Blog

I’m caught up as much as everyone in the Apple tablet hype. I won’t really try predictions, but here are the two things I’ll be looking for:

OS — If it’s a big iPhone I’m not interested. OS X and I’d be hard pressed not to buy it.

Input — Here is where they can do something truly innovative, though I don’t know what. I would like a full qwerty-esque keyboard on the touchscreen, where the keys pressed are determined not by their location, but by their position relative to the rest of your fingers. So you lay your fingers down on the screen and start typing, not really worrying about where your fingertips press. Rather, you extend your left index finger up and to the right (-ish) and then your right index finger to the left (-ish) and then your left middle finger up (-ish), and the tablet realizes you were probably typing “the”.

The concern with a touchscreen keyboard is the lack of tactile feedback. But with a good enough algorithm, the type-and-only-sort-of-care-where-you’re-touching” technique might be enough to make up for not knowing where the keys are. My friend had a FingerWorks keyboard once that was entirely a touchscreen and it was difficult to type on. However, it allowed you to easily move the mouse and do complicated gestures without your fingers leaving the keyboard, so overall he was more efficient. Incidentally, Apple bought FingerWorks, so maybe some of that technology will make its way into the tablet.

Anyway, tomorrow’s the big day! Let’s see what it brings.

Last weekend was MIT’s annual mystery hunt. There were a number of cool puzzles, as always, but I just wanted to highlight this “Be Kind Rewind”-esque one. For this puzzle, we had to “Swede” a popular movie and upload the resulting 3-4 minute clip to Youtube to submit. We weren’t allowed to say any of the main words in the title. See if you can guess what movie we were assigned…

Evans and I did the video editing on that bad boy. iMovie is pretty impressive!

While I’m at it. Here’s another video my team had to make for the Hunt a few years ago. It’s the trailer for a hypothetical sequel to the movie Wordplay. Greg Schroll did most of the editing on this one (hence it’s higher quality…), although I did suggest the music that plays, and the (spoiler) laser pointer idea.

Autumn is definitely here. For my family and friends back in CA, who sadly don’t get to participate in this season, I thought I’d take a few pictures on my walk back from work. One picture here as a sampler, more follow it. (All pictures are hosted on Flickr, since my web host charges by the MB stored and the GB transferred. Click the picture to go to Flickr and see larger versions.)

Read the rest of this entry »

As I was cleaning my room last week I stumbled across an old notebook. Flipping it open, I saw it contained a story I had started writing when I was just a wee little boy. I didn’t get very far into the story, and I’ll almost certainly never finish it, but I want to save what I do have. The pen and pencil marks are fading, so I figured I’d type up what I have, and may as well store it on my blog!

The binder it’s in mentions “Happy Eyes”, a cat I had when I was very young, so I think I started the story when I was no older than 10. But then about halfway through the “prologue” it switches from pencil to pen and I think that’s where I took over when I was older. From my knowledge of military ranks in it, I would imagine I was in Cadet Corps at that point, which would make me 12. I vaguely remember finding this notebook way back in the day, and rediscovering the story I had started even further back in the day, and trying to continue it.

Read on if you want to hear the start of a tale full of daring and intrigue that will leave you hanging…

Prologue

“Do you understand what you’re supposed to do?” Captain Rieekan finished his overview, and now began the specifics. “You two” — Captain Rieekan indicated two of the Special Forces Group — “will infiltrate the rebels’ base, avoiding being detected at all costs. Do you understand?” he asked again.

Read the rest of this entry »

I struggled for a bit with what to put in the little black bar at the bottom of the page. I poked around at some websites that I like the design of. Two had the little copyright symbol, and one didn’t.

I like the copyright at the bottom because it seems more “professional”. But mindlessly mimicking professionalism is dumb. If I actually paid the $35 and registered my site with the Copyright Office, then I’d put that down there in a heartbeat. Still, I don’t seem to need to do that in order to justify the symbol:

The use of the copyright notice is the responsibility of the copyright owner and does not require advance permission from, or registration with, the Copyright Office.

But, really, do I care if someone uses my design or words? No.

There are three things that I want down there:

1. Notice that I was the one who designed and implemented the site.
2. What year it was “born” (might be cool in 20 years to show that gabedurazo.com has been around that long)
3. “Gabriel Durazo”, to help search engines link this site with my name. “Gabe Durazo” (URL) and “Gabriel J Durazo” (In the header) both point here no problem, but not “Gabriel Durazo” yet.

But if I have those three things, I may as well toss in a &copy and be done with it.

Okay, I’m going to say the blog is nicely mixed into my site now. It wasn’t so bad, really, but I really had to brush-up on my CSS. As I mentioned before, I made a new theme to integrate it. Probably about 95% of the changes were done in the theme’s index.php, header.php, sidebar.php, footer.php, and my stylesheet.

I had to dip into the wp-includes directory to modify just one file category-template.php, and that was only to change the wp_list_categories() function. Ordinarily it outputs a list with class — I’m forgetting now — but I changed it to my “sidebar_item” class, so that it would behave the same as the other items in my sidebar. I’m afraid that change will get wiped out if I update WordPress, though (which is part of the reason I’m making this post!)

In case you’re interested, this is the state of my php files:

Read the rest of this entry »

I think I’ve mostly incorporated the blog! I’m pretty happy with the results, really. I have to figure out what to do about that stupid sidebar with all the archives and everything. It’d be easy enough just to remove it, but it’s pretty handy.

Getting it to float off to the right is trickier than I would have thought. Now it’s just kinda hanging out down below. Oh well. That’s for tomorrow.

Then I have to fix up the comments and a few other little tweaks, but all-in-all, I think it’s looking pretty nice. You should have seen this page before! It was just the generic theme. Now it’s got a nice gray background, a crazy dog at the top, etc.

I’ve finally set up a blog at my site. Great. Now I’m one of those people.

Anyway, I don’t count on anyone reading it, so don’t you worry about that. I will use it more as a place to keep track of what I’ve done to get this site going, and random thoughts I have that I’ll want to remember for the future.

I suppose I can make predictions, too, and then point to them in the future (deleting all the ones that fail, of course…).

First order of business: Integrate this blog with my site. Time to delve into the WordPress php!

Great, the integration is going well. I made my own theme and have been modifying its index.php and header.php files. I’m mostly posting this just so I have two posts to work with in making the theme. Cheers!