tech channel

What Hulu Needs

toby ho — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 21:51:29 -0500

Remote control - I want to be able to choose and watch shows, skip, etc. with a remote. So that I can channelsurf it while feeding my baby or at the dinner table(a keyboard is way too clunky).
Channel captions, sometimes I need to watch my show at low volume because the baby is sleeping or we don't want to draw her attention to the TV.

I was going to say continous playing too, but they already have this in the form of your queue. Still, they should improve this functionality by automatically choosing shows/episodes for you based on your preference.

justtodolist in the wild

toby ho — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 21:12:59 -0400

justtodolist.com is another side project of mine. I have now released it to the public. Go take a look, tell your firends, and I hope it becomes useful to you.

tadalist is unsecured

toby ho — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 10:14:19 -0400

I always look to 37signals when I need design ideas or looking for precedence for how to solve certain problems. My problem this time was: how to gracefully handle your Ajax calls failing due to your login session expiring? I looked at tadalist. To my surprise, even after I deleted the session cookie, modifying the list still worked. I looked at the request headers and it seemed like they simply weren't securing the app at all. I wrote a quick socket program to verify this, and it was true: any one who has the ID of your list and/or items can make modifications to them. I guess they just felt this app is not mission critical enough to worry about this kind of stuff. What about the todolist in basecamp? Hmm... let me check... result: they don't really handle this gracefully in Basecamp. If you try to check off a list which auth, it just hangs there foreever. I guess I'll have to creative and come up with my own solution here.

Use delicious with chrome

toby ho — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 12:10:25 -0400

Chrome has no add-on archecture so there's no way people can build a delicious plugin for it. The alternative is a bookmarklet, there's one for delicious: http://delicious.com/help/bookmarklets.

Google Chrome

toby ho — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 22:33:15 -0400

Google just released this awesome browser. They have a great comic strip walking you through what the big deal is about, which is a must read for web developers. I've been using the browser for half a day and it's been pretty rock solid for all the sites I normally use. Javascript is clearly MUCH faster thanks to the v8 engine, which I think Steve Yegge alluded to a while ago. I like many of it's different features, and think it's a great boost to the browser world as well as javascript, i.e. the NBL(Next Big Language).

Beef with Frog!

toby ho — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:24:46 -0400

Dang! Frogger! You no behave right!

I am getting proficient enough with the black USB froggie to start doing some real work, but this bug that I finally uncovered make using it really painful. Whenever I use the ctrl-s combination on the frogpad, the ctrl key will lock, eventhough the ctrl indicator does not show it. This kinda makes everything you do after that difficult. No, this does not have the feel of a polished product.

Update on the Frogpad

toby ho — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:47:24 -0400

Here's the latest on the frogpad. I exchanged my bluetooth frogpad for a USB one, and the reason is: the USB one had a non-sticky symbol key: so, the latest product(the bluetooth version) is worse than the earlier one(the USB), at least from my perspective. The USB one works a look better in terms of typing in symbols, at I expected. I am still using only on and off though, so I really need a lot more practice before I can use it for normal work. I do use it at work some times, and it's quite easy to switch back and forth, and/or have a different key input for different windows.

Acrobat dot com

toby ho — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:16:30 -0400

Wow! Adobe rolled out a competitor to netmeeting, and google word doc: acrobat.com. All flash based, the screen sharing part requires an extra plugin install. The UI is just amazing. I played with it and it is very usable. There's a shared whiteboard, and you can also share your monitor. In addition, you can do web cam, audio, chat, live document editing. It's just a super cool app.

e-texteditor: getting my ctrl-z back

toby ho — Wed, 28 May 2008 13:26:31 -0400

As I mentioned in a previous post, I am now using the dvorak keyboard with hacked in qwerty shortcuts. But recently, my e-texteditor ctrl-z shortcut key doesn't work anymore and instead keeps inserting an error message in my buffer... how annoying is that? I don't see any circumcetance when it's okay to insert an error message directly into your working document, that is just wrong! But, that's not the point. I found out that the ctrl-z combination is somehow triggering the spellchecker command instead of undo...how could this be? I did a little detective work an AH-HA! It turns out that in the text-bundle, the ctrl-; combination triggers the spellcheck, and ; in dvorak is z in qwerty... removed that key combination and everything was fine...phew...

Installing Ubuntu on the Old Sony Vaio without a CDROM

toby ho — Sun, 18 May 2008 23:58:09 -0400

Now that Weilai had to return her dell laptop, she had the idea to resurrect her old Sony Vaio PCG-R505DL laptop(She didn't like my wide screen HP because it's too big). Since the CDROM for this laptop - which is on the dock - is broken, I've had to install linux on it the last time I resurrected it by starting out with a floppy to boot and then going to the network - it was a Mandrake install. This time I wanted to install Ubuntu on it since it's the best distribution nowadays. However, installing Ubuntu from floppy isn't very well documented. I also looked at installing fro a USB stick, but unfortunately my BIOS didn't supporting booting from it. I've had to dig around for this one. The solution to my problem was found here - network booting using PXE. The steps were essentially:

make a gPXE boot floppy
setup a tftp server that serves a subdirectory of the contents of the ubuntu CD - which has the boot file needed for the client to boot
runand configure your own dhcpd server on the local network which will tell the client - our vaio in this case - where to get the boot file when it boots up
boot the client with the floppy

What you need to understand is that the network communications are all going to be happening in levels lower than IP and TCP. They are happening at the DHCP and UDP level (although you have the option of using http in place of tftpd now with gPXE). So, all that's required for the discovery is for your intranet to have one dhcp server running which is configured to tell the client that's booting the right boot file. The discovery is done is a broadcast fashion because it's part of the dhcp protocol. I am explaining this because this was confusing to me.

For me, I had to change a couple of steps. First, I didn't have a linux box at home, only a Mac. But getting dhcpd installed was not hard, I found step-by-step instructions here. And tftpd already comes with OSX, to my surprise, so I simply had to turn it on:
sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/tftp.plist
This page was helpful there. The tftp server is serving files from /private/tftpboot, so I copied the boot files into that directory - which I found from
http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/

Also, it turns out that I did not need a floppy for my installation at all - eventhough I uselessly made one. The BIOS already had the ability to network boot using the PXE protocol, I just had to turn the option on.

After that, the laptop booted straight to the ubuntu install prompt, and it installed as normal. Brilliant! This really opened my eyes to how cool network booting is, I wonder if you could run the laptop as a thin terminal running say OSX... I am sure you can, actually, but I just don't know how to set up the boot images on the servers side. Hmm...

Love hate relationship with the frog

toby ho — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 22:20:28 -0400

Sigh... I like typing on the frog. But till now, I haven't been able to use it for my programing work because, while it is quite good for typing in English, it is lousy for typing programs. This is because symbols on the frog are a pain to type. You have to hit one key to go into symbol mode(it's modal) hit your symbol, and then another key stroke to go out of symbol mode. In most programming langages(except maybe COBOL), you alternate between letters and symbols quite often, this is why the frog may not be suitable for programming. Can you reprogram the keys? I don't know, haven't found any resources on it yet. I later found that the USB version of the frog is better in this respect because the symbol key is non-modal(like the shift key). No word yet on whether I can get my Bluetooth version to do that though. Keeping an eye on this thread.

Belkin Stereo iPod Microphone

toby ho — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 09:10:37 -0400

I got my microphone in the mail yesterday, now I can use it to record interviews or music. It did take some effort to set up, though, mostly because of the fact that I have a Mac and Windows setup. I have been syncing my ipod with my Mac machine, and now I want to be able to access my voice recordings from my windows laptop. This is a problem because my ipod was formated in the mac format, googling found that I can reformat it to fat32 and have it work for both mac and windows, so that's what I did. I also set enable-hard-disk-usage to true and start-itunes-when-ipod-plugged-in to false so that from windows I can get at the voice memo wav files without having to go through itunes. I still use the mac machine to sync my music, this works just like before.