Batch IP Locator - Beta!

I've been looking for a service to geocode a list of IP addresses for awhile now, but to no avail. Well, for free anyway.

I just launched my version of a Batch IP Locator this morning, it will locate a list of IP address, returning the country, city and latitude/longitude coordinates. I'm hoping to fill a hole.

Years ago, I ran into "Map Multiple Locations" which opened my eyes to the power of data plotted on a map. As cheesy as it sounds, it was really a defining moment in my life (I am starting grad school on Monday, in Geography, after all). I hope to provide a similar service.

This beta is barebones for now. There is much in store (mapping integration, JSON output for ajax calls, etc), but for now I just have to settle with I've got.

Design inspirations

I've had some positive feedback regarding the redesign (many thanks to my wife who is full of patience and kind words even when she wishes her husband would spend time with her instead of the computer :) so here's my reply.

I don't do designs for hire, yet anyway. haha I'm just starting school again so time is limited, but I think it would be fun to do a little project once in awhile. Let me know what you've got in mind and maybe I can point out possible ways to achieve it.

For those of you thinking about web design but maybe "dragging your feet," here's some inspiration:

• Best of CSS Design 2008: The websites we use everyday seldom invoke an emotional response deep within out heart. Here are 50 that did for me late last year. Especially true for Viget Inspire (just beautiful!), Carrot Creative (smooth use of jQuery navigation) and Nine Lion Design (dark texture, bold contrast and warm ambiance)
• Nature Inspired Painted Background: This was the tutorial that got me "painting" again (see my attempt above) and generally interested in art once more, this time in the digital sphere.
• 17 Techniques for Creating Designs Inspired by Nature: Interestingly enough, I started looking into my designer feeds (I subscribe to 15 rss feeds on design that provide constant inspiration) and found this article, posted one day after my redesign launch, that outlines many of the principles I used this time around. It's a great starting point for someone who's thinking about being interested in learning more about maybe playing around with design :), especially if you're into nature photography.
• Web Style Guide 3: This book (yes, the entire text of the book in available for free online) is for those who already have design experience, but are looking into web standards and SEO and creating complex corporate websites. It takes a very conservative approach to web design, but is a good anchor and balance when your design needs to meet usability and interaction halfway.

A year ago, my wife started getting into food blogs, and I was blown away at how vastly enormous the food blog network is and how I had never seen a glimpse of it until then. Design blogs are the same - it's a whole new world out there and once you're in, you're in for good. Life just becomes one big design.

xanghe redesign! (yes, again)

It started out as a sketch. I was bored at the fair so I scribbled up a little scene I had in my mind. That night I scanned it and played around with it in Inkscape and then the GIMP. That was last Wednesday. The 6 following days have been pretty much wasted with me in front of the computer, but I have to say, this is my favorite design yet.

Enjoy. I promised my wife I this one would last at least a year.

Still Learning

The jasmine and bougainvillea I bonsai-ed are coming along beautifully. I think I prefer smaller trees. That has nothing to do with this post, though.

I'm still learning from my parents. I saw two characteristics over this past weekend that I guess I've always known, but for some reason hit me with more force this time.

My mom is an optimist. Not the blind kind, but the kind that takes lemons and makes lemonade. The active kind that pursues good out of the "bad." She's facing serious tests right now, mainly dealing with uncertainty and personal challenges, but she doesn't break. She calls them "opportunities" and "the perfect chance to prove what I've been believing."

This picture was taken 30 mins after getting out of the car, arriving home from a 3-day camping trip in the Uintahs. We had driven ("He" had driven, rather) for 4 hours to get home and everyone was very tired. It was 90ish degrees outside. I sat inside the air-conditioned house drinking water and eating cookies, thinking how it was so nice to be able to rest, when I looked out the window to see dad watering the garden (this is after he put away all the camping gear). Then I remembered that before our camping trip, he had been camping with the scouts for the week before that, and he had been the hiking advisor so did a total of 50+ miles hiking with little boys over the course of 4 days. Then I remembered that before that he went with a friend to climb Lone Peak - backpack in 7 miles, then climb the 700-foot vertical face of the peak. I recalled him saying that over the past 10 day period he had showered twice, even after all that physical exertion. He wasn't resting in his room or showering under cool water or even eating cookies before dinner... he was outside watering the garden, and teaching me something about priorities and work ethic.

Needless to say, my parents raised me well and are still teaching me by example the things that I should do. I guess no matter how old I am, I will always keep learning if I but keep my eyes open.

Google Money Master: The art of designing web scams

"Google Money Master" - sounds cool, huh? And $5000 a month from home (working only 10 hours a week!) doesn't sound bad either. Oh, and this author is from Orange County, too! Great, where do I sign up? Obviously these underlined, blue words are links, so I'll click on one of these. Uh oh, this new page looks like a scam... but Mike Richardson from Orange County said it's legit!

Haha, that's what went through my mind this morning when I hopped on the article from the "Los Angeles Tribune" about a way to make $5000 a month. After sheepishly collecting my wits upon realizing that I had been scammed (no I didn't sign up), I turned back to the page to find out how I was so easily deceived. I looks like scammers (yes, those people capitalizing on unemployed people) are listening in web design class. Here are some ridiculously true principals that I should have caught off the bat, but that seem to catch me (us?) every time:

• 

  Localization

  First and foremost, the scammers localize the content. The page was created in PHP, which means everytime it's served from the host, it can look at your whereabouts and figure out where you're located at the time of viewing. Mine says "Orange , CA" (notice the extra space after "Orange" - a sign of hasty coding) in two places. And the "Los Angeles Tribune" is not a real newspaper... I'm sure if you're in Houston it will say the "Houston Tribune." We are prone to believe something if it's happening in our back yard.



• Content

  They employed typical hoax content, using a fictitious name, realistic circumstances and a reputable entity (usually a media outlet or law enforcer, this time it's Google). It gives us a creditable source, or at least uses words that seem creditable. It even gives his email: "Tom Chilton@www.Financial-Weekly.com" - It's the first time I've seen "www." in an email's domain. lol This scam even holds true to form in its grammar - poor.



• Layout

  photo from Web Style Guide
  Here's my favorite part. We as web surfers behave very differently in many situations, but in some ways we act exactly the same. Like how we scan documents. As the images above illustrate, our eyes spend a lot of time at the top-left area of the page, and the scammers capitalize on that. The bold, alluring title, the photo of a young work-at-home millionaire... look at the little social networking icons! Looks just like the real thing.



• Reader Feeback

  At the bottom of the page, as all news articles or blogs should, we see a bunch of user comments. Some are skeptical, some affirm our hope that Google will truly send us a check within 48 hours of signing up. What better way to include non-obtrusive peer pressure! Notice the date of the comments happen to be before the "Created At" date, and they all were posted at the same time. And "Created At?" Is that English?



• Functionality

  No no, this is actually my favorite part. Click on the news tabs at the top. Go ahead and login, or post a comment. Or reply to a comment or favorite it, or hover over anything that we web surfers know so well to be links or functional buttons. No little pointy hand, no subtle animation. Not a single link on the entire page, except the handful they want you to click that lead to their trap homepage. Ha! This should have been the first warning that this was a fishy site, but just like a skilled magician, they distract you from what they're really doing by directing your attention to a little trick.

And so it goes. The hoaxes are still hoaxing people. Especially when we are in a financial rut. Hopefully we can take a look at this page and laugh, then take a deeper look at what other imitations are designed specifically to deceive us. When designed well enough, we may just scan our way into a trap without even knowing.

Google Money Master: a bona fide folk tale. Pass it on. ;)

Oregon road trip 2009

After plans to go to Vietnam, the Mediterranean or Belizé, we ended up going to Oregon. It was a very close second.

I finally got the pictures uploaded. Come take our road trip with us... from the comfort of your own chair!

Oregon Road Trip Pictures

4th of July Fun

070905_UtahFamily02, originally uploaded by xanghe.

Haha, I found this picture the other day. I don't know why we used eclairs but hey, it worked. That's Ty in the background.

Here's the zoomed in version - looks even better!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/xanghe/3600013123/sizes/o/

Life and Death - the Sudden Paradox

This week has thrown me into a fit of thoughts, all racing through my head at once. Life, death, and the time in between are so closely related, intertwined in one fluid motion that neither constantly moves nor abruptly halts, but always carries away the old in the ebb and always brings in the new with the flow.

I spent the first three days of this week with an 83-year-old man in a hospital bed. He has lived a long life and has fulfilled the temporary needs of his family to the best of his ability. His memories are sharp and on occasion come hurling out of his mouth from somewhere before the war, if he can remember them. Many of his peers have moved beyond this life, but he only flirts with the invitation. This time in the form of an inguinal hernia, but there will surely be others. I wonder how he holds himself together, all 8 decades of him in that frail frame that shuffles when it walks. To him death seems natural, something that we never bring up just like we never bring up the sunset, only when it's spectacular but not just because we feel it coming. Of course the sun will set; that's just natural.

The next day I found myself in the company of an old friend whom I had not seen for years. He's married now and has a child, a little boy who cooed for us but cries for his mom. To feel his little weight in my arms and look into his bright eyes, I felt the newness of life, a light that had just been lit. Not like turning on a flashlight with year-old batteries or switching the light on in the bathroom at midnight, but like a brand new star that was just formed in the black emptiness of space by a great explosion of light and heat and power. Yes, I felt a power in that child. To him life seems natural, it's embedded in his veins and nerves and in every reflex and instinct in his body. Of course his star will shine; that's just natural.

The weekend finds me sitting in the emergency room with a man whose life dangled from a thread. It was nothing but the hand of God that plucked him from the furnace and left him breathing gently on the bed, waiting for sleep and a rest from the terrible night. I watch him looking at the ceiling and I wonder how life and death can come so close in a man of his age. The setting sun that seems so natural to the old and the morning light that radiates from the young met in a paradoxical dance in this man and left me reeling in their burning wake.

He's fine now, just as the 83-year-old and the baby, but I am left ruminating. How am I to comprehend this breach of the quintessential dichotomy? It leads me to ponder the significance of the relationship between spiritual life and death, the proximity of our souls with our Maker. I think this will take some time to mull over and study before I can put the pieces back together. In the meantime, I'll try going to bed before midnight.

Inglewood Earthquake: A Reminder to ShakeOut!

Here's an email I received about the earthquake yesterday.  Let's all do as we've been reminded to do time after time and prepare for this kind of stuff.  Read the comparison of yesterday's quake and what a 6 or 7 magnitude quake would mean.  That's scary.  

View the email in your browser.

The Journey IS the Destination

Masters in Urban and Regional Planning This is the program I will be applying for next year to take that first step (FINALLY!) towards pursuing a career. The last time I wrote about this subject, I mentioned that I was leaning towards Environmental Science and Public Policy. Well, I left it at that and didn't delve into the deep history behind that decision. It all started on a dark and stormy night...

I realized early last year that my aspirations to pursue public administration would not lead to a satisfying career for me. Two important follies became evident: 1) I based my decision of Public Admin on the fact that I didn't want to take the GRE and wanted to pursue a grad program that would accept me as-is with my meager background in the Humanities; and 2) even though I tried to avoid sitting at a computer all day by pursuing community outreach instead of computer graphics, I now had a job in community outreach but I spent the day sitting at a computer doing graphic design (among other things). It became clear that I had fallen into the rut of basing my decisions on what I didn't want instead of did want. I realized that the more I didn't want things, the more they seemed to gravitate to me. So, I quit that. My criteria for finding a career changed to what I think I want to do with the rest of my life instead of what I want to avoid. This was a big step for me; remaining in that state could have been disastrous.

So I turned to Civil Engineering. I could still work as a public servant (I like working for the government) but I would be able to build things (something I've liked since I was a child). After a few weeks in that direction, I concluded that I would have to re-graduate with a degree in math or science to even dare apply for grad school, so I turned again. This time it was towards Environmental Science (see previous post). A few weeks later, I turned again to Geography, which emphasized more of the spatial relationship between people and the surrounding landscape. This meant a strong emphasis on mapping technology and GIS, which had become a favorite of mine as I built custom mapping applications at my current job. I applied for this program (twice!) and even enrolled in some deficiency classes, but it all hit the fan when the May 19^th election emerged because finals were on May 19^th. Awesome. So I watched another semester pass by eyes. Now, I'm glad I did.

One morning a few weeks back, I woke up remembering a grad program I had happened upon two years ago at my alma mater called Urban and Regional Planning. I had looked into the program then, but turned away when I saw that they required a GRE score (I didn't want that, remember?) Now, I revisited the possibility of returning to my school to continue my education in the grad program there. It felt good. I wanted it. It's the first time in the last two years that I've felt a genuine desire and motivation to jump back into school. I took that as a sign and contacted the grad advisor there. I missed the deadline for 2009 (what?!) so the earliest I can start is Fall 2010. Ugh. A full year and a half away. As disappointed as I was, I still didn't feel deterred. So that's that. I've found my direction. MURP. What a great acronym to represent my new life.

Ok, that's the just history, here's the moral. A few days ago I all-of-a-sudden recalled a conversation I had with my mom right before I left for Southern California. I had just returned from my missionary service and was ready to take on the world. We were sitting on the lawn at night, I think it was the night before I left.

"So what do you want to do? What's your plan?"
"I don't know yet. I want to help people, not sit at a computer all day."
"So what are you going to do?"
"... I want to make a better environment for people, to make neighborhoods and communities for people who can't afford it now."
"You mean multi-use housing?"
"Sure, whatever that is."

I replayed the memory a few times for nostalgia's sake, then it hit me. What did I say to my mom? I want to make neighborhoods and communities? Like developing housing tracts? Like ... urban planning?? I remember not knowing exactly how to articulate my plans back then, but I knew what I wanted and as I tried to put it into words it felt good. It felt like that was the direction I needed to take. That night, it was as if God gave me a glimpse of my future, albeit that I didn't know how to interpret it. And the next morning (maybe because I woke up at 2:00am to commence my 700-mile trip in my 1991 Eclipse) I completely forgot the experience. Whatever foresight I had gained that night was now gone and it was as if I had never received it. Interesting.

Now, six years almost to the day since our conversation, I am pursuing Urban and Regional Planning and it feels good. Again. Six years that started as care-free, blissful schooling that taught me a lot about life (and my soon-to-be wife :) but nothing about practical work skills, and that ended with frustrating phone calls, discouraging stand-stills, and long nights full of unanswered questions. Six years later, and I'm back to the beginning. I've finally come around to what God intended for me to do. I don't regret the last six years and I don't mourn over the fact that I could be well on my way in my profession instead of a year away from even starting, but I do find it intriguing that I've journeyed for so long, and now that I'm here, I realize that I knew it all along. I thought I was looking for the destination, but I wasn't because I already knew where it was. I was made to journey (through the wilderness?) because I still had things to learn before "arriving." The real destination lies in the journey itself. It's the knowledge we gain along the way that concludes our journey. And my journey, at least this phase, has come to an end. I'm finally calm about this decision and I'm determined in this direction.

It's really a microcosm for life. I just got back from my aunt-in-law's funeral, and as I chanted along with the monk, I thought about how she was now with her husband who passed on three years ago. She had returned to the place from whence she had come, but now with knowledge and experience that only a lifetime on earth can provide. Before we are born, I'm sure we are debriefed on our earth life and what we need to do and where we need to end up. Then we're born as a baby and forget it all. We start anew. It's only was we inch our way through life that we start to see glimpses of our true potential and final destination. And as we pass through the veil between life and death, I'm sure we'll say to ourselves, much like I did upon remembering my conversation with my mom, "Duh, I knew this."  But we will finally be able to arrive at our destination, only because we had "arrived" gradually by accumulating truth and experience as we made the journey.