Monthly Archive for July, 2007

Well, I’m going to sleep well tonight

Published
by
Josh Kim
on July 30, 2007
in Project Ideas
. 0 Comments

I don’t know the exact number of hours spent on HanMeta today. I gotta keep better track of the hours spent. I mean, I read my feeds during my breaks, and do some other work related to finding a full time job. Regardless, It’s just been a very very hectic day.

I’ll try to be a little bit more detailed so that others that are trying to set up Rails, Subversion, and Capistrano won’t have to go through the craziness that ensued today. Just need to figure out Capistrano… followed by lots of tweaking.

Yes. I’m so happy the app is getting started. I set a goal for this Sunday night (a little leeway) to have all this process stuff out of the way. Which mean I need to:

  • People
    • Who’s in? Who do I want in at this early stage?
    • Who’s doing what?
    • Take inventory of the hours people have to put towards this project
  • Rails
    • FastCGI vs Proxing HTTP?
    • How do I even do the second (because I hear it’s the right thing to do) on DreamHost?
    • So many other questions just about deploying an app…
  • Subversion
    • Double check on user/passwords
    • Make documentation (very similar to what I did with UIUC’s College of Education) on how to connect to the servers
  • ActiveCollab
  • Capistrano

Oh, and as a bonus, I want to run through the tutorial in the Rails book again before the end of the week. That way, I’ll be completely prepared for the n00bage that’s going to start next week.

I really hope that this doesn’t turn out like the last time I set out to do this. Lesson from that failure: Do something. It’s so hard to get things rolling.

UPDATE: The New New Dashalytics

Published
by
Josh Kim
on July 30, 2007
in Web Applications
. 0 Comments

Looks like the date range was added with version 3.1. Now I can see the Google Analytics data with specific date ranges. Looks nice!

Update: One thing: Why doesn’t the “1d” view show the hourly data for the day now? With 2.x, I remember distinctly the dropdowns… hmm…

A Few Issues with Google Applications

Published
by
Josh Kim
on July 29, 2007
in Web Applications
. 1 Comment

These are only the issues I’ve ran across today while using the new and improved Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Okay, maybe it’s not so new and improved… but it’s a month and a half since I did my personal expense reports, and the main screen changed quite a bit.

Lack of Copy and Paste Between Windows/Browsers

Yes, this is one of many issues AIR and OpenLaszlo is trying to solve. But man, I would have though Google would have thought of this scenario:

The user has two separate spreadsheets open, and want to copy over data from one to another.

Yeah, I like making blockquotes. But back to the point.

How would they implement such a feature? I’m not the crazy-awesome-web-application man, but I wonder if this would be a possible solution.

I’d think that if someone right clicked and selected copy in the contextual menu (and not control/command + c, because I don’t think you can map that to anything), I’d bake a cookie and then have it available by the paste functionality in another window. I can’t imagine any security issues (if you had a spreadsheet of user’s passwords, it’s already in your cache somewhere anyway), but I can see a problem with the size of the data that’s being copied.

Lack of a Consistent User Interface

Spot the differences between the pictures.

Google Spreadsheet - Main

Main Screen

Google Spreadsheet - New Spreadsheet

New Spreadsheet Screen

I couldn’t take a screenshot of the drop down menu on the main Google Docs screen. Just trust me on this one: the main screen is a lot prettier than the separate document/spreadsheet windows.

Does no one else think these two are quite different?

Bonus: Shortcut keys

  • Pressing “r” refreshes the feeds in Google Reader
  • Pressing “r” replies to selected email in Google Mail
  • Pressing “r” does nothing in Google Docs. Heck, I don’t think there are any short cut keys.

Just a minor annoyance. It’s not like I would expect F5 to work across Windows Explorer and IE… wait… But then why doesn’t command + R work within Finder as it does in Safari? (Other than that Finder is the most-used worst-built app that comes built in)

Yeah, just a random sidenote.

Learning the User Interface

I wanted to rename a spreadsheet I created.

  • I tried right clicking on the spreadsheet. Nothing.
  • I tried the “more actions” dropdown menu. Nothing but different formats to save it as. (Then why the heck isn’t it called “Save as…”)
    • Of course, another thing is that this “More actions” menu tells you to check an item before… why is it even clickable to begin with then?
    • I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt: I’m sure they’ll fix this later.
  • I open the spreadsheet. No “Save As” underneath the File menu.
    • Sidenote: It’s nice that if I had already opened a spreadsheet, the same spreadsheet isn’t opened again. However, the focus is not replaced to this spreadsheet I want to open. Why?
  • OH, there’s a “rename” feature. Ah.
    • But the main window doesn’t refresh… it… (Where’s your AJAX now?)

This is where I praise Windows Office Products [shudder]. Ever since the mass-adoption of it, the world of word processing, spreadsheets, presentations… they all became somewhat easily accessible. Through that adoption came the opportunity to ingrain in the users’ heads the idea of how things should look and feel. The save icon will look like a floppy disk (even though… we’re past that… I’m sure there’s a 5 year old out there, trying to understand the connection between saving a document and this weird looking squareish icon), the shortcut key for bolding will be control/command + B…

When MS Office works, it’s s… (okay must resist urge for a pun) sweet. The problem with MS Office is that it usually doesn’t. I personally use NeoOffice when I have to open up a .doc, and am fine with what I’ve got.

Of course the beauty here is that Google Docs & Spreadsheet users don’t have to purchase or download anything when these things get fixed. It’ll all be good to go.

Hmm… like the Crunchwrap Supreme. Yes, I had one yesterday.

Taco Bell should pay me.

The New Dashalytics

Published
by
Josh Kim
on July 23, 2007
in Asides, Site News and Web Applications
. 1 Comment

Dashalytics, the dashboard widget for the Google Analytics Service came out a couple days ago. Looks and functions a lot better.

One big issue I had with the previous version was that the height was variable based on the data you would open up. For example, if you wanted to see the data for the past 24 hours, you would be met with a drop down menu that would stretch for half the screen describing the visitor stats per hour. Yeah, it’s kinda hard without a visual, but just trust me, it wasn’t pretty.

Now, it’s a little bit clearer, but… it’s less granular. I can only get data for the last three months; no more, no less.

New Dashalytics 3.0

Give Them What They Want!

If you look closely at the screenshot… you’ll notice something. And no, not that “josh kim” search on technorati. I do it from time to time to see what’s going on with the rankings and so forth.

I didn’t know that How to Hack Xanga, Kinda was such a visited link. I guess I should write a follow-up. Seems like plenty of people want something like it.

Which brings me to another realization about this blog: I need to reach a balance. In the early days of… whatever blogging platform I was on (be it my own, Xanga, or WordPress)… I used my “journal” to write a lot of personal things. Back in those days, I was learning more and more about web development, so it would have been a perfect time to bring about a more technical blog. But I decided exploring more deeply the inner workings of Josh Kim was more important.

To this day, I feel like I want to keep writing about thing that interest me, and somehow apply it to the general field of computing. From relational issues to philosophical debates to oddly-misshapen clouds… I want to write it all down and share it. Heck, I want to write about why I haven’t posted in the past two weeks. I want to write about what I’m doing. But you see, all this… isn’t very useful to the whole lot of you. So instead, I’ll try to make my daily posts worthwhile. And no, it won’t just be all nerdy.

Why do I make this point again? It’s because I lost sight of some things again.

Difficulty of Writing on a Blog

It’s quite difficult, if you think about it… to set aside at least an hour of writing and editing per post (if it’s a good lengthy one), or even multiple short bursts of writing. TextMate Blogging Bundle does make the overhead cost less, but it’s still amazingly painful to actually think about the structure and the flow of a post.

As with a lot of things I trivialized, writing on my blog is another. Of course, saying it’s the hardest thing ever and never doing it again… that’s wrong, too.

Ah, balance, why do you elude me?

I’m going to try and go back to my daily posting schedule starting tomorrow. Hopefully, with pictures… need to go find a good stock photograph site. Wait, that could be a post all in itself.

Google Reader “Plug-in” for *ANY* Website

Published
by
Josh Kim
on July 2, 2007
in Site News and Web Applications
. 0 Comments

You know, it took me long enough… seeing as how much I read the feeds on a daily basis:

From your 179 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 13,522 items, starred 296 items, and shared 0 items.

Finally, the site has list of the most recent starred items I found to be interesting. I’ve always wanted to share my recent feed links with the rest of the world. Think of it as a JK filter.

I thought that this was available through a Wordpress Plug-in (I think it was called “hacks” back in the day), but actually, it’s just two script tags that you can add to any page on the Internet.

Google RSS Reader Shared Links

Just go to settings, and click on “add a clip to your site”. Whoo hoo!

Now, get to reading all those lovely posts on the iPhone and Facebook’s platform.