Hung Truong: The Blog!

Will it Blend? That is the Question.

So I was turned on to the “Will it Blend” phenomenon a while back when an Apple iPhone was blended. “Will it Blend” is a video podcast of sorts featuring a mad scientist type guy blending random objects that probably shouldn’t be blended.

Objects range from the aforementioned iPhone to Tiki Torches to (my personal favorite) Halloween glow sticks. The episodes take a pretty formulaic approach. The scientist guy talks about what he’s going to blend, picks a mode (like smoothie) and blends the item. The camera shows the item being blended initially, then pans out to show the dude in an awkward position, blending the object.

Once blending has commenced, the scientist dude opens the blender top. Then the phrase “___ smoke, don’t breath this” will occur. And the verdict? Yes, it blends! How could we for even one second doubt the blending power of Blendtec blenders!?

Of course, reason that everything blends is probably due to the fact that Blendtec produces the show as well as the blenders. Still, it’s pretty damn entertaining for a random video podcast. Plus when they do change up the format, it’s awesome. Sort of like if you were watching Scooby-Doo and it turned out that the ghosts were real, or Scooby was actually a ghost, or if Velma and Daphne started making out like they did in the movie!

Illustrated HTTP Error Codes

Via Boingboing, I found these awesome Illustrated HTTP Error Codes.

HTTP error codes are inherently funny to me, because of the all the possible double entendre possibilities involved. I mean, there’s 411: Length Required, 402: Payment Required (!), 414: Requested URL Too Long… The crude joke potential is just too high! In fact, Thinkgeek has a line of HTTPanties that exploits this very fact.

But these illustrations don’t pander to the lowest common denominator. Some of them are funny, like the dog that’s too big for his house (Requested Entity too large). Others are just kinda dumb. But the fact that someone drew these means there’s a bigger nerd out there than I. And I, for one, salute Ape Lad.

Introducing Notecentric: Facebook Edition!

So about a year ago I unveiled my killer web app, Notecentric. It was an online note taking app that I used in class. And I was about the only person who used it… Well, this Summer Facebook opened up their website to third party applications, and I immediately thought of Notecentric.

I haven’t really had much free time this Summer, though. I’ve been tele-working for a company during the day. But I found some time this weekend and last weekend to get a working version of Notecentric up on Facebook.

It really didn’t take much time since I had already done Notecentric once before. This was just sort of an adaptation, though Facebook has its own weird things to learn. Like redirects.

Anyway, check out and install the Notecentric app. Once I get 5 users, I can apply for Notecentric to be in the official directory! So hopefully that’ll be soon. I’m planning on adding more functionality as time permits, but for now, it’s totally working. I think.

XPath: Learn It!

So I’ve been trying to do some Facebook App stuff in Ruby on Rails (I already did some in PHP) and the RFacebook Gem uses this wacky XHTML/XML parser called “Hpricot.” The most experience I have with parsing XML is winging it with REXML until I got something that was somewhat correct.

So I tried using Hpricot tonight. Apparently it’s super fast, but the documentation assumes you know a whole lot about the mating habits (internal workings) of HTML and XML. And… I don’t really.

At least, not until I found this handy XPath tutorial! After actually reading the tutorial, rather than trying to wing/hack it again, I think I have a pretty good feel for this Hpricot thing. Basically, there’s a pretty simple vocabulary for describing the nested nature of XML. It’s impossible to figure out from the Hpricot tutorials (which I tried doing for a while), but insanely simple once you just look at the tutorial. Ah well, I guess that’ll teach me a lesson not to hack so much when it’s easier to RTFM…

Pownce Beta Impressions Update: Uploads Work!

Hmm. It looks like they fixed the uploads. Oh, Leah Culver, when will you learn that hotswaps aren’t infallible…

So now Pownce is actually kinda neat. One issue I saw was that one of the MP3s I uploaded (umm, totally a song I wrote and performed myself…) played at like, .01x speed. Weird. Also, I had registered as a “friend” of some people, then removed the friendship (or fanship) and their messages still stayed on my page for a while. Oh well.

Other than that, the site sure is slick. I can see this being a cool way to share neat music with people. It comes with its own mp3 player (which has some bugs), but so does gmail. I like the instant gratification feeling though. Aw hell, it’s fun to use, even if it isn’t a serious replacement for that thing I like to call “electronic mail.”