Sam Merrell

I'm really exited to know that I have only one more quarter until I am done with Neumont and I have my bachelors. It's been a long time but I have learned so many things and I feel I have progressed well as a Computer Science student. I can't wait to move to Austin to begin my career with IBM. I really feel like it is the right thing to do and the automation I'll be working on is right up my alley. All that stands between me and Austin now are four gen-eds! :)

I only have one more final and I am done with this quarter at Neumont! I am so excited about being done. I'm just completely done with this quarter and it will be nice to have a break for a couple of weeks. Just one more quarter and its off to Austin and IBM for me!

So I have decided to actually start using my Blogger account again, and this time I actually will be posting to it. If you want to read any posts I have about technology and programming, please go check out the site there. As for Vox, I'm going to use it for more random musings and more social type blogging such as sharing music interests, book interests, movies, etc.. Vox is much better at that kind of blogging than anything else since it allows for a much easier way to share interests with others. Anyways, go check out my technology blog and enjoy!

P.S.
Yes, I did just link to my other blog twice. I might be trying to hint at something (like you should go read it, I have a new post up and its awesome!)

Sam

OK, so we all know that politics in general are boring and I don't plan on turning this blog into anything remotely political but I had to post a great web site for all of you that plan on voting in the upcoming elections. Open Secrets is a web site run by the Center for Responsive Politics and tracks funding in our nations government. Here is an excerpt from the Open Secrets site:

The Center for Responsive Politics is a non-partisan, non-profit research group based in Washington, D.C. that tracks money in politics, and its effect on elections and public policy. The Center conducts computer-based research on campaign finance issues for the news media, academics, activists, and the public at large. The Center’s work is aimed at creating a more educated voter, an involved citizenry, and a more responsive government.

I really enjoyed looking at the raw funding data for each candidate and learning where it all comes from. I know this will be an invaluable tool for me during the elections and will definitely make me a more informed voter. Its great to see that people are out there documenting the influence of public and private funding on our elections. My only hope is that this site will grow and also include funding for all the other political parties out there. (Yes, there are more than just Democrats and Republicans!)

I finally have one. Those Wii have been impossible to find until yesterday when Amber's uncle actually saw a couple at Wal Mart. I think it was the first time I have ever even heard of one at Wal Mart for more than 15 minutes. Every time I had called around to see if there were Wiis they would sell out within a few minutes of showing up. I guess most people like me gave up and now that they showed up, no one thought to see if the stores had any.

I got the Wii with the new stringer wrist straps and an extra Wii mote as well. I would have gotten an extra Nunchuk but they were all out at the time. Oh well though, I can always get one later. Right now I only have Wii sports, but I'll be getting Zelda soon.

Now for you other Nintendo fan boys and girls, what games do you like most for the Wii? Dusda, that means you.

* End fan boy rant *

For a long time now I have known that Firefox has user profiles, but I never really thought about how they might be useful until today. I was reading an article from Google Operating System and it had some neat ideas for why would want to use profiles. After reading that I thought I would post what I had learned from creating my own profiles and why I have them.

To start, from the command line or run command enter:
    /path/to/firefox/firefox -ProfileManager

That will bring up this screen:

Profile Manager

From that screen you can create or modify your existing profiles. As you can see I created two other profiles other than my default. The first one is my presentation profile, as the name implies, I use it when I am doing presentations. It has no plugins, no bookmarks, and the homepage is set to about:blank. It also does not remember browsing history, saved form information, cookies, etc... so each time I start it up I get a clean slate to work with.

Firefox presentation setting

I also created a minimal profile if I need to run Firefox with only a few extensions installed. This can be very handy when you need to do a specific task and the other plugins are eating up too much memory or they just get in the way. This could also be used for programming by creating a development profile that has only the plugins I need for development such as the awesome Web Developer Toolbar.

The next thing to do after you created your profiles is make an easy way to get to them. For this, you have a couple options. First, you could uncheck the don't ask at startup option in the profile manager. I find that really annoying though since I really only want to run these other profiles in certain cases, so here is another way you can do it.

From the command line or run menu enter:
/path/to/firefox/firefox -P "Profile Name"

This will start Firefox in the profile you selected but remember that it is Case Sensitive.

Now you can start Firefox in a new profile easily from the run command or you could even make shortcuts for each profile.

I was reading this article and it got me thinking. What color schemes do you use when you code? Just recently I switched over to a dark scheme and my eyes have been thanking me ever since. Now the only time I switch back to a light scheme is when I have to use the projector. This is the scheme I've been using for Java. Now show me what you use!

Color

1 comment

Last night I was thinking about what I wanted to write for the next couple of posts and I came up with an idea. I am going to try and learn a new programming language every month and write what I learned from my experience with the new language. Recently, I have been reading more and more about niche programming languages and how they have been influencing other more popular languages such as Java. One of the most talked about being Erlang and how it is amazing for concurrent programming. Currently the language I am teaching myself is Eiffel and I'll be writing more about it in about a week or so. Aside from that I have a few other languages I was thinking about learning. My list right now is:

• Smalltalk
• Erlang
• Haskell
• Lisp / Scheme

As you can see right now I only have five languages that I plan on learning. Now I want to come to you and ask for suggestions on any other languages you think I should learn. I'd really like to see a discussion or posts about any other languages that you know or are learning yourselves.

It has been quite some time since I wrote anything on here, so i figured I should at least give an update before I write a proper post. School has started back up and I'm only taking gen eds this quarter. I had a rough two quarters before this one, so I am going to ease up on school and spend some time with my girlfriend and my daughter this time. Although I'm not doing projects or any other computer science classes, this doesn't mean I'm not writing any code! On the contrary, I am working on a new project with Thomas and Kyle. Its called the Open Campus Portal and I'm really excited to work on this project. I'll be spending a lot of time at home with my family and working on the Open Campus Portal. In the next few days I'll start posting more regularly about what I've been learning from the Open Campus Portal.