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I cannot be the only person who has a box of this kind. For the past few years all sorts of treasures (the untrained eye would call it junk) have ended up in a storage box I have. The list is as follows:

• Zaurus – the one chance linux had to be in a handheld. It is the greatest gadget I’ve owned in my life. Unfortunately it never got the care it needed.
• Magic Cards – classic part of any geek’s box of treasures
• Backup TI-83 calculator – I always carry a TI-89 but you never know when you will need a replacement
• USB extension cord
• Memory card reader

• Pads, bookmarks, plane tickets, receipts.. etc&.

So much of this box has already become outdated that its hard not feeling old. Imagine, twenty years from now the box will be worth thousands. Who even uses compact flash anymore? Or has seen a sharp PDA that actually works better than a Blackberry?

Umbrellas
Pads
Magnets
Bags
Digital Video Discs
Books
[Exit]
Metropolitan
Realist
Exhibition

In the span of one academic summer 3 projects were created and released into the public. This sets a new record for most productive summer yet.

1. Adium – Objective-C addition that will be merged into the main project sometime in the near future. This was the most interesting project since it was part of a greater project which happens to be used by
   thousands of people all over the world.
2. mySemester – Since freshmen year I have been musing over executing this project. You would think that will all the tools out there there would be one for creating a schedule that looked good, was printable and sharable with others. After doing word, excel, and html schedules to share and print I got fed up and created this site just for that. It has all the bells and whistles to be a 2.0 site : )
3. Time Tracker – In order to accomplish 3 projects in one summer tracking how I spent my time was of essence and for that I had the urge to create this nifty project. It is in fact a simple copy of Harvest Time except its free and simpler to use. This is meant for a single user who has many projects and tasks with due dates and a limited amount of time to give. Couldn’t be any simpler to use.

Situation: You have a form which you would like to validate before submitting. you also want to show error messages without having to reload the page. Example:

Username

Password

Suppose you want to call a function called validate() when either the user presses enter or clicks the button. The trick I discovered with Prototype is as follows:

function checkForSubmission(element,func){
Event.observe(element, ‘keypress’, function(event){
if(event.keyCode==13)
func();
});
}

Now for the example above, when the page loads you simply call

checkForSubmission(“login”,validate);

If the user presses enter in any of the two text boxes or clicks the button the form will now validate itself. Simple solution to a tricky situation.

Update: It seems that in Safari events happen in a different order: onSubmit event takes place before the onKeyPress event. To get around this you need to return false when onSubmit occurs. Easiest solution is to add the following to the form tag.

onSubmit=“return false;”

I have, ever since I purchased my MacBook Pro, moved away from using a desktop computing as a main computer. The Pentium III, 2Ghz, Wallmart branded PC has now for a bit over half a year been used as a file server. I managed to set the server up, initially, in under an hour. Quickly I was using iTunes on my mac with the music being stored on my server.

Recently however, due to many Ubuntu updates, my installation broke and I was forced with reinstalling a Linux distribution on it. Since I felt more comfortable with Linux I decided to try something new. What a disapointment.

First was Debian. I was impressed at how simple and extremely fast it was. It made my 5 year computer feel like new. What I found dissapointing was the fact that my NTFS partition simply was not recognized (even after trying to install special drivers).

Second was SUSE. In another extreme, it was extremely slow. The installation took for ever, the video card was never properly identified and it was just too slow. On the pro side, it had a very nice Gnome look and feel.

Finally I tried Fedora, after all I wanted something stable. Installation was so-so. It does boot up fairly quickly and the files are very well organized. Configuration was a barable level of Linux pain. But this by far does not mean I’m satisfied.

Conclusion, I’m still not satisfied with my half working Linux home server which its entire purpose is to server my MacBook. Samba works but only because NFS didn’t. Apache works well but I’ve got no sound. Oh well.. There really should be a Ubuntu version for home servers.