Preston Lee's Blog

Category: computer

  • Preston And AT&T Give Each Other The Finger

    I made the jump the last day before Verizon stopped offering unlimited data plans. The delay for switching to Verizon was not lack of motivation–AT&T service has always paled to Verizon in Arizona and is nearly nonexistent at my summer home–but in desperate procrastination of dealing with the migration process. My longest conversation (highly abbreviated)…

  • Apple Wireless Bluetooth Keyboard Dvorak Hacking

    It’s very easy to switch around the keys on Apple’s current generation of wireless bluetooth keyboard. The first time doing this hack I only had one “close call”, but know that I know how to get the keys off safely it’s simple, fast and easy. I used a couple razor blades to pop off the keys, but a…

  • TGen News Dashboard Widget For Mac OS X

      The Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization focused on developing clinically relevant medical diagnostics and smarter treatments related to genomic profiling. I’ve had the pleasure of working with the institute for over a year on a project related to breast cancer, and thought I’d share a widget I wrote keep…

  • Textbooks: What Publishers Don’t Understand About The Internet

    Textbook publishers in 2011 still aren’t fully appreciating the impact the Internet will have on their industry. A reasonably forward-thinking individual might optimistically assume the industry is self-correcting towards the wants and needs of consumers, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Let’s explore: Electronic typesetting. Physical textbooks obviously can’t be reissued every time…

  • Roku XDS Streaming Media Player Mini-Review

    I’ve purchased four Roku devices so far: an XDS and XD for personal use, and several XDs as gifts. Given the relative affordability of Netflix and Hulu Plus services–as opposed to a cable or satellite television subscription–the XDS provides the missing link in the web-based television ecosystem, streaming solid commericial content across your existing broadband…

  • Makerbot Thing-o-Matic 3D Printer Print Pictures & Product Review

    I’ve had my Makerbot Thing-o-Matic working for about a month, and I have to assume it only gets cooler from here. If you’re a hardcore DIY’er, or your technical dablings tend to involve small, intricate parts required of custom robotics, circuitry, metal/woodworking etc., read on, and seriously consider a 3D printer investment in the future.

  • MakerBot Thing-o-Matic 3D Printer Assembly Photographs

    After an estimated 16 man-hour assembly effort, here are high-quality photographs of the new MakerBot Thing-o-Matic 3D printer and component assemblies.

  • AmericanExpress.com: Tip On Configuring Your Web App

    For all you web application developers, I’d like to briefly note the following stack trace I received from the American Express website while clicking around: And here is the same trace in plain-text format: JSPG0036E: Failed to find resource /cardcenter/common/interstitial.jsp Root Cause: java.io.FileNotFoundException: JSPG0036E: Failed to find resource /cardcenter/common/interstitial.jsp at com.ibm.ws.jsp.webcontainerext.AbstractJSPExtensionProcessor.findWrapper(AbstractJSPExtensionProcessor.java:322) at com.ibm.ws.jsp.webcontainerext.AbstractJSPExtensionProcessor.handleRequest(AbstractJSPExtensionProcessor.java:284) at com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.webapp.WebApp.handleRequest(WebApp.java:3548)…

  • Introducing RailRoady: The Rails 3 UML Diagram Generator

    I just released the first production version of the RailRoady gem about 5 minutes ago. If you’re a developer on Rail 3, you’ll definitely want to check it out. No more Vizio class diagrams! (RubyFlow announcement.)

  • LaTeX Broken On MacPort “texlive” Update

    I spent about 4 hours today troubleshooting a stupid, stupid issue with the “texlive +full” package as provided by MacPorts, which is required to run certain GUI LaTeX editors such as TeXShop. Several days ago I ran an innocuous-looking… preston$ sudo port sync preston$ sudo port upgrade outdated …and amongst many things that updated, texlive…