Hello. My name is Harry Wolff.

I am a web developer working at GetGlue.

I enjoy tweeting, taking pictures, and making movies.

This is where I write.

GitHub Favorites: A Google Chrome Extension

Posted on 03/29/2012 by Harry

tl;dr: I made a Chrome Extension. Find the source code here. Install it from here.

Last weekend I was talking to some coworkers about a glorious idea I had for a website. The basic gist was that it would be a site like Hacker News, but only of links to resources and documentation that were related to hacking and programming. No punditry or introspection allowed. And each post would be taggable, so that at a later point you could search and easily find a link you had seen earlier.

I thought the idea brilliant, my coworker not so much. He posted a link to Delicious, asked how was my idea different, and promptly killed my dream.

Ok maybe it wasn’t that harsh but he had a point. As I had conceived it there wasn’t enough of a difference between my idea and Delicious to warrant an investment of time and thought.

But I still wanted to code something. Something preferably small.

As we hashed out and destroyed my idea I remembered another idea that had appealed to me before. GitHub allows you to watch repos, and whatever repo you watch you see its activity in your stream. This is Nice and Good but some repos tend to be more noisy than others. This leads to a stream of commits and comments from one repo without being able to see any others.

It’a been suggested to GibHub (via HN) to add the ability to Favorite or Bookmark a repo. GitHub either isn’t interested in this feature or hasn’t come up with an implementation they are happy with as I have yet to see the appearance of a Favorite button.

So this past week I took it upon myself to create this feature. I’ve built my first Chrome Extension that I’m calling GitHub Favorites. It’s a very simple tool: it adds a Favorites button next to a repos Watch button and when clicked it adds that repo as to your bookmarks in the newly created GitHub Favorites folder. Simple as pie (TM).

Creating a Chrome Extension was as straight forward as I had imagined. There were a few gotchyas: a content script (script that runs directly on a web page) can’t access chrome.* API extensions, nor can it access the page’s functions and variables.

This meant I had to either include my own reference to jQuery for DOM manipulation or go directly to the JavaScript DOM API. I chose the latter and immediately missed the coziness of jQuery’s bling (read: $).

But it was worth it. I think. The native JS DOM API wasn’t horrible. But jQuery is so much nicer…*drools*

You can find the source code to the extension on its GitHub page and install it from its Chrome Extension page. Please let me know if you have any bug or feature requests. And please enjoy. I hope it saves your sanity (as it did mine) when dealing with you GitHub stream.

Mashable Tours GetGlue Offices and Takes My Picture

Posted on 03/27/2012 by Harry

About two weeks ago Christina Warren from Mashable visited GetGlue’s office. While there she took a few photos. I happened to be wearing my GetGlue shirt that day and in a delightful turn of events had a sudden yawn attack which she managed to capture on her phone.

Head over to Mashable to read the article and catch some fun pictures of the GetGlue office and of me. I’m so excited! I feel famous!

Blog Stat Anxiety

Posted on 03/16/2012 by Harry

I try really hard to ignore the stats for this blog. I try. I really do. But it’s so damn hard sometimes.

I like seeing my daily visits go up. It makes me feel popular, liked, appreciated. No one wants to be the last kid picked for the basketball team. They’d love to be picked first – but settle for anything but dead last.

That’s how it is with view count stats. I live in abject horror on days that my view counts drop, and I yearn for so much more when I see a rise. I want to have as many visits as possible but anything is better than nothing.

Checking my stats every day is unhealthful. I don’t want to, but like an addict needing one more hit I inevitably log into my WordPress dashboard to see how I did. Every day I’m either disappointed or afraid. The days my stats drop I’m sad, the days they go up I’m scared they’ll go down tomorrow. It’s not healthy.

I’ve tried to stop. I’ve forced myself to ignore my stats for a week. Then I got paranoid. I didn’t know how my new content was performing, if people were responding to it favorably. I didn’t know what type of work I should produce more, and what I should produce less. I worked myself into a tizzy imagining jeering peers throwing insults my way. It gave me stomach aches and anxious thoughts.

So I peeked at my stats. The next day I did the same. And the next. Before I knew it I was back to daily stat watching. Damn.

It’s natural to be concerned with what people think of you. We’re social creatures. We depend on each other to survive. I don’t need my blog to do well to survive but I yearn for the fulfillment that I imagine popularity will bring. I’d love to be widely read and respected.

So that’s why I watch the stats. I watch them go up, and I watch them go down. My blood pressure follows a similar curve. Sure it’s not healthy, but what else do I have to do? Write? Yeah, like that’ll help.

Nyan Cat and Ron Make Nyan Ron!

Posted on 03/12/2012 by Harry

Hey, so check this out

You’ve probably seen Nyan Cat before. It’s cute at first, weird at second, and then just downright annoying.

My friends and I figured that it’d be funny to remix the Nyan Cat video. So two weekends ago I filmed my friend Ron, who sat and stared directly into the camera for the duration of Nyan Cat, a feat I do not envy.

This weekend I put the film into post production (aka Final Cut Pro X) at my studio (aka my apartment).

First thing I did was key out the background of Ron so that I could stick Nyan Cat in its place. This was the first time I’ve used FCPX to key out anything and it’s also the first time I’ve ever done any type of keying. Let me tell you: FCPX made it ridiculously easy. Also this walkthrough by Ken Stone was exceptional.

So after I keyed out the background I stuck Nyan Cat there and began playing with some effects.

What you see is the finished product. It took a few short hours to do – including learning the new skills. I think it came out pretty well considering the time put in and the subject matter.

Have a watch.

P.S: I think my biggest accomplishment with this video was getting two YouTube downvotes within 20 minutes of it being posted. Rock on.

Review: iA Writer for the Mac and for the iPhone and for the iPad

Posted on 03/09/2012 by Harry

They say the clothes don’t make the man. I’m inclined to disagree.

At least in this case.

I just purchased, downloaded, and installed iA Writer from the Mac App store. It’s what I’m writing this blog post on.

If I had to put into one word my reaction to this program it would be: awesome.

Well, I feel that kind of undersells how much I’m loving this application right now.

The type face is clear. The background is comforting. And the cursor icon, that beautiful little blue bar makes me just want to type, type, type!

The more I type the more I push the blue bar forward. And it’s dizzying just watching it jump across my screen. It makes me forget that I’m writing a blog post, letting my ideas flow, and preventing me from worrying if I’m making sense.

Stop. I am making sense right?

Yes? Moving on then.

I first installed iA Writer on my iPad. It shortly became my default writing app. It opened quickly which is always a top priority for me. When I want to write, I want to write. (omigod – aside: the auto-markdown feature on the mac is awesome. Just used it for the first time.) If it takes more than 3 seconds, hell, 1 second for the app to open then I’m annoyed. I can feel the thoughts slipping out of my head while I stare at a stalled screen. iA Writer nailed that out of the park from day 1.

When I’m writing I want to focus on my words. I want to focus on my words and the sentences they construct. Sometimes I want to focus on the paragraphs that my sentences have created but that should only be done when I revise. I need to be stricter about that, but ah well. iA Writer let’s me focus on my words. It blurs its edges, and the surrounding sentences, letting all my attention bleed into the line I’m currently writing. From my mind, through my fingertips, to iA Writer. It’s beautiful.

Yesterday I was getting near fed up with my writing app of choice on my iPhone. I was preparing myself to look through the App Store to find a suitable alternative. Wouldn’t you know it…yesterday iA writer released an update to their iPad app, making it Universal. Universally awesome is more like it.

Now I have iA Writer on my iPhone and my iPad. And it uses iCloud.

Last night I played around with the iCloud feature of iA Writer. It was delightful. I’d edit a line on my iPad and stare at my iPhone. Soon enough the changes just appeared there. No effort, no buttons pressed, just pure syncing joy.

It was at that point that I knew I needed to enjoy the benefits of iCloud on my Mac. And hence my purchase of iA Writer for the Mac today.

It’s on sale right now as well. Only $8.99 instead of its usual $18.99. If you like to write at all I strongly encourage you to pick up this app.

It’s also on sale for the iPhone and iPad (universal app, remember?). It’s only a measly $0.99 instead of its usual $4.99 for the iPad and $0.99 for the iPhone? That’s what it says on iA Writer’s website. I’m not really sure what that means. Long story short: it’s cheap.

I give iA Writer the Harry Wolff 5 stars out of 5. And I don’t usually give out 5 stars willy nilly. In fact, this is the first time I’ve given anything any stars.

iA Writer. It’s that good.

Focus on Effort, Not on Smarts

Posted on 03/07/2012 by Harry

In a detailed article Jonah Lehrer discusses scientific studies that focus on how and why people learn the way they do.

In an experiment conducted with fifth graders:

Half of the kids were praised for their intelligence. “You must be smart at this,” the researcher said. The other students were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.”

What do you think happened?

But it soon became clear that the type of compliment given to the fifth graders dramatically affected their choice of tests. When kids were praised for their effort, nearly 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. However, when kids were praised for their intelligence, most of them went for the easier test.

Why is that?

According to Dweck, praising kids for intelligence encourages them to “look” smart, which means that they shouldn’t risk making a mistake.

This verifies everything I’ve previously read and experienced. Smarts help but it’s the driving effort that truly matters. You can be the smartest person alive, however if you don’t take risks and stretch yourself you won’t accomplish nearly as much.

The Interesting History of Coca-Cola

Posted on 03/06/2012 by Harry

Today I learned a few things about Coca-Cola.

1. Coca-Cola was originally created in response to prohibition.

In 1886, the city of Atlanta passed a short-lived law prohibiting the sale and/or manufacture of alcohol. In response, a pharmacist named John Pemberton created a faux wine, mixing together fruit flavors with extracts from kola nuts (caffeine) and coca leaves (cocaine). He dispensed it via soda fountains—at the time, carbonated water was believed to have medicinal benefit—and with that, Coca-Cola was born.

2. Coca-Cola has a special arrangement with the government to allow it to use coca leaves stripped of cocaine.

In order for Coca-Cola to continue to exist in its current form, the company has a special arrangement with the Drug Enforcement Administration, allowing it to import dried coca leaves from Peru (and to a lesser degree, from Bolivia) in huge quantities. The dried coca leaves make their way to a processing plant in Maywood, New Jersey, operated by the Stepan Corporation, a publicly traded chemicals company. The Stepan factory imports roughly 100 metric tons of the leaves each year, stripping the active ingredient—the cocaine—from them. The cocaine-free leaves are then shipped off to Coke to turn into syrup, and, ultimately, soda.

3. Supposedly only 2 people alive know the mystery flavor of Coca-Cola known as ’7x flavor’.

“only two people know how to mix the 7x flavoring ingredient” and that “[t]hose two people never travel on the same plane in case it crashes; it’s this carefully passed-on secret ritual and the formula is kept in a bank vault.”

The Shins – “Bait And Switch” Music Video

Posted on 03/02/2012 by Harry

Did you know? The Shins are coming out with a new album Port of Morrow on March 20th.

Did you know? You can listen and watch their first music right now! Called “Simple Song” it’s wickedly catchy. There’s some joyfully upbeat rhythm guitars that kept my head bopping throughout the entire song.

Check out the embedded clip below.
Continue reading →

The iPad 3 is Coming

Link

The iPad 3 is coming. Hopefully along with Apple TV 3. And a new iPad cover. I hope the iPad cover is backwards compatible with my iPad 2. There’s only so much money I can spend on Apple products in a year.

And we haven’t even begun rumoring about the iPhone 5. This year is going to be exciting.

Amazing Lytro Camera Now Available

Posted on 02/26/2012 by Harry

Lytro is one of those amazing companies that has created a new piece of technology that is wildly like nothing else. Lytro’s cameras are able to take a picture that can later be refocused to any point in the image.

What does that mean? If you took a picture of someone and found out later their smile was out of focus you would be able to refocus the image so that their smile would be focused and crystal clear. No other camera can do that.

If it didn’t start at $400 I’d probably snatch one up, but as it stands it looks to be more of a niche purchase. Although…

There have been whispers that Apple is interested in lytro’s technology. Imagine lytro’s technology in your next iPhone. How wicked would that be?