Ben Noland's Blog

I was given a new machine at work today.  It’s an AMD Phenom II X4 965 running at 3.41 GHz, with 4.00 GB or RAM. The operating system is Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.

Here’s a list of the programs that I installed:

• firefox
• launchy
• netbeans 6.7
• python
• ipython
• java
• winmerge
• gvim
• winsplit revolution
• autohotkey
• tortoise svn
• cygwin

Some others I installed later:

• winamp

I’ve done some work over the last few weeks.

Here’s a graph of the time I’ve spent so far:

As you can see I started this project on 6/14 and have logged about 96 hours since then.

This week I added the ability to display cumulative charts like this one (just click the chart on the history page).

Anyone who happens to find this blog post is invited to try the private beta, which is now live. To gain access please navigate to http://eclocking.com/beta.

I’ve always been a geek for collecting stats.  As a kid I spent hours typing all the basketball player statistics from my NBA Live video game into a spreadsheet for fun.

I recently took up jogging, so of course I got out the old stopwatch and started logging my times into a spreadsheet. Manually transferring times from the LCD display of my stopwatch into my google docs spreadsheet wasn’t ideal so I set out to look for something better.

I found the following:

1. http://tools.arantius.com/stopwatch
2. http://stopwat.ch/
3. http://www.online-stopwatch.com/
4. http://online-stopwatch.chronme.com/

Each of these websites provide an online stopwatch, but they all lack the features I was looking for, the ability to save and chart your times.

I am putting the finishing touches on a better stopwatch. Some of it’s features are:

• save your times
• chart your times
• tagging – allowing you to organize and filter your history
• keyboard shortcuts

Stay tuned, more to follow in the weeks to come.

I’ve deployed a new theme, the old one was kinda ugly. The new theme is based on the “Multiflex-3″ template written by Wolfgang. You can get more information at his website here.

I’ve also updated the version of Edit Area that I’m using. As a result several browser specific bugs have been fixed, Chrome now works. Thanks to Christophe for maintaining his great project here.

I’ve added the ability to download the contents of your document as a text file.

(this post was moved from the old blog on 1/11/2010)

I was able to resolve some issues with the Safari (beta 3) and Opera web browsers. They should work a little better now. Firefox and IE are still the preferred browsers, but Opera and Safari are at least mostly working now. You may have to clear your browser’s cache to see the changes.

(this post was moved from the old blog on 1/11/2010)

Introducing collabedit:

• Real time collaboration, changes appear remotely as you type
• Any number of users can edit the same document at the same time
• No login required
• Syntax highlighting for several common languages
• Documents are automatically saved as you type Give it a try. Simply go here, paste your code, select your language, and send the unique url to whoever you want to share with.

(this post was moved from the old blog on 1/11/2010)