Accepting PayPal Payments
As I prepare to bring my teaching website, Your Online Life, online, I’ve been fiddling with PayPal. I plan to use it to accept credit card payments, and I got lost within their documentation. But I managed to pull together what I need, and here’s what I found. First, log in to PayPal, then click […]
8 May 08
Twitter, Twhirl, and FriendFeed I’ve been using these three technologies for about a week now, and I definitely have enough experience with them to say that I’m hooked. Not massively so, but I’m using them. Twitter is basically a group IM client in a website. You join, and add all your friends on the service. […]
In Defense of Facebook
A recent chart posted by cnet shows that Facebook apps are primarily used "just for fun." And there have been a number of blog posts lately (particularly The problem with Facebook) which trash Facebook, saying that the site is effectively pointless and not worth any money. Allow me to step forward in defense of Facebook. […]
What I Type A Lot
Inspired by Brennen’s entry, here are my most frequently-entered commands: $ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf \ “%5d\t%s\n”,a[i],i}}’ |sort -rn|head 216 ./die 97 vi 38 cd 34 ls 17 su 15 ./generate_homepage.py 14 ./upload.sh 11 b 9 apachectl 6 ftp “die” rolls dice, which I’ve used a lot for role-playing. “b” opens my blog in […]
Now Here’s a Crazy Idea
Imagine a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game with… …no elves or dwarves. …an emphasis on player skill instead of level grinding. …a vast, completely original world that the game encourages you to explore. …the ability to hire shopkeepers, guards, and any other NPCs to automate things …active GMs who regularly interact with players. …quests tailored […]
23 Nov 07
I keep hearing about Twitter, so I decided to try it out. You send one-liners to the service, telling it what you’re up to. You can see other people on there, and watch their updates, which I gather is the real power of the site — seeing exactly who’s doing what, in quasi-realtime. So I’m […]
21 Nov 07
So, anyone of you use del.icio.us? I’ve finally gotten around to setting up my own del.icio.us page, so if anyone’s interested, link me or connect me or whatever it is you do on this site. (I’m also on Facebook, if you’re interested, as BrentNewhall.)
19 Nov 07
An interesting point made on the “This Week in Tech” podcast: A billion people in India and China will be joining the internet for the first time in the next few years. And their first exposure to the internet will be on celphones, not desktops or laptops. Imagine the money to be made by celphone […]
22 Aug 07
If you were to parody Web 2.0, you could hardly do better than eSwarm. (If you’re not familiar with the term, “Web 2.0” was coined recently to describe the next generation of websites, characterized by community-driven content that uses the web as a platform instead of a destination in itself.) I have nothing against Web […]
25 Jul 07
Today, I began work in earnest on my new project at RC/STS: RCVA. It’s a desktop, instruments-only flight simulator aimed at small training facilities. We build an application that contains all the panels you’d find on a given aircraft (throttle, airspeed, etc.), and sell it off. The application development process involves copying a lot of […]