Dented Reality - Beau Lebens' projects, blog and contact details.

Nokia E71 NAM Real World Usage Review

Jan 06 2009

Now that I’ve been using the Nokia E71 NAM for a few weeks, I wanted to post a follow-up review covering some of the more “day-to-day reality” aspects of the phone. I’m going to bullet-point my observations/comments for brevity’s sake, and as with my initial review, any comparisons made here are as compared to my Nokia E61:
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An Open Letter to IE6 for 2009

Jan 05 2009

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Dear Internet Explorer 6,

How are you feeling? How was your New Years? Probably a bit lonely I expect, what with people deserting you left and right for your ritzy sibling, IE7, or some of the even more attractive kids on the block like Firefox, Safari and Opera. I know we’ve spent a lot of time together, you and I, but it’s time that I told you something that’s been on my mind for a while.

I don’t think we should see each other any more.

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Why Are You Still Paying for Cable TV?

Dec 23 2008

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When I first moved to the US, I moved into a fully-furnished apartment with 2 TVs. One of them occupied the cable connection where I wanted my computer plugged in, so that one got unplugged and never got turned on again. The other one was in the bedroom and only ever got turned on to watch my favorite show at the time: Alias. When I moved to California and was faced with the price of getting cable installed, I realized that I really didn’t want to pay that much money every month to watch 1 TV show. I preferred to watch DVDs and often watched video clips and things online though, so I needed a solution.

Instead of going and buying a TV, I went out and got a Mac Mini (with bluetooth keyboard/mouse), which I connected to a Toshiba projector. I got a 3 ft x 4ft blank (white) painting canvas, which hangs on the wall, opposite the projector (which is on top of my coffee table). A long (50ft, which turned out to be massive overkill) VGA cable runs around the edge of the room to the Mac Mini, which is housed with my (multi-region) DVD player etc under the screen in a standard IKEA cabinet.

I started out using Bit Torrent to download TV shows. I use the excellent program for Macs called Transmission, and experimented with a few different tools which worked by automatically downloading RSS feeds from tvRSS. I had Transmission set up with Speed Limits enabled so that it would only download overnight (when I wasn’t using my internet connection). This worked well for a while, but those freedom-hating Communists over at Comcast didn’t like that, so they started messing with my connection, which affected me day and night.

After battling with a bad connection for a while, I had to stop with the torrents because I was having trouble working. For a few months I just went without TV of any kind, which was actually refreshing in its own way. Then I got access to hulu.

hulu.com has made everything so much easier, and it’s even taken away that niggling feeling that I was doing something “wrong”. I can watch all sorts of things on hulu, even queue them up under my account so that I can keep track of new episodes easily. It’s available on-demand and I don’t care if I “miss” when a show was on normal TV, because I can watch it on hulu whenever I want.

Obviously I go without a lot of shows that are available on normal cable, but am I really missing anything? I sure don’t feel like it.

Challenges You Will Face When Working With Remote Teams

Dec 23 2008

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For a number of reasons at a number of times in my career, I’ve found myself working with variously-distributed teams of one kind or another. Perhaps the “office” is a building that spans 2 square miles, perhaps someone was working from home for a day or someone was on a 2 week “vacation”, or even working for a distributed company with no real office. These were all different situations, but they all suffered from simliar challenges. I want to take a look at a couple of those challenges and some ways that you can help mitigate them.

I’m looking at this mostly as a member of a technical team of some sort, but I’m sure a lot of it would apply to pretty much anyone who’s not working face-to-face with their colleagues. Apologies in advance for this being kind of rambling (and very long). It’s a collection of all sorts of observations, links and ideas that I’ve collected over time. Read the rest of this post…

Managing Your WordPress Install With Subversion (Safely)

Dec 22 2008

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There are a number of different ways to manage a WordPress installation, everything from not actually managing it yourself (WordPress.com can take care of it for you if you like) through to manually managing things via FTP. I’m going to look at my preferred method, which I think provides a few things that other methods don’t necessarily give you.

Control: this method puts you in charge (which also means it’s your responsibility to keep things up to date).
Safety: if you consistently manage your WordPress install using this method, then you’re in a pretty good position to avoid a lot of problems.
Simplicity: WordPress updates quite often (minor releases at least every month generally). This system means that you can generally update when a new version comes out in a few minutes at the absolute most.

What is this magic system you ask? In a word: Subversion.

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Nokia E71 NAM First Impressions

Dec 20 2008

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A few weeks ago, I got an email that I almost discarded as spam, asking me if I would like to try out a Nokia phone for a few weeks. As it turns out, the email was completely legitimate, and the offer was genuine. The good folks over at WOMWorld Nokia wanted to send me a Nokia E71 NAM (the NAM is for North AMerica, since there’s a slightly different European version) so that I could try it out and see if I liked it. Either way, I was welcome (encouraged) to write about it, talk about it, and generally let people know what I thought of it. This is the first of 2 posts that I will be making about the phone and the experience I had with it. I wanted to do one as a “first impressions” post, and then one at the end of the test period (unfortunately, I have to send it back ) with more detail on my experiences.

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HOWTO: Implement Facebook Connect on WordPress (in reality)

Dec 18 2008

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2008-12-23: There were a number of problems with the code samples in this post previously due to some WordPress formatting problems. They are all corrected now, and you should be able to follow through this post and get this working on your own blog quite easily.

2008-12-26: Fixed a bug that caused the JS to overwrite details on a non-FB Connect comment as well. Also changed the fake email address that’s stored to include the user’s FB user ID.

In case you’ve been living under a no-technology-news rock for the last few weeks, you’ll know that Facebook Connect was released recently. I had been seeing/hearing a lot about it, including this video at Mashable, showing how to implement FB Connect in 8 minutes. So when my friend Morgan from BlownMortgage asked me if I’d be able to help him implement it on his new resume-editing site ResumeDonkey.com, I figured “how hard could it be” and said yes. Although it definitely didn’t take 8 minutes, I got it done, so I thought I’d post some details on the specific approach I used for ResumeDonkey.com.

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Cupcake Camp 2, San Francisco

Dec 07 2008

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This afternoon I had the pleasure of attending the second Cupcake Camp, held here in San Francisco at the Get Satisfaction offices in South Park. For some reason, I was expecting a relatively small, civilized, fun event in South Park, with a few people, maybe 100 at the most, a bunch of cupcakes and some friendly conversation. Some of those expectations were met, some were vastly exceeded (or plain crushed). Here’s what greeted me when I got there: