Neonguru's musings: Archive

1 tag

Four Diet Rules

Four Diet Rules: Plants Eat Discipline Patience Plants: Emphasize plants in your diet. Eat: Don’t miss any meals, even eat more meals per day if possible. Eat a balance of nutrients, but don’t over-emphasize this. Discipline: measurement, diligence, incremental changes - do I really need to explain this? It will become a habit, and no longer require discipline. Patience: This...

Aug 30th

Why I switched from Google Search to DuckDuckGo

The main reason I switched from Google Search to DuckDuckGo is because of their !bang syntax. I use the Chrome browser, and with DuckDuckGo as the default search engine, I can bring up searches on ANY website that has search capability directly from the omnibox. Just add a bang syntax after the search term and DuckDuckGo will forward my search to that website. Here are a few that I use...

May 16th

Javascript solution for the Github tree slider

Want to know how neonguru.net does the dynamic page transitions? Here’s a post I put on stackoverflow answering how they do it on Github: I looked through their source code and they are NOT using CSS3 or a plugin. It uses jquery animate. And the code snippets they give on the Github blog are a good start, but the popstate handler is misleading. Try this instead: ...

Dec 30th

Switching from Outlook 2007 to Thunderbird 8 and...

I’ve been having problems with Outlook 2007 locking up lately. And it wouldn’t connect to my work exchange server for some reason, even though my phone had no problems doing so. And it’s not as friendly about syncing with other apps through caldav and such. So I decided to give the latest Mozilla Thunderbird with Lightning a chance. Turns out it works great and handles all my email accounts just...

Dec 8th

Jul 11th

Samsung Charge YouTube video won't play solution

I had this problem on my Samsung Charge where YouTube videos would play and I could hear it, but the video was blank. At first I just rebooted and it would then work fine, but I kept having to do this. So I did a search through some forums to see if anyone had found a way to fix it. Most just said to reboot, but that is a hassle that I kept having to do over and over again. But then I found...

Jul 10th

Jul 4th

Iphone or Android?

I decided a couple months ago that I was going to finally take the plunge and get a smart phone. I used them a long time ago when I worked at Microsoft on their Windows CE device. But it was big and didn’t have a lot of features that I cared about back then, so never bought one. Then the popularity of the iPhone caught my attention. But since I have a computer everywhere I go, I figured I...

Jun 19th

My summer blockbuster voice over from...

Jun 15th

2 tags

Mobilize your site

Want to make your site look good on mobile devices, but still look good on all browsers? Media Queries are your friend. It’s really not that hard and you can serve the same data to all page requests. You just modify your css to target different page widths. You can see how it works by changing the width of your browser on the neonenigma.com (moved to neonguru.net) website. The first thing I...

May 14th

Me on Piano

Me on piano, thankfully no audio!

Oct 4th

3 tags

Steps to run Google AppEngine with Django in...

Update: this post was written when the Google app engine didn’t have native django template support. Now it’s much easier. See the vogella.de app engine tutorial for current info. This post outlines the steps necessary to setup google’s app engine and the following contributing software to start developing applications on windows. First you need the Google App Engine to see what...

Oct 2nd

1 tag

Another site: entropykiller.com released

I just released another website at http://www.entropykiller.com. That site uses Google App Engine, Python and Django to achieve similar results to those at http://neonenigma.com (moved to neonguru.net) which uses ASP.net MVC. Although I tried a number of different combinations to producing entropykiller.com, it turns out that using Google App Engine Helper for Django was the most intuitive to use...

Sep 30th

1 tag

neonenigma.com released

I just released an ASP.net MVC application to my website located at http://neonenigma.com (moved to http://neonguru.net). In addition to MVC it uses jQuery and Silverlight to produce dynamic content. For instance, on the Web Dev tab I put a link that goes to a page that mirrors all tabs on the site using a single dynamic jQuery page. No http get is required to change tabs. See the All (gone...

Sep 16th

1 note

Feb 19th

1 note

Dream Gadget

My dream gadget is a car stereo that comes with an MP3 player which can sync bi-directionally to the car stereo and windows media player via bluetooth. Are you listening Microsoft? Or Apple, or …

Feb 10th

1 tag

Improving your Web Site's Front End Performance

Last week Steve Souders of Google via Yahoo! gave a talk at Myspace regarding improving web site front end performance. See http://stevesouders.com, especially the section about his book, cuzillion and ySlow. This talk was about dramatically improving you site’s performance without writing a lot of code. He has a list of 14 rules that you can use to achieve this. The list has some very...

Nov 1st

1 tag

Book Review: I am a Strange Loop - by Douglas...

This book was a compelling read for me since: it is very new at this time; it investigates the origin of consciousness; and it seemed to have less scientific or religious fervor behind it. Plus the author has won a Pulitzer and seems to be a well respected professor teaching this topic. Having read it, I find Hofstadter to be a master at using analogy to elicit deep insight into every topic he...

Aug 18th

8 tags

Setting up Tumblr

Still setting things up here on Tumblr. I now have Disqus setup for comments. It’s pretty easy to do, and appears to be the front-runner for comment engines of the entire www. It works on wordpress, blogger, tumblr, typepad and movable type. So of course, I also put it up on my blogger site. I also have feedburner burning the rss. They were purchased by Google some time ago and handle...

Aug 12th

15 notes

3 tags

Book Review: Don't Make Me Think - by Steve Krug

Subtitled: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. As the subtitle says, it is mostly common sense. But to have it reinforced like this turns judging web site designs into a much simpler task. I found myself feeling like I had confirmation for many thoughts I have on the subject, but it raised my awareness of different user view points to a higher level. One item that was quite new to me...

Aug 11th