Ryan's Journey » Computer

Google SearchWiki

Ryan — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 14:55:48 +0000

I just did quick search, and saw all these extra icons. After finishing my search, I went to the Google Blog to see what was all this stuff. It turns out that all that extra stuff is Google’s new feature called SearchWiki. SearchWiki allows users to put certain items at the top of the list if they always click result 5 for x search. After watching the video about SearchWiki feature, I thought of several questions:

Wait a minute, I thought the “My Web History” stuff was supposed to rearrange stuff for me – yes I know SearchWiki is instantaneously.
I thought marking a result as a bookmark also does this.
How do I undelete/unremove a search? It’s bound to happen, "Shoot! I meant to hit bump, but I hit the x". I didn’t see an undo button anywhere
How much extra do screen reader users have to listen to?
Can I turn this off? Kind of cluttersome
Are bumped results tied to Google Bookmarks?
Will bumped results from all users affect general search results?
What happened to the Google Bookmarks or rather, where’d the bookmark star go?

I am sure more will arise, but that is just a few. I know I may find the comments handy to use. Then again, if I added a result as a bookmark, I usually added a comment to it.

Technorati Tags: google, searchwiki

Summer Job ‘07 – End

Ryan — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 05:35:12 +0000

Just over two month ago, I started my summer job, and Friday was my last day. When I look back, it’s hard to give an overall feel. I have done various projects over the years, but this year I feel like I did all that much. Yeah I created two small databases, I was supposed to fix/update one that I did last year, but I never was told what needed to be done really. One of the two I made from scratch, I felt pretty good about.

I am not sure how to properly describe this, but I work in a satellite location of the headquarters. Actually the hierarchical of the company is Headquarters > St. Louis Office > Us — Seattle. The database that I liked was only for four or five people locally, but there is a hundred or so totally. Right now, well at least locally, it is done by one big old excel file. One of the supervisors who used to have this position and covered some stuff with me. He started to pull together other location’s data and made kind of a summary page for each location. Between not knowing what all the figures means or why they were pulled together in the manner in which they were. I couldn’t meet with this person much after that due to his schedule.

I also received three awards. The first was a Commander’s coin, the second was an award that was made within the last 9 months or so. During the little spiel, I was told this represents my dedication to the place I worked for, and my ability to shift from team-to-team without any hassle.

Search with Google Reader

Ryan — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 19:53:01 +0000

After quite a bit of time, you can now search within your feeds in Google Reader. This is probrably the most wanted feature since the debut. To be honest, I am not impressed at all. I did a search for Craig, and of course got thousands of hits. I read a few posts, and to be honest, if I did the same search after a few hours, I couldn’t tell you which I read and which I didn’t. It is like they rushed it out the door two days after a product launch versus several years.

I noticed the search bar this morning, and of course my mind went blank as to what to search for. Just about 10 minutes ago, I sat down at my computer after lunch, and I am still waiting for it to load. I am not Scoble or anything, I have 120 or so feeds, which are mainly news sources, so what is up with the wait time?

Earlier today I did notice it was running a bit clunky, but didn’t think anything of it. Just minutes ago my browser timed out trying to load Google Reader. I am using IE7 on T1 connection. This is the first time in years I got a 404 error from Google.

Is anybody else having problems?

Technorati Tags: 404, 404 google, google, google reader, reader

Viruses Effect Harddrives

Ryan — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 07:04:42 +0000

I was just in a chat room and somebody said the following:

person: I hate my laptop sometimes
me: Why is that?
person: it keeps shutting off
me: that’s crappy
person: very, idk why it does it
me: you may have a virus
Person: I did. I got rid of it but I think it affected the harddrive, it was a fucking nasty one
me: most are

People make me laugh.

Where does it go?

Ryan — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 18:02:07 +0000

I just realized something, I only blogged two times in the whole month of July. How sad is that? I got this domain almost a year ago, in hopes to just explode with blogging and other things. However that is not happening really. During school, I was trying to focus on my studies, but I don’t have any now. So where has the time gone? In the end of June, I wrote a post about how I was dealing with some personal issues. I thought things would clear up and return to normal, but seeing that it will not happen, I have to pack my things up and move on. That happened just about three weeks ago. If you don’t know me, I usually don’t have the best luck with women.

I have been working on putting together a site for a department at school. My initial design went over pretty well, I am waiting to hear back about it. This caused me to dive back into PHP. One of the features the department wants is to display a few blurbs about the department — like updates and such. This caused me to throw together a small database and figure how to show only the latest few entries.

My next step is to figure out how to make a form, so that the proper people could “update the site” without touching my database. My main issue is I don’t know how to make the form say: put these values into these fields of this database. I haven’t really looked too much to figure it out. The examples I have seen, have a random URL in the beginning of the form. From what I recall, you need to do that only when you are giving a detail summary. If anybody could give me a pointer, it would be great.

Making My Own Theme

Ryan — Sun, 27 May 2007 02:33:03 +0000

The other day I came across Stripe Generator 2.0 while browsing, after playing around with it, I started to play around with the theme I have. Then I started thinking, why do I keep doing these minor edits, when I can do everything from the start and leave it. The theme I have started with is fSpring by Fredrik Fahlstad, here is a demo of fSpring. Quite a change huh?

I am currently developing the theme as a flat file for ease, but will be converting it to PHP later on. It won’t be too hard I don’t think, the biggest concern of mine is getting it finished. Which won’t be for quite a while because of school.

I have been playing around with a few ideas, some that I have seen in some templates that have the look I am going after, but those aren’t too widely used. I am hoping to have it done soon, but I would still need to convert it to the appropriate files for WordPress.

[Update:] I started this post just over a month ago, and this is how busy I am…I decided to keep what I have now.

Technorati Tags: theme, wordpress

New Google Maps Feature

Ryan — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 05:41:30 +0000

Have you ever thought, hmm I would like to make my own map? Well now you can. Google Maps has enabled a feature that you can make your own map and share it if you choose to. There are a number of sample maps available to view, such as all the MLB ball park locations, and an annotated journey along the famous Route 66.

If you have Google Earth installed, you can download these custom maps as a KML file and view it in Google Earth. (KML is the file type used in Google Earth.)

Technorati Tags: google, google maps, map, maps, google earth

Twitter

Ryan — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:21:13 +0000

I jumped on the band wagon with Twitter. It is like a big social community to let others know what you are doing. I thought I would not use it much, but actually I am quite a bit. It is interesting to see something take off so quickly, and see people adapting to the ‘hottest thing.’

There is already a sidebar plugin for Firefox and Flock, a search bar submission engine, a widget for Macs, and a small Windows app. There may be some others that I am not aware of yet.

Some links for Twitter

My twitter log – it is also linked on the sidebar.
Tweetbar – a sidebar plugin by Mike Demers. For Firefox and Flock.
TwitThis – sort of like Digg, when you put it n posts of a blog, and a person clicks it, that post is now their latest tweet.
Twitterrific – a Mac OS X 10.4+ app/widget.
Firefox Search Plugin – You post new tweets directly from your Firefox search bar.
Twitter Tools – by Alex King, integrates Twitter and Wordpress, makes posts on your blog per tweet.
Twitteroo – sort of like Twitterrific, but for a PC.
Twessenger – a plugin for MSN Messenger.
TwitterBuzz – lists the most popular links on Twitter.
TwitterFeed – post new blog posts automatcally to Twitter, and it uses OpenID

I think this list will keep growing, so if you have another, just send it and I will add it to the list.

Finals Week

Ryan — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 12:05:56 +0000

This week was finals, it was quite a blur even though I had only one standard final. On Monday I left work early to start studying, and catch up with a friend for dinner. Unfortunately, dinner plans fell through and that left me to study for the night. Both Tuesday and Wednesday were hell. On Tuesday, I took the day off, because my final was Wednesday. A friend and I arranged to study together, originally she wanted to start around 9:30 or 10. So I got up at 9, got ready and waited for her call that said she was nearby campus…She called a bit after 10, and told me she just got up, and to give her about an hour to get there. I figured I would do stuff around here, and buzz to the library in about 45 minutes or so…thinking I’d just get there and just getting settled before starting. I get set up, and figured I would do a bit, and kind of start over whenever she comes. Around 11:15 I get a call she had just woken up again, and is now on her way. She showed up about an hour later, and we got started.

We were there until almost 8:30, and she had to get back home. I was absolutely beat, I studied practically 9 hours straight on almost no food. I had a protein bar when I got up, I took a break around 3 to get a smoothie, and on my trek there, a group was giving away FREE food. I was like sweeeeeeeet, unfortunately it was only half a sandwich and a granola bar, but free. I ate the sandwich on the way into the place to get my smoothie. On my way back, I gave them a ‘can I have another’ look, but they didn’t bite.

I arrive back at my dorm, around 9, and sit down to dinner at 9:30. Absolutely drained, I decided to take a cat nap and then study some more. Well, when I got up, I was like oh crap, I don’t know what to go over, what to memorize, blah, blah, blah. After almost 3 hours of that, I said to heck with it, I am off to bed for good. My exam was at 8:30, I had my mom give me a call around 7-7:30. I managed to get up at 6 to get some last minute studying in, but I didn’t make much progress than I did when I quit 4 hours ago. Yes, I took a final on 4 hours of sleep.

I walk into my final, gave it an once over, and was like I was stressing over this and this, but it’s not on here. I only said damn I should have gave that term more than a quick read while studying two times. Somehow I managed to finish the test with just about a half hour to spare. The person I studied with finished before that even. After a quick bite to eat I manned our booth at the tech fair. I primarily answered questions about accessible technology, and did on-the-fly accessible web design evaluations.

As for the rest of the week, it was pretty mellow.

Technorati Tags: finals, exam, exams, study, UW, web design, accessibility

Gmail: Muted

Ryan — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 09:28:40 +0000

I was just going through one of my Gmail accounts to check the posts on the various mailing lists I am on, and I found a new shortcut that I have not heard talked about at all. It is ‘m’, this is quite an useful and the way that Gmail’s help words it, it makes it quite funny:

If you’re subscribed to a mailing list, you’ve no doubt been subjected to the ‘thread that just won’t die!’ If you’re part of a long message conversation that isn’t relevant, you can ‘mute’ the conversation to keep all future additions out of your inbox.

By using the ‘m’ shortcut key, new messages added to the conversation bypass your inbox so that the conversation stays archived. If your address appears in the to or cc field, though, the conversation will pop back into your inbox ready for your attention.

If you need to see what you have muted, just type is:muted in the search bar and you will be given a list of your “muted” conversations. To un-mute it, select it, and click the move to inbox button.

Technorati Tags: gmail, muted, is:muted