I got bored while I was paying bills so I decided that I wanted to automate a bill that doesn't have a very good automatic payment method. I decided to use Ruby and Mechanize to perform the task. Since I don't want the script just hanging around with my customer or my credit card information, I decided to pass those values into the script from the command line. To avoid leaving my password and credit card number in the history file, I learned about HISTIGNORE. This little gem is pretty easy to use but it basically ignores any line that matches the commands separated by a colon.

A default that I found on Using Bash's History Effectively was to use something like:

export HISTIGNORE="&:ls:[bf]g:exit"
      

He also suggested to add [ \t]* to allow for keeping any command starting with a space or tab out of the history. I'll definitely be using this and now I just have to remember to use a space.

This question is a slightly updated version of "Why did my computer crash?" In general people blame that question on Microsoft or the OS provider. And while there are bugs that are inherent in any application, especially an OS, the large percentage of the time, drivers are at fault that are not under the direct supervision of the OS.

So, the new update to this question is, "Why did Firefox/Safari/Chrome crash?" And, the answer could be the browser, but in my experience, more often than not it seems that plugins are to blame. Plugins like "Flash", and inline PDF readers. It seems that adding all those extras just makes the browser that much more unreliable. Maybe with the adoption of HTML 5 we'll notice crashing less as browsers implement a more streamlined browsing experience without the use of plugins.

I am thrilled that HTML 5 is being used to display youtube videos in the browser. I have noticed on my home computer that flash and shockwave have really been the cause of most of my browser's crashes. I usually know that if my browser is having problems (locking, stalling or slowness) it is because of a flash or shockwave component. I look forward to removing the single largest piece of flakiness in my browsing experience.

Just finished presenting on Web Sockets to a group of techies. We had a pretty good discussion and I think everyone went away with an understanding of web sockets.

You can check out my un-amazing powerpoint presentation or just read up on the topic. You'll either need the Chrome Dev release from the Chromium Dev Channel or you might be able to get things working with the flash web-socket-js bridge in other browsers.

I demoed an echo server that was modified from github/gimite. My modifications include opening the servers on a specified host instead of my VM's localhost. I also added two new servers called status_server.rb and date_server.rb. I think some other useful links are EM-websocket, ruby EventMachine and twitter-amqp-websocket-example. I also learned something more about how to use these at Google announces Web Sockets and jRoller.com. The definitive source of course is W3.org Web Sockets API.

So, I recently watched the movie "Up" on Blu-ray and I was amazed at the experience. Not good amazed, although I'm sure the pixels were just spectacularly clear and crisp, but I was more amazed with how we as consumers are being thrust into this less than stellar experience by the entertainment industry.

My Blu-ray player was aware of the thorns in the experience however. It warned me that while the blu-ray was loading it might take few minutes to load the content and be "ready" to watch the movie. Ok, maybe the player has some blame, but this is one of the better blu-ray players, not a post-Thanksgiving day made from left-over parts found in electric mixers. And yes, it did take a few minutes - no previews to watch while it did its thing or anything. Dug the dog just swishing his tail and his collar flashing on and off for about 2 minutes. With anxious kids it felt a lot longer.

Second, the device would skip every so often and pause mid-movie just waiting to re-buffer maybe? Anyway, it wasn't a seamless experience. Maybe it will be when the devices catch up to the discs. I can't say that I'd re-purchase all my DVDs for the new format. Definitely no visual difference between blu-ray and DVD that I could detect. Just took longer to watch the movie with the unexplained pauses.

Definitely not a better experience.

</rant>

Thanks a million to this user who posted the solution to my weekend long vonage router unlocking experience. It should read ANSI encoding however.

The REAL solution is never use notepad. NEVER. Especially when you need a file edited correctly and firmware is on the line. But only slightly less well-known is this: "Never use notepad when death is on the line"!

Ok, so the forum really needs to have a section on checking your file type encoding and this would have been over earlier today. Anyway, I only am doing this to resolve an issue with QOS and hoping that the vonage router works slightly better since the network is routed after the phone portion of the network. Besides, I can sell my other phone router if this works out.

I just finished installing drivers that work for my Belkin 54G F5D7050 (version 2) wireless adapter. I downloaded this driver off of the Ralink website and all is working now in Windows 7. I think it should work for the 32 bit version of Windows as well, but one never knows.

Over the Thanksgiving weekend I got back to my headphone project and was able to complete my alteration to my Sennheiser noise canceling headphones. I figured that most of my time is spent at my computer with 5V USB power and figured there was no reason I couldn't make them use that for a power source. It was harder than expected with power being grounded to the headphone jack, I was able to make a mod to make this work over the weekend. So, now I don't have to have batteries to enjoy noise-canceling goodness. I can still use batteries which keeps the headphones at least as usable as they were.

I love reading google voice transcripts. My favorite recently was this line:

Try to catch our home, puking feminist.
      

Now that had to be one of the funniest lines I've read recently. I think spammers should start sending google voice transcripts to get by spam filters.

So, I used to use Vonage. They kept raising their already pretty great rates, but eventually it just wasn't for me. So, I jumped ship early last month and think the decision was pretty good. I've been using Google Voice and Gizmo5. My bill over the past month has gone from $25 to about $5. Not a bad decrease. The quality is just as good and I don't miss Vonage. Plus I ported our old number out so I didn't lose our old number. I did have to configure things and Gizmo5 could be easier to set up, but I got it working for now. Now that Google has bought Gizmo5 it should be interesting to see what they do with it.