Musings of Jacob Thomason

Collab on my shared Spotify playlist, Electro-fi

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 00:30:00 -0400

So, I’m trying to pull together some electronic music fans! I need a little help here. If you are into electronic music and have a Spotify account. Please check out my collab playlist, Electro-fi. I’d like to get one really large, really awesome playlist put together that everyone can enjoy.

For me, I like to listen to electronic music while I am coding. It’s excellent for keeping the pace, subtle and not distracting as music with words can be many times.

So, check it out, and collab!

Dreams make for awesome ideas. I want to see a room where the painting is done by multiple colors...

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 06:15:00 -0400

Dreams make for awesome ideas. I want to see a room where the painting is done by multiple colors of foot prints all across the ceiling and possibly down the walls as if someone was walking. Feet of all sizes too. I think this has epic potential.

Maybe you have this really crazy multicolored chandelier in the middle of a room, fairly high ceilings, and all of these multicolored foot paths steps away from the chandelier and slowly fade out as they would naturally from the paint running out. Some would come down the walls just a bit, others only a few steps away from the chandelier, etc.

Awesome

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 15:37:51 -0400

Awesome

phpStorm 3 - Theme "Heat of the Night"

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 01:51:00 -0400

Verified with phpStorm 3

OK, so, I didn’t really like any of the themes out there for phpStorm and, being design oriented, nothing bothers me more than having to strain my eyes looking at crap I can’t stand. This is version one of the color scheme, it’s decent, I am sure some improvements could be made, particularly with the relevance in terms of color and some of the saturation aspects of the colors. But, overall, I think it turned out pretty well.

I updated a lot, but primarily, css, html, php, and javascript. There are some others mixed in though, but just minor improvements.

Here are the HSB values I used for the color scheme. Feel free to update some of the other templates and share! I’ll update this post with any improvements ;)

Orange = 30 76 89

Red = 0 59 68

Lt Yellow = 48 47 78

Loud Sea Green = 180 100 80

blue green = 190 43 60

Pink = 315 41 100

Green = 75 59 69

White = 0 0 78

Blue = 213 50 82

Purple = 276 50 58

Here are some screenshots of some code templates so you can get an idea of how it looks…

HTML

CSS

JavaScript

PHP

You can download heat of the night here.

Charter Communication - WORST cable co ever!

Sun, 31 Jul 2011 01:45:00 -0400

I’ve lived in many different cities, different countries and used all sorts of ISPs. Charter is by far, hands down, one of the worst cable companies I have had to experience. I’ve made countless calls complaining about the intermittent issues experienced and I keep getting the same story, time after time… “we have to be able to spot the issue when it’s happening”. I can understand that, but you can also investigate the issue. After all, the cable modem was put on the watch list.

Here is the latest saga in the hell that is Charter Communications…

trooper:~ jacob$ ping google.com PING google.com (74.125.159.147): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 74.125.159.147: icmp_seq=0 ttl=52 time=14.235 ms 64 bytes from 74.125.159.147: icmp_seq=1 ttl=52 time=615.180 ms 64 bytes from 74.125.159.147: icmp_seq=2 ttl=52 time=760.084 ms Request timeout for icmp_seq 3 64 bytes from 74.125.159.147: icmp_seq=3 ttl=52 time=1730.940 ms 64 bytes from 74.125.159.147: icmp_seq=4 ttl=52 time=1136.144 ms 64 bytes from 74.125.159.147: icmp_seq=5 ttl=52 time=1902.091 ms Request timeout for icmp_seq 7 Request timeout for icmp_seq 8 Request timeout for icmp_seq 9 Request timeout for icmp_seq 10 64 bytes from 74.125.159.147: icmp_seq=6 ttl=52 time=5443.491 ms 64 bytes from 74.125.159.147: icmp_seq=7 ttl=52 time=5195.108 ms 64 bytes from 74.125.159.147: icmp_seq=8 ttl=52 time=4945.529 ms 64 bytes from 74.125.159.147: icmp_seq=9 ttl=52 time=4463.646 ms 64 bytes from 74.125.159.147: icmp_seq=10 ttl=52 time=3958.829 ms ^C --- google.com ping statistics --- 14 packets transmitted, 11 packets received, 21.4% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 14.235/2742.298/5443.491/1972.875 ms

Nothing like an infographic to put the deficit into...

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 22:47:05 -0400

Nothing like an infographic to put the deficit into perspective… wow

"One of the things you learn as a college president is that if an undergraduate is wearing a tie and..."

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 14:56:22 -0400

““One of the things you learn as a college president is that if an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o’clock, there are two possibilities. One is that they’re looking for a job and have an interview; the other is that they are an asshole. This was the latter case,””

- The Social Network

PROTECT IP Act?! Grrr...

Wed, 11 May 2011 13:01:00 -0400

I’m so fucking sick and tired of the dumbass morons this country continues to put into Washington and their complete lack of foresight! It enrages me to no end!

**Will the PROTECT IP Act provide benefits to Americans and people worldwide? **

To many the answer will be “Yes”, but only in the fashion that you might not be able to visit some site that spreads a virus to your computer, websites that are selling illegal software, stolen music, or something a long these lines. Maybe terrorist network sites will be block, etc. But, this is NOT the position of govt! Their job isn’t to decide what I see or not see! This is censorship, plain and simple!! What if the govt doesn’t want you to see the website of a radical new movement anywhere in the world, maybe like the many thousands that have helped to shape the world in which we live today! Don’t forget that the intentions of laws like this are most always done without mal-intent. But when you are in charge of a country and have goals to accomplish, you will use all tools available at your disposal to accomplish said task. Who knows what the future will hold, but if the govt doesn’t like something, they can squash it! Imagine if this was in place a year or two ago before wikileaks broke out huge. You better believe there would have been a huge movement to sensor it and honestly, people would have just gone about their lives with it censored. And, while I am not a huge proponent of everything that Asange and Co pump out, I fully support freedom of speech and press, regardless of what the fuck is being said!

Will the PROTECT IP Act be global censorship?

Yes, it absolutely will, especially since the new provisions require that search engines filter out content, and guess what laws the major search engines will be required to comply with?

I also feel the need to mention the lack of foresight here in terms of court costs! For a gov’t that has over 13 TRILLION dollars in fucking debt, the last thing we need are more court costs! You better believe that the tax payer will be paying the dumbasses (indirectly) to run a program of this nature, offering court hearings for many cases and then slamming the gavel on all the other companies that must comply, costing them administrative and technical overhead in the process. It’s laws like this that fuck an economy, slowly, one after the other, gov’t gets larger and larger to the point where it takes massive money to support a network of operations that do nothing more than create massive inefficiencies!

For a good overview of the good, the bad, and the ugly as well as the original copy of the act see here…

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110511/00115314234/full-text-protect-ip-act-released-good-bad-horribly-ugly.shtml

What can you do?

Sign the petition here… http://www.dontcensorthenet.com/ Take your opinions to the web Contact your US state representative to tell them how terrible this is for freedom of speech and press. Be proactive! The future of the world depends on it!

Nice Easter weather here in Florida.

Sat, 23 Apr 2011 12:34:31 -0400

Nice Easter weather here in Florida.

The iPhone Layar app icon is absolutely one one the best...

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 00:27:47 -0400

The iPhone Layar app icon is absolutely one one the best I’ve seen to date. Props @layar!

My new kicks, very comfy.

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 00:20:53 -0400

My new kicks, very comfy.

Next Day PETS? Seriously!? Why in the world do we need...

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 22:56:05 -0400

Next Day PETS? Seriously!? Why in the world do we need something like next day pets, and why is this a common suggested search term on Google?

Adding a Separator Line with CSS between 2 Variable Height Floated Containers

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 00:49:00 -0400

OK, this is the 3rd time I’ve written this, and it’s now being written inside of textedit, b/c the tumblr plugin for chrome loses your data if you click off the browser window, or you click the “html” link… angry face

So, the shortened scenario now…

The situation is that you have two floated block level containers that you wish to have a separator line between. This is a very common situation. Now, many times you don’t know the height of these containers b/c the content within them is dynamic. This is an issue b/c you almost always want the line to be the height of the greatest container.

Now, you could use js to do this, getting the height of both containers and overriding the height style inline in the DOM, but this is a nasty approach and js should be avoided at all costs.

I am sure there are some other css solutions out there that others have used, and I’d love to hear them as well. However, I recently encountered this issue and came up with what I think is a pretty brilliant and clean solution.

I should reiterate that this really only works with 2 columns b/c we’re only able to get the greater of the two. Again, this is for floated block level containers.

So, the HTML code



    Column One

    Column One

    Column One

    Column One

    Column One

    Column One


    Column Two

    Column Two

Now, obviously from this code we can tell which container has a greater height, but let’s assume for the sake of this example that we don’t know which one would have a larger height. So, here is the CSS…


div.container {
    float: left;
    padding: 10px;
    }

div.column-one {
    border-right: 1px solid #CCC;
    }

div.column-two {
    margin-left: -1px;
    border-left: 1px solid #CCC;
    }

And that’s it, basically, we just overlay the lines on the same side. Super simple, huh? Would love to hear any feedback that you might have.

Is that right?

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 21:11:12 -0400

Is that right?

Computer Vision glasses… Perk of the job…...

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 16:27:16 -0400

Computer Vision glasses… Perk of the job… Yay……

Daily News - Business Idea

Sat, 05 Mar 2011 14:28:39 -0500

Ok, so, I enjoy reading over my twitter followers to see news articles, but it’s time consuming and I dont do it often. If you do do it, you probably aren’t working enough.

So, an idea for a business model would be to take you daily stream and parse it out into an rss feed customized with REAL urls and site titles and maybe including a description meta data and a pic. This would be super efficient and offer an option for tying in ads maybe.

My new iPod LunaTik watch, pretty sweet. Now I need to figure...

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 16:13:27 -0500

My new iPod LunaTik watch, pretty sweet. Now I need to figure out how this will work in the gym. The snap in/out is nice for this, but doesn’t look nearly as nice.

Thanks UPS

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 19:49:42 -0500

Thanks UPS

"It doesn’t matter how slowly you go-so long as you do not stop.” - Confucius"

Sun, 09 Jan 2011 12:47:56 -0500

““It doesn’t matter how slowly you go-so long as you do not stop.” - Confucius”

Clustrix for MySQL scaling issues

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 14:49:30 -0500

This is really a great idea. I wish I could find pricing on it. My guess is that it’s going to be very expensive, but I could totally see companies offering this tech in a reseller like scenario…

http://www.building43.com/videos/2010/12/07/clustrix-makes-scaling-sql-databases-a-piece-of-cake/