Preston Lee's Blog

Category: computer

  • What's Better Than Windows Balloon Help?…

    Twice as much balloon help! My current testing environment for JumpBox development uses two Windows XP virtual machines on OS X under Parallels coherence mode: one with IE6 (gold taskbar on the bottom), the other IE7 (blue taskbar on the right). While they perform sufficiently with 4GB physical RAM, the constant nurturing required to keep…

  • Switching To Dvorak: One Week Later

    It’s been exactly one week since I switched to the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard (DSK) layout. Thoughts… The first couple days are especially frustrating while you memorize key locations and build a small bit of muscle memory for common phrases. Hang in there.. this is the toughest part. Temporarily relabel your real keyboard with cheap stickers…

  • Switching To Dvorak

    After years of deliberation, I’m finally taking this Thanksgiving break to switch to the Dvorak keyboard layout. It’s been frustrating, yes, but I believe my wrists will be much better off with the change. Within a couple hours of switching I’m probably crawling at ~15 words per minute, which is faster than I expected. Stuff…

  • In The News

    OpenRain affiliate img surf‘s Mugr facial recognition services have been receiving some press lately. Here’s the lowdown of what’s been happening.. ReadWriteWeb.com article, by Josh Catone. AltSearchEngines.com comparison, by Charles Knight. RoughType.com article, by Nicolas Carr. Official Mugr blog, by the Mugr team. Public Mugr developer support Google group. Mad props to the Mugr team…

  • Featured In Rubyology Podcast #48

    The talk I gave at yesterday’s Phoenix Rails meeting will be featured in Rubyology Podcast #48, courtesy of Chris Matthieu. Thanks for the effort and kind words! The Mugr.com demo portion at the end got cut out unfortunately, but the meat of the technical discussion is available for your listening pleasure. Slides: Keynote PDF Listen…

  • Rails Presentation: attachment_fu, Kropper and Mugr.com face-based services preview.

    I’m giving a brief talk at tonight’s Rails meeting in Chandler at 7:00pm on what we’re doing with attachment_fu and Kropper for upcoming face-based search service mugr.com. I’ll post the slides afterwards for those who can’t make it, but you won’t get to see the Über-secret developer build unless you come 🙂 Slides: Keynote PDF

  • Rails attachment_fu/Kropper Scaling Fix: attachment_fu_skip_resize

    I recently integrated Kropper into a custom RoR application for OpenRain affiliate img surf. A fundamental flaw in the upload-save-crop-save process used by Kropper is that attachment_fu automatically scales down the image on first save to :resize_to dimensions. After the subsequent crop–which may result in a significant drop in resolution–the image is scaled back up…

  • Dynamically Generating SSL Certificates with Ruby on Rails

    OpenRain had a couple projects recently need to programmatically generate private keys and SSL certificates in Ruby. To contribute back to the community, we’re releasing several small things today. SSLsicle.com A simple form which does the OpenSSL grunt work and pop outs an SSL certificate ready to use with Apache (or whatever). SSLsicle uses.. eassl_fix…

  • Facial Search Service Coming Soon

    My company recently entered into a partnership with img surf to develop Mugr.com: a facial identification/search service initially targeted at the mobile market. I’m pleased to announce that we already have the base functionality working, and are planning to deploy Mugr.com for experimentation in an invite-only beta starting in October. We’re also planning on providing…

  • Subversion For SCM Slides

    I gave a presentation to Arizona’s ASULUG/PLUG yesterday on using subversion for software configuration management. Raw slides: Keynote PDF