of Mana. That is not to say there weren’t other SNES games with good sound tracks. In fact, there is an entire community of people who take video game tunes and remix them. The big place for that happens to be OCRemix.org and I have spent hours upon hours on that site. They truely have some talented remixers there. Here are a few good mixes, but certainly there are hundreds more that are quite amazing:
- Dragon Song by Harmony
- Into the Thicket by Darkesword
- Wicked Six by Sixto Sounds
- El Lagarto by Evil Horde
- Super Mario’s Sleigh Ride by The OneUps
Beyond the realm of OCRemix we have video game cover bands (as if things couldn’t get any better) ! Some of these include: The Megas, Armcannon, The OneUps, Powerglove, and The Black Mages. All of the bands mentioned even have CDs you can purchase, or most of them have options where you can download the music (for a small price). For those of us that love the video game tunes it is truely a great time. Back when I was much younger there were none of these things and the closest thing I had to listening to video game music (other than playing the games) was a Mario Kart 64 Soundtrack that I found somewhere.
Whether it’s an OCRemix or a video game cover band these guys are taking the old 8-bit tunes and turning them into musical glory. This gamer in particular finds himself frequently amazed at what they can do.
In the future I plan to blog a little more about video game music as its one of my interests. I just haven’t had the time lately .
