Star Trek – Engage!

By Josh Highland in Josh's Rambling

I embrace all things geek, but I believe that with this blog post, I’m taking that love to a whole new level.

Earlier this year I had a massive knee surgery. As a result, I spend several months laying on my couch, working on my computer and watching reruns on TV. Over that time I discovered Star Trek: The Next Generation. After a few episodes, I was hooked. More importantly, so was my wife!

I grabbed the complete DVD box set and within a few weeks we had watched all 178, hour long episodes. I think that officially makes us “trekkies“.

After we watched all of the episodes and the TNG related movies, I was still hungry for more. I picked up a copy of “Make It So: Leadership Lessons from Star Trek The Next Generation”. The title says it all. A leadership book based on TNG. To be honest, it was a major let down, but I still wanted more.

As luck would have it, one of the largest Star Trek exhibits ever was going on display just 20 minutes from my house, and practically next door to the university I attended.

The exhibit ended up being way sweeter then I could have imagined. To my surprise,  most of the items were from The Next Generation. In my opinion, the most amazing thing in the exhibit was the re-constructed main engineering. It looked perfect! We were able to walk around in it and play with everything. It was awesome. I really wish they allowed pictures to be taken. I wanted a picture of me modifying the warp drives in the worst way. At least I can say that I got to see it.

When Halloween 2010 rolled around, I know just what I wanted to be, Captain Jean-Luc Picard! Amy wanted to be a Vulcan science officer. I wasn’t going argue with that! I have to say that the bald cap and pointed ears worked well for us. My make up made me look more like Data then Picard. Maybe I’ll join my love of Robots and Star Trek and go as Data next year.

The Star Trek Exhibit in Riverside, Ca is running until February 2011. I highly recommend seeing it.

Facebook hates the iPad

By Josh Highland in iPad, Josh's Rambling

I just got off the phone with my mom. She said that Facebook wasn’t working on her iPad. Specifically, she couldn’t pinch the screen to zoom in and out. I verified the problem on my wifes iPad.

I started to dig a bit deeper into the issue. It appears that Facebook had intentionally added code onto their site to disable the zoom feature on iPads. You can read Apples documentation on how to do this here.

The question really isn’t how they did it, but why would Facebook would do this? This doesn’t seem like an accident.

Reasons why Facebook has disabled screen zooming on the iPad:

  • Today, 10/20/10, was a major announcement day for Apple. It’s possible that Facebook wanted to humiliate Apple or make the iPad look weak.
  • Android and Backberry tablets are set to be released soon. It’s possible that Facebook could have been paid off by one of Apples competitors to make the iPad not work so great with their site.
  • Facebook has realized that hardly anyone with an iPad uses the iOS Facebook app. Maybe the are trying to force users to use the app. Personally I think the Facebook app is garbage, it’s not even designed for the iPad!
  • It could have been an honest mistake. However, I don’t think this is the case. If this was a mistake, Facebook could have fixed it in a matter of minutes.

I’d love to hear some of your reasons on why Facebook is doing this to iPad users around the world.

Yes, you can “touch” this

By Josh Highland in linux, mac, tutorials

“touch” is a handy unix utility to udate the time stamp on a file. Recenly I ran into a case on my mac book pro that required me to update all of the files and sub-directories of a project with the current date.

In terminal, I could have gone one by one an used this command on each file

touch thisIsAFileName

But after a few moments of onterweb searching, I came across a perfect solution

find . -print0 | xargs -0 touch

This command will find all of the file in all sub-directories, even if they have spaces in their name, and set their last updated time to the current time.

Just a handy tip I thought I would share