TheCrypto's Blog

Yesterday, I got on two new webapps, Suprglu and MeasureMap. Since MeasureMap is a stats tracking site and I screwed with the stats because of posting my name to the public Million Dollar Experiement site, I'm going to wait a few days before showing anything from it.

So instead, I'll talk about Suprglu. This site is is similar to an entry I saw win Rails Day but since the site is down for that I can't find it again. However, that site never worked so it's probably best I can't rememember either.

Suprglu tries to aggregate all the RSS feeds we are creating from del.icio.us to 43things and back. Then it puts them into a nice blog style format and lets you reaggregate them. It's an idea almost like the status page idea I had but entirely from feeds. I like the idea and I hope that the team can do more with it soon.

Here is my personal Suprglu as an example.

As another note, more sites should use subdomains for user webpages. It is so much easier than remembering the path to the user information.

TC Out

I've been reading Steve Palina's blog for a while now. He always has interesting stuff going on such as his polyphasic sleep experiment which I read with much interest as a couple of my friends attempted the same fairly recently but ultimately failed.

Today he started another experiment to try and bring a million dollars to people. I originally read about this idea in one of Scott Adams' books (who now has a blog himself). I can't remember which book it was or else I would link to it. But, I never had the impetus to actually do it. If this intention works the way people want it, everyone will be earning a million dollars somehow, and I have a number of idea of what I could do with a cool million. Hopefully, some of them to be posted to this blog soon.

TC Out

I just came down with something, probably a cold. So I thought it would be a perfect time to talk about Merlin Mann's recent post about status pages. I think this is a wonderful idea. I need to code something up for PyBlosxom to do this soon. Maybe when my brain is working again.

My idea would be to have a static page of fields and values, however, the fields are pulled via scripts. So I can do things like post my current word count information for NaNoWriMo or grab 5 random entries from my todo list and so on. Since the status page updates based on information I'm creating, it should actually stay up to date much more than trying to summarize what I'm doing on a regular basis.

TC Out

Over the past couple of months, I have been using a new window manager under Linux. It's called wmii. It is currently attempting to approach the interface of the not quite dead Plan 9. What makes it useful is the keybindings for everything, and a model for organizing the windows that makes sense.

I normally used the tiled layout when I'm doing my work. You have one main window that takes up most of the vertical space, and all the subordinate windows running along the side. To pull a window to the main takes just a slap of a key and the focus follows. The sloppy focus is some of the best I've seen as well. Also the developers are concerned about the quality of their code. Each new snapshot actually decreases the amount of code they have while still adding features.

If you have a *nix box and are looking for a new window mangager. I would defineitly try it out. It's a bit weird to get used too but it still has a much smaller learning curve than ion or evilwm.

TC Out