The Personal Blog of Michael Whalen
Michael Whalen is an 18-year-old web developer working in beautiful Honolulu, Hawaii. He loves Web Apps, Django, CSS, JDM and Euro cars, and his beautiful girlfriend Elan. More »
My apartment is dirty as all hell, dirtier than a saigon street whore. So, Jason let me bro a Vacuum. This aint just any vacuum. Cheggit. Cheeee.
R2D2 Vacuum Minisauce from Michael Whalen on Vimeo.
Just in case anyone really cares even a teeny bit about my most used commands lulz.
JÅWßR∑AK∑R ~: history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
93 ls
90 cd
70 clear
68 svn
29 mate
26 sudo
16 ssh
16 git
15 python
6 ping
Via The B List.
I’ve received quite a number of requests from my readers out there to release the code for my live search to all of you. And you know what, I think I am going to take the advice of my little community of readers, and pack it all up into a little zip or tarball for you all of you ladies to enjoy.
Or maybe I’ll release it on Github and make all of you clone it from there. Muahahaha. That would of course require that I be an active and real member of Github (which I am not, invites would be greatly appreciated!).
Sorry for that tangent, back to the point: livesearch. Right now it’s really not the best implementation. I certainly need to robustificate it. I seriously wrote it in about half an hour, so it definitely needs some help. Anything other than a standard letter will pretty much break the search, and force a reload. Also, it’s pulling a ton of content over the wire from the server and could use some JSON-ification in that department to decrease that payload and increase SPEED!
So I plan on rewriting all of it, both the front end and the back end, to give Wordpress users out there a fairly simple turnkey sort of drop in solution for live search. Maybe it will be as easy as installing jQuery and a Wordpress plugin, who knows :) I’d love to hear from you guys, however, if something like this would really be valuable. Would you guys use it? What would you like to see in the whalesearchsizzle?
The new version of Wordpress that we’ve all been anticipating just hit the shelves! They kicked it off with pretty big bang by launching a new website too. If you haven’t seen the new Wordpress yet, it is certianly worth the upgrade. It’s got a brand new interface which was designed with help from HappyCog and is a heck of a lot more fun to look at. I’ve been running the latest SVN release and update every few days so won’t be as surprised as many other Wordpress users, but I’m still stoked to see that they finally hit their milestone! Congrats!
Check it out here. I just got Gravatars enabled on the site thanks to 2.5 too :)
I just discovered this nifty little trick with the fan’s that can be found on the dock when you have a folder there. I actually never use this feature, or maybe use it once in a few months (really, it isn’t a very useful tool for me) but this might be helpful to others.
When you click on a dock folder and hit the tab key, you can use your arrow keys and enter, or the tab key and enter, to slide up and down the fan. It’s not entirely useful to me until I can activate a fan in the dock with a keyboard (If this is a feature currently I haven’t stumbled upon this one yet, hehe).
For the record I used the shittiest screen recording software on the face of the earth, Snapz Pro X, purely because it was included in the Macheist bundle that I purchased not too long ago. It’s really the worst application ever created by man. Do not buy it. Ever. Don’t even demo it.
Mod_wsgi, a super fast and fantastic replacement for mod_python, just released version 2.0! I’m running 2.0c4 right now for local development and it’s been stellar. The CTO here at Blue Lava and one of my best friends Jason is installing Apache and mod_wsgi on his new Mac Pro right now and we were surprised to see that the 2.0 release of mod_wsgi was released just 9 hours ago. Pretty cool!
If you’re still using mod_python you definitely need to give mod_wsgi a look. It’s essentially a drop in replacement and offers substantial performance benefits. And also, its obviously being actively maintained unlike mod_python which hasn’t had a release in nearly a year!
Check out mod_wsgi here.
So being the cool boyfriend that I am, I bought some tickets to see Incubus (her favorite band of all time) at the Waikiki shell. It’s literally a five minute walk from my apartment here in Hawaii, and just off the beautiful and famous Waikiki beach. Apparently Easter sunday is an excuse to stay home and not fly out to Hawaii for 4 days with your boyfriend and see your favorite band of all time. I should have know.
Because of this tragedy I now have a spare ticket to see Incubus this Friday at the Waikiki Shell. If you’d like to fly down to Hawaii for a weekend and see them, holla. You’ll be comin’ with me and my bro Jason Skitzenator.
I certainly learned a lot this past week at SXSWi in Austin, TX. I’ll be putting together many of my experiences in a post for all of you to gobble up in not too much time, but until then, I will leave you with one of the sexiest things I have ever seen. I pretty much had a geekgasm when I saw this.
View the large photo here
This is Chris Lea’s gloss black sexmachine Macbook Pro. Chris is the Director of Technology at Mediatemple. I’ve wanted a custom paint job from ColorWare as long as I can remember, but the (mt) replacing the Apple logo is the icing on the cake. It’s made out of what looks like the same material as the Apple logo as well. It glows when the screen is on, etc…
I can only imagine that he had a custom outer top piece machined out of aluminum and then a custom transparent piece made as well. Definitely on my list of hardware mods for the future :)
Alright. Crazy story time. I’m staying in the Doubletree Austin, a few miles north of the convention center. I’m on the fourth floor staying at the end of a pretty long hallway. My boss, Lorenz, is at the complete opposite end of the hallway in his own room.
Cory, Lorenz & Me
Lorenz just got back from some parties in downtown and after chatting for a while he decided to head back to his room. He’s got a flight in a few hours so he’s heading back to pack and then he’s out of here. I was walking with him back to his room to say bye and as we were walking we heard some interesting noise coming from one of the rooms that went a little bit like this…
“Fuck. FUCK! FUCKK!! *slapping sound* FUCK! *slapping sound*”
At first we were looking at each other a little confused, it sounded more like a bitchfest divorce-status give me the kids and half of the house fight between a couple, then we heard some music and some girls singing, soooo I decided to play a little trick on the orgy that lie behind closed doors.
I knocked pretty hard on the door, and as I did this, Lorenz ran like a little pansy down the hallway to his room. After a few more furious knocks I said in a loud fob-alicious voice, “Escuse mee, but dat is too loud you need stop make noise” and then booked it to my room.
Apparently my door key decided to stop working just as I got to my door, so I ran the rest of the hallway to the stairway and lept like a gazelle on the african plains down to the first floor. I caught my breath for a second and then took the elevator back up to my floor.
Standing in the hallway was a pretty cute barely legal looking brunette in some pretty skimpy pajamas, with her blonde friend. They were prettttty hammered. They both ran towards me like orangoutangs, swinging their arms and slurring their speech, asking if it was me who accidentally knocked on their door. This was the start of a fairly long ordeal.
They followed me to Lorenz’s room, where I tried to get a working room key (I thought he had accidentally taken mine). They were all over Lorenz like kids in a candy store. Then they followed me back to my room and pushed me out of the way trying to get inside. They were pretty drunk off their asses and definitely wanted to party all night long. I knocked and asked for Cory inside to come open the door, then the girls both started cheering “Yeah Cory! Come and open this door!!!”
Eventually not too long later the girls were both inside jumping up and down on our beds with Lorenz just coming inside. I was dumbstruck, Cory was dumbstruck, and Lorenz was laughing his ass off. I leave for 1 minute to walk Lorenz down to his room and come back with two drunk college chicks bouncing up and down on our beds.
Anyway eventually they headed back to their room, it was weird, kind of like an on/off switch. One second they were jumping on each others beds and grabbing each others tits, and the next they were heading back to their rooms. Crazyness.
I’m baaaaaack. Due to a pretty gnarly domain mix up, Whalesalad was offline for the past 5 days or so. I got a text message from a good friend on my way home from Las Vegas last week, which said Whalesalad was resolving to a Godaddy splash page. I didn’t register the domain with Godaddy… put those two thoughts together and you’ll realize why I nearly shit my pants. I was scared for a while that someone hi-jacked my dear ’salad.
Turns out the company I initially registered the domain with finally went under (Registerfly) and Godaddy took over a lot of their old accounts. After a lot of tender loving Godaddylicious care, I managed to prove that I in fact own this domain. It’s finally mine again!