After hearing the State of the Union speech last night, I was curious to see historical trends in respect to style and difficulty. I created a database of all the historical State of the Union speeches since George Washington’s in 1790 till George Bush’s in 2006 and did some analysis. This stuff isn’t terribly useful, [...]

Sudoku is a Japanse puzzle and gained popularity in 2005. The purpose of the puzzle is “is to enter a numerical digit from 1 through 9 in each cell of a 9×9 grid made up of 3×3 subgrids (called “regions”), starting with various digits given in some cells (the “givens”). Each row, column, and region [...]

A few days ago I released batnotes.com. The idea was conceived by my brother and a few of his friends; my role was simply the website and e-commerce portions. The product being offered is a high quality study guide designed specifically for particularly difficult classes by students who have preformed exceptionally well in it. Check [...]

In designing this website I tried to keep design clean, simple and neat. I tried to focus on its contents rather than putting in media (graphics, flash, etc.). Simplicity in making a website is important and I always try to keep the content well organized. This concept of ‘minimal’, or ‘minimalist’ is about showcasing the [...]

There are many times I hear people complain about Microsoft products in regards to security. It’s something we’ve become used to; auto-updates, clean reformats, anti-virus software, spy ware. What users tend to ignore is that the people that create these problems are also rational people. Why design viruses and spy ware for a small percentage [...]

My email, me@askthefool.com has been plastered all over the internet over the past four years. I get an inordinate amount of junk mail. I’m not talking about the typical 5-10 pieces a day, but rather 600-700 pieces of junk mail an hour. I usually check my email about 15-20 times a day and always turn [...]

My first publicly released WordPress plugin. I’m sure there are others that do the same thing, but I wanted a stepping stone into the plugin API. This provided the perfect reason to experiment with it. An example of the output can be seen on the homepage. The plugin consists of 4 functions: 1) askWPCount_postCount() Returns [...]

With PHP 5.0, SimpleXML makes working with XML extremely easy. Howerver, many hosts currently don’t support PHP 5.0. I don’t offer PHP 5.0 yet because my web control panel, Plesk, dosen’t fully support it. Thus, when I was designing the Photography section of this site I needed an easy way to deal with the XML [...]

I use two computers frequently. I tried switching to using one and an external monitor with the extended desktop solution of Windows XP but I felt myself working much slower. The two computers are my Dell Inspiron 700m (Princess) and my custom built machine (Beast). Well, I much rather use a full sized keyboard and [...]

Today, I launch, simpleHotel. simpleHotel performs all tasks of hotel management including payroll, reservations, timesheets, and room reports. Furthermore it provides “snapshot” views of properties where multiple property owners can see real-time status all their properties from a single location. An XML/SOAP architecture allows individual property owners and their designers to securely connect to simpleHotel’s [...]

Accounts are free, so sign up at journal.askthefool.com. It has a bunch of cool features which you can read about and experiment with such as comments. For those of you that used to use version one, this is pretty much the same with a few new features. Expect more in the coming weeks and months [...]

I’m hesitant to list this here because of the amount of random pointless messages people will send me. However, against my better judgment I’m going to post it with the hope that morons don’t abuse it. Not only is it annoying to keep having to check your phone, but costs $.02/message. Unless you are a [...]

Now that I’m on a college network and using iTunes with sharing enabled I’m always prompted “users are connected” when I try to quit. I don’t care and quit, but I’m usually curious to know who is connected to my iTunes. So after Googling a bit and coming up with nothing I tried some old [...]

Over the years, a few people have criticized me for “selling” software I’ve made. I’m a strong advocate of capitalism, have always been, always will be, so feel free to take this with a grain of salt if you must. The gist of others people argument is that scripts/programs I’ve create, rely on “open source” [...]

There are two different types of posts: One in which a person writes about random thoughts or an aspect related to what they are working on or one in which a person can post about the things they do in a day or a week. I’ve done both however, probably more of the former. Most [...]