Hi, I'm Ben Oakes and this is my geek blog.
Currently, I'm a Software Developer at Hedgeye.
Previously, I was a Research Assistant in the Early Social Cognition Lab at Yale University and a student at the University of Iowa.
I also organize NewHaven.rb.
I do development with Ruby, JavaScript, SQL, HTML, and CSS. I have an amazing fiancée named Danielle Smith.
RubyConf 2011 was a blast. It was great to meet other Rubyists, get a ton of T-shirts (no really, I got 8 or so), and talk Aaron Patterson into giving Jonathan Magen a special message.
If you weren’t able to go, I pushed my notes up to a public GitHub wiki. A couple others from Hedgeye are adding their notes as well, so with those (plus the Confreaks videos when those guys finally have access to a reliable Internet connection), it’s almost like you were there.
Just a note to other Mainstays WT-8029U owners: if you think your clock is broken and the battery won’t hold a charge, you might be wrong. There are two solar modes you have to set. The first is on the back, under the battery compartment. The second is set using the menu:
Press “set” until “SOL” appears in the day field (12 times)
Set it to “off” (press “+”)
We thought this clock might have been broken until I found this tidbit in the manual. Before changing this setting, the screen would go blank when the solar panel wasn’t in direct light.
Otherwise, this is a great little clock. We got ours for $9 on clearance at Walmart (probably because of people thinking it was broken). It charges a AA battery with solar power, sets itself to atomic time, and even has temperature and humidity readings.
I recently decided I should send my aging TI-83 graphing calculator out to pasture. I haven’t really used the thing since my freshman year of college, and if I am going to do any serious amount of math, I have much better looking (and faster) solutions on my iPhone and even my ancient Zire 31. I’m a little surprised Texas Instruments hasn’t brought out anything significantly better — a TI-83 feels out of place in 2010. I guess that’s what you get for stifling competition; they’ve basically owned the graphing calculator market for quite some time. (Seems a little like Windows XP to me.)
Before selling it on Amazon, I thought it would be best to save some of the TI-83 Basic programs I had written back at the turn of the millenium. Some of my first programming experience came from writing dinky programs on the thing (which wasn’t ever that easy — keep in mind that it has a severely limiting 16 x 7 display). After figuring out what I was doing (a little) I even wrote a hangman program (pictured above). It’s littered with ugly things like single letter variables and goto statements. I don’t even know if it’s possible to make functions… I think they have to be other programs, a la Matlab — which is part of the reason that I say “Matlab is a great graphing calculator”.
At any rate, I typed up what I thought would be worth saving for “historical purposes” and even uploaded it to my snippets repository on GitHub. Take it as my gift to the TI-83 hacker community. :P
Update: …and within less than an hour, it sold on Amazon. The Internet still blows my mind sometimes.
I spent some time over the last few weeks pulling together lots of command line tools that I’ve written over the last few years. I’ve shared them on GitHub.
Some fill in gaps that I wish *nix systems would have by default (such as prune vs uniq or reverse vs rev). Others just script things that I do commonly or are just tedious to do (such as backups2git, github-init, timestamp, latest-migration-path, and std-timestamps). Some are just there for fun (such as is-computer-on). Most of them are written in Ruby, but some are plain old Bash scripts. Lots of the Ruby scripts make heavy use of ARGF, which is awesome for writting shell scripts if you’ve never used it.
I also spent some time documenting (and remembering) how they worked. (Most of it was just shuffling comments around.) Almost every command has a --help option that prints usage information and a short synopsis now. I hope you find them useful!
I’ve been listening to some podcasts lately, mainly Engadget. However, since I listen to these on my Palm, I’ve been having to sync these manually. It’s a pain.
The iPodder software comes in a variety of flavors, including a PocketPC version. Now, why are we, as Palm OS users, getting handed the shaft? I haven’t experimented much, but when I get this much fabled laptop of mine, it’ll have a card reader and I could sync to the “Audio” folder on it, but that’s really just a workaround. I guess it’s a pretty similar situation for the PocketPC users, which leads me to wonder why they don’t have a Palm-friendly solution.
This being Thanksgiving vacation, I had some major goals:
Eat. Watch a movie. (The easiest and best goal, if you ask me)
Finish up all the chores I had been neglecting (which took an entire day–I was expecting more)
Get all the homework that I can done
Do tons of research and order a new computer
Blog
I’ve been living with this computer of mine for far too long. It has a multitude of problems that reside in the hardware of the computer itself–enough of them that I don’t want to replace anything else. It was a computer from circa ’97 that I had outfitted with new hardware. So, after three (or four?) motherboards, processors, a new hard drive, optical drives, and many other substantial upgrades of which I will not delve into, it’s an entirely different computer than it was. You wouldn’t recognize it if it were not for the case.
Of course, now it has some problems. One of the hard drives is the original one from the computer, which I have since filled to the brim with MP3s. It’s dying. Quickly too. I think I have a backup of most of the data on it that’s important, but it’s mainly just music. Plus, I have most of the source CD’s.
But that’s not it. The main hard drive is starting to fail too. And it’s not very old. Every time that I want to boot up the computer, I have to take a can of air and clean out the connections on the mobo and HDD, just so that it will work. If I’m lucky, it will work for at least an hour. This is not enough time to do an English paper without major annoyance. It tends to crash right as I’m saving changes, too.
Add to that the fact that the case doesn’t like to stay together anymore, the keyboard is about as old as (insert favorite religious figure here, preferably one that is rumored to have created the universe), the mouse is an el cheapo piece that refuses to do most anything, and the monitor is about 14-in and covered with smoking and coffee stains (not mine).
But the graphics card isn’t half bad. Unfortunately, I’m not a gamer.
So, if it still needs to be said, I want (almost need) a new computer. I’ve been out of the loop for far too long. The sheer amount that you can get for such little money these days is staggering. I decided on a laptop mostly because I don’t want the computer to be a permanent fixture if it need not be. The little bit of extra money will be worth it just for that, I think.
My friend Sean just got his Sony Vaio PCG-K33, and I was blown away with what he got for only $1500. Then I started looking around. This is what I’ve decided on:
HP zv5000t series
Operating System
Microsoft(R) Windows(R) XP Home Edition with SP2
Processor
Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 2.80A GHz
Display
15.4″ WXGA BrightView Widescreen (1280×800)
Graphics Card
ATI Mobility Radeon(TM) 9000 IGP
Memory
1.0GB DDR SDRAM (2x512MB)
Hard Drive
60 GB 5400 RPM Hard Drive
Primary CD/DVD Drive
4X DVD +/- RW/R & CD-RW Combo
Networking
54g(TM) Integ. Broadcom 802.11b/g WLAN & Bluetooth
Productivity Software
Microsoft(R) Works/Money
Primary Battery
12 Cell Lithium Ion Battery
Editor’s note: this was quite possibly the worst computer I’ve ever owned, looking back on it from 2010. I’ve since vowed never to get an HP again after they wouldn’t do an in warranty repair after it died within a year. I’m now on the Mac and couldn’t be happier. I can’t even believe how much I spent on this thing too…
The processor is 200 MHz slower, but the 512 MB more RAM than the Vaio K33 will more than make up the difference. In many other areas, it’s just a tiny bit better, but still very comparable. I love the fact that he went down to Nebraska Furniture Mart to buy his and ended up paying around $1700 after taxes, etc. I’m paying less than that and getting a 802.11g router and a printer, no taxes, no shipping. The great part is that I would have been buying these anyway.
If you know anything about computers at all, you might just be drooling over these configurations. Or is that just me? In case you’re wondering why I’m going with such high specs, it’s because I do tons with digital video.
There’s still a big road block to me ordering though. I didn’t like the Sony notebook because they only supported their own proprietary Memory Stick. I thought that the HP had one of their 5-in-1 media readers, but I’m not sure at this point. Their specs page doesn’t mention it at all, but the 3D tour (requires Internet Explorer, bleh) devotes a section to it. I’m still waiting for their sales team to get back to me–the sooner the better.
Oh, and by the way, here’s a wholehearted thank you to Mel (she’s the one that took the pictures of me and my “fan club”) for helping me decide on specs.
