Geek Speak

“The island itself is only two million, but of course we’d want a house and stuff like that… so do you think if we work together we can earn 8 million dollars? That way we’ll each still have three million to spend.” Sigh. Such is the typical back-seat conversation these days as we go to and from school. And to think a few months ago they were saving up for the new Tamagotchi.

So far they’ve scraped together 60 dollars or so and have been trying to think of ways to earn more. Then they heard about that kid who outdid Angry Birds. “Maybe we could write an app too!” I couldn’t care less about money. Still, being the geeky mom I am, I told them they’d have to learn to program.

“What language would you like to try first?” Mary suggested English, Spanish, or Arabic. My bad. So after a quick explanation and some poking around for kid-friendly programming introductions in Google, they decided to start with Java in Judo, and try new a language and another IDE in a week or two.

Last night after Ethan discovered the graphics capabilities and had played around with it a bit, I thought I’d show him how to change colors based on user input. But I was getting errors, and it was time to read scriptures, so we left it for the night. Immediately after school today:

“Hey look! It compiled… and… come on… yup! It works!”
“Oh yeah? What was wrong?”
“You had the favColor variable as a String, and it should have been a Color.”
“Got ya. How’d you figure that out?”
“I checked the manual.”

Warms my nerdy little heart.

Just a quick note in case I have to do this again, I (finally) decided to get SSL working with my local environment, which in this case is MAMP. I’d avoided it for a while supposing it would be too much a pain. But I found a tutorial by webopius (“Getting MAMP working with SSL on OS X“) that made it relatively simple. That was easy enough, but I was getting 404s on everything, even after I disabled fancy url redirects, even on a plain html file outside the framework I’d been working within.

The problem:. I’d been developing from another path than the default MAMP installation and had changed this easily enough through MAMPs gui. I just didn’t realize that the DocumentRoot path for the SSL virtual host would also need to be changed. So, if you’re running into this same issue (or in case I run into the same issue again on another computer), simply go back to editing your ssl.conf, comment out the existing DocumentRoot site, and change it to your own real path, like so:


# General setup for the virtual host
# DocumentRoot "/Applications/MAMP/htdocs_ssl"
DocumentRoot "/your/real/path/goes/here/"

Save that and restart your apache service, and you should be good. And if that doesn’t work and you need to troubleshoot, have a look over your SSL error logs for more info. Good luck…

Okay, most of you who know me personally know I’m ridiculously happy at my new job. I’m currently redesigning blendtec.com, and little else could fuzzify my geeky little heart like this does.

But many of you, particularly my girl friends, have never heard of “Will It Blend” or Blendtec. And when I say “Oh! It’s so cool! They have these super tough blenders that blend stuff, like magnets and silly putty and iPhones!” you look at me like I’m from another planet.

So here are a few links to fill you in.

Blendtec on Modern Marvels: Super awesome behind-the scenes stuff, and a great overview, too.

Total Blender on Time Warp: Blending stuff is even cooler when it’s filmed at 10,000 frames per second and then played back in high definition slow mo! On this one they blend strawberries, gum balls, a video camera, and butane lighters. Parental discretion advised if your kid is a pyro. Otherwise, be sure to watch it in HD!

Bad guys, good guy, and a blender: A notoriously tough guy gets in the blender with the bad guys. Who will win? Blendtec had to remove this after the tough guy (whose name I dare not mention since I work for BT now, but you can find one of his many fan sites here) sent a cease and desist. But several youtube users had re-posted the original video, including this one. Too funny.

And of course we have Will It Blend? — a huge video collection of Tom Dickson blending stuff. And last but not least, blendtec.com — which is going to look awesome before the summer’s through.

And the best part of all of it? They Gave Me A Blender! Anyone up for smoothies?

… and by that I mean it sucks me right into it! Remember Great Homepages Really Suck by Cameron Moll? I read it back when it was new in 2003, and it was lovely to read it again today as part of my homework for DGM 2740. (more…)

I don’t know when I started using this phrase with my kids as a way to hurry them out of bed in the morning. Incidentally, it’s lost its magic. This morning Mary responded, “So what is a pop up anyway?”

I guess I’d always pictured gophers when I said that, but I laughed and told them about the pop up windows we had to endure back in the day. “But most modern browsers take care of them for you, so you guys probably don’t know what I’m talking about.” My oldest isn’t nine yet and I’m sure pop-up blockers have been around at least that long!

“Oh, I’ve dealt with pop ups before,” Mary sighed. “Especially if I can’t get Firefox out of Safemode and I have to use Internet Explorer. It’s so annoying when I’ve got ten windows to close”

Ethan nodded. “Internet Explorer IS a pop up.”

To do when they’re home again: Check for malware & install Chrome. :-p