David Grant's blog

I hate hashtags. At least they way that people use them. People seem to like using them to say things they wouldn't normally say in plain English. For example:

Why won't my kid take a nap? #damnkid #brat #nomorekids

This doesn't translate exactly into the following:

My damned kid won't nap

My kid is a brat

I don't want any more kids

I'm tired of all this social networking bullshit. I mean the social networking bullshit that is always asking me to click something, creating visual noise, and generally just pissing me off because I'm not interested in sharing everything I do with the world. Today I purchased some books at Chapters and after my purchase went through I got this screen asking me if I want to "tell my friends about my purchase" on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter.

Chapters - Share Your Purchase

I just tried Windows 8, and to be honest it's pretty awful. It looks like it's meant for running on a touch screen but if you are a desktop user it's horribly awkward to use. I'm not sure if it's a bug but getting the task bar thingy (what's it called?) to show up on the left-hand side of the screen is very difficult. I seem to have to hover on the top-left corner and wait for an icon to appear, then move downward, then the whole task bar thingy will appear.

So I have a django database I'm working on and I decided I wanted to do the development in sqlite3 instead of mysql. I decided to do this because it makes it easier, for example, to have someone else work on HTML/CSS if I can just give them a directory, tell them to run a bash script and go to http://localhost:8000, rather than them having to do all that AND setup a mysql server. Sure, that can also be done with a script, but with sqlite things are just a hell of a lot easier in some ways.

A few days ago the B.C. government announced a new $10,000 bonus for new home buyers. Not only is this a stupid waste of money that could have been diverted to many more important things, it may not actually do anything to improve affordability as housing prices will surely go up accordingly.

We ordered a bunch of shoes online for my daughter, from various American companies. One of them was Preschoolians (I'm not going to link to their site. There is an entire blog devoted to how much Preschoolians sucks but the last post was from 2006 so I decided to give them a try anyways.

I'm just trying out Linux Mint Debian Edition and the best part about it is how fast it is. The desktop is super responsive, almost feels like a new fresh Windows machine in that respect. User switching is also super fast and works perfectly, something that Ubuntu had never quite mastered. Most importantly, however, is the fact that it is not using Canonical's Unity, but instead it is still using Gnome 2.

I just had a listen to this CBC interview with some writer about the housing situation in Vancouver: Young Adults Leaving Vancouver.

It turns out Yelp doesn't suck after all. Well, ok, it did suck when 5 out of 5 of my reviews were filtered out, essentially flagged as spam. I wrote a bunch more reviews, and I guess I have now become a trusted reviewer, so now all my reviews are no longer filtered. Yah!

I have been having a hell of a time with my new Nexus S. The battery life has been abysmal. I have finally paid close attention to the battery use screen and began removing applications. These are the applications so far that were using a lot my battery's charge:

• Google Latitude - Cannot be uninstalled on a stock Android phone, so just log out of it.
• Twitter

Some applications were suprisingly good about not using up much battery:

• Gmail
• Skype

I'll update this list as I find more applications that use up lots of battery.

Update: Yelp has now un-filtered all my reviews.

My resume template is now available on CTAN, the TeX archive. This will make it easier for LaTeX users to use to create a resume. It is called tucv and the style file was created by George Louthan. Check it out!

I've just created my first Android application. I was surprised how simple it was to create but most of all how easy it was to deploy. It was available on the Android marketplace immediately with no hassle. I'll provide another post about once the application is a bit more mature. It's basically just a simple calculator application for physicians.

I got my wife an unlocked Samsung Galaxy S (the "Captivate" variety) and had a few challenges getting it set up.

Configuring the Fido APN

There are at least two ways to configure the Fido APN although you find even more configurations if you search online. I ended up getting the Fido APN settings from Rogers directly. The instructions were for the Nexus One, but it doesn't matter to Rogers/Fido what device you are using, all Smartphones look alike to the carrier as far as I can tell.

Here they are as they appear on my phone:

On ubuntu systems, you'll need the following packages: genisoimage and dvd+rw-tools.

If you have a folder named "mydvd" in your home directory containing a VIDEO_TS folder, cd to your home folder mydvd, then run:

cd ~
mkisofs -dvd-video -o mydvd.iso mydvd

This will produce a mydvd.iso file. To verify, run

isoinfo -l -i mydvd.iso

At this point, you don't actually have to create a DVD. As a commenter pointed out If you have mplayer, you can play the .iso like this:

mplayer dvd:// -dvd-device mydvd.iso