Archive for October, 2007
Prosper
Posted by SimianLogic in Uncategorized on 10/31/2007
I’m not much of a blog-reader myself, though I’ve been trying to get into the habit of it for work purposes (gotta keep an eye out for competition!). One that I’ve started reading pretty often is Lazy Man & Money. Like the author, I’m lazy. And I like money. Today he was talking about something I hadn’t heard of: Prosper. The site (and concept behind it) is really interesting to me, because I proposed the exact same thing to my accountant dad as a business idea almost three years ago (I don’t know how long they’ve been around). His response was, “Nah, that would never work.”
I’m glad to see that someone thought it would work. The interface is pretty clunky, and they were asking me for bank account details before they even really told me how the site works (which has got to turn a lot of people off…). I filled everything in just to see what kind of interest rates I might expect… they gave me a B grade, which isn’t so bad. Most of my credit card debt is sitting at a fixed 9.9% from a balance transfer, so I wouldn’t be doing any better by using their estimated 12-13% for a small loan. I’ve still got around $2000 on an 18% card, though, but I’m not entirely sure I want to bother with setting up yet another “credit” source to pay it off (especially since I’m planning on having it paid down in a few months anyway).
It’s a cool idea, though. I remember seeing something awhile back where individuals could fund small business loans to third-world entrepreneurs (where $250 might be enough to start a business). Prosper strikes me as the free-market, 1st-world version of that. The thing seems most useful for small amounts, though (like: “I need $500 to fix my car.”). I wonder if anyone is using it for small business loans, or if that would need an entirely different setup.
First Earthquake
Posted by SimianLogic in blog on 10/30/2007
I just experineced my first conscious earthquake since moving to California. It seemed pretty mild… I think it’s pretty cool that the USGS had an almost instant feedback system with maps and data (this link). I wonder how long they’ve had that sort of functionality… the USGS might’ve been one of the first really interesting data-driven mapping applications. Their map is organized by zip code, sadly, and you can’t zoom or pan at all. This seems like the sort of thing Google would jump all over… I wonder why they haven’t made an earthquakes map yet (although I did find a link to some Google Earth add-ons for recent earthquake data).
YUI Not-Tabs
Posted by SimianLogic in Uncategorized on 10/30/2007
Unfortunately, the Flex RTE has been back-burnered for a bit while I work on more pressing things at work. I’m currently using YUI’s tabs for something, but don’t really like them… So I’ve been tinkering around with an alternate tab-like interface. The concept is somewhere in between tabs and an accordion structure. Basically, we’ve got lots of text boxes. Rather than make our users choose which one they want to display, I want all of them to start out in a blog-like “preview” mode. Clicking “more” would expand that one box while shrinking the others. Clicking “back” (or an icon) would take you back to the multiple-pane view. I guess this is more of a tree-like data structure than true tabs or accordians. Read the rest of this entry »
Flex RTE Part 2: Faking mouse:hover
Posted by SimianLogic in Uncategorized on 10/22/2007
Before getting into the meat of my post, I suppose it’s all right to now mention that I’m working at a site called Piqqem. As of last week we’re no longer officially in “stealth,” but we’re not quite ready to go into full-on publicity-seeking mode yet, either. The RTE code I’ve been working on is for our “Piqqem Notes,” a wiki like section for all of the stocks we cover.
See also: Flex RTE Part 1: Link Buttons
I’ve actually skipped an installment on converting real HTML to what flash considers HTML and converting the gobbledy-gook that flash considers “HTML” into real-world-usable HTML. This installment, though, (mostly) fixes one of the more annoying features of the Flex Rich Text Editor control. The new code hasn’t yet been integrated into my code from Part 1, just in case someone wants to see the “simple” example.
The Flex CSS support actually covers a:hover, but there’s no way to use CSS with an editable TextField, which means the RichTextEditor control doesn’t inherently support mouse hover states. The only indicator you get that you’re mousing over a link is a hand cursor–but there’s no built-in way to see where that link points to. Read the rest of this entry »
NY Times for the Win
Posted by SimianLogic in Uncategorized on 10/19/2007
I was reading an article over on the New York Times website and accidentally stumbled on one of the coolest features I’ve seen on a website. In the body of the article, you can double-click on any word and a definition will pop up–anything from “science” to “Web 2.0″ to “bubble.” This is the kind of feature that really isn’t necessary for all sites… or even most sites. But for something like the New York Times, which probably has a pretty decent foreign readership–or really any “information source,” I just think it’s a fantastic idea.
More Fun With Credit Cards
Posted by SimianLogic in Uncategorized on 10/16/2007
Just when I think I’m getting the hang of the whole credit card thing…
Back in June, I got a Circuit City card (well, really it’s a Chase Card) for a promotional purchase (an HDTV). Knowing full well that most cards apply payments to promotional balances instead of interest-carrying balances, I wanted to do some checking before ever using the card on a “normal” purchase. If the repayment order stood, my plan was to never use the card again (at least until the promotional period ended in January of 2009). So, before making my first payment, I gave the Chase customer service a call. Read the rest of this entry »
Flex RTE Part 1: Link Buttons
Posted by SimianLogic in Uncategorized on 10/05/2007
In this post earlier this week, I set out the project goal of making the Flex Rich Text Editor control a little more user-friendly. Here’s the first bit. I’ve removed the old add link textField completely and replaced it with two new buttons: “Add Link” and “Remove Link.” Read the rest of this entry »
Not quite 5-a-week.
Posted by SimianLogic in Uncategorized on 10/03/2007
I drove in to work today, meaning that I won’t have biked in every day this week. I did this for a few good reasons, though:
- I needed to drop my girlfriend off at the train station (at least one of us took eco-friendly transportation to work).
- My legs were pretty tired last night.
- I wanted to have enough energy to go rock climbing after work.
Even 3/5 (not sure what I’m going to be doing Friday) seems like an awfully good start, though.
Business Reply Mail (ouch)
Posted by SimianLogic in Uncategorized on 10/02/2007
One of my cockamamy schemes that I’ve been working on involves distributing lots of pre-paid envelopes to people who probably aren’t going to bother responding. Just out of curiosity, I thought it would be cool into getting some of those business reply envelopes so that I’d only have to pay for the ones that get sent back. The long and short if it is that the finances involved are a little nuts. Read the rest of this entry »
Flex RTE and the obscure getTextField() function
Posted by SimianLogic in Uncategorized on 10/02/2007
Because of issues with the YUI Rich Text Editor, I’ve convinced the bosses that we should use a modified version of the flex RTE control. Though flex has some weird htmlText quirks, the subset of HTML it renders (bold, italic, underline, font sizes/colors, and a few more) are almost exactly the subset of HTML we want our users to have access to. The downside is that the built-in RTE also uses a bunch of markup which is completely bogus, so I’ll have to do some regexp replacements to get it to spit out actually-usable HTML. These are the modifications that I’ll (hopefully) be making: Read the rest of this entry »