Matthew Gorbsky

Chrome Extensions

// March 30th, 2010 // No Comments » // Blog

So while reading one of the many tech blogs, I came across this Chrome extension called “Incredible Start Page” that replaces the standard Chrome new tab (the one with the most visited sites, recently closed tabs, etc) with something a bit more pleasing to the eye, yet also functional. Being the way I am, I immediately wanted to start customizing this to include things like weather, my netflix queue of upcoming movies, twitter feed, etc.

Doing some quick research reveals that Google makes the chrome new tab page easy to change. Just create an extension, give it an attribute of “newtab”: “newtab.html” (link to documentation) and set it to whatever HTML page you want. You can interact with the bookmarks, recent tabs, etc as well as add in anything else you wan to do.

I typically use 3 browsers for various activities:

• Internet Explorer – for work related activities and testing my personal sites to see how much IE breaks my CSS
• Firefox - personal browsing at home and for developing websites, reading tech blogs at work (the RSS dynamic bookmarks are wonderful)
• Chrome - personal browsing at work (gmail, facebook, twitter, etc)

In Firefox, my home page at at both work and home is my iGoogle page. I get current news updates, slickdeals feeds, weather, and all kinds of other stuff that I miss when I open Chrome. I don’t use it as my home page in Chrome because I really like the new tab page functionality. Big icons let me open the pages I read most often very quickly.

The thought of combining the real-time stream of information with the tab interactions of Chrome leaves me wanting to take the Incredible Start Page, rip it apart (you can find the source for chrome extensions in your local machine), and put it all back together with all the bells and whistles I get in iGoogle.

EduTechnica Enters the Cloud!

// February 14th, 2010 // No Comments » // Blog

Originally, we were using WestHost as our hosting provider for EduTechnica. They were a great host and I would recommend them to anyone (and I have), but recently we learned that they are not supporting the type of Tomcat server we had any more.

Seeing as how we run a Java-based application, we need the Tomcat support. So, our site is now hosted by Rackspace using their Cloud Servers. It’s similar to the type of account we had before with WestHost, but we now have much more flexibility in the server configuration and can quickly scale as necessary.

In addition to now being hosted in the cloud, we migrated our email over to Google’s “Apps for Your Domain” which basically allows us to use GMail, Google Docs, GCal, etc within our domain. I personally love this since the POP3 support on my Droid seems to be spotty at best but it interfaces seamlessly with GMail accounts. So now we have awesome web-based email, integration with my phone, private chat options, and Postini spam filter. I’ll also be moving all of my other domains to Google Apps in the coming weeks.

So now that the hosting has been reestablished, the databases have been migrated, and SocialEngine has been set up again, it’s time to get into the pCharts and tie it all together. Expect closed beta testing to commence soon.

Updating PJAS.net

// December 8th, 2009 // Comments Off // Blog

So it’s that time of year again when I need to get www.pjas.net set up for the new science fair registration period. Typically, this used to require me to go in, manually archive all of the student and project records in MySQL and essentially reset the site to day 0.

Each year, I try to make some improvements to the site, both for my end users and for myself. For example, last year, I introduced the concept of a “fair,” which allowed me to keep all of the previous years data while still making everything seem to “reset” for the end users. This year, I’m working on expanding on this and using the previous data to allow sponsors to import their students again from last year. My hope is that this saves the teachers a lot of time by not requiring them to enter the same student information in year after year. As a note as to why they’d need this, most students participate for all 3 years of middle school and 4 years of high school under the same teacher/sponsor.

I have all of the front-end coding complete and the student IDs are being sent to my server for the students I need to re-import. I now need to find the most efficient way to copy existing MySQL records while allowing teachers to make updates as necessary (student moved, new email address, etc). From a few minutes of research, it looks like I can just run an Insert query with the Select statement embedded (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/insert-select.html). This should make my life a bit easier. Gotta love learning new SQL tricks.

Site Update

// December 4th, 2009 // Comments Off // Blog

After a long period of what would have seemed like inactivity to anyone watching this site, I’ve decided to finally make the updates to tie all of my projects together. It may not be much, but it’s mine.

To begin with, I have Wordpress running the main portion of the site now. This replaced the hand-written PHP code I was using before and should make updating the site much easier. I’ve also integrated my twitter feed and my Twitpic feed, so any mobile shots I take on my phone get posted here right away.

Next steps will be integrating the various other applications I’ve written into the site. As an example, I will be running some homebrew (as in beer) software that I have been experimenting with. The software keeps track of recipes, brew-day procedures, fermentation schedules, and beer status (what’s in the primary, what’s on tap, etc). Once I get that set up so I’m happy with it, I’ll have the current been menu on the home page. I’ll post the details and a review of this software soon.

I also have some Arduino projects that I’ll be posting on here. Long term, I plan to make a “Brewduino” system using the Arduino to automate some (or all) of the brew day. More on this to come.

Finally, I do help run a business in addition to my day job, so I’m sure there will be plenty of updates on the state of Society-Centered Technologies, LLC as time goes on. Big things are in the works, so hopefully there will be some exciting news soon.

That’s all for now. Expect more updates soon.