Alex Beutel's Mental Masturbation, Musings, and Methods

Skype and Verizon Wireless

Alex — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 20:24:28 +0000

At the start of this break I was frustrated with the fact that my house is a dead zone for Verizon and as a result I missed any and all calls while I was home. To deal with this I decided to finally properly configure Skype to work in sync with my cell phone. [...]

Break from Studying

Alex — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 22:28:58 +0000

In the middle of studying for some finals, I thought I’d take a break, install the new Wordpress 2.7. Of course, this required I actually write a blog post to give the new version a legitimate spin. So just wanted to post that my new favorite command (after rsync) has been wget, installed via macports, [...]

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 [...]