Jun
03

Fitbit Tracking

FitbitSeveral months ago I got a Fitbit tracker as a prize for a contest.  While I generally dislike exercise (as much as I know I should), I love gadgets, and this thing is as geeky as a pedometer can get (note, the @fitbit folks are very adamant that this is not a pedometer, but it accomplishes the same goals).

I find myself constantly looking at it to see how many steps I’ve made during the day and checking the flower to see if it is healthy or wilted.

My favorite feature is the activity mode.  When I do actual exercise and I hit the treadmill, I can switch it to activity mode and get down to the minute statistics of how well I did.  I love this tracker and highly recommend it for people who want to track their daily activity.

Read the rest of this entry »

Permanent link to this article: http://www.nick.pro/2011/06/03/fitbit-tracking/

May
31

Migrated Back to WordPress

Over a year ago, I migrated nick.pro from WordPress over to Drupal.  I did this so that I could experiment with Drupal more, thinking I could make a more robust site if I did so.  Unfortunately, while Drupal is a fantastic, flexible platform for web development, it is simply not efficient as a blogging tool.

Drupal was so cumbersome to use as a blogging tool that I ended up stopping blogging altogether.  So for the first time in years of migrating this blog around and around, I’m reverting it back to a previous home on wordpress.

In the last year wordpress has come a long way, with lots of great new features that makes blogging even simpler then it was before.

I in no way mean to bash drupal, it’s still far and away the best CMS system out there for developing complex sites, but for a blog… it’s good to be home.  My hope with this migration back to WordPress is that it will lite a fire under me to blog again.  No more can I shirk my blogging responsibilities with the whine that writing a post in drupal is just too much work.

Permanent link to this article: http://www.nick.pro/2011/05/31/migrated-back-to-wordpress/

May
28

Returning to Blogging

I revisit my blog after a busy May, 2011 including going to Google I/O 2011 and what do I see as the last post on my blog, a short stinger post about Google I/O 2010. This simply won’t do.

I’ve written other blog posts in the last year, they just haven’t been on my own blog. I’ve written a number of blog posts in the last year on Justia’s Law, Technology and Legal Marketing Blog. I’m well past due however writing blog posts for myself. I will make an effort to pick back up on this as it’s something I’ve always enjoyed.

I’ll begin with some general updates. Two blog posts ago (March, 2010) I was blogging about making a difficult decision regarding looking into adopting a child. While we did look into pursuing that angle, sadly the mother of the child in question changed her mind and decided to keep the child herself. We haven’t given up hope of having a child someday (hopefully not too far in the distant future) but sadly God has other plans for us right now it seems.

I have been incredibly busy with work over the least year and I love working for Justia. We’ve put out some great projects in that time including Justia Legal Answers which I had the privilege of writing about on the Justia Blog and Justia Daily Opinion Summaries which was part of a revamp of our Justia Law Center. More projects are, as always, underway and I look forward to pushing out some great new features in the upcoming days.

In my personal life, I’ve gotten to do quite a lot of exciting things this year, which I’m going to try to write separate posts for. Going to Disney World for the first time and visiting the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in the process, Going on my first Cruise, Visiting New York City (3 Times!) and getting my first (and second) taste of Broadway and Time Square.

 

Permanent link to this article: http://www.nick.pro/2011/05/28/returning-to-blogging/

May
24

Another Fantastic Google I/O

Google I/O was fantastic, and not just because I got a free HTC Evo from Google and Sprint for going. Lots of great things, some of which I’m looking forward to implementing in my work.

Permanent link to this article: http://www.nick.pro/2010/05/24/another-fantastic-google-io/

Mar
20

The Biggest Decision of our Lives

Last Sunday I posted the following message on my facebook:

Naturally, many of my family and friends are curious just what this “huge decision” is. After consulting with both of our families, and some other trusted advisors, we have made our decision, and I can now share what the decision was about with you.

Read the rest of this entry »

Permanent link to this article: http://www.nick.pro/2010/03/20/the-biggest-decision-of-our-lives/

Mar
05

Memories of Spelling Bees gone by.

So tonight was fun.. Amazing how things can bring back both such fond and such painful memories at the same time. I went to a play tonight, “25th Annual Putnum County Spelling Bee” and they were looking for volunteer spellers and I was chosen.

Fond memories of being on stage again, little bit of improv involved as I had to play along with the actors.

As for the painful memories, just like the last spelling bee I got out on my first word. It was such a hard word I don’t even remember what it was, the other 3 volunteers had easy words their first rounds (one of them had Cow, another Fandango) but me not so much.

Entertaining though, when the volunteer asked them to use “Fandango” in a sentence, the sentence was:

“I see a little silhouetto of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the Fandango.”

Gotta love a Queen reference.

 

Permanent link to this article: http://www.nick.pro/2010/03/05/memories-of-spelling-bees-gone/

Dec
23

The Cloud is falling, the Cloud is falling! Amazon, Walmart, Salesforce and others down on December 23rd

A Major pre-christmas internet outage seems to be hitting the heavy hitters on the web right now. Amazon.com, Salesforce.com, and Walmart.com are all offline right now, perhaps even more. Interestingly enough sites running on amazon web services (AWS EC2) seem to be running just fine. An outage of these large sites at the same time is likely a result of an attack of massive proportions.

UPDATE: It appears the outage was actually isolated primarily to the west coast of the US, and was actually an outage of ultradns.com which provided dns for all of the above sites and many others, including netflix and newegg.

EC2 and S3 never actually went down, but S3 urls that actually used s3.amazonaws.com were not functioning, so while many sites with S3 images stopped loading, twitter, which also uses S3 for image hosting did not have a broken image because they had their own dns pointing to S3′s ips. I also didn’t notice the EC2 servers being down, but that was because I access EC2 servers with other dns names, not amazonaws.com, had I tried to access them using amazonaws.com urls, I surely would have had difficulty.

Permanent link to this article: http://www.nick.pro/2009/12/23/cloud-is-falling-cloud-is-falling-amazon-walmart-salesforce-and-others-down-on-dece/

Dec
08

Google List Message Headers Changing – Could real Google Groups for Domains be on the way?

UPDATE: I was right, tonight Google announced Google Groups is now part of Google Apps for Domains!

This morning I noticed a change in the way emails sent to a group (formerly known as list) email address on google apps for domains appear. Below is an example of the bottom of the email headers on an email sent to one of my groups on nick.pro:

On the other hand here is the bottom of the email headers on an email sent to that same group today:

As you can see in these images, a few new list specific header lines have been added that make lists appear more like they were handled by more traditional mailing list software, rather then a simple email forwarder.

I’ve confirmed this change seems to have happened today as emails to groups as recently as yesterday do not have the additional headers, while emails to the same groups today have the additional headers, hop past the break to see a breakdown of the 4 new headers and what I think this change means:


The important new headers are:

  • List-Help, which contains both a link to a support for the mailing list, as well as a new listname+help@domain email address for list support
  • Sender, which is now set to listname+owner@domain rather then being left off of the header (and thus defaulting to the original sender’s From: address
  • X-Original-Sender, which is the original “sender” in this case the same as the from address
  • X-Original-Authentication-Results, which contains the SPF parsing results from when google processed the original email

What does this mean? I think it means Google is finally making an effort to turn the groups in Google Apps for Domains (already taking a step closer to real mailing lists earlier this year when they improved the permission system on who can send email to the list), into real mailing lists closer to the popular Google Groups service. If this is true, and I hope it is, we should be seeing additional Google Groups type features (such as archiving, subscription, and digest options) coming to Groups in Google Apps for Domains soon.

Permanent link to this article: http://www.nick.pro/2009/12/08/google-list-message-headers-changing-could-real-google-groups-for-domains-be-on-way/

Nov
16

Mofuse.mobi down with MySQL Errors

The Blog Mobile Site creator service Mofuse is down today with a MySQL Error.

Permanent link to this article: http://www.nick.pro/2009/11/16/mofusemobi-down-with-mysql-errors/

Aug
31

Nick.pro Migrated to Drupal

I have successfully migrated the nick.pro site from the WordPress blog that it has been for ages, into Drupal. This is perhaps the most unusual migration of this blog (and I’ve moved this blog several times now), in that I don’t actually consider Drupal to be a better blogging software then WordPress, in fact, I find WordPress to be the absolute best blogging software available today. However I’ve long wanted nick.pro to be something more then just a blog, I’ve wanted it to be a whole site showcasing what I’m up to online and off, and Drupal is a far better CMS platform for a more robust site then just a blog.

While Drupal works fine as a blog, where it really shines is in it’s flexibility. There are Third Party Modules available to do almost anything you can imagine, and for those things you can’t imagine, it’s a robust php framework for coding my own modules to do even more incredible things.

For the moment, all I’ve accomplished is migrating my old blog content, making sure all of the URLs redirect correctly, and adding an activity stream to show my recent activity on various online sites (twitter, digg, youtube, and flickr to start, more to come).

This is far from the first time I have migrated my blog. Stay tuned after the break for a brief glimpse of how this site has progressed from “Cap’s Log” on Movable Type 2, to Nick.pro running on Drupal today.
Read the rest of this entry »

Permanent link to this article: http://www.nick.pro/2009/08/31/nickpro-migrated-to-drupal/

Older posts «

» Newer posts

Switch to our mobile site