Do Know Evil - Tyler Mulligan’s Tips and Tricks

I was checking out an address with a friend on Google maps yesterday and we noticed that Street View had been added to Boston.

I never really played with street view before because I wasn’t traveling to any of the supported locations, so I never really felt a connection to the information. Now that it’s in my own backyard though, I can make connections to familiar objects such as a friend’s car or even that friend (double edged sword)! The interface is very intuitive and smooth as one would expect from google. You’re given a little man that you can drag and drop. This man has a bubble that shows the picture. You can click and hold the picture to free rotate.

Google’s gotta pretty nice spread right now. They’ve undoubtedly covered some ground both literally and figuratively.

P.S. Before submitting any important form on the internet, it’s a wise idea to hit ctrl+a, then ctrl+c. That way you don’t have to write a whole post over when your browser craps out.

Checking your class schedule is easy at Wentworth Institute of Technology. So easy in fact, I’ve decided to share this web experience with you.

Step One: go to http://lconnect.wit.edu

Step Two: Be told that Firefox is out of date because this web application is using some new crazy technologies that your browser may not be able to support like “javascript, cookies and java”.

Step Three: Click continue to go to the ‘real login page’, which if you note is ipsca.com secured. Solamente el mejor para Wentworth.

Step Four: Click Leopardweb-Banner (whatever the hell that means! More confusion to the end user than anything IMHO).

Step Five: LOL

Step Six: Click Student and Finical Aid

Step Seven: Click Registration

Step Eight: Your choice. ‘Week at a Glance’ or ‘Student Detail Schedule’. H3LL Y34H B0Y, TH4T’5 L337! I hope my browser can support the technologies that are able to give me two options on how to view my schedule O.o.

So, do think your school can top this?

Sungard Higher Education may be the solution for you!

I’ve talked about mind overflow before. You know the stuff that your brain wants to remember but it can’t because you’re trying to focus on too much information at once and it stresses you out because you forget some things and blah blah blah? If this sounds at all familiar to you, check out my makeshift solution that’s sort of a precursor to TSO which I haven’t gotten developed yet.

I take a 5×8in piece of paper and fold it in half then in half again to make myself a little ‘book’.

Then I label the sections (imagine pages 1,2,3,4) as ‘todo’, blank, ‘ideas’, ‘remember’ respectively.

I do this because to me, TODO is the most important (front), then Remember (back), then ideas (inside right), then blank space for who knows what (inside left). If I ever run out of space, I have the whol inside to use, wheee! So all day, I just have this with a pen in my pocket and write down / cross out whatever I need.

To manage my mind overflow further, I use a three ring binder to manage the overflow of the 5×8 overflow so I can move todos, ideas, remembers and whatever else to new days without losing track.

I don’t but I’m giving it a shot for the first time! I’m starting from scratch, building an XHTML compliant template the way I like it, then through some reverse engineering / tutorials, I will pass the data I need to my template files. I’m pretty excited!

Here’s a sneak peak:

I’ve been busy with some design work the past few days, finishing up a few more entrecards and working close with clients to get a design that properly represents their business:

The ninjaz have been making some headway and we’re testing out a new host for ~5 game servers which will run NANL configs on. I go back to school in less than a week.

I’m a bit surprised at the number of blogs I come across that fail to load. A lot of the times, this can be fixed with a simple plugin call WP-Cache. WP-Cache will save a copy (cache) a Wordpress page the first time a user visits the page. This greatly reduces the overhead as it doesn’t need to run through all the php code and connect to the database on every page call.

It’s a very simple install, just upload the contents of the zip to your plugins directory and activate it. A new menu will appear under your options tab giving you filtering options.

And you can check the status of your cache at anytime, deleting files when necessary.

This plugin is simple and useful. It should be integrated into the project.

Please refer to the README.txt if you’re having trouble.

It’s important to note… that if you have this installed and you’re making template changes, you will need to disable the cache or clear it every time to see the changes in real time.

I post a lot of zip files on forums to trade information with my fellow gamers, programmers, internetards and what have you. As such, I like to tell them what the zip contains. Now the title of this post is a bit of a misnomer as I haven’t really created the zip yet… but I figured it would be just as helpful. The only extra step you would have in doing an actual zip file would be to extract the files to a folder but enough of the intro, lets dive in.

Step one: Have a folder with the files you want to list

(Whats with your image icons d00d? My images are associated with irfanview)

Step two: Open the Command prompt.

Do this by going to start -> Run… and typing in “cmd”

Step three: Navigate to your folder with “cd” (change directory) and list the files without any attributes using “dir /b”

Step four: Right click anywhere in the black and choose, “Mark“, this allows you to highlight the outputted text.

Highlight your filelist

When you right click again, the text is copied to your clipboard and you can paste it anywhere you’d like

I’m proud to announce that I’m one of the Entrecard users with seller status. I will begin selling Card Redesigns, Quality reviews, Ad space shortly and possibly some t-shirts in the future.

To give you an idea of the quality of my work, here are two cards I’ve designed for forum goers who took advantage of my free offer. There are 2 spots left… if you’re interested, act fast. Otherwise, it’ll cost you 400 Credits.

Congratulations to the rest of the winners and too readers uninterested in Entrecard, I have some more how-tos and lifehacks on the way!

I you’d like a check check out My Entrecard Page.

Happy New Years 2008!

I’ve always had some trouble staying organized in real life (IRL). I think part of the reason is that other people’s methods don’t really work for me.

This tool is designed to help me deal with ‘mind overflow’. That is, more information than my brain is willing to process at one time. An organizer of sorts. That is what I consider my project to be. It is neither a notepad or a day planner, a scribble pad or a journal; it is what you need it to be, fast.

Used in conjunction with its bigger brother, who we’ll call ‘Homebase’, the device ‘Soldier’ is a fully customizable, expandable, archivable, seperatable ‘mind overflow system’.

Soldier is able to hold ~10-30 pages of 3 ringed paper 3.5″x5.5″. He can find relief from older documents by redistributing them to Homebase.

Notice the pen on the outside edge. This is intentionally done for quick access to the pen when TSO is closed.

Entrecard users knew from the start that not everyone was in it for the same reasons and lets face it, there are some blogs we’d rather not waste our time viewing. Blogs that waste our time trying to get rich off their garbage content. Unfortunately, the only system in place as of now, is reviews. Unfortunately, these were being gamed until recently.

So Tyler, what do you suggest?

Well, I wouldn’t want to tamper with the one-click drop method because that would be silly but I want to integrate something into the widget so a user can tell a lot about a blog just by being at said blog.

My proposal is a system such as this:

With this integrated voting system, it will be easier for other bloggers to know if it’s a reputable source or just some more internet garbage so some degree. In an ideal world, there would be some crazy algorithms to back this thing up to prevent gaming but I’ll leave that logic to the Entrecard guys if they like my idea!

Another approach Entrecard can take to limit the amount of abuse would be some additions to the forum. Staying true to the proud design of Entrecard, I’ve crafted my idea of a simple solution.

The reputation would preferably use some ajax that would pop up with a box to fill in a reason. Reporting posts would help admins moderate the forum. A quick link to message a user would be handy as would the edit post button.

What do you all think?

Edit: There is a thread on the Entrecard Forums that answers some FUD related questions.

There is something Google did a while back that ruffled my feathers a bit. When they updated their style to move the bar to the top. They removed a feature I used quite often.

Say I want to search for “Tyler Mulligan”

but last second I decide I’d rather see my sexy mug than a bunch of text. When you change your search type (i.e. web to images), your search string disappears!

Am I alone in missing this feature? Certain other search engines don’t have this problem.