I AM The Universe: Random Thoughts

So, I was watching this episode of How I Met Your Mother, where Marshall keeps on pointing flaws in Barneys theories, and then says “BAM! You’ve been lawyered!” So, I got to thinking – if people as boring as lawyers can do it, why not engineers! So you come up with a nifty little methodical shortcut for doing things, or optimize someone elses process, and then you go “BAM! You’ve been engineered!” That’s cool, and it can be used as an innuendo when used correctly

Anyway, so people who follow me on Twitter know that I use a service called twt.fm to share music from time to time. But I got tired of using their website, so I decided to write myself a little script. I used Doug’s AppleScript to get the current playing track information from iTunes (credit to him for that), and then wrote an Automator script to get the twt.fm URL from their API and post it via Tweetie.

You can download the script here. You can put it in your Scripts folder so that it appears in the menubar, or you can put it in the Applications folder. Just launch the script when your song is playing in iTunes, and the script will get the twt.fm link and open a new post in Tweetie with the content. You can tweak the way your message appears by opening the script in Automator.

The only configuration required is opening the script in Automator, and entering your Twitter username and password. That’s it. And there you go.. BAM! You’ve been engineered!

I have a weird relationship with UNIX. Probably because I like the feeling you get when you know that you’re capable of doing what you want to do – that you have the capacity to figure out a way. And since I’m not very proficient with UNIX (even though I like to call myself a geek), doing something in UNIX gives me that feeling.

I had my first bout with it when I was thirteen. My brother tried installing SystemV on our old 386 just after we got a brand-spanking-new 486. Before beginning the ritual of the CLI (:P) he locked me out – I was a kid, what did I know about computers, right? Two hours later, there was smell of burning transistors all over the place and my brother rushed out of the room. Much to my brothers delight – I refused to believe that a piece of hardware could just evaporate because of a software glitch. Suddenly I was the guy who knew all about computers Khair he needed to have SysV installed because of some college project, so we tried installing SysV on the new 486 this time. With me in the room! That was the first time I experienced the magic of the X Windowing environment!

Even though I’m not a particularly big fan of UNIX, I wouldn’t be a very good geek if I didn’t know much about it, now would I? So I still play around with Linux. I’m a Mac user, which means that the terminal gives me plenty of space to play around with the UNIX CLI. Plus I install Linux on everything! Just for the heck of it! I don’t really use Linux to get any of my work done, I just like to get it on any machine that I own, you know, just to prove a point!

I installed YDL on my first Mac – a Wallstreet PowerBook G3. It was the earlier G3 which really wasn’t a G3 at all except for the brand name – on the inside it was a 603e processor, which didn’t support any existing Linux distribution natively. You had to tinker with the firmware – thankfully it had an Old World ROM, which meant that using the ROM Toolbox you could still install a patch (I love the free internet!) in the ROM to enable installation of Linux. Sure it was painfully slow, but it was so satisfying just to know that I could install Linux if I wanted to

I installed Linux on the first iPod I got. The affair didn’t last long because honestly, the player sucked bigtime! I installed Linux on my PS3, just for kicks.

sudo Don’t laugh.

So. There’s been a lot of hype about this new computational knowledge engine that goes by the name of Wolfram Alpha. It has been all over the news for the past couple of weeks, and it sounded pretty cool. The though of being able to get answers rather than page results seemed interesting, so obviously I was pretty excited about the launch. But I was pretty disappointed when it couldn’t tell me why line monitoring and intrinsically safe circuits don’t go hand in hand.

But these guys more than made up for that disappointment with their appeal to Dylan fans! If you’re a Dylan fan, go to their website, and search for “how many roads must a man walk down”

I’m thinking of dropping a Link Parade a few days a week, rounding up a few interesting websites I end up at. So here goes the first one!

1. Top 10 Songs Over 10 Minutes
2. The Trojans of Sulawesi Live To Die - Spooky article!!
3. Executor – App Launcher - Finally, Windows users have a semi-elegant app launcher
4. Creating a Content-Slider – Neat CSS How-to
5. Six email Aggregators – For people for whom one email address is not enough Even otherwise, some of these are really nifty start-pages!
6. How To Manage Priorities with Excel – Amazingly helpful productivity tweak.
7. The Evolution of Men’s Style: 1933-2008 - Neat pictorial!
8. 13 Things That Do Not Make Sense – Very interesting read.