Here’s where things get scary. A crafty hacker could also potentially break into your Facebook page, blog, or email. Once they have your user name and password, the can get your email address from your account details on Twitter. Then, they can head over to GMail, Hotmail or whoever you’re using and try logging in using the same password you use for Twitter. Unfortunately, there’s a good chance that this will work since studies have shown that many people use the same password for everything. So how do they get into your blog? If you’ve linked to your blogk in the Web entry on your twitter account, the hacker now knows where your blog is, and they’ve got a relatively good password to try on it too. The same goes for Facebook, and anything else that you’ve ever linked to from Twitter, perhaps a Digg page or a MySpace page.

This is all speculation, but if you’re using the same passwords for more than one online service, be sure to change all of them if you’ve been affected by this attack.

• 1 - Open URL dialog (also includes history and bookmarks)
• 2 - Window list
• 3 - Home page
• 5 - Toggle images (requires page refresh)
• 6 - Page up
• 8 - Next window
• 9 - Page Down
• * - Full Screen
• # - Toggle between desktop and fit to screen display
• Space - Page down

• Formatting pages better for the smaller screen
• Handles multiple windows with ease
• Quicker forward an back functions
• Faster as-you-type URL auto completion
• Quicker loading, rendering and scrolling of large pages
• Option for reporting itself as a desktop browser in case you don’t want the mobile version

There’s a 30-day free trial, so you can try it out yourself before buying it.

Initially intended to be a way to catalog all the ornaments that we have on our tree at home, I’ve decided to add a few features to it, such as different “trees” that you can browse and opened it up for everyone. Really not much more than a Christmas themed photo gallery, it became my first true adventure into Ajax. You can see this because the page never reloads, and if you’re pay close attention, you’ll see that only 8 ornaments are loaded at a time into the slider at the top of the page. There’s still some work to do on it, here’s what I plan to do:

• More trees and ornaments (This will happen when I get photos of all the ornaments on our tree)
• Search
• Tags
• Better back-end interface

Some other changes at the museum include the entire west pavilion being shut down for the construction of the new Science Storms, opening in spring of 2010. That’s going to be a rework of the old Hall of Basic Science, with a weather related slant. The centerpiece of it will be a 20′ tall tornado. Also, the southern balcony is under construction. The body exhibits are also being reworked and will open next spring.

Also of note was the Mechanical Cabaret Theater. This was a showcase of cam and pulley driven animated scenes. One of my favorites was the cat lapping up poisoned milk, as the sign described it. After about 10 licks the entire wooden cat collapses. In true Museum fashion, the museum inner workings of the display are completely exposed, allowing the curious mind (mine included) to look at what exactly causes all of the motion.

The former Robots and, prior to that, Time exhibit hall now is an exposition of where new technologies may take us. There is a lot of interesting content there, and it looks like they’ve set it up so they can keep it up to date very easily, which will be critical to keep the information fresh.

Finally, the Omnimax theater refurbishment has been completed. There are new seats in the theater, new carpeting and a DLP projector that displays movie theater-style pre-show questions and answers, instead of the old slide based system. I saw the Grand Canyon Adventure which was excellent, like every Omnimax film. The film was also shot exclusively for Omnimax (or they have outfitted the projector with a lens that corrects for it) as there was no distortion near the edges of the field of vision as I have become accustomed to seeing with Imax films being played on an Omnimax screen. The movie had spectacular views of the canyon from top to bottom. It also included plenty of the Imax signature flying-over-the-edge-of-a-cliff scenes designed to make everyone in the audience jump a little.

That was from the summer of 2002, when I started at Purdue. Then, the site ran on Greymatter and didn’t have a photos section. Now, I’ve upgraded to Wordpress and I’m using Gallery 2 to handle the photos.

About all that made it through the re-design was the backwards “b” logo (short for “by” and styled after the @ symbol) and the content. The tweets and random photos in the old design were added last-minute and didn’t fit the available space very well, which is what prompted me to start redesign the site.

I started with a Wordpress theme called Grey Matter (purely coincidence) and customized it to my liking. I then adapted it for use with Gallery 2.

Wordpress was a breeze to customize the theme, Gallery 2 was a little trickier. I feel like all of the documentation for it is not entirely up to date. For a challenge, I threw in some integration between Twitter, Gallery 2 and Wordpress. You can see the results of that in the sidebar at the right with the random photos and recent tweets available on each page.

Something to note with the design, having the links and sidebar to the right make the site much more accessible to small-screen devices, that tend to ignore layouts and just display content top to bottom. With the links at the left, the small-screen user has to scroll past all of them before they get to the page content. I’m noticing a lot of this as I find more and more uses for my new smartphone.

I went to the game anyways because it was #4 vs. my high school at #25. I expected a better game than what I saw. Since I had my phone with me and no camera, I decided to micro-blog the entire game with my commentary and score updates. I also went for the “total experience” and blogged the band and fan reaction. You can find all of that under the “Twitter” link at the left. Whether or not anyone was paying attention to it is another question, but I’m sure someone got some use out of it.

It was a little tricky. Trying to keep to keep track of the next play while typing up the last one on a tiny keyboard. You’ll notice some spelling and grammar errors that I blame mostly on this. I thik I got it figured out by then end I was even to get some player names in, picking them up from the field announcer.

Part of the reason I got the phone and data plan was because of the amount of traveling I do for work. Almost immediately I found out just how handy it is. Last week I was able to keep track of the baseball games from factory floors in Dallas and Milwaukee, and from the St. Louis airport. For this, I found Sportsline to work best.

I also use Google reader a lot to keep tabs on news, Digg and a handful of other RSS feeds that I follow. The integration between the full browser app and the mobile one is great. I can flip through my feeds at lunch, read the ones that I want to keep up on and star the remaining ones to look at later that day.

Google Maps has also been great. In addition to the directions it’s integrated to your contacts so you can get directions to any contact with an address in your phone book. Also, when looking up a business, the phone number is clickable and puts you right into a call. Finally, the traffic has also helped out, especially when I was in a Dallas and needed to know if I’d be able to make it to my flight.

For instant messenger, I found the free Slick to work best. It does it’s best to keep you connected, even after a call. The only gripe that I have is that I would like it to look at the phone’s profile (Loud, vibrate…) and adjust its alerts based on that.

I also picked up a Twitter client and I’m going to start using that. You can see my updates from that here. I’m currently looking into two different clients, and I don’t have a favorite yet.

I’ve made my web site mobile friendly. I didn’t do anything special for the blog, just added a Word Press plugin that puts a nice mobile theme in place when viewed from a mobile device. The photos section of the site, however, required a bit of work. I designed my own theme for Gallery2, and put together a few different ideas that I picked up from the support forum to get it to detect mobile devices and change the theme accordingly.

Since then, I’ve been working in controls engineering. The job entails everything from design, to installation and service. I’ve got to select parts, be it motors, sensors, fuses, relays that are appropriate for the task at hand. Then draw up the schematics to integrate them into the machine. Next, I write the program that runs the machine, making the right motions happen at the right time to build a particular part. That all happens at our shop. Then, once the customer approves the machine’s function, I’ll travel with it to their site and set it up again on their floor. This often includes some electrical wiring, and adjusting the program to their specifications after they get used to running the machine for a while.

The travel has been quite fun. There are some days were I’ll be asked at 1 in the afternoon, “Can you be in Buffalo at 7 tomorrow morning?” I don’t mind this one bit. I’m often going to work on a machine that I haven’t seen before, so before I can fix it, I first have to figure out exactly what it should be doing and why it’s not. I’ve traveled from Maryland to Texas, Canada to South Carolina spending 36 nights on the road last year. This has worked quite well for photography that I’ve gotten into recently.

A roommate that I had in college was the photo editor for Purdue’s newspaper, which is where I got my interest in photography. Since I’ve been working, I’ve been able to afford more expensive toys. I got myself a new car not too long after starting work, and picked up a digital SLR about 6 months ago. I’ve had a great time photographing things such as high school football games, marching bands, the Chicago Auto Show, and family and friends during the holidays. One of my favorites was Niagara falls, just a few weeks after I got my camera. It was essentially a free trip for me, since I was in Buffalo for work. It took some trial and error, but I managed to get some excellent photos of it. Since then I’ve learned a lot about photography. You can see all of my photos in the Photos section of this site.

I often use it as a print preview for programs that don’t have one built in.

I’ve have yet to find a format that it can’t work with, and have had great success creating videos for use on my 5th generation Ipod and my Motorola E815m.

Once you’ve got things tagged and organized, the search function lets you quickly find any images within Picasa. There’s some simple editing and tuning tools, one of which is “I’m feeling lucky.” From a technical standpoint it’s a level adjustment algorithm, but like a Google search by the same name, it almost always makes the photo look better.

It’s integrated with Picasa Web Albums, so you can publish your photos online. Picasa is also integrated with various on-line photo finishers, so you can upload to them directly from the program. Finally, it has tools for creating web pages from a selection of photos, based on a customizable template.

The Amazon service is $0.15 per gigabyte per month, and $0.10 per gigabyte transfered. It’s pay as you go, so you’re never paying for more storage or bandwidth than you need.

Jungle Disk is a very user friendly front end for the Amazon service. It creates a new network drive on your system that is your access to your storage. Use it just like it’s a local drive in any application. It also includes a customizable backup utility that will backup at a scheduled time and keep archived versions of changed files. Finally, it’s free to try and only $20 to buy it. The license is for every one of your computers, including a USB drive friendly version that you can run on any system without needing to install it.