MOVITS!

I bet you’ve always wondered what you get when you mix swing with hip-hop beats and lay rapid-fire Swedish rap on top. Yeah, me too. MOVITS! finished off their US tour by performing at CMU. They hail from Luleå, Sweden and received much deserved attention in the US after performing on the Colbert Report. The [...]

Learning Erlang

I’m learning Standard ML in Principles of Programming (15-212). I didn’t think I would like the functional programming paradigm but it’s starting to grow on me. Having functions as first class values allows you to do some pretty neat things that would be a pain in other languages and some of the programming idioms are [...]

Category Posts Widget 3.0

This latest update introduces a few new features:

Support for WordPress 2.9’s post thumbnails.
Option to show the post date.
Option to show the comment count.
Option to set the word length of the excerpt.

Note that support for Simple Post Thumbnails has been removed in favor of the built in functionality.
You can download the plugin at the WordPress plugin repository: Download here.
Please [...]

Trailer: Avatar

Not a huge fan of Titanic but Avatar looks pretty cool.

Review: District 9

Twenty years ago an alien race landed in South Africa, stranded. They become unwilling refugees, trapped in a slum known as District 9. The people of Johannesburg don’t want them around and the aliens, or “prawns” as they are called, would like nothing better than to leave.
District 9 reminds us of the horrible things humans are [...]

Category Posts Widget 2.0

Update: Category Posts Widget has been updated to version 3.0!
I just released a long overdue update to Category Posts Widget. At the time of this writing, it has been downloaded over 23,500 times and has an average of 4.5 stars from 22 people!

CPW 2.0 has been included with Press75 themes for sometime now. I haven’t heard any [...]

Welcome to jameslao.com v3

After two months of designing and coding, jameslao.com v3, code name “Ambassador”, has launched.

Simple Plugins for Press75.com

I wrote a couple WordPress plugins for Jason Schuller over at Press75.com. Jason designs premium themes for WordPress. Many of his themes have been video centric and he asked me to write a couple plugins to make it easier for his customers to post videos.
Simple Video Embedder adds a widget to the posting screen with fields [...]

Things I need to work on

I do a lot a few things well but I have come to realize there are still some basic things about being a person I need to work on some more. A few that I can think of off the top of my head:

Smiling and saying hello to people I know when I walk pass them–I’ve [...]

Category Posts Widget update

I made a small update to my Category Posts Widget plugin regarding the problems people were having with displaying excerpts. Thanks to “carnyfeet” who posted the fix in this thread on the WordPress forums.
You can download the update at the official WordPress plugin repository or use the automatic update feature in newer versions of WordPress.
Thanks to everyone [...]

Cellofourte

Homecoming weekend was this week so there has been a lot of alumni around and stuff going on at pretty much all waking hours of the day. At the kick-off on Friday there was live music from a variety of bands, food, and all sorts of other stuff including Quasi the robot and fireworks! Cellofourte, [...]

2008 Portland Flugtag

The Red Bull Flugtag event is a testament of human ingenuity, foolishness, and love for watching things crash. My friends and I went down to the Waterfront today and watched as teams flew their man-powered flying creations off a 30 foot deck into the water. Some of them glided for a few short seconds, but [...]

The Dark Knight – Review

Not another comic book movie! No, this isn’t just another comic book movie adaptation. The Dark Knight is truly fantastic. The actors are well cast and the plot is darkly immersing. I thought Iron man was good, but The Dark Knight blows it out of the water.
The movie starts with a bank robbery that takes an [...]

Finem Respice

I have a policy when it comes to rating experiences: never rate experiences until they’re over, only in retrospect, because you’ll most certainly hate it at the time if you’re rating it in the first place. I remember the councilors saying that high school is going to be some of the best four years of [...]

How Toyota Is Like A Startup And Other Thoughts

The New Yorker recently ran an article titled “The Open Secret of Success.” It talked about how Toyota has sold more cars than General Motors has in the first three months of 2008. What makes this significant? G.M. has sold more cars anually than any other company for the past seventy years.
So how did Toyota, a [...]

My Childhood Dreams

My teacher suggested I watch Randy Pausch’s “Last Lecture” yesterday. I saw the story go by in my Google Reader a few weeks ago but didn’t think to look at it. I forgot about it again when I got home and didn’t remember to watch it until I saw a quote by him on a [...]

Category Posts Widget 1.3

Update: Category Posts Widget has been updated to version 3.0!
As promised, I’ve updated Category Posts Widget. Version 1.3 brings one new feature to the table: an option to show a post excerpt. I also converted the widget to the new WordPress 2.5 system of adding multiple widgets so 1.3 will only work on WordPress 2.5 or later. [...]

Contemplating Mac

I’ve been using my current laptop for a 2-3 years now. It’s an old Dell Inspiron 6000 that I got for about $1,000. It works fine for the most part, but the wireless is flaky and dies on me randomly which kills it for me. I need my wireless to be rock solid and reliable. [...]

Rediscovered Journal

I rediscovered my journal from fourth or fifth grade the other day. I wrote some “interesting” stuff back then. Here’s the first entry in my journal complete with mistakes.
May 20, 2001
Today I woke up at 9:30 to watch Rwall! Redwall is a T.V. show base on the book Redwall, written by Brian Jauces. When I was done [...]

Messaging on Social Networks

As I was sitting at my desk this morning reading my email, a new message arrived. When I switch over to the inbox view, I read the subject line of the new message and discover I have a new message on a social network I’m part of. How exciting—I don’t get these very often. I [...]

FIRST Robotics Retrospect

I don’t think I have mentioned on here that I have been participating in the FIRST Robotics Competition this year. We had talked about doing it last year when we finished InvenTeams and I was asked to join drafted. I had no intention of participating at the beginning of the year because I would be [...]

In Response to the Assertion That Science is Not Based on Faith

After reading a post about faith and science on Bad Astronomy, I feel compelled to respond to Phil Plait and point out a few glaring flaws in his argument. In my Theory of Knowledge class, we discussed this same topic. I would like to first state that I am not a religious person. I find [...]

Category Posts Widget 1.2

I tried to think of some new features to add to the Category Posts Widget, but I couldn’t think of anything worth adding. Instead I fixed some bugs and tweaked how the plugin behaves.
Changes:

Fixed widget options save bug where title had to be specified in order to save options.
If no title is specified, the name of [...]

How to Survive IB

You should be proud of yourself if you’ve decided to take on IB. All those upperclassmen weren’t kidding when they were complaining about all the homework they had, or how little sleep they got that night. However, going through IB supposedly prepares you for college where it gets even worse. In the mean time, here [...]

I Had to Write a Poem

I had to write a poem about poetry for IB English. It turned out alright in my opinion. This might be my first piece of poetry worth reading so I’m posting it. Hope you like it. Critique if you wish.
Natural Chorus
With my pen in hand,
I sit down to write my prose.
I scribble the first line,
But crumple [...]

One Year Old

Jameslao.com turns one year old today. It has been an interesting trip. I didn’t blog as much as I wanted to but I think I did alright. I don’t feel obligated to blog all the time like some so I guess it explains why my post count is rather low in comparison to some blogs.
Reading posts [...]

WP Tag Manager 0.1

One of the things that puzzled me about WordPress 2.3 is that it didn’t come with a tag manager. Then I realized they probably wanted to see what plugin developers would come up with first. Well, after looking around at some tag manager plugins, I decided to write my own. My goal is to create [...]

I’m a Technologist

Yay! I won the TechStart Student Technologist of the Year award! This is the only scholarship I’ve applied for so far, so it’s kind of nice. The award goes to a student in Oregon who is planning on majoring in computer science. Seeing as how pretty much everyone knows I’m a tech nut, I was [...]

School Again

It’s been two weeks since school started and I feel like I haven’t complained about it in a long time. I don’t hate school; in fact, you might say I love school. I get to see my friends and learning is fun. However, I find myself sick and tired of it all around the second [...]

Working at Vernier

I’ve been working at Vernier Software & Technology as an intern for about the past seven weeks now. It’s been interesting as this is my first real work experience. The “job description” said that I would be creating an employee map so employees can find where others are situated in the building more quickly. However, [...]

MIT – Day 4

Work has been keeping me busy, but here it is finally: day four of The Odyssey event at MIT in blog form.
I went geocaching for the first time today. It turned out to be a lot of fun too. Luke and I ran all over the MIT campus hunting down waypoints where we would take a [...]

MIT – Day 3

I didn’t get a chance to finish my post on day 3 on that day since we were up pretty late doing stuff. So here it is now.  
Today was the first day of the showcase where all the teams showed off their inventions they’ve been working on for the past eight months. All of [...]

MIT – Day 1

The flight from Portland to Chicago was killer. I had Warcraft III to hold me over for the first hour or two but my laptop battery died and I had to suffer through the rest of the flight. What was really stupid is that the pilot missed the runway (that 4000 ft long strip of [...]

I Wish I Was Still on Vacation

First day back to school from the band trip to California and I already want to go back on vacation. Everything is spiraling out of control. I only missed two days of school and some how I have fallen so far behind…
Totally worth it though. Went to Knott’s Berry Farm and rode roller coasters all Friday [...]

Oregon SkillsUSA Web Design Champions

I competed in the Oregon SkillsUSA web design competition last Saturday. My teammate, Sadie, and I competed against five other teams from other high schools in Oregon. We were all given a fictitious website proposal and had four hours to complete the task. After the competition I had lunch and sat around a couple hours [...]

May the Pranks Begin – April Fool’s Day

It’s a shame April Fool’s day is on a Sunday this year. It’s a lot easier to pull pranks during the week days when people are a lot more accessible! Oh well, I guess no remapping people’s keyboards, blue screen of death screensavers, encasing people’s staplers in Jello, or controlling people’s computer mice remotely this [...]

300

I finally gave in and saw 300 yesterday. I think it might be one of the goriest movies I have seen in a long time, but it rocked. It wasn’t overly gory considering how far they could have taken it and I think it was at just the right level. Sure, there were more than [...]

Re: Why Can’t Programmers.. Program?

Jeff Atwood made a post on his blog today about a simple test used to screen prospective programmers looking for a job. The reason: many people who claim to be programmers fail to solve the simplest of problems. The test:
Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print [...]

Awesome VW Advertisement

A truly ingenious commercial for Volkswagon Phaeton. Who knew shadow puppets could be so cool?

SAT Craziness and Barlow Double-Header

Yesterday was a busy day. I took the SAT, which lasted far too long. They should have laws against testing for four and a half hours. The sad thing is I didn’t feel I accomplished anything after I completed the test. It wasn’t very hard, just very very long. I forgot to bring my calculator [...]

Final Exams: Day 3

Day three is over. Just one test today, Physics. It wasn’t too hard. Most of the problems weren’t very calculation intensive if at all. Now just one more day to go. Actually two days because I have to take the SAT on Saturday. Crap…

Final Exams: Day 1

And so it begins. The first day of final exams has arived. Today I have Biology and Band, so I’m not to0 worried. It’s History, English, Spanish, and maybe Math that I’m worried about. I can’t wait until all of this is over; then it’s a clean slate, and we get to start all over [...]

24 Season Premiere

The Messiah has arrived. The one show I’ve been looking forward to for over six months now is finally returning today. 24 is going to rock!

Site Redesign

As you can see, things have changed—hopefully for the better. I decided to create that custom site design I had originally planned but couldn’t create due to lack of time. Overall I’m pretty satisfied with the new design. The site is was flexible width and the CSS and XHTML both validate, so I think it’s [...]

Winter Break

Finally, free at last! Winter Break has arrived and now I get to slack off and be lazy. School has been crazy the last couple weeks with so many big projects being assigned. There was even a period where I was only averaging three hours of sleep; oddly enough I found that I was more [...]

Zune Review

In case you don’t remember, I’ve been on the hunt for a media player. My PSP wasn’t cutting it because of its size and interface so it just wouldn’t do. The Zune caught my eye because it had more features than the iPod and was the same price. Initial reviews from some major sites are [...]

Welcome

Welcome to my little piece of the internet. Here you can find what is going in my life. I’ll try to post as often as I can, but I can’t promise anything (school is hectic you know?).
I originally planned to create a custom theme for jameslao.com but unfortunately I don’t have time at the moment. K2 [...]