If you’ve downloaded Ping Fire from this site in the past seven days you will want to check http://www.pingfire.us to ensure that you’re running the most recent version. 

If you have any comments or suggestions feel free to email me or post a comment.

Installation Instructions

1. Download and Install PingFire.
2. Add the “Ping” button to a menu.  You can do this by going to View >> Toolbars >> Customize.
3. Provide the extension with your Application Key.  (You can find your key by going to: http://ping.fm/key.) From within Firefox, go to Tools >> Add-Ons.  Find “Ping Fire” in the list then click the “Preferences” button. Enter your User Name and your Application Key into the fields provided then click “Ok.”

Installation Instructions

1. Download and Install PingFire.
2. Add the “Ping” button to a menu.  You can do this by going to View >> Toolbars >> Customize.
3. Provide the extension with your Application Key.  (You can find your key by going to: http://ping.fm/key.) From within Firefox, go to Tools >> Add-Ons.  Find “Ping Fire” in the list then click the “Preferences” button. Enter your User Name and your Application Key into the fields provided then click “Ok.”

Editor’s Note: About an hour after this post the people at Ping let me know that PingFire was approved! So now everyone can use it.  Just remember that the plug-in is still in beta.

PingFire is working.  You can now post using all of the different “Ping My” types (Default, Blog, MicroBlog and Status) as well as any custom triggers you have created.

You can also quote something you’re reading on the web with Ping Fire.  Simply select the text you want to quote and hit the “Ping” button.  Ping Fire will automatically copy the text you’ve selected, append the URL and add it to the message box.  All you have to do is hit the “Ok” button.

I figure this puts PingFire in an un-official Beta status.  The status is still un-official since I haven’t gotten PingFire approved yet.  I submitted the stripped down version on Monday night so I’m hoping that it’ll get approved soon.  I’m also hoping that I don’t have to go through another submission round to get all of the new features I approved.

In the grand scheme of Firefox Extensions, PingFire is relatively simple but I’m still proud of how far I’ve come since Saturday.  When I started this project I knew some Javascript, knew some XML and I had never heard of XUL. Now it’s three days later and I’m still by no means a pro but I think that I’ve come a long way. I hope everyone enjoys the extension as much as I enjoyed developing it.

Ping Fire will a Firefox extension that allows a user to post a Ping without having to be on their Ping.fm Dashboard.

Initially, the only thing the extension will allow you to do is post to Ping. I will add new features as I find a new or when someone requests a feature that I feel will be useful.

The extension is still in the beginning phase.  I have the extension running in Firefox along with most of the necessary windows and Javascript.  I’m still waiting on my API key from Ping.fm before I can work on the rest of it.

If you’d like to make a feature request add a comment here.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

Just the title of this book had me thoroughly intrigued. This non-fiction, fast-paced book guides you into a cloak-and-dagger world that is usually reserved for CIA spies. The main characters are economic hit men (EHM) of which John Perkins was one, jackals and the military. The goal of an EHM? To gain control of a country, more correctly its resources, without having to invade.

If only half of this book is true, it paints a scary picture of how the US Government operates. The stories told are of assassinations and of one-sided deals that were a boon the American companies involved.

The Secret History of the American Empire

This book is a follow-up to Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. It goes into greater detail regarding the events mentioned in Confessions. It discusses John’s meteoric rise in the EHM ranks and his moral awakening.

Although a truly a great book the last chapter was too preachy for me. I understand his plight and why he’s trying to motivate the reader but I feel that it is misplaced and it better suited for another book.

Wrap-Up

If you’re interested in clandestine operations of the United States these books will prove to be a great read.

My latest foray into this arena comes from REXwireless. Their todoMatrix application does not fail to impress. Task organization is very natural - your tasks are organized by “drawers” and then by “folders.” A task takes under a few seconds to create, this is a great deal quicker than any of the other applications I’ve used.

Why I Love It

Another nice feature they have is named “injection.” todoMatrix installs an injection option to the menus provided by your Blackberry. Injection allows you to take the text currently displayed into a new task, saving a great deal of time.

Those few things made me fall in love with the application, but one feature really clinched it for me - rexDesktop. rexDesktop allows full CRUD on your todoMatrix data from the web.

Quirks

todoMatrix is not without its quirks. It would be nice if there was option on the menu that displays the shortcuts available. I’m sure they’re in the documentation but I’m too lazy to read it and I couldn’t carry it with me.

Also, I find the UI to be lackluster. I’m going to break that comment into three separate parts - 1. The Main Screen, 2. The Folder View, and 3. The Item View.

A Lackluster UI

The Main Screen

The main screen displays a tree which contains all of your drawers and folders. Although you can configure the colors of the folders, it still feels clunky to me. In Rex’s defense, I’m not sure what more can be done with a tree.

The Folder View

This view shows all of the tasks that are stored under a particular folder. The top quarter of the screen displays information related to the selected tasks and the bottom three quarters show all of the tasks.

The task detail section is too small. So small that labels for the six data elements that are displayed contain acronyms. These acronyms, although logical, I can’t get their meaning as quickly as I’d like to. I’m forced to look at their values in order to determine what I’m looking at. It seems to me that there is room to expand this section or at least expand the label names.

The tasks displayed give you a hint as to their status but there are only two colors used - a light blue for uncompleted tasks and a light gray for completed ones. I would like configurable colors for each status or priority. I understand that this could lead to confusion for the user, but if the colors are configurable, then the user could use as many or as few as they like.

The Item View

The Item View suffers from the same problem as the top portion of the Folder View but at least there’s a line that explains the meaning of each label.

RexDesktop

This is probably my favorite feature of this application. Unfortunately, it too suffers from a UI problem - it sucks. In a world full of Ajax and flashy UI’s this web app still looks like something from the late 90’s. It is fully functional it just looks ugly. But I’ll still choose function over form.

Wrap-Up

Although I write a great deal about the things I don’t like, todoMatrix is a great application. I feel that its strong points speak for themselves. I can’t wait to see how this application matures in the coming versions.

—

todoMatrix can be purchased at rexWireless.

My first reaction has been to create a toString method. This works rather well but it too is tedious. So I’ve created a toString method that uses reflection to create the output. The code for this method is located at the bottom of this post.

Some things to note:

• This code has been created for my own use. Therefore you won’t have some of the objects I reference.
• This code is free for all uses. If you’d like to use it commercially or for your own pet projects feel free to do so. Although I wouldn’t mind a mention (or a link) in the Javadoc or on the application’s web page if you see fit to do so.
• This code is by no means feature complete. For example, I imagine it could be recursive so that when an object is encountered, this method is called instead of the Object’s toString method.
• I also notice that my escape characters are no longer escaped. This means that you’ll have to add your own backslashes.
• This code uses StringBuffer when StringBuilder would be more appropriate.  I used StringBuffer because of constraints that were put on me when I originally developed it. (If you’re interested in the differences between these two check out: http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=652378)

The Code

    public static String toString(Object a_oToConvert)
    {

         if(a_oToConvert == null)
         {
              return "Object is null";
         }

         StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer();

         sb.append("n");

         sb.append("t" + Util.DASHES + "n");
         sb.append("t" + a_oToConvert.getClass().getName() + "n");
         sb.append("t" + Util.DASHES + "n");

         Class cls = a_oToConvert.getClass();

         Field[] arrFields = cls.getDeclaredFields();

         for(int idxField = 0; idxField < arrFields.length; idxField++)
         {

              Field fldCurrent = arrFields[idxField];

              String sName = fldCurrent.getName();

              Object oVal = new String("---");

              char[] arrChars = sName.toCharArray();
              char[] arrMod = new char[arrChars.length];

              for(int x = 3; x < arrChars.length; x++)
              {
            	  arrMod[x - 3] = arrChars[x];
              }

              String sFirstChar = new String("" + arrMod[0]);
              arrMod[0] = sFirstChar.toUpperCase().toCharArray()[0];

              String sGetMethod = "get" + new String(arrMod).trim();

              try
              {
                   Method methGet = cls.getMethod(sGetMethod, null);

                   if(methGet != null)
                   {
                        oVal = methGet.invoke(a_oToConvert, null);
                   }

                   if(oVal == null)
                   {
                        oVal = new String("Value is null");
                   }
                   else
                   {
                        if(oVal instanceof List)
                        {
                             oVal = "List Size: " + ((List)oVal).size();
                        }
                   }

              }
              catch(NoSuchMethodException nme)
              {
                   oVal = "No such getter - " + sGetMethod + "()";
              }
              catch(IllegalAccessException iae)
              {
                   oVal = "Not public - " + sGetMethod + "()";
              }
              catch(InvocationTargetException ite)
              {
                   oVal = "ITE" + ite.getLocalizedMessage();
              }

              sb.append("t" + Util.beautify(sName, oVal.toString()) + "n");

         }

         sb.append("t" + Util.DASHES);

         return sb.toString();

    }

After playing around with the code a little bit, I noticed that the sample code didn’t play too well with my Struts application. So I wrapped their code into my own class OpenIdAuthenticator. This class simply wraps the logic from the sample code to make it compatible with Struts.

Feel free to use the class for any purpose - commercial, private, etc. If you so desire, please give me some credit somewhere in the Javadoc.

First, let me give you a background on where I’m coming from. I’m a Mac user since March 2007 and I’ve been a Palm user since 1999. As far as Palm’s go I’ve had the Handspring Visor, Handspring Visor Edge, Palm m500, the Palm m515 and the Palm Treo 650. This has been a long way of telling you that, in the past, I’ve been a heavy Palm OS user and this is my first BlackBerry.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Treo 650, let me give you a brief history. It’s a brick (-), its battery weighs more than my Pearl. It has a QWERTY keyboard (+). It has a touch screen (+). It has a large screen (+). It does email (+) but not very well (-).

Right out of the box the Pearl started to impress me. The size of it is simply amazing! It fits comfortably inside the palm of my hand and my thumb easily reaches the trackball. And, as I mentioned earlier, it weighs less than the battery of my old Treo 650.

The phone is also very stylish. The pictures I’ve seen on the internet do not give it justice. If you’re interested, go to the Verizon store and see it for yourself.

As far as the phone goes, I was a little apprehensive of even ordering it. The lack of a touch screen and a QWERTY keyboard really worried me.

On my Treo I could type amazingly fast, my fingers flew over the keyboard like a pianist’s fingers do over piano keys. On the other hand, the Pearl does not have a QWERTY keyboard. Instead it has two letters per key. In order to make typing easier the phone uses something called SureType. In short SureType is a Predicitive Text application that guesses the word you are typing based on the keys pressed.

In the past I’ve used T9 (another predictive text application) and quickly turned it off in favor of tapping each key in order to get the letter I wanted. So far I haven’t turned off SureType as it works rather well. One of the first things I did was type up an email with some of the words that most people don’t use - a co-worker’s last name, “Java,” “Lodgenet,” and some other things. It was able to guess all of them. But I found one problem - me. I worked against the application. In order for SureType to guess what you want, you have to type. I would type three letters, see that it was being displayed wrong so I would try to fix it. Instead, keep typing. Most of the time it will guess what you’re looking for.

If you’re a Mac user, beware of software installation. In the Palm world you would download a PRC file and tell the HotSync Manager to install it next time the Palm was synced. In Windows land this paradigm applies with BlackBerry as well. Unfortunately for us Mac OS users this simply isn’t possible - neither PocketMac nor Missing Sync support it. This is a major buzzkill for me. Thankfully OTA installations work but this is a major hassle.

As far as other Mac-centric things - I can’t find anything wrong. The Pearl integrates well with iCal, Address, etc.

BlackBerry has long been known as an email device. The Pearl is no different, it falls in-line with all of the other crackberries that have been released.

In order to get my email up and running, all I had to do was login into BlackBerry’s Verizon-Branded website, give them some information regarding my accounts and off it went. Within five minutes personal and consulting email (both hosted by Google) was being pushed to my phone. I didn’t have to enter in any technical information - just my username and password.

All in all the Pearl has been a rock solid device. I love using it, I love carrying it and I have love/hate relationship with instant access to my email.

Do you love or hate my post? Are you thinking about the Pearl and have questions? Do you have the Pearl and need to vent? Would you like to tell others how much you like your Pearl? Leave a comment!

Some students get into computer science because they think it’s a great gig, others have a passion for computers. The passionate ones are often labeled “geeks” or “nerds.” These are the people that I’m writing for. Those with passion, those who love computers, those who love to learn.

Computer Science exposes you to a broad range of topics. I was exposed to compiler design, database design, language design, AI, application programming and internet programming, just to name a few. Within each of these topics there are countless languages and perspectives and theories. One can literally spend their entire life researching computer science and still never know everything there is.

This is the beauty and the pain of computer science - computer science encompasses a vast world of topics and college skims the surface of most and delves deeply into a few. You are forced to know a limited number of things, just enough to grasp the important points of the subject matter and then you’re given a diploma and sent into the world.

You’re a graduate now and go out into the world and find a job. Often times your first job allows you work on one system, with one language, solving one particular problem. This is great for a first job. It teaches you the business world, which we all must interact with. It teaches you problem solving skills, which you probably haven’t been taught well enough in college. It gives you real world experience.

The problem is that life comes at you fast - climbing the corporate ladder, relationships, children, mortgages and so on. Soon you realize that your skill set is stagnant. The passion you had as an undergrad is gone and now you’re simply a cog in the corporate machine. Going to work, coming home, sometimes making love and plucking at gray hairs.

What happened? You forgot to stay hungry.

Remember those nights that you stayed up late trying to work out the one last bug in some application you were working on? Remember when your thirst for something new and interesting kept you reading and experimenting?

Innovation has not stopped. Computer Science is a living, breathing, mutating, evolving subject. A quick look at the world around you will prove this. Look at operating systems, mobile devices, the internet, or even the appliances in your kitchen! There is no reason to starve.

The important thing is to find something that piques your curiosity. Does AI sound interesting to you? Research it. Try to write a simple application. Are you sick of Java? Learn Ruby-On-Rails. Maybe you always loved electronics class, learn more about electronics.

Life comes at you fast. Do not go to bed 25 and wake up when you’re 50 and wonder where the hell it all went. Stay hungry.

What I Need

As with all websites it is important to have a clear idea of what you want out of the website. I split to split this into two separate lists - what I need now, and what I want in the future. In this post I will go into what I need now.

• Visitor Tracking via Google Analytics.
• Provide an easy way for prospective clients to contact me.
• Provide an easy way to update the site.
• A blogging mechanism.

How I Got There

Visitor Tracking via Google Analytics

Visitor tracking is important to any business. It provides a way to see a few things - Are people actually visiting the site? How long are they staying? Who is talking about site?

Setting up Google Analytics is easy enough - add some Javascript to the theme and be on your way. What happens when you want to switch the theme? You have to go back and update the theme. I don’t plan on changing the theme to often but why do it if I don’t have to?

The Google Analytics Project provides the ability to use Google Analytics without having to worry about the theme. It also provides lots of other useful features:

• Role Tracking - Only track the types of users you care about. Do you really need to track what your team is doing? Probably not.
• Profile/User Segmentation - This only works for people who have accounts on your site, but it’s still a nice feature. It gives you the ability to see which users did what or even track where the users are from!
• Download Tracking - If your site offers downloads, this is a must. Imagine the following situation: You post a PDF of the requirements for a project you’re working on. You can validate whether someone, in particular, the certain user (or users) has looked at it. Great to know if you’re worried about your project schedule.

Provide an easy way to prospective clients to contact me

Why have a website if the visitors can’t inquire about your services? I provide a simple page with contact details and mailto: links but that’s rather boring and doesn’t provide many features. So I wanted a form that users could use. Now, I could write my own form to do this but every time I wanted a new form, or I wanted to change an existing form I would have to update code. Being a programmer, this isn’t really difficult, but I wanted it easier.

The Webform module provides pretty much everything I want. With no programming involved at all I was able to create a form that collects all the information that I’m curious about. It also provides more nice features - it will automatically email the form, store the results in the database, and it also works with the Captcha project to prevent Spam.

Also be sure to check the Webform Report project. I haven’t worked with it enough to write it up, but it does looking like a promising reporting tool.

Provide an easy way to update the site

This feature is default with Drupal. I would go so far as to say that Drupal is simplicity. Don’t get me wrong, there is a learning curve involved but just click around inside of Drupal for an hour or so and I’m sure you’ll get the hang of it.

A blogging mechanism

Another great feature of Drupal is its blogging mechanism. Again, it’s another feature that comes with Drupal. Each user can have their own!

Finalize

So far my experience with Drupal has been great. I have been able to find modules for all the things I’ve been trying to accomplish. And I’m certain that I could write my own module if I can’t, especially after looking over the Developer’s Guide.

Linked List

The list below provides an easy way to get to some of the websites that I’ve written about.

• Drupal
• Google Analytics Project
• Webform Project
• Captcha Project
• Webform Report Project
• Drupal Developer’s Guide

If you’re just looking for screen shots, scroll to the bottom of this post.

Backstory

While reading Paul Graham’s essays I first noticed a link to Xobni. The icon (which you find in the right hand column of this page) intrigued me. I’m also addicted to all things organization so “taking back my Inbox” sounded great. Although I was a little skeptical, I signed-up for the beta and even put the button on my web site.

I fought the Inbox, and I won.

On Friday I received an invitation to download Xobni and I was psyched. (Note: Xobni thank-you, thank-you, thank-you for not succumbing to invititis.) Unfortunately the application is only available for Windows users and only for Outlook and I use a Macbook at home, so I was out of luck. Yesterday, I installed it - boy was I surprised!!

The installation process is as simple as you expect - close Outlook, run the install, wait (up to 25min) for it to gather statistics about your email. The length of time it takes to install should not deter you, trust me, it’s worth it.

After Xobni is installed, a context-sensitive sidebar is added to the right hand side of the Outlook window. Simply click on an email, any email and watch the extra pane change. Simply awesome!

If you’re a stats junkie you will love Xobni! At the top of the Xobni pane it displays: how much email you receive from this person (by time of day), a rank (which is how much email you receive from this person in comparison to everyone else) and, using the menu, you have access to a plethora of other customizable reports!

It shows the current email as a thread, this is similar to how Gmail does it.

It shows all the files you’ve exchanged with the person.

It allows you to setup a time to meet. When I first noticed this button I expected it to create an Outlook meeting request, it doesn’t. This may seem wrong but what Xobni does is much better. When you click this button a new email is opened and it includes your availability over the next week. Highly useful, especially if the person isn’t a fellow employee.

It automatically updates contact information. Don’t get worried, this contact information is Xobni-only so there’s no need to worry about this application ruining your contact list. This is only feature that gave me a problem - it doesn’t accurately guess the phone number 100% of the time. This problem happened once out of hundreds of people, so I really don’t think it’s anything major.

It shows all the people that are “connected” to the person who sent the email. A connection between people seems to be made when they both are recipients of an email you send. By clicking on a connection you can see all the information about them.

Wrap-Up

Simply put - Xobni rocks! The UI is fantastic. The reports are great and the application very snappy. Be sure to download it at www.xobni.com!

By the way, if you’re looking for a job, they’re hiring. The only reason I mention this is because Xobni looks like a fantastic place to work.

Screenshots