Matt Bowcock // mbowcock.com

I just got Opera Mini 3 installed on my ocean and wanted try the functionality with Wordpress. The stock browser can’t handle logging into wordpress so I was doubtful but so far so good. I’ll need to experiment some more but I’m impressed so far.

There are a number of personal sites I read where the author writes ‘What I’m Reading’ topics and I usually enjoy them. A lot of times I will find new books to read from someone with similar interests to mine. So I figured I would follow suit and do the same. I’m not sure if I want to do individual posts or create a page dedicated to reading material - we’ll see.

Currently Reading -

Computer Organization and Architecture - This is for a class I’m taking at Umass called ‘Computer Systems’ (ECE561) - so far so good - I’ve only made it a couple of chapters into it and its been basically review/history of computer systems, ENIAC, von nuemann, etc. Looks to be getting into more detailed topics - actual chip architecture and design - I’ll definitely post on it in the future.

Beyond the required reading for school I am hopping on the Getting Things Done bandwagon. I just started reading Getting Things Done by David Allen.  GTD seems to be everywhere these days - I tried GSD (Getting Shit Done) but I might need something more structured so here it goes.

I used Matlab quite a bit in engineering school and got used to having it available not only for math but for its programming ability. After graduating there were times I wished I had access to Matlab but didn’t couldn’t afford the commercial license so I looked for open source/free software with similar capabilities and was really surprised to find some great software.

GNU Octave - Similar functionality and programmability of Matlab. Programs written in Octave can be run in Matlab if they are written with that ability in mind.

FreeMat - Another app similar to Matlab - I personally used this one more than Octave - not for any particular reason I just liked it. The programming language syntax is similar to Matlab.

TechCrunch asks - Microsoft Tafiti is Beautiful, But Will Anyone Use It?  The answer is NO.

I was playing with Tafiti doing random searches, storing stuff to the search “shelf”, playing with the tree view and I decided to show my wife - if only for the wow factor.  She was completely unimpressed.  She didn’t care about the sleek look, or the cool technology behind the scenes, it just seemed to obscure her search results.  I think at this point most users are so used to search results being simple - getting them to use anything new would be difficult. 

I just updated my About page - but instead of posting the same information here I will just point you to the page if your interested.  About Page

Unitarian Church Statue

Unitarian Church Gargoyle

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I mentioned in my previous post that I was testing some software for Fenway Forum - well I played with bbpress and while I liked it I ended up deleting it and just installing wordpress.  I figure its so hard to get a true forum to critical mass where it is somewhat self sustaining - that I would be better served creating posts in wordpress.  If I need to in the future I can always add bbpress and integrate with wordpress.

I also had the thought of allowing anyone to register in wordpress and give new members a “contributor” role.  This would allow them to contribute new posts - but they would need to be approved by an admin (me).  This would allow users to create new posts and other uses to post comments just like “true” forum apps - all whithin the comfort of wordpress.  We’ll see how it goes.

Being a huge Red Sox fan I was randomly searching for domains related to the team to create a fan site - to my surprise fenwayforum.com was available. I’ve been looking for a forum software package to use for the site and have been disappointed at whats available. It seems most forum software is bloated, slow and a resource hog. I think I will look into bbpress and vanilla over the next few days - hopefully they’ll be closer to what I’m looking for.

I installed flock a long time ago - never used it and ended up uninstalling it. Somehow I stumbled across the flock site today and decided to give it another try. It looks like there are some nice new features - hopefully it will be a little more useful to me than last time I installed it - if it does I will post about the features I find useful.