Why Windows Tablets Have a Chance

Windows as we currently know it is useless on the touchscreen tablet form factor. We know this because Windows came out with tablets as early as 2002, (years before Apple released the iPad), and all of them were colossal failures. Windows is inherently a desktop OS. It’s gone through 15 years of refinement for the mouse and keyboard, and as a desktop OS, it’s great. What that Microsoft completely missed though, (and what Steve Jobs caught), is that as wonderful as desktop OSs are on desktops, they are terrible for touchscreen tablets.

Read my full article at TekGoblin.com.
 

Fixing Facebook With Stylish

Facebook is a great website, and after Google, my main destination on the web. But there are some annoyances. People You May Know, as well as Sponsored Ads, for example. I've been looking for a way to fix that, and the only working method I'd found uses Greasemonkey to kill the entire right column. This removes Upcoming events as well, and leaves a large white space, which is almost as annoying as the Ads. What I wanted to do was remove just the People You May Know box, and the Ads box, and using the power of Stylish, I have done it.

Stylish is a Firefox addon that allows me to run custom CSS on top of a website's own. This lets me make any changes I desire to the look of the site. Hiding an element in CSS is simple. You set it's "display" to "none". The problem lies in finding what an element on a page is called, so that you can call it out in your code.

Fear not though, for we have the Page Source view on Firefox. And since the title rows of the sections we want to remove are plain text, I can search for that text in the source page, which gets me close. Facebook unfortunately uses minimized code, meaning that instead of single lines, spaced nicely for ease of reading, it's compressed. This allows for a faster page load, but a slower read. Which is also a benefit to them, since a site like Facebook doesn't WANT us messing around with their code. Understandable, but I'm out to please myself, not them.

So, looking around, I finally found what I'm looking for. The class of the container holding the unwanted items is "ego_column". So I pop up Stylish, and set up my document. First I place in a beginning line, which just tells Firefox what type of document this is.

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

I then place in my container, which specifies that the code only affects Facebook.com.

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("facebook.com") {

}

Inside that then, I write my code.

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("facebook.com") {

   .ego_column {display:none !important;}

}

The result is immediate. Here is a screenshot from before:



So, yay for Stylish!
 

Music, Here There and Everywhere

I'm a very random person I guess, my taste in music jumps around. The three artists/bands that have been in my head for the past couple weeks consist of eletronica Hurts, sorta Indy sounding Kimbra, and ... I don't even know how to describe Massive Attack (they did the song that became the intro to House, if that rings any bells.)

So, I thought I'd share a sample of all three.






 

Apple Minus Steve Jobs, Take 2

In a letter written to the Apple board of Directors, Steve Jobs has officially resigned as the CEO of Apple. UPDATE: Apple has now confirmed in a press release that Tim Cook will be taking over as CEO. This is actually the second time Jobs will be leaving the company he co-founded, the first being in 1985 when he was forced out. He returned in 1996 when Apple bought NeXT, the company Jobs had founded after leaving. By 1997 he was again running the company, albeit officially as "interum CEO", a title which he kept until 2000, when he dropped the "interum". Jobs' return to Apple is wildly recognized as having saved the company, as his return heralded a return to the profitability of the early years. It'll take time to see how his second departure will affect Apple, but it's unlikely Apple will face problems any time soon, given the massive profitability of both the tablet and smartphone markets.

August 24, 2011–To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community:

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.

As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.

I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role.

I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you.

 

Just Google It

Every now and then when I get stuck on how I want something to look, I'll just google it, and look at what other people are doing. Today I've been working on a revamped Useful Links page for my new website.

The reason that I am changing the style of the page itself is that the way it's set up now is in a 3 column page, with a navigation panel on the left, content in the middle, and my picture on the right. For the new site, the right-most column will only be on the homepage, nowhere else. So I'm changing the setup of the links page to use all the extra space that it's now going to have.

I got stuck on the design though, because I've decided that the current setup, while modern looking, is also not as useful, because the links aren't immediately apparent. Using red non-underlined text for links isn't normal at all, and while block highlighting looks pleasant, it's also confusing. Because of this, I'm going to be changing to a more classic style of links for the new page. I tried just basic blue, and that looked okay ... but the purple of visited links didn't fit at all.

Stuck, I went to Google and searched for "useful links", and the results were mainly the links pages or a random collection of websites ... exactly what I was looking for. The methods vary widely, but one method technique which I thought looked really nice was used by Clemson University. The links don't change color, and the color fits the scheme.

The purple they use doesn't fit with my own color scheme at all, but I've got an off color blue which does, and by removing the change to purple for visited, I think I've solved the problem. Thank you Clemson University.
 

Summer Recap

Today is the last day of summer; tomorrow, classes begin. It's been a good run I'd say, definitely up there in my top summers and very possibly the best overall. This post is just a quick recap of events and thoughts.

I started off the summer with a few weeks living at home, before coming back and moving in to my apartment. It's the first time I've ever lived alone, and while there were annoyances, the benefit of not having a roommate overwhelmed all of them. Not that my roommates these past years have been terrible, but it's just nice to have my own space where I don't have to deal with anyone.

At the beginning of August, I moved out of my apartment and back home, then immediately left to go to Gen Con for half a week. While there were some personal problems, Gen Con itself was great, and I'll definitely be returning next year. Afterwards, I spent the last 2 weeks of summer at home, visiting family. Got new lenses for my glasses, got 2 cavities filled, and got my hair cut. Moved back up to West Lafayette the day before yesterday on Friday, and then had this weekend to settle in.

I spent most of the summer living there and working at ITaP, either in the DLC or being farmed out to help with incoming freshman. I did some volunteer work with high-schoolers looking at Purdue, and went to a few festivals and events sin Lafayette. The lack of classes was impactful, because even though I was working 20-40 hours a week, there was no homework and it ended up being much less than an average college semester.

During non-peak moments at work, I spent my time pushing my web development skills. I increased my knowledge of HTML and CSS (learning about HMTL5 and CSS3 as well), and taught myself jQuery, PHP, and mySQL. Obviously the last three I'm not an expert at, but I have enough basic understanding that with the internet as a reference guide I can do anything I want.

I finished up the schedule creator tool to go along with my Purdue ICS Templates, and created a dynamic data table to test out PHP and mySQL. Lastly, I finalized the design for my new website, which will launch sometime this Fall.

Overall I'd call it a very productive summer. I worked enough to pay my expenses and save a little, and learned some useful skills. Not to mention I just enjoyed the experience of living on my own. Classes start tomorrow morning ... senior year, here we go.
 

Blogger ...

I just finished typing out a solid 3 paragraphs about my day and the dentist trip. I clicked preview and Blogger said FUCK YOU and gave me an error and deleted the data. And I don't feel like typing it all out again. Suffice to say, I went to the dentist, it sucked, but it's done, and that's good. You can imagine the 3 paragraphs and yell at blogger for deleting them on you.

Paragraph 2, deleted by Blogger. Blogger sucks and doesn't want you to read this paragraph. Blogger sucks and doesn't want you to read this paragraph. Blogger sucks and doesn't want you to read this paragraph. Blogger sucks and doesn't want you to read this paragraph. Blogger sucks and doesn't want you to read this paragraph. Blogger sucks and doesn't want you to read this paragraph. Blogger sucks and doesn't want you to read this paragraph. Blogger sucks and doesn't want you to read this paragraph.

Paragraph 3, deleted by Blogger. Blogger sucks and doesn't want you to read this paragraph. Blogger sucks and doesn't want you to read this paragraph. Blogger sucks and doesn't want you to read this paragraph. Blogger sucks and doesn't want you to read this paragraph. Blogger sucks and doesn't want you to read this paragraph. Blogger sucks and doesn't want you to read this paragraph. Blogger sucks and doesn't want you to read this paragraph. Blogger sucks and doesn't want you to read this paragraph. Blogger sucks and doesn't want you to read this paragraph.