www.lucidrealms.com

Are you a Pandora user? The concept is pretty cool. You tell it what songs you like and it builds a radio station that plays similar songs. You can fine tune the result by giving the songs a thumbs up or thumbs down as you go along.

So wouldn't it be cool if there was something for video? Well I thought it would be so I created a new website, VideoChanger.com, that does just that. Check it out and let me know what you think. Is there something you really like, don't like, or some killer feature that is missing? Leave a comment below and if it is possible I'll make it happen.

I just finished reading The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris, and I think it is an amazing book. Judging by the reviews on Amazon it seems you either love this book or you hate it, but after reading some of the negative reviews it seems many of them didn't read the book or simply missed the point. This book is really about maximizing your productivity so that you spend more time doing the things you like to do and less time working for works sake. Can you really work a four hour work-week? Probably not, unless you start your own successful company and outsource everything. Tim himself even puts in about four hours a day of real work, when he is not taking a mini-retirement, simply because that is what he enjoys doing. Any way if you are interested in ways to increase your productivity so you can spend less time working and more time making the most of your life you should check this book out.

While most people seem to be strongly opinionated when it comes to tabs vs. spaces for indenting their code, I honestly don't care. My biggest problem is when I edit other people's files and everyone uses different indenting styles. Really all I want is vim to be smart enough to detect if an existing file is using tabs or spaces (and of course how many spaces) and do the right thing. Today I found the DetectIndent vim plugin that appears to solve my problem. To have it always on simply add the following to your .vimrc:

autocmd BufReadPost * :DetectIndent

First download SALOME-MECA-2008.1-GPL.tgz from the CAELinux website. Then starting as a normal user:

tar xvzf SALOME-MECA-2008.1-GPL.tgz
su
mv SALOME-MECA-2008.1-GPL/ /opt/
exit
cd /opt/SALOME-MECA-2008.1-GPL/postinstall/
./postinstall.py
su
chown -R root:root /opt/
exit
/opt/SALOME-MECA-2008.1-GPL/runSalomeMeca

While I'm typically not very fond of social networks I have to say that I do think that www.ohloh.net is pretty cool. Perhaps I like it so much not because of the "social network" part, but because it gives you a quick glimpse into the development of open source projects. It is interesting to see who and how many people have contributed to a project, or just how many lines of code there are. If you know what you are doing you could find all of this information yourself but it is nice having it easily available. I think the whole Kudos/ranking thing is a little silly and meaningless, but whatever. It is also kind of cool that they essentially build up an open source resume for you (yeah I know mine is currently pretty sad).

Windows Vista Home Premium

Broken Skewer

Well, it looks like I have more bicycle parts I need to buy. Thursday morning on my way to work I was about 4.5 miles into my ride when suddenly it was like someone slammed on my back brakes. Right as I came to a stop I heard a ping and my skewer shot all the way into the middle of the street.

If you're like me you probably enjoy the fact that you can type a search term as an URL in Firefox and have it return a Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" result. Of course Time Warner's Road Runner internet service now thinks that I'm just a blathering idiot typing senseless crap in the URL bar. And what do you do with senseless idiots?