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Google Quick Search Box for Mac OS X rocks!

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on September 29, 2009

in Apple and Google

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I just downloaded Google Quick Search Box for Mac OS X, and I have to say its awesome. I mean, Wow, its just done so perfectly well. I would recommend it to everyone who owns a Mac.

To begin with, it doesn’t step on the toes of Spotlight. While Spotlight is a good search tool, I do like to use it for certain things (at least for now), Google Quick Search Box allows you to override the Cmd+Space shortcut, or use a different one (Cmd+Cmd), which I prefer.

Secondly, the interface is awesome. Its pulling information from apps on my machine, documents, and then provides options to search the web, dictionary, etc. You can even use shortcuts before typing, like Cmd+0, which will focus your search on Google Images, for example. And when you are searching for a directory, you can actually browse to that directory, and continue to drill down to a file and open it (or inspect it, email it, etc) all from within the interface.

Lastly, it integrates with Google Apps (like Gmail, Google Docs, etc) and Twitter so you can search those things too, right from the desktop.

It really is very well done. I recommend it to everyone who uses a Mac. I do use Google Desktop on my Windows computer, and I haven’t checked for an update recently… but I am off to do that now because I hope there is a Windows version of this, or an update to Google Desktop. Nice job, Google.

Twitter and Facebook

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on August 23, 2009

in Blogs and Miscellaneous

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You can follow me now on twitter and facebook.

http://twitter.com/dhergert

http://facebook.com/dhergert

Google warning on every search result

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on January 31, 2009

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Apparently there was a “hiccup” of sorts today at Google. Every search result had a warning underneath it reading “This site may harm your computer”. Clicking through the link brought you to a Malware Warning page and you couldn’t continue to your destination without copy/pasting the URL. Quite annoying.

Obviously some technical glitch in the system, but they appear to have already corrected the issue a few hours later so everything is all better now. But seriously, its gotta be a pretty big glitch to thing Rainbows and Unicorns may harm your computer. I mean, c’mon!

rainbows and unicorns - Google Search - Mozilla Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 (Build 20081201061100)

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Online videos of late

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on January 12, 2009

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Lately I have been watching a few more YouTube videos that I used to. Somehow I was browsing along, reading posts on Digg or something and stumbled across a guy named Philip DeFranco. He’s a pretty funny guy, he’s got some interesting takes on the world and I think he touches on a lot of different topics and presents it in a humerous way. You can check out his site at http://phillyd.tv/ or you can go straight to his YouTube channel, http://www.youtube.com/user/sxephil.

There is also a pretty funny guy, kinda sxephil’s “sidekick”, at least he started out that way. Shay Carl, funny goofy fat guy jumping around, but he has a sort of redeming quality about him. Check out his YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/shaycarl.

Lastly there is this comedy duo from Washington, Barats & Bereta, that I have been actually following for a couple years now. Really funny guys, their skits are awesome. Check them out here.

If you’ve got any really funny people you follow on YouTube, MySpace, or elsewhere, let me know.

I got an iMac!

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on July 15, 2008

in Family and Miscellaneous

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Lately we’ve been thinking about getting a new computer. The old one was getting a little out dated, noisy, slow, etc. I had built it about 5 years ago when I was finished up college. Bought all the parts from TigerDirect.com and put it together myself. Was a nice little project, good computer on the cheap.

Now, 2008, got a family, taking lots of pictures, listening to music, surfing the web…the computer has become a central part of our household. It sits in the middle of the house. It was time for a fun, easy, cool computer. I debated with getting a high end gaming machine but after discussing with the wife, I really am not a hardcore gamer. So long as I can play a decent game here and there, I’m fine. I use the Wii (and maybe an Xbox 260 someday) for my main gaming.

So we decided to foot the bill and get an iMac. A nice 20″ beauty. Sits perfectly on the desk, fits great. It was a bit more expensive than I’d like, but it truely is worth it. But, we got that Federal Rebate Check…I should thank Bush for my iMac I guess. So its great, a nice break from Windows. I use Windows all day, and don’t get me wrong, I think Windows is just fine. But OS X is just a breath of fresh air. So I got my mac, and I love it.

Windows Vista Fonts on XP

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on January 29, 2008

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I must say, I like the new Windows Vista fonts. Although I don’t yet have Windows Vista, its possible to get the fonts legally. I just changed my default system font over to Segoe UI. Trying to obtain it wasn’t as straight forward as I thought, googling it came up with multiple results one of which was softpedia.com, but if you download it from there, it DOES NOT include the Segoe UI font, the one you’d really be looking for. As suggested on the wikipedia article, the best way to get it is to install Windows Live Mail. I installed it and changed everything over and it looks great. Definitely a font you can see was specifically designed for on-screen viewing using ClearType.

The other ClearType fonts that come with Vista: Calibri, Cambria, Consolas, Candara, Constantia and Corbel, are pretty nice as well. I specifically like Consolas for programming, its a decent fixed width font that looks nice in ClearType only. And I think Calibri is a great replacement for Times New Roman. Its a sharp looking font that I think looks good.

I built a shed!

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on September 22, 2007

in Family, Miscellaneous and Photos

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This summer, the big project was to build a shed. We have various other large projects around the house we’d like to get done, so we are trying to knock them off each year. Things like a bigger deck, redo the kitchen, master bathroom (maybe :)), etc. This year we decided on the shed so that we could use our garage again for parking.

It went pretty well. I decided to do it myself to save some money and I enjoy learning about and doing those types of things myself. I took a week off in the summer and went at it, 5 or 6 days straight. I did a little bit of work before hand on a couple of weekends, buying some wood, digging out and flattening the plot, putting together the floor joists. That was about it, until the solid week of working on it. I purchased the plans online from a site called hometime.com. Specifically the plans I purchased are here. Not bad, for $8.95 I received three very large professional-grade blueprints, with 5 different size layouts. We chose 10×16. They were pretty easy to follow. I would definitely recommend them.

I think it came out well, take a look at my picture album. At various times throughout the week I had my neighbor up the street help out, my neighbor next door and my father came in from Buffalo as well. It definitely wasn’t easy, but now after its built and stained, it feels good to have built it. We even decided to tweak the plans ourselves and throw the door on the broad side as opposed to the end. I think it looks much better that way, and the door can now be seen from our house and it gives it a nice touch.

After it was built my other neighbor hollered over to me “you didn’t build a shed, that’s a barn!” Yeah, I’d have to agree, it was a bit bigger than I anticipated. I knew how much floor space I was getting, but man, its tall. There is a lot of storage up top inside. It’s really great, I am extremely proud of it. And thanks to the drive of my wife and the help of my friends and my father, it wasn’t too bad to build. And now we’ve filled it up and my wife can park in her garage, and I have a spanking new shed to throw my stuff in and put a work bench in someday…hopefully soon.

What do you think this image means?

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on June 24, 2007

in Funny, Miscellaneous and Photos

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I was reading through the manual of a product I own today and came across this interesting safety image. I am curious to know what others think it means, I am sure there are a few funny captions which can be applied to it. I was thinking “don’t eat the cover of exploding food”. The actual answer is below.

Safety image from a pool filter manual instructing the user to release the pressure in the pump before removing the top of the filter.

JavaOne 2007

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on May 17, 2007

in Java, Photos, Programming, Web and Work

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I’ve always heard about JavaOne over the past few years as I’ve been more keen to Java and the like, but have always been unable to attend. Well, last week I had the privilege of being sent to JavaOne in San Francisco, California on behalf of my company. Myself and another engineer attended.

It was quite an experience. First of all, I had never been to the West Coast of the United States before. I’ve always stuck to the East Coast, and even then, I am not too well traveled. So it was pretty neat to fly across the country, and to add to that, we were bumped up to first class on the way there…very nice.

There were a ton of people at this conference. JavaOne is pretty much the “mecca” for Java developers and it stood up to that label. There were tons of vendors there pushing there latest and greatest products and tools. The keynote was cool, got to see some nice presentations on the new announcements from Sun, like JavaFX, OpenJDK, etc. You can see what was covered here. Overall, there is some cool things being worked on at Sun.

The Technical Sessions were very good as well. Our days were booked, with sessions from 9:30 AM until 9:30 PM, and even later some nights. There was alot to cover! But we went to topics ranging from the web tier, to EJB 3.0, to JSF, to Shale, to JPA, to Real Time Java 2.0, JavaScript frameworks like Prototype and Script.aculo.us, as well as AJAX and all the possibilities with that. It was alot to absorb in just four days.

All of the stuff I am very excited about, there are some up and coming things in java that I am looking forward to. It was nice to see all the good things that are happening in the Java world. One can get to focused on tasks and projects at work and so you put your blinders on to get it all done and don’t get to see all the neat things that are being done out in the community that can allow developers to make better applications with better tools.

I hope to attend next year, but we’ll see. The budget has to accommodate it and the moons of Jupiter may have to align as well. Also, it might be good to spread the experience around and send different developers. We’ll see, although I would love to go.

Oh, and I snapped some pictures of the conference as well, and then on the last day got some pictures of the San Francisco bay area landmarks. Most people wouldn’t consider it a landmark, but we also were able to stop by the headquarters of digg.com, one of my favorite sites. It was pretty cool; saw some of the developers as well as Dan Huard, site admin of Digg. Enjoy the pics!

Euchre

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on February 10, 2007

in Miscellaneous

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Played euchre tonight with some neighbors. I won second place for the second month in a row. Not bad. I really look forward to Euchre nights, they are fun and I get to see neighbors that I don’t get to see all that often. Got a good group a people livin’ around me.

I’m on MySpace

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on February 5, 2007

in Miscellaneous

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I am on myspace now. Some family and friends told me about it and I thought I’d take a look. Its REALLY cool to see old high school friends and how they are going. Very interesting to see how everybody it turning out, and see “what we’d be when we grew up”. I won’t be blogging at all over there (I don’t much over here either), but its definitely something useful for networking. Dave’s MySpace page

Certified in Java 5

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on January 22, 2007

in Java, Programming and Work

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Alright, I am officially certified in Java 5! I studied pretty hard for it and surprisingly, I felt the test was actually a lot easier than I expected. It’s nice to finally be done with it.

And how wonderful, they even sent me a nice little pin and membership card. I’ll be sure to keep it in my wallet and whip it out in code reviews!

Jets vs. Bills 2006

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on September 23, 2006

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Going to the Bills game tomorrow! I think we’re starting to make a tradition out of this. Last year we went with some friends (The Ignizio’s - see Little Ignizio on the blog roll). Had a great time with some great friends. One of them is a Jets fan so it makes for a nice friendly rivalry. This year its been expanded a bit…we have about 15 people going and we’re all heading out of Rochester about 8am for a day filled with fun, tailgating, free food and beer (Labatt tailgating party) and FOOTBALL!

GO BILLS!

I’m a Java Yellow Belt!

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on September 23, 2006

in Java and Programming

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I signed up for JavaBlackBelt.com quite awhile ago and decided today to actually take some tests. I’d also like to start contributing if I can. So I took the two initial Java SE exams and have been promoted to Java Yellow Belt! Whoo hoo! See here!

It wasn’t too difficult. We’ve been studying at work to take the actual Java Certification Exam…so most stuff is pretty fresh in my mind. And considering I work with Java on a daily basis as one of my primary functions, I should be pretty well versed in the language. But you’d be surprised at the odd things and quirks that usually go unnoticed. So its on to Green Belt.

Gotta keep up on this

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on August 30, 2006

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Geez, its been months. I really want to keep up on doing this blog, I just never find the time. Let’s see, whats been going on in my life? Things have calmed down quite a bit at my job. I am still working on the same high profile project, but we got our initial deployment out, so we’re now in a iterative release mode where we are just banging out feature enhancements.

The boys are getting big! My oldest is starting kindergarden next week! It seems like yesterday we had just had him! Its so exciting, my wife and I are so excited for him, but at the same time sad. What an event this is in our lives, we’ll never forget it. I know he will do so well and he will enjoy it so much. Can’t wait to start helping him with his homework.

My wife is starting up with helping at church…doing some volunteer work with the youth groups. I am happy for her, she will get a huge sense of reward out of it. She’s always wanted to ‘give back’ for all the people that have influenced her and helped her throughout the years. It should be very fulfilling for her.

I think thanks about it at the current moment. Summer is coming to an end. We are about to close the pool. Its just been way too cold the past few weeks (at least the pool temperature has). Plus it gets kinda dirty and its just annoying to keep taking care of it. We are already thinking about halloween. I remember last year on here talking about the making the crayon costumes. I was so proud of those. The boys this year have been expressing interest in “The Incredibles” outfits. I doubt I’ll make those, probably would just be easier to buy them. We’ll see; whatever I do I’ll mention it on here.

Alright, its late, time to get alittle more work done and then bed. Later.

101 Reasons Java is better than .NET

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on April 17, 2006

in .NET, Java and Programming

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Fun list of reasons why Java is better than .NET.

Interesting to actually see on paper all the reasons why it really is better. Now the author doesn’t seem to give .NET any credit what-so-ever though. I have worked with .NET (which I assume the author has too) and I have to say that .NET has some good features. I am not about to go into them, I am just too tired. But all I’ll say is .NET isn’t all bad. Microsoft did a decent job with the framework but Java is definitely better.

“Top Ten” Lists about Geeks

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on February 21, 2006

in Blogs and Funny

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I’ve come across posts like these in the past, and figured I’d put a few of them together in a single post. I find them funny to read because there is some truth (I think) to them and its funny to read about things you know we geeks do and don’t even realize. And, I’ll just quickly say, this can definitely apply to female geeks as well…myself and the posts just use ‘him’ when referring to a geek as I guess the stereotypical image of a geek is usually male.

Of course, as every geek loves to hear (and I, too, heard it all through high school) is geeks make good friends. Exactly what a geek wants to hear in high school from a cute girl who is the subject of his latest crush, “you’re a good friend”. Ugh, was that not the story of my life!? But when you see some of these reasons, its because we’re good people!
Top Reasons Why Geeks Make Good Friends
Ok, so once geeks get past that whole horrible high school experience, we actually end up meeting girls in college, and end up dating. You may have ended up dating one, lucky you! +1 for the geek lover. But sometimes, it can definitely be a challenge, as this post lists.
Ten Things to Know When Dating a Developer (aka Geek)
Then, if you’re as lucky as I think you are, you ended up marrying that geek. Again, score another point for you! Here is a post that mentions that its not always easy to be married to a geek.
Ten Reasons It Isn’t Easy Being Married to a Geek
I’m beginning to see a trend here. C’mon, it can’t be all that bad. You obviously eyed this guy in college, dated him, and married him. What could be keeping you with him (besides the fact he was a good friend). There has got to be a reason my wonderful wife sticks with me, I just know it. So, besides our good looks, smarts, and fortune-making potential, I agree with this post that lists some reasons why geeks make good fathers. And after reading it, boy do I think its true, and damn it, I take pride in it! My boys will be proud to have a geek for a father (I hope).
Top Ten Reasons Geeks Make Good Fathers

So that about does it, from dating to marriage, to child rearing; we geeks can have our hang ups, but we also have a couple of endearing traits too. And we always end up with a great spouse, at least I think I did.

Much thanks to imhelentex for a few of these lists.

Google Video homepage interface updated

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on January 9, 2006

in Uncategorized

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Google Video has changed its look; showing popular, random, and now, video store videos, all at the same time.

read more | digg story

Been busy, gotta get back into this

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on January 4, 2006

in Miscellaneous

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Wow its been awhile since I’ve posted to this blog. Things have been so busy between work and family life. The holidays were a blast and now its back to the daily grind and some sort of normalcy. I have been very busy in the evenings with work…a large project has caused me to put in some extra hours. But I think it will pay off in the end.

Anyways, I’ll try and start posting alittle more. I’ve continued to read a good deal of blogs out there and I’d like to start writing my opinions on things that are going on around the world, specifically in tech. So we’ll see where I go.

Google - Click To Call

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on November 24, 2005

in Google and News

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Googles got another new service. Click To Call. See the digg story comments for links to screen shots.

Neat idea, I can see it being abused alot, more so than with all these other companies that have had it already, mainly becaue the sheer availability Google will give it since their ads are EVERYWHERE.

But I’ll digg it because its gonna generate some revenue and because there are gonna be some funny prank phone calls.

Actually, as I think more about this, I can see Google instituting a nice way to keep the abuse down. When you submit a number, when it rings you, a Google-created message says:

“Hello, this is a call from Google AdSense (or whatever, Google ClickToCall). This number was recently submitted to be connected with an advertiser. Press 1 to accept and be connected, 2 to decline this invitation, or 3 to remove your number from being called for 90 days”.

That’d curb it in no time.

read more | digg story