A quickie tech tip for Windows users… I have to admit, this was a new one to me and I’ve been using Windows  since 3.1. I’m kind of embarrassed by not already knowing this. 

I was recently working on a project which required me to be working on two different machines - my development machine, and the second local machine which had access to the remote server where I needed to deploy the changes. What this meant was that I would work on some code, then swivel in my chair to look at the other monitor with other keyboard/mouse, and either drag’n'drop the affected files to the remote server again or copy-then-paste the file again. 

The whole process is slightly annoying, but nothing too terrible. One of my coworkers and I were discussing a different matter the other day and I was working on this project while he and I talked. As he watched what I was doing he asked “Why don’t you just copy the file once again then just keep pasting it after you update it?” Um… because I didn’t know that would work? I suppose I should have, though. 

See, I know that when you typically move files in Windows you don’t REALLY “move” the data to a new location on the hard drive. The system merely grabs a reference to the file and then, in the case of a “move”, will merely flag where that data should now be logically accessed in your drive’s directory structure. But it doesn’t actually move the bits somewhere new. The same is true for copying from one location to another, whether the destination is on a local or remote machine over a network drive. If you “copy” the file, you will store the reference to the file’s location. If you paste, the system will at that time go get all data contained within the file and copy it to the new location. What this means is that you can keep changing the source location without having to re-copy it after every change - on each paste, Windows goes and grabs the full contents from the source before actually writing data to the new location. 

I guess you do learn something new every day.

So today an old college buddy posted a link via Facebook to an application he had discovered known as sobees. From their website…

sobees is the perfect desktop companion for online social networks. sobees offers an easy unified user experience to get, organize and share information from the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Digg, Flickr and Youtube directly on the desktop.

So ok, this sounds like a pretty cool application. Obviously the people that this software will appeal to is more than your average Facebooker, but let’s admit that over time as these sites have come out, a number of us have signed up for flickr accounts, have started “tweeting”, and are incessantly updating our status on Facebook (usually via our tweets) or otherwise stalking talking with our friends.

Enter my issues on computer number 1. After ensuring that I was up to date with the .NET Framework (v3.5 SP1 required), I install the program which takes an amazingly long time when compared to the relatively small file size of the install program. After finally installing, the taskbar shows the “sobee Login” window but… no window. Nothing, anywhere. I check behind other windows, I try to Minimize All (that trick sometimes reveals otherwise-hidden applications), nothing. I open Task Manager and find one application and one process running. If I try and “Switch To” the application, TaskMan minimizes itself. Oooookay. I write to their info@ email address which they indicate in their FAQ you should email if you have trouble - I got a fairly prompt response, the first of which was roughly “that’s strange - we are trying hard to clear up any and all bugs, but we’ve never heard of this one”. 15 minutes later I received a second reply stating they had released a new installer to the website which should solve my problem. Interesting. I uninstall, re-download, re-install (again, a painfully slow process; I’m really not sure what this installer does), and still have the same errors. Uninstall and give up.

Computer #2, running Vista. .NET Framework is up to date, download installer, install (still slow), woohoo I have a login screen! I sign in and am greeted with a bar which takes over the entire top of my monitor - which wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if it had just resized the rest of the viewport for me. Having the application on top of my browser tabs in Chrome isn’t really what I would call convenient. That aside, I try and start configuring the connections to my social networks. The Facebook profile seems confused, as it only asks for my username but no password - same for Youtube. Friendfeed, stangely, does ask for both. Regardless as I try and connect with my profiles the entire program seized on itself and I had to mercy kill the application just so I could get my computer to respond again. Start the program up after checking TaskMan to ensure that no processes associated with sobees were running, and I get both the login screen AND a popup which warns another copy of the application is already running and the one I just tried to start would be shut down. Um, ok then. After logging back in, I try and set up my profiles again. Another seize, another TaskMan kill, and I’m back to reinstalling the application.

Unfortunate since the idea had a lot of promise, but wait - in my Googling I came across an application called 8hands. (Who knew there was a bona-fide market for cross-social-network applications?) From their website…

8hands is a service for the social networks users that want to always stay in the know but don’t want to waste too much time on checking their blogs and profiles. The 8hands Desktop application will organize all your social networks into one place and notify you upon new events.

Sounds pretty similar, so let’s give this one a go. Install goes well enough, and on starting the application I am asked for the account credentials to any of the networks I wish to connect to, any RSS feeds I want to subscribe to, etc. After entering it all the program enters a lengthy initial sync process - to paraphrase the message in the program, “Grabbing all your info - this could take a few minutes. Want a sandwich?” Once it was done I was connected and it began to pull data from messages and wall posts on my Facebook account, as well as comments on a YouTube video I had posted, from the past 30 days. I thought that was a little much (do I really need the last MONTH?) but it wasn’t the end of the world.

Then came to playing with the app. Admittedly my primary focus was on Facebook since that’s the “big one” in my opinion. It is really neat that you can see your friends from FB, and post to their walls right from the application. You can also post on your OWN wall from the application - do people actually do this? I comment on my own postings, but a wall post to yourself? That aside, everything seemed pretty slick other than missing out on some data from the main “Feed” page - I would get notifications in 8hands about some things but not others. Perhaps this has something to do with their supposedly-super-special-uber-cool-ultra-l337 algorithm which tells you specifically WHICH of your friends, across all of your networks, are your “best friends” who interact with you the most and you only get info on those people, but I didn’t play with the feature enough to find out. What I DID notice, however, was that certain things (like viewing more info on a particular friend) required me to actually go to FB in my browser - I could tell because I would click on a link in the program and suddenly my browser opened a new tab for the link.

The problem here is not the separation between the program and added functionality, but the fact that Facebook will log you out in one location if you log in from another. Let me elaborate… If you happen to be logged into Facebook in, say, Firefox, and then open 8hands, Facebook will say “hey, you just logged in somewhere else, I’m going to log out that first user”, which will render your session within Firefox moot. If you click on something in 8hands to go to Facebook, this means you will NEVER be logged in - unless you have “remember me” checked off, you are going to need to re-enter your credentials every time. The worst part is that while surfing Facebook, 8hands may cycle back around to ask Facebook once again if there any any updates that you should know about. Guess what happens in your browser when 8hands does this? Ding-ding-ding.

Overall I liked 8hands - certainly it was miles ahead of sobees in my opinion since I could actually get the program to run. (Also, 8hands continually spells their own name correctly on their website. I’m not one to make fun of people when English is not their first language, so I won’t pick on translation and grammar errors from the sobees crew: BUT, when you have “download sobess” on your own download page of your site? Poor form, guys) The interface in 8hands was a little more Instant-Messager-like, which was slightly more palatable than the “take over your machine” feeling I got from sobees, and any time a new update occurred in one of your networks you would see the small box pop up just above your system tray letting you know what was going on, just as if you’d received a new IM in MSN Messenger or new mail in Outlook. That said, it seems the concept is still just a little too unformed and the software just a little too early in its infancy for me to really recommend with any strength. It’s interesting to poke around in but for now I’ll stick with manually checking my sites, thanks.

I would be interested to see how the 8hands Mobile application works for cell phones, but alas my phone isn’t supported. Anyone out there feel like giving it a shot and letting me know what they think?

Long story short - after being gifted a 5×5x5 rubik’s cube, I decided to buy myself a 3×3x3 (standard size) cube since I never knew how to solve one. In less than 48 hours, and after a LOT of time spent reading tutorials online and watching YouTube videos and Googling, I had finally learned the cube well enough to solve it without using any cheat-sheets. Unfortunately, despite some excellent resources that are out there I still had some trouble learning how to solve it due to two primary factors: #1, there are a LOT of different “Beginner’s Methods” out there. Finding one that made sense to me and was explained well was a personal challenge. #2, most Beginner’s Methods that are out there are written by very experienced cubers. That’s great for getting some in-depth explanations on certain portions of the solve, but I found it was also a detriment in some ways because these cubers didn’t seem to grasp anymore what it meant to be a “beginner” cuber. 

Another thing I felt that most tutorials lacked was the explanation that you should really, honestly, truly WATCH what you are doing when attempting to learn how to solve the cube. Personally, I don’t learn well by seeing R U R’ written down and say “oh, ok, no problem”. I need to see that move in action on the cube, and even if I don’t fully comprehend what exactly is happening, I can see what is happening which helps my brain remember what my hands should be doing so that my eyes see the same thing next time. 

I also ran into a few cases where the person explaining the solve either underestimated the person wanting to learn to solve the cube, or greatly overestimated them. “This algorithm should be real easy for you to learn, it’s only 18 moves long.” Oye. Or, the flip side of that coin was “Try this algorithm to do what you need to do next. Depending on the state of your cube you may need to do this 1, 3, 5, or 39 times in order to get the cube to look like what you want”. (I may have slightly exaggerated that, but the point stands). What I would prefer, myself, in a Beginner’s Method is to be given some basic instructions on what I should be looking to accomplish, what I should do in order to reach that goal, and be given not only an explanation of what is happening when I do that but also be presented with one or two alternatives saying “hey, if the first thing isn’t working for you, maybe this will help instead”. To me that seems like a fairly basic teaching method which would help a lot of newer cubers. 

Before I do start into my own ideas on what may help beginning cubers on their way to solving the cube, I do want to give credit to the two primary places online which helped me as I learned how solve the cube myself.

CubeStation - http://www.cubestation.co.uk/ - DanH has a lot of great information on here for beginning cubers and is probably the most well-thought-out tutorial that I found. The Java applets also really help for watching some of the algorithms in action for when you’re unclear on what exactly the notation in the algorithm means you should do. 

Badmephisto on YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/user/badmephisto - A personal hero of mine for making extremely well-made video tutorials for many aspects of solving the cube, including a great 3-part series for beginners as well as more advanced concepts for once you start to get more comfortable with the cube such as intuitive F2L (if you decide to learn the Fridrich method later), advanced cross techniques, commutators, and more. 

So anyway, that all said and done I suppose without an further adieu I present my effort at teaching others how to solve the Rubik’s Cube. 

update 3/3/09: this series of blog entries is actually going to become separate pages within the site to accomodate the addition of some Java applets to help illustrate the points. This post will be updated when the entry point to the series has been created. I do know of at least two of you who have been actively asking where this tutorial is, and all I can say is “soon”.