Monthly Archives: June 2009

Moving… To A New Old Host

Posted on by

I’ve been using Slicehost for more than a year now (since March 4th, 2008, with a little break in between May to October of that year). All the while, I’ve become a huge huge fan of their service. Why?

Montastic tells me that Slicehost suffered a bit of downtime during my time with them (via a quick Gmail search), but it happened so rarely that I can’t recall ever being frustrated at the service. (How about Dreamhost, you ask? Ahem.)

It’s been quite the experience, trying to admin a VPS at Slicehost. It was a lot of fun and pain trying to set up an Ubuntu server from scratch. I learned quite a bit, and found respect for all the unsung sysadmins out there.

But lately, learning more and more about the art and science of system administration almost feels like premature optimization. That’s not to say that the subject matter is not interesting (or easy, because it’s completely insane how the Internet exists), but I’m going to wait until when the optimization becomes that much more effective.

This feeling is magnified by what I’ve been doing with this slice. The full potential of this $20/mo slice has gone to waste, being used to host only this WordPress install.

The fact is that I bought this slice, thinking that I would be deploying some major webapps. You see, past-JK would have thought that future-JK would be awesomeing all over the place. Current-JK is sad that this is not the case.

But he is hopeful. Uh, back to first-person.

I’m hopeful. I also have a couple non-programming projects I want to start up, and it’d be nicer to have a solution that has a more pay-as-you-go style of billing. I am back to NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

Change. Change always brings something new and exciting, doesn’t it?

And this post is how I end the first half of the year of 2009. Kinda not very exciting, but I’m learning to find excitement apart from dates that have merely numerical quirks.

Sober Understanding

Posted on by

I’ve come far, but there’s quite a bit left.

When I started, I didn’t think it would take this long, but I was sorely mistaken. It’s going to take even longer, now that I’ve buckled down again.

Don’t be disheartened, but grow. Grow even the tiniest little bit, and it’ll all work out in the end.

> Boys, be ambitious. > > * Boys, Be Ambitious, No Brain – Vol 4.

Everyday is filled with choices. Your choices. Let them speak for who you are, not some silly press release.

Think What You Can Do With What's Already Available To You

Posted on by

With the tools that you have, think what you can do to sidestep the roadblocks in your life.

I’m realizing that the world is the way it is: I can only hope to steer it a certain direction with my projects. Instead of trying to rebuild every single product or service that I use and try to improve them, I should be milking them for all they’re worth.

Nothing is new. Repeat after me: Nothing is new.

I think too much into the future. Heck, I think too much, period. And this type of forward thinking and risk-taking is great when done in a certain controlled environment. But when it’s a life-or-death situation, in terms of my company, I don’t have such a luxury.

And so starts a new category on the blog called: selfdev. I’m looking to do some category restructuring, as well as a redesign soon. Let this post be just one of the many steps I need to take to become awesome instead.

Drive-By Blogging

Posted on by

Meeting the few people that I know here in Illinois for the last time, or at least for a couple months. I have a feeling I might be coming back for a music festival, as long as I can find people to meet up with when the time comes in September. Iron & Wine as well as Ra Ra Riot? Pygmalion is hotness.

Tomorrow’s going to be quite the day of packing. Lots left to box and move into my car for the drive back into Ohio.

Change Of Plans: Back To Cincinnati

Posted on by

This is not the post I was going to write tonight. But life happens, and so, I must blog about its happenings.

Looks like I’m heading back to Cincinnati, back to my parent’s house. You see, I’ve decided to help them pay a large portion of the down payment on their house required to get rid of the insurance on the mortgage.

As you would have guessed, this completely destroys my runway. Of course, I would have food and housing taken care of, but I’d be going back to my parents house.

The last time I was there was after I finished my freelance stint after I graduated from college. I left after getting angry at them for their impatience in my inability to get a full-time job, and largely myself, for not being able to get a full-time job. (Really, it’s because I aimed WAY too high with what I had, such as the low GPA coming out of school, thinking that my experience in web development would pick up the slack. It did, eventually, which is how I ended up back in Urbana, IL, but not without a stop up in Minneapolis for a job for… six weeks.)

Going back feels like a failure to me. I was ready to see how far I could take my company before falling back on them again, and was planning to leave for Seattle or Portland for a new set of life experiences. I guess those can be put on hold for family.

It’s mildly annoying because now I’m all wrapped up in moving yet again. I don’t mind the moving (in fact, I would be enjoying it if I was moving to somewhere new), but I mind the fact that I’m not spending time on doing what I should be doing: creating a product.

I came back from California with a renewed sense of scope (amongst other things, which I have yet to blog on). Now, I have this renewed sense of urgency. Let’s make some magic happen with a mixture of these two.

NOTICE: Josh Kim Is Becoming Diurnal

Posted on by

5:30 AM is the new 10 AM ~ 12 PM.

I’ve gotten lazy with my sleeping schedule over the past two months, and it’s been bothering me. There was a time when I did pull an all-nighter into 5:30, only to realize how much I loved seeing the sun rise.

Shortly thereafter, I fell apart into a million pieces on my bed.

I like to dedicate this new rise time to Jason Gwak, quite the devoted son of a gun. What a crazy kid, pulling basically a full time job and going to school for a J.M. Insane. This 5:30 AM thing came into reality this morning because of Jason getting up for his “part”-time job at his parent’s cleaners.

I will not be dedicating this post at all to Jong-Sun Yi, because that kid has a natural knack of not sleeping. If only I could have such a skill… Such a beast.

The Absence of Posts

Ew. It’s a meta-post (a post on the dearth of posts). Trust me, I’ll be quick.

The blog’s been quiet, I know. Makes sense since I’ve been away in Cali for most of it.

Rest assured, I’ll be picking up the slack as the week continues. It seems like I’ll be in Cincinnati sometime very soon, if not this weekend.

Renewed sense of direction. That’s all I got to say for now. I think I have a pretty good handle on a plan for the rest of the year, which I’ll share when I have a better handle on it.

Packing For San Jose, Rest Of The World?

Posted on by

I’m currently in the middle of packing for a trip to San Jose for a wedding. An uncle on my mom’s side (my mom’s cousin) is getting married.

After this trip, I’ll be stopping by Cincinnati, to spend some time with family and have a trip up into Cleveland. While the Texas trip was cancelled, I still hope to have a change of venue; as in, not spending 90% of the day in front of a computer.

But what made me write this down is… due to my somewhat excessive nature to be efficient, I’ve started thinking about how to pack for a new life away from Urbana, IL. My room has never been more box-able.

I have just two months before the lease runs out. Two months and one day, to be precise. I never thought this far through in the process, because I wasn’t 100% sure where I was going. Would I be a solo developer/businessman? Or will I really go all the way and start a company with co-founders and employees?

And still, I’m not too sure. At least, I know I can stay flexible for at least the next two months. But where to go to stay just as flexible after that period?

Generating revenue would widen my options quite a bit, and I am hoping to focus more and more of my efforts into making HanMeta a reality. I know it’s a small win, but I’ll be having health insurance, starting on the 15th. I’m about 90% happy with the directory structure I have, with all of my unfinished projects and documents and such; Going for that extra 10% is not worth it. The important thing is that I know that’s not effort well spent.

Portland seems exciting. Seattle was amazing. San Francisco/San Jose seems just out of reach, but maybe this trip might change the outlook on that. And yes, all three of these options are on the West Coast. I miss it quite a bit, the Pacific.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll give up in a month, and start looking for a job. In any case, I won’t feel right without having shipped something before I do anything else.

More Caps Lock Fun: But For Windows Users

Posted on by

I want this (AutoHotkey), but for Mac.

Use Caps Lock for Hand-Friendly Text Navigation

Makes a lot of sense, seeing how Caps Lock key is kind of a mode of its own: A crazy screaming person mode. Now, let’s make it make it to be awesome text edit mode.

For now, I’m going to use it as a backspace, as I wrote earlier. The only problem with this is that I’m going to probably start accidentally capping things if I’m using someone else’s computer.

Waiting For The Right Moment? Stop It!

Posted on by

I thought that Inspiration would shine from the skies, that the Muses would sing my name, that God Himself would breathe passion through my veins.

But seriously, it’s not that glamorous. Get over yourself.

I kept waiting. I waited for that one blog post to end all blog post… the one that will start off some golden age of programming and business development.

The problem I’m having with this blog is that I’m trying to capture the Awesome pre-emtively before it happens. Of course, this is a problem because I have yet to actually attain that level of Awesome, not even taking into account own high standards.

Here, are you still asking yourself when the right moment is? It’s right now. It’s not after you wake up. It’s not after another round of Team Fortress 2 or another episode of the West Wing.

The time is now. Unless, of course, you have some other responsibilities. Like a full time job. I’ll let you decide what counts as “responsibilities”.

Caps Lock, VI-esque Keystrokes, And Other Obscure Keyboard Fun on Mac OS X

Posted on by

In an effort to reduce the pain I’ve been having in my wrists and forearms, I’ve been trying to pick up Dvorak again. Little did I know, there is yet another keyboard format called Colemak. It seems like it’ll be easier to pick up than Dvorak, and seems to offer a better experience than Dvorak in some ways.

Apart from this desire of switching an entire key layout, I started rethinking about the Caps Lock key. Colemak actually maps it to be Delete by default. Since I don’t use Caps Lock all that often, and I’m a crazy person about efficiency sometimes, I decided to follow through with remapping not only the Caps Lock, but other keys as well. (One side effect of this is that in certain programming languages, Caps Lock is nice for typing out constant names. Not a big deal, though.)

Anyway, digging around the Colemak site, I got to this page on how to remap Caps Lock. got me to these two wonderful Preference Panes.

Disclaimer: Yeah, you saw this coming. This might cause your computer to erupt in flames, but that doesn’t mean you should come over and do the same to my apartment. Moving along.

To get your Caps Lock to function as Delete, first install: PCKeyboardHack. There will be a checkbox to change Caps Lock to 51 (Delete).

This will make it work, but you won’t be able to hold it down to insert multiple deletes. To get this working fully, install: KeyRemap4MacBook. Go into “General” and turn on “Enable CapsLock LED Hack”. However, for me, I’m unable to turn off the Caps Lock light. It decided it’s going to stay on forever.

In summary, PCKeyboardHack seems like it’s used to just turn on the ability to map the Caps Lock to delete, and KeyRemap4MacBook seems to do “everything else”.

Which brings me to the next point.

vi/vim Fun

I’ve been looking into getting a system-wide way to mimic the modal input style that vi/vim offers. Short of writing a kernal extension (because I’m not that awesome), I found the “Vi Mode” in KeyRemap4MacBook fairly useful.

You won’t be able to hit escape and move around with hjkl, but you will be able to move around with Right Command + hjkl. This means, of course, you will be sacrificing the application specific shortcut keys involving the Right Command, but I’ve actually gotten used to using the Left command for most of my shortcuts.

More Keyboard Silliness

There are so many things you can mess around with using KeyRemap4MacBook. I started thinking about some of the keys I rarely use, and thought about how to remap them to be more efficient.

Like the tilde, for example. I mapped that to be the Escape key if no modifiers were pressed. (Command + ` after Command + Tab cycles through applications backwards, so other than that case, now the backtick is escape. I don’t have to stretch as much.) I don’t know if I like this, but I’m sure willing to try it out.

Oh, and remember to mess around with the “[Key Repeat] Initial Wait” and “[Key Repeat] Wait”. I lowered those to fit my ever insane need to move around faster on the keyboard. I keep trying to get those values lower and lower as time goes on.

And that ends yet another weird entry about a very weird obscure topic that I care way too much about. Thanks for reading.