Over the last week I have been using MoneyWell for managing my income to setup a budget. I will be taking a few weeks or months to review the product on my end, taking notes of what I like and dislike.

Once I am done reviewing the application I plan to write a pretty lengthly review on the site. If you will be in the market for software like this keep checking back over the next month or so for my review.

What I can say right now at this moment is that I like the software so far. I am still early in the stage of entering transactions as they come up so I am sure I will run into some issues or even a feature that I really like. I was going to work with the beta version that they have out however I do not think it will work with my bank account because it is a Chase Pay Card and not a “typical” bank account.

Anyway stay tuned….

Many of us spend quite a bit of our days searching the web either using Google, Yahoo or some other search engine.  These search engines make billions of dollars every year through advertising in your search results.  Why not do something so that you can benefit too?  Scour.com is a search engine that will return results from Google, Yahoo and MSN.  I am sure that in the future they will expand what engines they include in the results.  The best part is there is a points reward system for your searching.  The more points you earn the more money you can make.  While it takes a while to build up the points to get a reward why not take the time since you do searching anyway?

So how do you earn points and just how many points does it take to get a reward?  Well everytime you run a search you will earn 1 point.  If you rate a search result positive or negative you will earn 2 points.  You can earn 3 points by leaving a comment about a particular result that you found to be good or bad.  The more points you rack up the better so the more active you are on Scour.com the better.  Now it does take 6,500 points just to get a $25 gift card but what other search engine would give you this?

Another good thing is that for every person you invite you earn 25% of the points they earn as well.  You will both collect points.  The more people you invite the faster your points will build up.  Be sure to go over to Scour.com and check out what they have to offer.  They have a nice UI which shows the rankings of the results on Google, Yahoo and MSN so you can always see where the results rank with the engines.  Since I always use Google I think I will be using Scour.com from now on.  I get the same results and can even be rewarded for doing my searches.  Why didn’t Google start this themselves?

As you may or may not know I have recently been getting into Mac Development. I have been going through the new Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X (3rd Ed.) by Aaron Hillegass. It is an extremely useful book and I believe it is also used as the textbook for the Cocoa Bootcamp course they hold at the Big Nerd Ranch. I have wanted to take this course however the costs of the course are out of my reach. I have been going through the book at a slow pace trying to understand everything it has to offer. I have asked questions on forums, IRC chat and mailing lists to answer things that I could not figure out.

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If you do quite a bit of web development there is a nice FireFox plug-in that can help show you which CSS selectors are not in use. This can be handy when you are working on cleaning up a site from an old layout and want to reduce just how much garbage code that is left over from the old design. Dust Me Selectors was just updated to support FireFox 3 which if you have not updated yet I urge you to.

There are a lot of blogs on the internet and most of them will have all of the social networking badges. As a webmaster wouldn’t it be nice to know what social networks your visitors frequent so that you could show only the appropriate badges?

Website developer Aza Raskin has come up with a simple JavaScript solution. It is a small javascript that will create a list of links in an iframe and then decide which site a visitor has been to based on the link color. When you visit sites on the web the links change colors to let you know that the link has been visited. This little javascript will return a list of sites that have been matched as visited. Now this is not a fool proof way but it is the best way currently. There are a few catches. The user has to have JavaScript enabled in their browser. It also only goes based on the browser history so if they clear their history often it won’t pick-up on this.

I am going to look into integrating this into my site maybe in a wordpress plug-in so that I can show only the relevant badges to my visitors. Obviously I would have a default list of badges to show just in case the script was not able to detect any of the sites. If you would like to get the script to use on your site be sure to visit this blog post.

Over the last few days I have been reading up on CarPuters and the things you can do with them. As you might have read in my post about the CarPuter there are a lot of things you can use them for. I was reading the forums over at mp3car.com and I found this post about a Dashcam video with GPS Speed overlay. I was intrigued to find a solution that I would be able to use with the Mac Mini I plan to integrate. During my search I found a great piece of software called SecuritySpy.

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Since late 2000 I have been thinking of building a CarPuter (as they are called) however the costs were expensive. I needed to take the time to plan out how I would install the system, modify the vehicle as needed, etc. It was just more than I wanted to take on financially and time wise. Now however I am thinking about integrating one into a car I plan to buy within the next few months.

You might be wondering why in the world anyone would want to put a computer in their car.. There are many reasons, below are just a few.

• Music
• Movies
• Gaming
• GPS Integration
• Satellite Radio Integration

Just so there is no confusion I am not the first person to do this. Many people have done this so I am not engineering anything. I am simply going to follow guides that I find online and seek any assistance I may need from the community at mp3car.com, there is actually a nice post of someone installing a system into a 2005 Mazda3 which is worth taking a look at.

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Most of us can remember the days of the Nintendo first coming out on the market. The best game in the world back then was Super Mario Brothers. I remember playing this game when I was a kid. I played it so much that I was even able to beat the game using only one life and not using warp zones. I also did not just skip by everything and just run to the end. I took my time killed all the bad guys and got almost all of the secret stuff such as mushrooms that would make you big, stars, etc.

This morning I stumbled across something that I found to be really cool. A web based version of the game that was written completely in JavaScript. The uncompressed size is 35kb and the compressed version is only 14kb. Now this is not the complete game and a lot of stuff is missing however they created this as a challenge to see if it could be done solely in JavaScript and just how small they could make the file. Everything on this is done in JavaScript. They even embedded the music as base 64 encoded data into the file. All images etc are generated with JavaScript which is actually really cool. Personally I think the guys who developed this did a really good job. Be sure to try out the game. You can find it by going to their blog post.

I had no idea you could do things like this with JavaScript and it makes me want to start looking into the language. What else could you do if you can generate something like this? Do you know of other cool things like this done with JavaScript? Please feel free to share them in the comments.

Ever since the release of Leopard people have been taking the initiative to hack their Docks so that they were not using the same old dock that everyone else has been.  With the release of CandyBar 3 they have made it very easy to change the look & feel of your dock but it also allows you to change other system icons.  CandyBar 3 is not free however it has a $29 price tag.  With CandyBar you can download tons of icons and docks from the repository that they have created. Today I read about a program called Dock Library which I have not tried.  It looks like this is only for customizing your Dock so CandyBar has the upper hand with me so far.

In the same article that I found the link to Dock Library I also found a link to a site called Leopard Docks.  There are a ton of different docks for you to choose from.  You can use these docks in both applications that I have stated above.  In CandyBar you just click on the Change Dock Appearance tab and start dragging the images from finder into the appropriate spots in CandyBar.  Once you are done you can save the set as an iContainer to share with other CandyBar users.  I have created the iContainer for the Garden theme which you can download from here if you so choose.  I have to say that the best theme I have seen so far would be the Litho theme by Anthony Piraino.  You can grab Litho System from this page along with all of the extras which make it even nicer.

Leopard Docks has some nice Dock themes and Icon Factory has some nice themes to choose from.  The one thing I really wish was that there was a very large repository of full blown themes for Leopard.  Even if they were just images in a zip file I could create iContainers to use with CandyBar.  I would like to see a theme where the wallpaper, system icons, dock etc were all rolled into a theme that looked good together.  Anyone know of such a repository on the web?

When you are working with remote data feeds it will definatly impact the load time of your site.  For instance if you are using multiple curl calls to reach out to Google and Yahoo to get search results and Google takes 1 second but Yahoo takes 3 seconds it takes your application 4 seconds to load.  Now this can add up very quickly if you are making several connections.  The load time for your site becomes the total load time of all sites you are reaching out to.

What about simultaneous requests?  Well this would make sense because the load time of your application would be as long as the call that takes the longest.  In the example above the load time would be 3 seconds as opposed to 4 seconds.

Stoyan Stefanov wrote a nice article with example code showing just how to accomplish thi.  I cannot wait to give it a shot and boost the performance of my apps.  Thanks for pointing this out Stoyan.