Journal Archive

After a long run, it's the end of the road for kimages. As many of you know, kimages was the image hosting service that I ran. It sparked a great deal of my interest in learning to script in PHP and allowed me to learn a lot about scaling web applications to large audiences. In the past two years,...

Not too long ago, I wrote a longwinded review of the Motorola Xoom. In short, it brought to the table what I expected it to. It is a great product with a solid design and good software, but it felt incomplete. Partially because expected features were missing out of the box, and partially because th...

Let's face it. The iPad 2 isn't revolutionary. It doesn't "change the game" of the tablet market. And with an incredible amount of competition rising against the de facto mobile device manufacturer, you'd expect more than a few cameras, a sleeker design, and a faster processor. In the ...

Late last month, I started to weigh my options. My image hosting service, kimages, has long outgrown shared hosting environments. With bandwidth in the terabytes, and ever increasing disk usage, it was time to change something. Originally, I tried to see how much of an effect deleting all images o...

I suppose I've been taking my summer break from writing here. June passed without any articles, sadly. So to placate those of you who hang on my every word (you're out there, right?), here's my midsummer update. Personally, I have less than two months before school resumes. My summer thus far has ...

Pagination is an increasingly popular method of breaking up content into multiple pages. Specifically, I'm addressing the method of navigating to older content using single buttons. Above, "the good" is from the tech blog Engadget, while "the bad" is from The Unofficial ...

Through the multiple iterations of this blog, I've written my own commenting systems to use. While they were not necessarily the most feature-packed, they most certainly got the job done. Now, as I just somewhat rewrote my blog engine, I'm considering bringing back commenting. Lately, comment...

Tomorrow, Apple is slated to unveil their roadmap for the iPhone 4.0 operating system update. In the last three versions, we've seen a great number of feature additions (need I mention the App Store?), but the overall look of the operating system has remained the same. While it's an elegantly desig...

Continuing with my enthusiasm about Apple's iPad, I checked out what Apple has done to update Safari for the iPad. In general, not too much. People have been complaining about poor rendering of certain websites, etc. However, Apple has implemented some new CSS media queries to allow desig...

It's been a long time since we've seen a truly revolutionary device enter the computing world. Within the past decade, computers have grown in performance while shrinking in size. However, the way we interface with computers has remained unchanged. The first computer mouse was prototyped in 1963 ...

Since virtually the beginning of the web, universally identical fontography has been a problem. Every platform ships with different fonts which render differently in nearly every browser. However, with the advent of Typekit, utilizing obscure fonts to achieve design perfection has become feasible. ...

If you haven't noticed, I've been tweaking my latest blog design non-stop; adding features, fixing glitches, etc. I even re-enabled access to super-old posts (apparently people can't stop visiting my silly tutorial on CSS bar graphs). However, I haven't had much time to talk about mu...

Following a few months of stagnation (thanks to a busy college schedule), I got around to doing a redesign here. I'm taking it in a much simpler direction for the time being. One post at a time, linear newer/older navigation, plenty of room for stories, no comments. I like how it has turn...

While I didn't get a chance to go to the show this year, I did cover a lot of stories over at ConnectReviews. There were plenty of cool things to see, as there are every year, but to be honest, I'm a bit disappointed. First things first. Let's start with the buzzwords for this year in tech...

Happy holidays to you and yours. Hopefully one of my new years resolutions will be to post more often. Until then, have a safe and happy holiday season! ...

I recently received an invitation to join Google Wave. Having heard so many comments regarding it being "Email 2.0" and the next big step in internet communications, I signed up and was eager to see what the big deal is. For those of you who don't yet have access to Google's new...

I'm one of the many proud owners of the iPhone 3G. Like many, when the iPhone 3GS was launched at WWDC this year, my existing piece of Apple hardware felt somewhat inadequate. Therefore, I quickly jumped to the thought of upgrading to the new 3GS (with the "S" standing for speed). To...

So. A few months back, a friend of mine stated that he saw ads on my blog. Seeing as though I never try to monetize my sites, I took this as a laughable claim and was similarly unable to find these ads he spoke of. I verified these findings with a few others, and they couldn't find any ads eith...

It's no surprise that Facebook envies the recent attention Twitter has been receiving. Even Oprah jumped on the tweeting bandwagon. However, when people start to compare the two services, it's like comparing apples to oranges. Sure, they're both social networking platforms, but Facebook has to focu...

I've written quite a few blog posts over the years relating to how to perform certain tasks. However, more often than not, I find it hard to show off a working demo. Starting today, all my "demo" blog posts will also have a link to a fully working example. Should help out people who just l...

Is it just me, or does the new Amtrak logo (right) look a lot like the existing Bank of America logo (left)? That's just what I thought the first time I saw it. ...

Over the past few days, I've been looking into the long list of JavaScript graphing utilities that use the HTML <canvas> tag to produce attractive and professional graphs. What I found most interesting is that, in comparison to standard graphing tools (such as RRDtool), the graphs had incredib...

Last week, Apple introduced the new iPhone 3.0 software that's hitting the public this summer. Looking back at the launch of the original iPhone, I'm wondering if there's anything that Apple is still missing. On the hardware side, we got our 3G network and GPS. On our software side, what is the...

I'm not sure how to feel about the new Facebook homepage that launched today. Now the news feed is dictated by people's useless statuses as opposed to the old three statuses at the top. I don't think I like the change as it makes the content more confusing to navigate. Also, the default f...

Recently, more and more students are choosing their colleges not by visits or mailings, but instead, the internet. While visiting colleges remains an integral part of the final decision for most students, college websites introduce students to everything that the school stands for. However, is desig...

Last weekend, I found the time to go and check out the 2009 Chicago Auto Show. Had a good look around, and, sadly, was unimpressed with a lot of the new models. However, I was very happy with what Audi had in the works. Their new A3 and A4 models are absolutely amazing. In addition, the V10 R8 seems...

I suppose I don't sympathize much with fontographers. I don't want to pay $30 for a font to use in a logo once. Even if I did pay the $30, I wouldn't even be sure if I wanted to use the font. However, I guess there's no other way to get money for the design put into fonts. Maybe font...

With many sites nowadays, the sign up forms for simple services are getting longer and longer. This shouldn't happen. Sign up forms shouldn't interfere with a user becoming part of a site. The best way to do this is by incorporating signing up into the user experience. To sign up for a service, a u...

I recently created the new design template for the package tracking service, TrackThis. While the design that is in use now isn't my exact original work, it's pretty close. Definitely check out the new design (and service) at usetrackthis.com. ...

So I've decided it's about time to start over. This isn't a product of losing my existing site in some horrible data loss accident. It's simply me deciding that it's about time that I brought a new look and new revived interest to my site. I've been very lazy about updating my existing site be...