Photo by Kazze

Seize the moment of excited curiosity on any subject to solve your doubts; for if you let it pass, the desire may never return, and you may remain in ignorance.
-William Wirt

Ever since I first ran across this jewel of advice, I have always made an effort to apply it to my life. Whenever my interest in a certain subject flares, I make a point to explore it before my focus has a chance to shift elsewhere.

As of late, my excitement and curiosity have revolved around photography. I bought a Nikon D40 in June and have since only put it to good use on occasion. Since I purchased it, I've had a nagging sense that my photos weren't turning out as interesting or "professional looking" as those taken by my friends who are amateur photographers. Part of this has to do with the fact that I'm not always as creative as I'd like. I also knew the source of my displeasure wasn't the fact that I have an entry-level Nikon, because I've been told time and time again that the camera doesn't matter.

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Photo by eyeRmonkey

These days, It seems like I meet a new college freshman every couple of weeks. I always wish I could pass along all the lessons I accumulated during my first year of college. And thanks to the wonders of the interwebs, I can! My experiences were at the University of Oregon, but I think they are applicable anywhere. I suspect that some of these lessons need to be experienced first hand to have any effect on you, but I still think they are worth sharing. Here's my advice (in order of importance):

#1 The first week defines the rest of the year

I feel like this is the most important piece of advice I could offer, but I also know it's the hardest thing to control. During the first week, be more outgoing that you normally would. Over the first couple days, meet and talk to every person in the dorm for at least a couple minutes. The best way to develop a community is to do everything as a group for the first week.

Let me give you a breakdown of how things went in my dorm for the first week and how I heard things went in every other dorms:

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I've been doing a lot of work with complex search queries on Google lately. I have a script that grabs all the URLs returned for a given query. The problem is that although there are hundreds of thousands of results for most queries, Google will give you this notice if you try to get more than the first 1,000 results: "Sorry, Google does not serve more than 1000 results for any query."

This restriction became a problem for me. After doing some research, I ran across an interesting workaround that allows you to access twice as many results. Simply include and remove a common word in your queries. For example, if you are searching for proxy and want to get 2,000 results, use these two queries:

• proxy +"the"
• proxy -"the"

Now you have 2,000 unique results.

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I have been a nerd my entire life. I started designing websites in grade school and I have only been sucked further and further down the rabbit hole since. I have been part of the online nerdy community for quite a while, but it's not too often that I get to interact with my geeky brethren in person. This past weekend was my first excursion into that community and I must say that I had a blast.

My boss, Jon Steinhart, has a party at his house every summer and invites all of his friends, coworkers, etc. Little did I know, Jon has built up quite a list of contacts in the tech world in his time.

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Facebook recently released the Facebook Platform which allows developers to write applications and tools that run inside users' profiles and within Facebook itself. So far, the Platform has been a huge success. Dozens of useful applications are coming out every day and most users are very excited for the extra functionality.

I am in the process of writing an application that brings together Flickr sets and Facebook photo albums. Unfortunately, the current implementation of the Facebook Platform lacks the ability to easily upload photos to a user's account.

To remedy this situation, Paul Wells and I decided to writing our own addition to the Facebook PHP5 Client Library. Using it is as simple as uploading the file to your server and changing two lines of code in your existing applications. The best part is that our class does not involve code hacks at all. Our classes simply extend the current ones and add the functionality we want. The advantage to this approach is that the code will still work if Facebook updates the API.

To download the code and see an example of it's use, visit the project page.

I was pleasantly surprised with how easy it was to install a WordPress blog to my server. I use GoDaddy for hosting. The only problem I encountered during the installation was when I wanted to change my permalink structure.

The problem arose when I switched from "ugly permalinks" (http://example.com/?p=N) to "pretty permalinks" (http://example.com/year/month/day/post-name). I already had a .htaccess file in my root directory, but when switching permalink stuctures, WordPress attempts to write it's own .htaccess file. Since mine was already in place, it failed and I started getting 404 errors on every pages except the home page.

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