Aaron Parecki

Rough notes from the talk at pdx web innovators on 2/1/10 presented by Marshall Kirkpatrick

Quick summary: Automatically bookmark a site after it has been open for a certain amount of time.

At a recent meeting, I was asked to explain open-source licenses to people who had not heard much of them before. I only had about 5 minutes because I had to rush off to another meeting immediately after. I was, however, able to touch on a few key points in the 5 minutes I was given, and help them understand a bit more. This page is an attempt to provide you with enough information to give your own 5-minute explanation.

I've been logging GPS data for about a year and a half. I use an app on my Windows Mobile phone to log the GPS data, and my phone has a wifi antenna that stays in the "off" position most of the time. I met with @donpdonp the other day and he introduced me to the geomena.org project. I realized it should be possible to log access points along with my existing GPS logging. It was easy to install Airomap on my phone, so now I can log wifi points too!

A recap of all the things Google has announced in this first week of December. The big ones are Google Goggles, new versions of Chrome, and real time searching, but they've also launched some less flashy things like a dictionary and public DNS service.

The 85-year-old tree isn't expected to live after a group of strangers hacked off many of its branches

Jetblue doesn't fly in to Ithaca, but they do fly in to Syracuse. Jennifer was nice enough to pick me up from the Syracuse airport. It's only 55 miles, but it feels a lot farther than that. Ithaca is kind of tucked away in the middle of nowhere, but it has like a dozen highways leading into it.

The Apartment

I took the bus from the Pittsburgh airport to downtown, then caught a bus from downtown to Silas' place. Of course since it was the second day of the G20, they had a big chunk of downtown completely blocked off with roadblocks and police. I've never seen so many different kinds of security in one place. City police, military, riot squad, private security, roadblocks, barbed-wire fences.

This one I just thought was mildly amusing. The screens that are supposed to tell you when the next flights are coming in are apparently Windows computers running Internet Explorer.

Since I've already been logging GPS data for quite some time, I thought it'd be interesting to log as much data during flights as possible. Of the three flights so far, I've been able to log data on two of them. I think it has to do with the fact I had a window seat on both flights. I'm pretty sure the plane is shielded in a way that blocks the satellite signals. I'd be interested if anybody can fill me in on why this might be.

San Francisco's BART and MUNI couldn't be any easier to use! I had no trouble getting from the airport into the city. Once in the city, it was easy to get around as well.

The Long Beach airport wasn't quite what I expected. Walking through the airport I feel like I'm in the middle of a 70's movie. I got off the plane into the terminal which basically just had a bunch of "leave now" signs directing me out of the airport onto the street. The font used for the airline signs in the airport is old-school!

Speed Up Wordpress

This page contains some short notes on my 3-week adventure while jetting around the US. It was mostly used as a place for me to jot things down on the road so I could refer back to it when writing the blog posts. You can also read about my trip on my blog.

I wanted to create a RAID 5 array with four 1tb drives. I only have three, but I have a 750gb and 320gb drive lying around. I figured there was probably a way to combine them into a 1tb drive that I could use with the others.

Wiimote with Max/MSP

Comcast just started blocking port 25 outgoing. I have several computers at home configured to send email reports of cron jobs. Of course they do this by trying to send mail on port 25 from inside the house to my mail server outside. Now that Comcast is blocking that, I need some other way for my emails to be delivered.

Using Forums in a Class

The ATC has been using a system for accepting registrations for workshops that I developed a couple months ago. It can be seen here: