Over the weekend I picked up my latest Apple device, this time I went with the base model Mac mini. Overall I’m impressed with the way it handles everything except video games. Thankfully I wasn’t delusional enough the believe that it would play games fine although I won’t be lying to say I had a small hope.

I’m hoping to use the mini for storing photos, learning a bit of video editing, doing my web and application development on, and in general being a workhorse. I’d like to delegate gaming and heavier lifting to the PC I built last November but we’ll see.

Here’s my intend list of core applications:

Development: Panic’s Coda. I’ve played with it some on my laptop, but just have a hard time working with it wherever I tend to be. I really think I just need to get used to it with a full screen monitor. Remote FTP editing plus a host of other features I have yet to use. Overall I’ve been impressed enough where I’ll be purchasing after the demo. For CSS design I’ll most likely be using cssEdit. In the past it’s always been good to me, why abandon it now? Hoepfully things wont stop there. I picked up Programming in Objective-C 2.0 as well. It’s time to learn a new language.

Social Media: Per previous posts it should be no surprise I’m going to be going with Blogo and Tweetie. Both are recent additions to my social media arsenal but are very excellent applications which give my desktop that web 2.0 feel.

Entertainment: Boxee really makes me want to buy another Mac mini. It’s great on my AppleTV, however it’s absolutely amazing running on the Mac mini. Along with the Apple Bluetooth keyboard, it makes for a quick easy hookup on my TV and gives me the ability to watch any of my media with little effort. Just need to get some of my friends hooked on it now so I can spy and see what they’re watching

The main problem is now that I’ve picked up a new mini, I want a new MacBook. I’ll fight the urge for now though.

Guess we’ll see what happens with this one. Hopefully it turns out to be more than a $75 paperweight. It doesn’t weigh much even with batteries so it probably won’t be a good one.

As a byproduct, who knows maybe I’ll even start posting videos here.

On the twitter side of things, i highly recommend Tweetie. Enough where I sent the $11 to help support the project. I’ve been a Tweetie convert on my iPhone for the past month or so and really am enjoying it on OSX. I’m still using twhirl on my PC though. It’s odd that I find so much innovation in OSX software in terms of UI and simplicity. Hopefully Windows developers are taking note.

Speaking of the web only doing so much, if you’re a PHP developer and cringe at the though of working with javascript, I highly recommend sitting down with jQuery. We’re in the process of replacing Mootools with it and I love it. As soon as I finally get around to updating our code structure to support dynamically loading the correct plugins, life will be a breeze with it. I’ll try to get some actual decent demos up sometime soon.

Other than that, life is back to working long work days, I’m pretty sure these will never end. It builds character right? Or is it that it puts hair on my chest? The world may never know…

The error we were receiving while doing so however was “The script tried to execute a method or access a property of an incomplete object.”  Doing a bit of reading up on php.net, it turns out that php serializes an object, then when the session is started, it unserializes the object.  You won’t actually find out there’s a problem until you call a method that is supposed to reside within the object.

The work around for this problem is loading the class into memory before starting your session.  In our situation, we’re running the Zend Framework which start’s the session on it’s own and it seems unsensible to modify the Zend libraries but we still had a problem with an incomplete object.  Thus on my path to finding a way to work around this problem, I created class.cow.php.

class cow {

	var $name;
	var $milk;

	function __construct() {
		$this->name = 'bessie';
		$this->milk = false;
	}
	function moo() {
		echo "mooo!!!!
";
	}

	function gotMilk() {
		if($this->milk == true) {
			return true;
		} else {
			return false;
		}
	}
}

Cow has all of the basics for our needs.  You can tell your cow (all cows are named Bessie btw) to moo, or check if it’s ready to be milked.  For my test, I created 2 files, the first was index1.php which will be used to create our session object, the second is index2.php which we used to load our cow object from memory.

index1.php

name."
";

	$calf->moo();

	if($calf->gotMilk()) {
		echo "We can milk ".$calf->name."
";
	} else {
		echo $calf->name." still doesn't have any milk.
";
	}
	echo "waiting...
";
	$calf->milk = true;
	if($calf->gotMilk()) {
		echo "We can milk ".$calf->name."
";
	} else {
		echo $calf->name." still doesn't have any milk.
";
	}

	$_SESSION['calf']=$calf;
?>

index2.php

name."
";
	$calf->moo();

	if($calf->gotMilk()) {
		echo "We can milk ".$calf->name."
";
	} else {
		echo $calf->name." still doesn't have any milk.
";
	}
	echo "waiting...
";
	$calf->milk = true;
	if($calf->gotMilk()) {
		echo "We can milk ".$calf->name."
";
	} else {
		echo $calf->name." still doesn't have any milk.
";
	}

?>

Both files are mostly identical except for the line $calf = $_SESSION['calf']; in index2.php.

Here is where we get the error: Notice: main() [function.main]: The script tried to execute a method or access a property of an incomplete object. Please ensure that the class definition “cow” of the object you are trying to operate on was loaded _before_ unserialize() gets called or provide a __autoload() function to load the class definition in index2.php on line 6.

The solution was to load the class, then unserialize and re-serialize our object. The code change to $calf = unserialize(serialize($_SESSION['calf'])); resolves the issue and all works as normal. This was pretty interesting food for thought for me, hopefully you found it to be the same.

This is a problem because I feel as though I’ve lost focus with the site. In a way I’ve decided I wanted to keep webninja to code oriented things but the personal life bleeds through. The thing of it is, if I write about cars, I know the majority of the people reading this wont care. If I write about code, the car audience won’t care. Music? Well I enjoy both hip hop and electronic and those genres don’t generally cross.

The funny thing is, I took a look at my stats and really I don’t have an audience. A few tech friends visit, but I don’t really advertise the site either. So I’ve decided I’m going to take a new approach and just write about whatever is on my mind. If I think something is cool, I want to try to write about it.

Although to get back to the original point, I still can’t write about everything I’d want to. If I’m frustrated about something with friends, I can’t exactly write about it here. Eventually I’d like to think most of my friends find this site at one point or another, it’s just a matter of if they come back. I’m guess the latter is true due to lack of updates. So I guess I should change that.

In my last post, i made mention of wanting a utility that does it all for me. lets me take a screenshot, crop it, add a border, then upload it to my ftp. The Jing Project has completely met all of my expectations when it comes to this solution. Jing comes from TechSmith, the company that created the popular screen capture program SnagIt. It’s a great application but comes with a $49.95 price tag that makes it not worth it to me, let alone the average consumer. Instead, Jing is totally free. I assumed there had to be a catch somewhere, but my up front assumption is TechSmith is considering ways to make an application free for the home user, and get away with something such as advertising when images are linked to. At the moment, there’s none of that either.

I’m getting ahead of myself though so I’ll start first my explaining how it works. You have 2 options, an annoying (to me at least) sun orbital at the top of your primary screen, or you can set a hot key. Personally, I’m using Control-PrintScreen. Upon hitting the key combination, the screen is grayed out and you draw a box over the area. I would have loved to show a screen shot of this, but print screen wouldn’t dump this to clipboard. After you pick the area, you decide image or video (which creates an swf file). Next you get this screen:

Now you may have noticed the FTP highlighted. With Jing you have the option to create a free account at Screencast.com with 2 gigs of storage, or dump it to your flickr account, ftp, or straight file. Since I’ll be using it for ftp I predefined my login info, where I wanted my screenshots to go, etc. Then you have multiple choices. The first icon uploads the file and copies the direct link to your clipboard. The second copies an embed link (think <img> tag, which you can also change for example if you wanted to us bbcode [img] tags) The third saves to disk, and the last option puts it in your clipboard. Along with this you can perform small changes such as creating a text label, highlighting areas of the screen shot, or even creating a frame (like the above screen shot)

So in other words, I’ve not simplified posting screenshots tenfold. I wish I could find applications like this every day.

I think part of the issue is ease of use.  I’d love to post images more but that requires opening up photoshop, tweaking any images I want, saving it, then uploading it to an ftp.  It’d be nice to have a screen capture application that has borders, does cropping, resizing, and saves directly to ftp.

I’ve been experimenting with better ways to organize my digital life and get things done faster.  For example one application, Launchy.  It’s much like QuickSilver but on PC.  Thus far it’s pretty useful.  In short it indexes certain things like applications, and directories you configure it to, then those are accessible by pulling up it’s search screen with the windows key and space (also definable).

Then once you find what you’re looking for, hit enter and its loading.  You can also add certain triggers, for example you could create one that would allow you to type yt dramatic squirrel and having it automatically search youtube for a dramatic squirrel.

Anyways, beyond that, I have a bunch of really exciting coding projects I’ve been working on which I’ll be sharing here soon hopefully and with Brandon leaving, I’ll need someone to share them with.

We’re going to be doing another trial run of the PodCast soon, we’re still working out some things such as topics, focus, etc. Oh and probably a name eventually. Along with that, I’m hoping to start doing more writing akin to my previous post about PowerSet. I’ve been trying some offline blogging utilities, currently I’m writing this post in ecto on my way over to Sean’s house. If you happen to be familiar with a decent offline utility, please let me know. Some day I’d like to move to the bay area and this could be a good start at getting my foot into the door out there.

On another note, I’ve been using Twitter a lot lately. On the new layout I have my twitter updates on the sidebar however until I get around to that, you can see what I’m up to at www.twitter.com/trahma. I’ve been using the Twinkle iPhone application as well so quite frequently you’ll see pictures attached to my tweets.

And with that, I’m pulling up to Sean’s house, time to steal his WiFi and post this.

Unfortunately, lots of the world isn’t like me. Most people don’t think in queries, and which words are most likely to be indexed. Enter, Powerset, a company that is working on developing a search engine targeted towards parsing the human language. While I can applaud them for trying, I have to admit I was skeptical if they can knock google down. It’s time to do a comparison.

Now before I show off some comparisons, I’d like to point out that to be fair, at the moment Powerset searches Wikipedia so we’ll be comparing it to Google’s site:domain.com feature.

To start with, we’re going to use one of the searches they recommend “Who is Jon Stewart”

The first thing we see is that Powerset is giving us data it has obtained from Freebase. Beyond that we see a list of results in Wikipedia that reference Jon.

So now, let’s do some comparison shopping… and here’s Google’s results

Based on our up front comparison, I’d say Powerset is holding up as a solid contender to Google. Most of our results all link to one of a few things, the Wikipedia entry for Jon Stewart, the Daily Show, the short lived Jon Stewart Show, and entries on Jon Stewart in other languages.

Of course, this was a recommended search, I’d expect to see results like this. Let’s go a but deeper now. At the moment, Serenity is playing on my tv, so it seems fitting. Let’s see what TV shows Joss Whedon has worked on. This time, we’ll use the string, “What TV shows has Joss Whedon worked on?”

I’m pretty pleased with the results found with this search. How will Google compare?

Obviously Firefly is the most successful show that Joss has worked on, but we notice the 3rd one down, Dollhouse. It’s Joss Whedon’s new series which I was actually unaware of. Funny thing, PowerSet missed this so we need to give the point to Google.

Lastly, let’s do one more test, this time, let’s find out who developed the Tesla Roadster. The Tesla Roadster is an electric sports car, developed by Larry Page and the Tesla foundation. Due to it’s electric engine, not only is it free of pollutants, it sports an impressive 4 second 0-60 time.

Good news, the Factz portion of Powerset noticed that Larry Page is an investor in Tesla Motors. The results below the Factz show Lotus’ work on the vehicle as well as well as more info on Larry Page.

We pretty much get the same info with Google, however we’re given a bit more info showing us Lotus played a much more important role than what PowerSet has led us to believe. All in all, we’re really not getting much benefit from PowerSet over Google. I like what PowerSet is trying to achieve, however I’m much more interested in seeing where other newcomers to the search engine world such as the human powered Mahalo. Granted, PowerSet is still in development so we’ll just have to watch and see what comes from the San Francisco firm.  For a bit more insight, I recommend checking out the Jason Calacanis’ blog post which led to me to my research.