Suggested chat program...

A friend recently turned me onto a program that can intergrate many of the chat services that we use into one window. I liked that iChat does this somewhat, but it lacks some features that I would love to have... Primarily I hate having separate buddy lists for various accounts.

The program is Adium (http://adium.im/) and it supports a lot of differnt chat protocols, including Facebook. I think I may try it out in the coming weeks, but I welcome comments from anyone that is currently using it. If it means that I can use Facebook to keep in touch with people without having to see one more Mafia Wars or Farm update I am game to add another piece of software...

On a side note, I just figured out that I can block all posts from an app on Facebook! This may not be news to the rest of you, but I don't care that "a sheep wandered off of your farm while you were looking for the golden craps dice!"

One of the best T-Shirts ever...

I am not a big fan of Facebook, and more and more I find that it just highlights the aspects of humanity that annoy me. Today it did offer something good...


This site has a few more, and based on a recommendation from my friend Robert I also found a couple good ones here too.

Making my mac do what I want... NOW!

So I am going to have to come back to this later and add more to it, but the basic idea is this:

I used to use a program called Quicksilver to search for things on my mac and to launch programs that I don't want to keep lying around in the dock. I noticed that it made my machine slower to login and it could hog resources...

I decided to try out the native OS X solution, the spotlight, and much to my delight it was speedy and pretty well done. Since it is already running by default, it is not using any more system resources. Then I thought, what if I could search google and the web from it... So I found this:

Google Importer 1.0.1
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/spotlight/googleimporter.html

I will try and followup on how well it works...

WELL, that was short... At least the website saved me the trouble of downloading it, becasue when I tried it informed me that it was not compatible with OS X Leopard (Tiger only). So now I have to find another way to search quickly. I have heard some negative reviews of the google desktop search... Oh well :-(

"the U.S. and Canada are the third world of mobile phone networks"

I was just reading an interesting article on the NTY website about the overload that the iPhone is placing on the ATT&T network:

Customers Angered as iPhones Overload AT&T

I understand the need for a company to make money, really I do, but at a certain point companies need to invest in maintaining an advantage over their competition in the future. I would own an iPhone today if I had not had such a crappy experience with Cingular/ATT&T years ago (almost 10 years!), but with that in mind I will continue to use my palm with Verizon. My palm is fast and not without its flaws but it is a known, and I have heard that things have not improved much on the ATT&T network since my experience.

If you are not a frequent visitor to my blog then you may not know that I am a computer science graduate student, and that my area of research interest is in networking and distributed systems. I should be very clear in saying that there is no silver bullet and no perfect network. They all have their own advantages and faults. Take the home access to the Internet in the United States as an example. I have hear rumors that in parts of Europe and Asia one can get a network (Internet) connection that offers roughly 10 times faster download speed and an amazing 400 times faster on upload. This connection can be had for as little as $10 us and I pay almost 5 times that amount for a connection that is much MUCH slower. Am I angry because I want a faster connection? No, I am angry because I pay so much for a "slow" connection. For most of us, we don't utilize a substantial portion of the connection we have. Like my friend Mike J. says... As long as the tubes keep the [media] flowing ;-)

I don't want to get into a debate about why the US is a leader in innovation, but lags so far behind in implementing and deploying those innovations, but I would like to see us do a better job of doing things right. Maybe if we get our priorities strait...

So I guess its my own humble opinion that it is not the iPhone that is the adversary, but a network that is not up to global standards. Hell we invented the internet 40 years ago, you think we could get it right.

Tattoos, Piercings, Punk Music and Facebook Oh MY!

I am not quite sure what made me think about this, but one has to wonder what the future holds for our children. The most obvious is the house of cards that we have left for them. At some point we have to stop living as a culture with the hope that if we ignore problems that they will go away or that the next generation will come up with a way to solve the problem without any sort of sacrifice or real effort, but I digress.

My point is much more benign than the cooking planet or the flaws of greed based capitalistic society. I am just curious about what happens when a generation of parents have tattoos, and punk music? Have our peers not already pierced every imaginable body part? We have even embraced the cultural differences. So what is left for our children to do to assert their individualism? How do they tell the world that they are not their parents?

I guess if I have to look to history for any sort of clue one might expect something like the 1980's reaction to the 1960's and 1970's social rebellions. It brought with it a generation of social conservatism...

It makes me think that maybe I need to take out my earrings, cover my tattoos, and start Bible thumping so that my kid can have the joy and youthful pride of not being a carbon copy of his parents without having to resort to joining the young republicans or ending up with a job on Wall St.

The blur of life...

Does it seem to anyone else that our lives seem to accelerate and that there is no terminal velocity in sight? Granted I may have bitten off more than I can chew this semester...

A good friend of mine recently graduated with a PhD in mathematics. I am just getting ready to start my venture toward a PhD in computer science, so maybe he would have some better answers...

Check out his fledgling blog here

On top of the world...

Well I have now secured the top google search returns for my name :-D

Cooks and Programmers

For those of you who may not know I have a background as a professional chef, and I am now working on my PhD in computer science. The pastry chef who made the cupcakes for our wedding used to be a programmer, and I read an article today about a guy who was a programmer and is now considering a career change to being a food writer. Maybe I am going at this backwards, but at any rate, he has a very cool blog called No Recipes which is a nicely done site that should be checked out.

http://www.norecipes.com/

Maybe I should start doing some posts of my own culinary adventures...

My other pages

Well not that I have a whole lot of time to work on maintaining a presence on the internet, but I do have a few projects that get some attention now and then.

A good friend of mine is quite the photographer and I am in the process of putting together a small page for him to display some of his work.

http://www.kipamato.com

I have a page that is also in the process of construction for a small building maintenance company.

http://www.abbottservice.com

I have my own personal page.

http://www.gavaletz.com

My wife has her blog.

http://chrystal.gavaletz.com

I have a flickr page,

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gavaletz/

a Picasa page,

http://picasaweb.google.com/gavaletz

and there is a face book page out there too, but I am not a fan of how I have little control over what content is displayed on my page. I also don't see a way to lnk directly to a Facebook page.

Any who...enjoy!