Alex Beutel's Mental Masturbation, Musings, and Methods

Rsync Backup and Batch Printing

Alex — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 18:24:40 +0000

So I haven't posted in months and have a short break between classes so I wanted to post some scripts that I wrote this year and have been particularly useful. These are both specific to Duke's campus, but could easily be extended to other situations. The first is backup. In the past few months I [...]

Duke’s new ACES

Alex — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:01:50 +0000

As a rising sophomore at Duke University and a web programmer, I was naturally excited to see the update to our new Automated Computer Enrollment System (ACES). However, upon seeing the update, I was quite disappointed to say the least. Not to add to the moaning and groaning coming from plenty of my [...]

Hacking the New Facebook Design with Greasemonkey

Alex — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 04:38:43 +0000

In the seemingly never endless wait yet quickly approaching wake of the Facebook redesign I decided I should update my Greasemonkey Quick Links script. Unfortunately, hacking this new version of Facebook was not quite as simple as appending some HTML to a div. Because of Facebook's push towards more AJAX integration, even their menu system [...]

The Essence of the Internet is Lost

Alex — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 04:36:21 +0000

I was recently reading in the New York Times "As Web Traffic Grows, Crashes Take Bigger Toll", an article about the need for greater sustainability in Web 2.0 websites. The article provides interesting insight into the quickly growing costs of server outages for large companies like Amazon, Google, Twitter, etc.. With sites like Google Docs [...]

Acrobat.com and Flash - Again

Alex — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 01:14:12 +0000

I know I already posted about this subject once, but I must again express my disappointment in Adobe. After reading this post on Adobe's blog about their "cool new features" such as this embedable flash version of PDF's, I was again a bit surprised at their Adobe's simply silly buisness strategy. Adobe is clearly trying [...]

Facebook Beacon NOT Dead?

Alex — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 00:39:24 +0000

So it is 10:51 on June 26th and of course I am waiting around to go see Wanted at midnight. Being the responsible consumer I am, I purchased 3 tickets for the showing 2 hours ago so as to make sure my friends and I had tickets before taking a single REM-cycle nap so I [...]

PHP and Acrobat.com

Alex — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 01:36:46 +0000

A good while ago I heard about Adobe acquiring Buzzword, which was quite exciting since it definitely seemed like the most clean of the up and coming online document editing software. Finally, just last week Adobe released a public beta of a suite of Buzzword, Share, and other online editing tools to go along with [...]

Running Multiple versions of Firefox

Alex — Mon, 19 May 2008 01:46:47 +0000

So, in my recent frustration of both Facebook Chat suddenly not working on Firefox 3 RC1 and also many of my developer add-ons for Firefox not working in the new Firefox, I decided to try to run both Firefox 2 and 3 simultaneously. This can of course be done with the two separate profiles and [...]

iChat, Adium, and Quicksilver

Alex — Mon, 12 May 2008 17:38:36 +0000

So recently Adium has been annoying me because it seems to not pay attention to if I am actually connected to the internet. It says I'm online when I lose my connection and as a result I lose full connections. As a result I have been switching back and forth and sometimes using both iChat [...]

Adium and Quicksilver

Alex — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 01:01:09 +0000

I searched around yesterday for a plugin or script to use Quicksilver to set my Adium status, and while there were numerous results, all were outdated and did not work with newer versions of both pieces of software. So I decided to edit some of the ones I had found online. The original [...]