tmarthal.com

so its true. the difference between a ' digital native ' and a 'digital immigrant' is the amount of information that they contribute to the world. I absolutely hate having to wade through google searches to find an answer to my problems, so I try to post here about some of my tech adventures (even though it might be nerdy ) hoping that one day a spider would come and crawl/index it and provide answers to people for the same questions I couldn't find answers to! So I tried to upgrade the ATI Radeon drivers on my Windows machine for my old video card (thinking it would improve performance! hah! no.) but I could not get Direct3d to work for my ol' Radeon 9500. After the 26 or so re-boots fiddling with the hardware, the hardware connections and the hardware drivers, something finally happened to my Windows XP OS partition. It got fried. I tried to boot up, but after the BIOS loaded I would get the error: Windows XP could not start because the following file i...

Sometimes, you think that you are covered on the internets (all of them!), but then I get an email like this to my primary account: As a courtesy, we are notifying you that XXXXXX users have found the following accounts for you:    Flickr tmarthal on Flickr    Digg tmarthal on Digg    MySpace birddog on MySpace    Picasa marthaler on Picasa If you would like to make these accounts private, please change the privacy settings on the original network and XXXXXX will update its search results to reflect your changes. To find your friends on XXXXXX, signup now. I removed the company that sent the email, not sure that I want to encourage this type of email and account harvesting. The point is, that someone, somewhere has correlated my different accounts on my various networks to my single email signon. Someone, somewhere knows my that the articles dugg on digg are associated with the pictures that I post on flikr !...

So my desk-mate* and I were having a conversation about an upcoming coding project, and he remarked how nice it was for someone, somewhere to post a complete sample on their blog for the spiders to index, so that he can find it. So I thought I would also, pay it forward and hopefully someone in like 2012 comes by and needs a sample main method using the spring spring framework for application level dependency injection. Everyone out there seems to have used the MVC and deploying spring based apps in a web server WAR file. Except for this link: Levarage Spring Web development with Offspring . [Offtopic: it uses classes in the com.offspring.* package, like the band's website !] It uses a simple bean file and a main method really close to the following snippet to instantiate (that's my new favorite word) the application using the spring context**: import org.springframework.context.ApplicationContext; import org.springframework.context.support.ClassPathXmlApplicationContext; ...

Following up the xkcd.com "comic" , a sweet idea to map the IP address range and their owners into a 2d map (where all adjacent values are grouped together), some bored people over at an email consulting company mapped out the IP addresses and activities using actual CAIDA 'whois' data in a scalable google map. CAIDA (The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis) collected the data as seen in the huge png: Huge CAIDA PNG The scalable 'google maps' like viewing of the Hilbert Table is here: http://thewholeinternet.wordtothewise.com/ I should be all Blog2.0 and post this as a trackback, but they don't have the option. It is pretty neat to take data that you normally don't visualize, in this case the assigned DNS IP ranges of organizations and put them together in a way that can make the lay-person understand something new. In this case, you can see the companies that 'formed', or at least were the first to embrace, the intern...

What this post boils down to is $100 for 2 months of sweet iphone usage. =) I can't say that I'm disappointed, my $499 4GB iPhone purchase was a sunk cost, and I expected some 'early adopter' problems. I did not expect news that apple would cost them so aggressively so soon. Today apple released news that they are getting rid of the 4GB iphone models and dropping the price of the 8GB version to $399. Pretty crazy. But the last two months were worth the hundo! We do throw them out of windows, you know. -- And in a suprising move, jobs offers $100 credit back to early iPhone adopters ! There is a first time for everything, I guess.

I had been using my iPhone without a problem since I got it opening day, June 29th at the Manhattan Beach Apple Store . [Thanks fulk dog for waiting in line!] Everything was awesome; contacts, pictures, youtube, Safari integration, everything. No problem activating it, like others have reported. I didn't usually let people handle it, I'm crazy like that, because they would have no idea where to start. So I would show them around all of the features; usually open up my Boards of Canada video to display the screen, surf the contacts and show them how to put their number into the phone, and/or show them Safari and my friend Deward's blog (since it looks super nice in the iPhone browser ) depending on if I was on a wireless network or AT&T's EDGE. Take a picture, show them some pictures from that bar crawl from mid-June. Normal things that you would do with an integrated device that bills itself as a revolution! So, fast forward to last Saturday night. I let my ...