Google Docs does Online Presentations - but no OpenOffice Impress support yet...

Tom Raftery notes that Google Docs now does online presentations. Sadly, right now, those brandishing Keynote or OpenOffice Impress presentations (.odp files) are out of luck as far as importing existing files.

I'm back teaching a college course part-time right now, and the way I've done it for the last few years is to use a Powerpoint presentation for the lecture (it's what they run on their media machines - no getting around it at the moment) and also provide printed handouts at the beginning of each class so they don't spend their time copying down notes.

But maybe this could provide an alternative means for students to get the notes. I could publish these for online viewing. Or better yet, start a free blog with links to each week's presentation viewable online using Google Docs. I've wanted to do this in the past but didn't like the idea of hosting pdf files or ppt files for download.

Also noteworthy is that they give you the option of downloading a zip file of the presentation. This file actually contains an html file and all the folders and media files so that you can view it in your browser locally (offline).

Because there doesn't seem to be a way to export the file to ppt, odp or anything editable at the moment, I'll likely end up using it just to make versions for online viewing.

To check out the simplicity of the online viewer, you can check out my Week 1 presentation right here. Be careful you don't fall asleep watching it - the first week is almost always a snoozer.

Anybody got any bright ideas on how to make use of Google's new Online Presentations?

Jottit - a potentially useful web app. Finally!

I no longer Twitter, tweet or whatever it's called these days.
Me no Jaiku.
No hablo el Facebook. (except to read the odd personal message from long lost high-school acquaintances).
Pownce (Tell me again.. why?)

But Jottit does seem to be (potentially) fun and useful. From what I can tell:

- editable pages with static addresses
- simple simple simple
- two pane text editor is fricking brilliant!! Blogger(tm) - Are you paying attention!??!
- public or private
- editing history - wiki style note-taking anyone?
- simple simple simple
- web 2.0 gradient-free
- simple simple simple!
- NOT built upon a requirement to socially network! Aaargh.. thank you!

Jotit seems potentially useful. How novel. :)

Click here to visit my baby-steppin' Jottit page.

Now there's something you don't read about every day...

Tom Raftery is using his Vista laptop more than his MacBook Pro. He supposes that the ClearType font rendering is making screen reading easier on his eyes.

The tech blogging space seems so pro-Mac / anti-Vista these days. Talk about walking around with a bullseye on your back. ;)

Google Reader finally gets search, Humber College gets Google Apps and I'm looking to ditch Powerpoint

Google Reader finally get's a search box!  Hooray!! I think that this is definitely a big deal. It will change the way I use GReader. No more going to Google's blog search or to Technorati to find posts I need to recall. It's about fricking time! :)

I start teaching again this Saturday (materials and methods of construction to architectural technologists) at Humber College. Turns out Humber has now moved to Google Apps (check it out here).

Now if only I could get away from using Powerpoint to do my weekly lectures. Sure, I do most of the setup work using OpenOffice, but I always have to double-check formatting and stuff with Powerpoint since that is what's installed on the college machines we use for presentations. You don't want to learn from someone who has fonts running off the side of the screen do you? :)

Incidentally, if you want to see a presentation ninja in action, you really should check this out (via Chris Brogan).

Opera 9.5 - Gmail Render Problem - maybe a deal-breaker?

As I posted a day or so ago, I'm now trying out the Opera 9.5 Alpha3 browser both at home and at work. The performance improvement over Firefox is noticeable for me on both Linux and XP. However I am having what might be a deal-breaker type of problem with Gmail.

Opera seems to have problems rendering the Gmail Quick Contacts display on the left hand side correctly. It only shows my name and the status drop down box, and even then, it appears cut off. I cannot see anyone else in the quick contacts display and therefore cannot launch a Gchat window for anyone in that list either. Not good.

I've figured out how to run user javascripts (ie. Greasemonkey Gmail skins) on Opera for the Gmail page, but haven't found anything that will fix the problem. I've also read about a tip to use the F12->Edit Site Preferences->Network->Mask as Firefox, but this hasn't helped either.

Anyone know of a way to fix the problem or at least provide a decent workaround?

This is definitely a deal-breaker for me. I  have Gmail up all day long and use the quick contacts list intermittently. Not having it, is a royal pain. While the exact rendering error is slightly different between XP and Linux systems, the error appears on both systems.

And I know that it is more than likely because Google hasn't implemented CSS exactly to the standards either. Opera is very standards compliant and that makes for render errors when CSS coders don't follow them correctly. Too bad the error is happening on what is probably one of the most important sites to me.

It ain't all bad news. Opera seems to just blow away Firefox in handling the recently revised Digg commenting system - it's much snappier. The FF developers should find out what Opera is doing in that respect and copy copy copy. ;)

Microsoft and OOXML - another battle to add to the list

I've been doing a little reading tonight on Microsoft's attempt to fast-track approval for it's OOXML (Office Open XML) standard by the ISO. Just trying to wade through all the anti-Microsoft rhetoric and educate myself on the issue.

Mary Jo Foley writes about Why Microsoft deserved to lose the OOXML standards vote. She does a good job of clarifying the issue for me - the proverbial layperson:

In spite of the rhetoric on both sides, Microsoft wants OOXML to gain ISO standardization so that it won’t lose out on government contracts that require “open,” standards-based products. Microsoft’s competitors don’t want Microsoft to obtain ISO standardization because they see this loss as a chance for them to finally lessen Microsoft’s 90-plus-percent market share in the desktop-productivity suite business.

I've also read a lot of comments about how Microsoft's current specification is in quite dodgy shape technically speaking. Many people are of the opinion that the standard was rushed and that it was not written with interoperability in mind at all. For some more technical criticism of MS's proposal, some people are pointing to the Danish complaint's listing (pdf document).

Now this was only a vote on fast-tracking approval of OOXML. Microsoft needed 2/3 of the votes and only received 17 out of 32 votes. But it's not necessarily the end of the story. MS can get another vote in March after it addresses technical questions posed by some of the voters. It may very well win that one. And only adding to the political drama is Microsoft's apparently unethical lobbying tactics.

With Microsoft owning so much of the commercial market share in office apps, you might doubt the importance of such an ISO standard. But then again, Redmond seems to be going to great lengths to have it go their way.

It will be interesting if they lose out in the end. They're already embattled with Google on several fronts, watching Apple hit home run after home run, trying to get to grips with an increasingly open-source world, battling Linux on the server side, and finding a few manufacturers now offering pre-installed Linux systems on the desktop...

Geez, I'm almost starting to feel bad for them...

Nahhhh. ;)

PC Envy

Kent Newsome just bought a new (and quiet) toy. Of course, I'm immediately jealous. :)

I've been pondering for the past month or so about what my next system purchase will be. I'm torn between a laptop or a desktop machine. The Dell XPS M1330 has caught my eye - no pedestrian Inspirons for this tough guy! ;) But buddy at work got a nice XPS 710 desktop system a while back and I have to say, when you pair that up with a Dell 24" LCD monitor, it's pretty damn nice too.

My current machine is still plenty usable. It's a P4-3GHz, and with running Openbox on Feisty, I'm very happy with the speed. It's very capable for most of the stuff I do. Of course extra processing power (even in the M1330 I suppose) would do me fine for encoding all those damn screencasts too. :)

So right now I'm torn between a laptop and a desktop. The laptop makes infinitely more common sense to me. And I'm not looking for a desktop replacement style laptop either. I like the 13.3" screen because I'm interested in a light, portable and capable device. We have a 17" HP laptop at work and it's a behemoth. Completely at odds with what I'm looking for (the guys at work say I'm nuts).

Another problem? I've been out of the computer buying market for quite some time and haven't paid enough attention. A T5300 or T7200 processor means almost nothing to me. And worse still, I've never owned a laptop so I'm at a loss as to what to really look for technically. One thing is for sure, it's gotta be a Dell - family discount y'know. :)

Opera 9.5 Alpha out: Very Nice - Time to Switch?

Web browser underdog Opera 9.50 Alpha 3 is up and available.

I've always liked Opera and actually used it quite a bit back in the v6 and v7 days. I've tended to use it off and on over the years. I've been playing with the latest alpha of 9.5 today after reading several Digg comments about it's rendering speed.

After visiting most of my normal sites, I have to say, it does feel very snappy. And to tell you the truth, I have not been overly impressed with Firefox since v2 debuted. It's been relatively crashy and not all that stable and quick as of late. So many times recently I've noticed that when I start Firefox, it tells me of an abnormal termination and gives me the option of returning where I left off, even though I don't remember it closing abnormally.

I think it's high time to give Opera a serious go. I'm not big on FF plugins (although the It's All Text add on is something I'd like to find an Opera equivalent for - anybody know of one?), and maybe Mozilla's developers have become a little too big for their britches. There's nothing like a little competition to light the fire.

Right now I'm just testing it out on XP here at work, but I think I'll load it up on Linux at home and make it my default browser for a little while.

Screencast 35 now glitch-free and up on YouTube

I finally got around to fixing the glitchy video by re-encoding my screencast episode 35. I also managed to upload it to YouTube although with it being over 10 minutes long, I once again had to split it up into part 1 and part 2.

The workflow was still by no means painless. There are a few things I still need to streamline, but definitely mencoder is the way to go for me.

How to dismantle a castle - brick by brick

Yesterday Earl Moore writes that he's ditching MS-Office for the Mac in favour of Neo-Office (a GPL'd Mac-tuned version of OpenOffice), then today it's announced that HP will join Dell and Lenovo in selling desktop PC's running pre-installed Linux.

I know that I don't run in the 'Redmond is great' circles, but there does seem to be a relative dearth of positivity coming via Redmond these days. Vista has no killer app or edge, Apple is going great guns, Linux is slowly eating into the mainstream and "non-proprietary", "open-ness" and "freedom" seem to be the popular themes in the tech world lately.

Perhaps the castle *is* coming down - even if it is a brick at a time.

Perspective Reflections - Inkscape Screencast

I've uploaded my latest Inkscape screencast (Episode 35). This one describes a neat method of creating reflections using a simple black to white mask. I discovered this neat trick at Nicu's great blog.

While I've made reflections using Inkscape in the past, I've always had two problems. First, if the group of objects to be reflected consisted of multiple colours, using a simple opacity gradient was quite a pain. Second, creating a realistic looking reflection for an object in perspective (particularly photos) was very difficult. The one that we use on the screencaster LCD monitor thumbnail (at the top of this post) is really faked with a white opacity gradient. The problem being that if I changed the background to anything but white, you'd suddenly see the retardedness of it all. ;)

So the mask method eliminates these two problems and makes creating reflections of more complex objects (including perspectives) much easier and more elegant.

Hope you enjoy it.

For those who care about the mechanics of screencasting, this was actually the first one that I created solely with recordmydesktop, mencoder, and Audacity - although I did use an ffmpeg one-liner to extract a screenshot for the thumbnail (anybody know how to do that with mencoder/mplayer?). I think the quality is better and the workflow is definitely easier and more logical. Big thanks to Heathenx for helping me out with this stuff.

But it wasn't completely without problem. You will notice some weird artifacting that occurs about 2 or 3 seconds into my sped-up intro. This wasn't in the original ogg capture, but occurred somewhere during the post-processing. I thought it might disappear by the end - but no such luck. ;) I've decided to leave it there for the time being and will correct it and replace the files when I can.. ie. not tonight. ;)

One other thing is that I haven't yet put this one up on YouTube. It's about 12min long, so I'm gonna have to split it up like I did with Episode 26. I'd like to do it with mencoder as well this time, so in the next couple of days I expect to have the two-parts finished and up on YouTube as well.

So post titles do matter...

Did you know that over the past month, precisely 12 people have arrived at this blog via a google search on the term 'peeing'.

The awesomely well thought out title on this post a while back is the reason.

Anyways, welcome to the site pee-ple. ;)

Slicing and Dicing mp3 files

As I've likely mentioned before, one of the things I like about my new
car is the USB port right in the front panel of the stereo. I bought a
wee little Lexar Jumpdrive Firefly recently which I keep filled with various
folders of music and podcast mp3 files. I just stick it into the
stereo and it works. It's a nice, simple, and open system - no
proprietary hardware or software interface, any usb stick and plain
mp3 file will do. Heck, it doesn't even wanna play wma files which is
a good thing too! :)

But if there is one nagging thing I don't like about it, it's that the
ffwd and rewind functions are designed for music and not podcasts. So
if I'm 45 minutes into an episode of TLLTS, and my daughter wants to listen
to the Irish Rovers, I know I'll have to ffwd through 45min of TLLTS
to get back to where I was later on. That means holding the ffwd
button for about 5 minutes - not ideal.

So naturally, what I do is make a mental note of the time elapsed
before switching to a different track and then (if I remember) I bring
the track into Audacity and cut off the first 45min of it (or whatever
the elapsed time was). Still kludgy at best.

But I've found a quicker if not less-kludgy way of doing it. If you
need to chop off the beginning, the end or some portion of a given
mpeg file (mpeg2, mp3, mpeg4), then mpgtx is your tool of choice.
Available for linux or windows, this nifty command line tool sounds
like a nice tool for quick mpeg slicing and dicing. In particular to
do what I wanted, I simply used:

mpgtx -s tllts_206.mp3 [45:00-] -b cut_tllts_206

This splits (-s) the input file (tllts_206.mp3) taking the portion
starting at 45min to the end of the file, and outputs it to
cut_tllts_206.mp3. The -b flag is for the basename.. haven't figured
out that one, but you need it there for it to work.

So in a matter of 2 or 3 seconds it chops the first 45min off of the
file and gives me a new mp3. Nice!

Doing this same thing in Audacity was a chore. It would take a minute
or so for Audacity to import the mp3, I'd chop off the front 45 min
and then have to export it back out which took another minute or so.
Then, depending on the default export bitrate, I might get a bigger
mp3 file than the original (!). So in one fell swoop I cut the process
from 3 minutes to 3 seconds. Not bad.

Incidentally, what I likely *should* do, is split up longish podcast
files into 10 minute mp3 files. So if I need to find my place I can
just click through 10minutes at a time. I figured out how to do this
back in the comments of this post. Sheesh.. if only I was half as organized and prepared as I'd like to be. :)

The Vacation Return Quick Post

Today we arrived back from a week's vacation up in Fort Irwin, Ontario. We rented a 4-bedroom cottage on a nice quiet lake and recharged the proverbial batteries.

We had family up for a few days to join the three of us, which added a little hullabaloo, but all in all it was a nice relaxing week off.

A little fishing, a lot of eating (too much as usual) and some early nights - fresh air will do that to you - felt quite good actually. And while we had satellite internet connectivity, I never really felt like browsing. Just a little email checking and the odd wistful cottage real-estate searching was all it amounted to.

And it was surprisingly easy to just delete the hundreds of unread feeds in my reader tonight. Not to worry for the chosen few (actually it's in the tens) in my close-knit feed group.. those got scanned, starred and read tonight.

A few things learned this week:

1. My daughter can cast a fishing rod! - and has no fear of slimy, squirming worms!

2. Even though neither my 5 year old daughter nor her 14 month old cousin need glasses, they both love to wear them!

3. Satellite internet and it's associated lag times pretty much sucks compared to full-on DSL.

4. My wife had never been to a county dump/landfill before. I think she was expecting some semblance of cleanliness. The big pile of rotting garbage bags and it's associated seagull party-place environment came unexpected to her.;)

5. A chipmunk can squeeze 10 unshelled peanuts into it's cheeks without so much as a sideways glance. Now if only I could do that with pizza...

6. The call of loons on the lake in the morning is indeed one of life's greatest sounds.

The relative quiet and inactivity did give me some time to both unload the claptrap I call my mind, and do a little more photography than usual. I think the biggest pressure I feel at the moment is to sort through the 250 odd photos, pick out the better ones and update my Flickr gallery. But that will sit for another few days. In the meantime, I thought I'd upload a few of them directly here:

Morning Commute Hack - Advanced Green Light Anyone?

Here's my contribution for the 'lifehacking' culture out there. And it's a little bit selfish:

It's typically heavy morning traffic and you have to make a left turn at a set of traffic lights, as you approach the intersection the lights are red for you. If you're the only one in the left hand turn lane, chances are good that little old you is NOT going to get the advanced (flashing/arrow) green light to let you go first when the light changes.

So don't pull all the way up to the intersection and wait. Instead, hang back a full car-length from the light. At many intersections, if you hang back a car length it can fool the sensors buried in the road and makes them think there is more than one car waiting to make the left. The result? It gives you the advanced green light.

I'm not going to say it works for me every time at every intersection, but it has worked on this one turn I make each workday morning for the last 4 years.

Tips:

- Check for the asphalt cutlines indicating the sensors buried in the road. You can sometimes spot where the sensor is and stop on top of it to better your chances.
- Sometimes you will spot two sensors (one close to the line and one further back) - stop on the one further back.
- If you spot a car approaching behind you, move ahead when it gets there. I hate it when people ahead of me don't pull up. Don't be annoying in the name of self-promotion.

Caveats:

- No idea if this contravenes any traffic laws.
- No idea if this works in countries other than Canada.
- Of course there are probably countless different traffic signaling systems - this works for me, you mileage (hehe) may vary.
- Don't kid yourself. You *are* being selfish. I try to convince myself that I deserve some 'reasonably small reward' for being such a courteous driver (I'm not given to fits of road rage, don't cut people off, flip people the bird, talk on the phone etc..). But alas, I'm being selfish. Maybe spreading the word about it will make me feel less guilty. ;)

One thing that Windows does better than Gnome... Heresy??

Here's my heretical post for the week:

There is one bit of functionality that I use and value while working in Windows that I miss when I'm using Gnome:

In XP, the standard File->Open or File->Save dialog box opens and I can rename, delete, copy or paste files that appear in the dialog. So for instance, if I'm saving a file and I want to rename one of the other files in that folder before I do the save, I can do it with a simple right-click to bring up the context menu.

As far as I'm aware, the standard GTK file open dialog doesn't let me do this. Of course I'm very very good at being wrong, so please let me know if I am.

Do the standard KDE open/save dialogs provide this functionality?

And is there any way to achieve similar functionality in Gnome or KDE if indeed it's not there?

The Feasibility Lingo of Engineers

Via this Usable Help blog post, comes a great article lucidly describing how to understand Engineers when it comes to feasibility.

If you want a clear and simple discussion of the terms impossible, trivial, unfeasible, non-trivial, hard, and very hard from an engineer's perspective, then you should definitely check it out.

One misunderstanding by some non-engineers is how the word 'trivial' is used. In our discussions, trivial just means that we know the solution to a specific problem. It doesn't mean that the implementation of that solution is necessarily easy. So for example, the design of a specific portion of a structure might be trivial but actually building it might be a nightmare.

It's definitely an interesting read for anyone involved with solving problems - isn't that all of us? ;)

What is it with light-duty office suites? Does anyone use them?

Earl Moore writes that the Appleworks suite has reached 'End of Life' status, and it got me to thinking. I've never owned or used a Mac or Appleworks. I wonder if it's anything like Microsoft's eternally retarded and resoundingly ignored MS-Works application suite.

MS-Works  had most if not all of the functionality that I needed in an office suite, but I always found it to be significantly incompatible with their proper 'MS-Office' suite. Now, I'm talking about when it came with my Win95 equipped system back in the day. I have neither heard nor seen mention of it to this day - although it seems via Wikipedia that it's alive and still breathing at version 9.0.

I never used it simply because I always wanted the 'pro' apps and not the crippled ones. And if you were working in MS-Office at work, then you wanted full and unmistakable compatibility at home. I always wondered who actually used it.

Mind you, I've always been against feature bloat, and everyone knows that 95% of people use 10% of the features in Word and Excel. I'm sure MS-Works would have been perfectly satisfactory for my use. I always scratched my head at why they didn't just make proper 'lite' versions of Word and Excel. I'm sure they would have sold many copies at $39.99 a pop. Instead, people pirated the entire Office Suite.

The Mac world is largely alien to me. Did (and do) Mac users actually use the Appleworks suite? Or did they flock to high-priced 'pro-level' apps instead?

Build 'em up and Knock 'em down

One sure sign that you're successful is when people are eager to start tearing you down. Witness the comments on this digg thread about some unpatched, unsecured, locally hosted - but Canonical sponsored servers that were taken off line today.  While I'm not a sysadmin, I would think that *any* operating system that is unsecured and unpatched is an incident waiting to happen.

But it's a testament to the popularity that so many people are so eager to see Ubuntu fail in any way possible. While not unexpected from Windows and Mac fanboys, it's disappointing when you see it coming from other linux users. A rising tide floats all boats does it not?

Gnome Turns 10 - as does the Gnome/KDE war

So the Gnome desktop environment turns 10 today. Of course I took a look at Miguel de Icaza's announcement post. But I found the single follow-up post to be interesting too! ;)

On Fri, 15 Aug 1997, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> We want to develop a free and complete set of user friendly
> applications and desktop tools, similar to CDE and KDE but based
> entirely on free software:

IMHO this is a knee-jerk reaction to a nonexistent problem.

Best of luck doing this with GTK... it has a long ways to catch up
with Qt.

-Dan

Clearly not only the start of Gnome, but the start of the Gnome/KDE wars too! :)

Personally, I have always ran Ubuntu with Gnome, but I run KDE and GTK apps interchangably. Besides, my new found love is OpenBox anyway!!

Here are a couple of screenshots of my current desktop setup:

Photo Printing in Linux

A recent article in LXer points out that printing photos in Linux is a nightmare. And while I can't comment on most of the apps that she's tried, I can say that I've been quite satisfied printing in the Gimp.

I recently bought a new Epson R380 printer. So new in fact that Feisty didn't have support for it. It turns out that the Gutenprint project added support for this printer as of version 5.0.1. Installing these drivers was a bit of a quagmire, but I got it done. And luckily, the next release of Ubuntu (Gutsy) will support this printer out of the box.

So contrary to the LXer author's findings, I can print photos quite happily in the Gimp. Yes, even high quality borderless ones (I've printed borderless 8x10's and 4x6's so far). Colour profiling and correction for the printer is not easy, but I have to say that with a little tweaking to lower the greens and increase the magenta levels, I've managed to get very nice colour prints. And besides, my dad has an older model Epson R300 that he uses with XP (and the Epson drivers) and his prints always end up magenta-heavy, so colour profiling is not something that's really easy on any platform - it's a feature that requires simplification everywhere - and no, getting your printed output to match your screen in Photoshop is not that easy either - definitely not easy enough.

Shattered Photo - Inkscape Screencast

I've finished another Inkscape screencast, Episode 032 to be specific. This one shows one way of creating a shattered glass effect with a photo image using Inkscape. I've uploaded a lower quality version to YouTube and of course you can find it in significantly higher quality, along with all of our other screencasts at: screencasters.heathenx.org

Hope you enjoy it and find it useful. :)

Gaming nostalgia and a possible time sinkhole...

Back in the day, I used to enjoy me the odd pc-based videogame. I was heavy into the racing sim games which varied from the high quality (Indy500 from Papyrus, Geoff Crammond's GP1,GP2 and GP3) to the very low (Bill Elliot's Nascar Challenge, and the old Road&Track Grand Prix Unlimited game - eeewww, what's that smell??).

But my pc-gaming experience extended past the racing sim genre to include a few other favourites. Two of which I've recently re-experienced using a neat utility called DosBox. DosBox is an open-source DOS emulator. Indeed, I have been using DosBox at work for some time, since it's the only way I can get a favourite old DOS-based design program running within XP. From their website:

DOSBox is a DOS-emulator that uses the SDL-library which makes DOSBox very easy to port to different platforms. DOSBox has already been ported to many different platforms, such as Windows, BeOS, Linux, MacOS X...

DOSBox also emulates CPU:286/386 realmode/protected mode, Directory FileSystem/XMS/EMS, Tandy/Hercules/CGA/EGA/VGA/VESA graphics, a SoundBlaster/Gravis Ultra Sound card for excellent sound compatibility with older games...

So locating the files for two of my absolute all-time favourites, 4D Sports Boxing and Out of this World (which was called 'Another World' in the UK), I immediately fired up DosBox, mounted the C:\ drive to a specified folder on my system and it ran them both flawlessly, sound included - just like they ran on my old 386 and P75 machines.

Out of this World is still a marvel of interesting gameplay. The theatrical intro, ultra cool background music and polygon based graphics made this one a cult hit then. It's still a great challenge to play. Think of it as Prince of Persia but much more elegant and involving. I remember spending countless hours trying to figure out solutions to the problems I faced in the game, without the benefit of Google or it's associated cheat and hint code environment.

So indeed, if you've got a hankerin' for that pc game from long ago, check out DosBox and let the retro roll!!

And if arcade gaming was also your thing (think Zaxxon, Galaga, Q-bert, Omega Race and Joust) then you could always check out the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator or Mame for short. You can find the mame site here, or if you're a linux user, check your repos, you might be a quick 'sudo apt-get install xmame-common' away from retro gaming nirvana like I was. ;)

Caution: This post holds the potential for a massive time sinkhole. You have been warned!! :)

Were you a gamer in years past? Share some of your faves in the comments.

The graphic app that will change the world!!

via Digg,

Finally! Something windows users can be proud of, and Mac users can just sit and drool over:




:)

Excuses Excuses

Too much work + not enough time = very little blogging

But in the meantime, I did find this hilarious:

A source for free comic fonts...

Among the 1001 other things I've wanted to learn more about is comic design and creation. A nice find this week was the Comic Tools Blog. Via that blog, I found a homey 90's looking website of the very experienced comic letterer Todd Klein. Lots of interesting information there.

Of course, being into Inkscape I was keen on the computerized end of things. Long story short, I ended up at the Blambot Comic Fonts and Lettering site. They sell a wide range of comic fonts, but wouldn't you know - they also offer several high quality free fonts for non-commercial use.

I'm sure experienced comic artists already know all this stuff, so for any of you aspiring web comic artists out there, you might want to check it out.

Incidentally, one of the free fonts there was called Evil Genious. Dave Slusher would be proud. ;)

ps - Come to think of it, I miss Earl's comic-captioned photos too. Where'd they go Earl?

Minneapolis Bridge Collapse

Watching the horrible news of the bridge collapse in Minneapolis. CNN is currently listing 3 fatalities. Watching the footage, I'm thinking the news will get significantly worse. :(

As a structural engineer, things like this scare the hell out of me. I'm not sure if it's naive to take the safety of our buildings and bridges for granted, or a testament to our engineering and construction know-how when we realize how few and far between failures like this are.

There are many variables that can lead to a structural failure: errors in design, errors in construction, and errors in maintenance. And make no mistake, engineers, designers and constructors are only human. And humans make errors. Let's just hope they find out what those errors were, and what we can learn from them.

Check out The GUIdebook

If you're interested in screenshots, icons and splash screens of various GUI's over the years from GeoWorks, Amiga Workbench, CDE, NextStep, BeOS, OS/2, Windows, Mac and others, check out GUIdebook.org. While the front page notes a last update of Oct/06, I still found plenty of good images, and info on the development of various GUI systems.

The navigation on the site tells me that they were planning (or maybe are still planning) to provide a very wide breadth of information on GUI's and OS's from timelines to graphics and news. There are a quite a few areas to explore, but naturally some areas are thin on information as you might expect. A nice find anyway though.

One GUI I couldn't find on the site was the old OpenWindows desktop (a piece of which is shown above). I used this desktop during graduate school for my thesis which dumped me into the deep end of C programming, make files and gcc. Nevertheless the OpenWindows desktop (and unix in general) seemed like a revelation to me at the time (just previous to the launch of Win95). Very high resolution - for that time - and a desktop capable of really multitasking made me frown when I went back to my apartment where I was running Windows 3.11 at 800x600 and bombing around the Compuserve forums using OzWin.. ;)

Google Image Labeler - Using the User

Have you ever tried out Google Image Labeler? I had never heard of it, and I'm not sure if it's new or not.

Doing a quick image search on something, I was presented with the question at the bottom of my results asking whether or not I wanted to try it. Curious, I clicked the link to find out what it was. According to their web page, Image Labeler is:

"...a new feature of Google Image Search that allows you to label random images to help improve the quality of Google's image search results."

So you get paired up with a partner and for two minutes you are shown a variety of images. As each image is presented, you (and your partner) enter plausible labels for the image. When you and your partner match up on a given label, you move on to the next picture. At the end of it, you're presented with a score and ranking.

It's no surprise to me that Google has given a neat way to help improve their search product and involve the user in the process. They don't hide the fact that yes, they are using you to improve their search. I took a few minutes out to do it and it was quite fun to see how high I could get my score. It didn't bother me in the least. How effective it is at improving their product I don't know.

[note: I'm assuming you need a google account to use Image Labeler - not entirely sure]

DIY Linux Box (literally!)

Anybody who has ever seen the Red Green show will have come to know the full potential of duct tape. If Red Green wanted a linux box, you just know he would have made it himself, and it would have looked something like this one.

[via digg]

Screencasting Workflow Mess

I was a bit overwhelmed last night putting together my last screencast. The actual recording of the screencast was done early last week and took about 25 minutes. But last night I set about getting things in order to upload things to the site and to YouTube. Needless to say the whole process was a dog's breakfast and took me several times longer than it should have.

So in order to try and get a handle on it, I've used Gliffy to do up a simple flowchart (see below) of the shameful process I used. You will plainly see that I don't know what I'm doing. But that shouldn't be news to anyone. ;)

Have a look if your interested and give me some suggestions if you see some step or process that is plainly retarded.

I'm going to try and streamline this mess so that it doesn't take me 3 hours of fiddling to get things online once I finish recording a screencast. We'll see how that goes. ;)

Device Graphic - Inkscape Screencast

Amidst the quagmire heathenx and I are calling 'Codec Hell', I did manage to get another Inkscape screencast done. This one demonstrates the use of Inkscape's guides, gradients and some shadow effects to come up with a decent looking 3D device graphic. This one is about 17 minutes long (my longest to date), so I had to split the YouTube version into two parts. Hopefully I won't lose anybody at the halfway mark. With their 10min/100MB limitation it makes screencasting about something substantial a bit of a tough one. But that's one of the reasons we started screencasters.heathenx.org. So if you want to see the whole video in one piece, and in significantly higher quality, check it out there instead.

Also, please let us know via our blog at screencasters.wordpress.com or via the comments here if you have any trouble watching the video.

New organic food logo...

The Canadian Federal Government has come up with a new logo for organic foods that have been tested and certified by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

I have nothing against organic foods or the logo, but at first glance it reminded me of the Maple Leaf Foods logo for some reason.

Even though you'd find it tough to argue that the two logos were anything but distinct, there was enough there, that as a Canadian consumer, it's the first thing I thought of. And if that feeling is widespread, it might be quite beneficial to Maple Leaf Foods Inc. in the long run. Lucky break maybe.

Police Reunion Tour - Awesome Concert

A nice last minute opportunity gave the wife and I floor seats (16th row) for the Police reunion tour concert in Toronto tonight. I'm not always a big fan of rock shows, but this was awesome awesome awesome!

Even the opening band (Fiction Plane, fronted by Sting's son Joe Sumner) was pretty darn good. He's got a very strong voice reminiscent of his father and Bono. There was a lot of young middle-agers there. And while it had its fair share of cougars and cougar-wannabes, there is something to be said for an audience who's there to sing and dance without the aggression and stupidity of youth. Not quite as friendly and nice as the beautiful James Taylor concert we went to years back, but very nice nonetheless.

The Police have always been one of my favourite bands. And I think they've stood the test of time so well because of their complete lack of schtick and the fact that their music has always been so unique and honest. Just three guys rocking out without the hairspray, pyrotechnics and gimmicks.

They played for about 90 minutes and then did two encores as well. I could have sat there just watching Stewart Copeland drum all friggin' night. What an amazing band - very very impressed.

My favourite of the night: Truth Hits Everybody (from the album Outlandos d'Amour). I hadn't heard this song for years, but it brought me right back to a 1982 trip down to Florida in the back seat of my uncle's Monte Carlo.. tape deck blaring. :)

If you get a chance to see them on this reunion tour, I highly recommend it.

Intel Onboard Graphics Performance Upgrade in 10 Seconds

I've had this desktop computer for two and a half years. I've been running Linux pretty steadily since October 2005.

Today, July 20, 2007, I figured out that I could enter the bios upon bootup and increase my onboard video card's shared ram (default 8MB) to 32MB. This took a total of about 10 seconds.

Performance is now significantly improved everywhere on my system.

I, faithful reader, am an idiot.

So if you own a pc with an Intel onboard graphics chip (mine is an i915) and it uses shared ram, do yourself a favour and check if your bios will let you increase the default amount.

Now excuse me while I go tar and feather myself.

8 Things You Didn't Know About Me

Earl Moore has tagged me to supply Eight Things Previously Unknown. They ended up being a bit wordier than expected so apologies there, but let's get down to it:

1. I eat a bowl of cereal almost every night before bed. I've done this since I was probably 5 years old. Special K - lightly sugared, is my absolute favourite.

2. Out of high school, I applied for Architecture at 3 schools. One of them accepted me, but at that time they were not fully accredited with the Ontario Architect's Association (they are now). I declined and went into engineering in Ottawa instead. The rest is (a lower paying) history. :)

3. I worked for my father's company in plumbing and pipe-fitting work for years. My first duties were answering phones, filing, and accounting/payroll ledger work starting at the tender age of 13. I moved on to actual construction work at 16. From the start I learned that an honest day's work is something to value. Since then I've always respected hard honest work much more than easy money. Spoiled son of the boss, I was not. My dad wouldn't have put up with that crap.

4. I have an older brother (2 years older). We got along well (and still do) but in a lot of ways we're as different as the day is long. He's a licensed plumber and moved out west to Edmonton several years ago. We speak about twice a year on the phone. He's a man of few words, always has been. But still we get along remarkably well. We accepted our differences long long ago.

5. My father was born in northern Italy, my Mom in Manitoba. I only ever had an Italian set of grandparents since my Mom was basically abandoned as a young teen by her family. And although some of her family is still alive, I've never met them and never care to. I think my Dad, Mom and brother went out to visit them before I was born, and we've never ever been back since - I guess that tells you how well it went. ;) Do I feel at a loss? No. Not at all. My mom has always been remarkably strong and self-sufficient. I love that. I can't speak much Italian and my Nonno and Nonna couldn't speak much English, so I never really had the typical grandparent-grandchild relationship that most others did.

6. At age 9 I was at a week long summer hockey camp. On a dare, I picked up a pay phone, dialed zero and said 'There's a bomb here..' and quickly hung up. I almost soiled myself 15 minutes later when police and fire trucks arrived to evacuate the community centre. I was never caught, and I never made another crank call again. Boy, you can be remarkably stupid at nine years of age.

7. After graduating from university, my first engineering job involved being a technical specialist for a startup company developing a new extruded concrete building product. The money was great and I had my own big office. I thought I had it made. After 4 months it turned out that the owners were trying to take the company public and were swindling shareholders in the process. It all ended for me during a shareholders meeting at a downtown hotel. I sat in the audience and was called out by the owner to tell everyone when the product testing certification was finally going to be completed. He expected me to say one month. I told the truth and said six months. I was let go shortly after. I was glad I left. The owner ended up in big trouble with the securities commission and was even sentenced to some jail time. Talk about a rude introduction into the engineering world.

8. I did all kinds of semi-embarrassing things as a kid. I learned to knit at age 5, took tap dancing lessons around age 7, accordion around age 7 or 8 too. I learned to do laundry well before 8 years of age and could cook a decent supper shortly thereafter. At around 7 years old, using one of my mother's cookbooks as a guide, I made and baked an apple pie from scratch while she napped (Mom was a shift-working emergency nurse). She told me the kitchen was an absolute disaster area but the pie tasted great. As a result of this type of upbringing, one of the things I always encourage of our daughter is self-reliance. Don't wait to be taught something if you can learn it yourself.

Now to tag 5 others to share their own 8 unknown things. Feel free to ignore if you're not into meme's or if you've done it already:

Perwari Naan

Donncha O Caoimh

David Airey

Will Simpson

Rich Burridge

My new favourite blog post...

You've got to hand it to Dave Slusher. He took all of my heightening disinterest in Web2.0, social networks and  startups and splattered it all out in one fell swoop. Bravo sir, Bravo!

Three cheers for Dave!!

iPhone's style was originally based on something else...

... the Zenith Space Command remote control from the 70's! Plink!


Wonderfully chunky, rounded-rectangle device. Friends of the family had one and I was jealous. We were still using one of those rectangular brown plastic boxes with the 20 buttons along the top (kuh-chunk!) with the wire running to the tv.

Little did I know at the time, but the Space Command remote didn't even require batteries. It worked on sound frequencies, something akin to a tuning fork. To me it was very cool. Almost like something from Space: 1999.

I wax nostalgic.. Sorry.

Nuking the Firefox Search Box and Finding a Better Way

One of the things I never use in Firefox is the search box up in the right corner. I finally figured out how to get rid of it, and it's super easy-peasy.

Thanks to this wonderful post, you just right-click a blank area on the toolbar, select customize and then drag the search box into the customize window and POOF! it's gone. Fabulous.

So how do I search? Well I go to altavista.com and then I ... er.. just joking - sadly. What I do is go to google.com the very first time and do the following:

1. Right-click the search box.
2. Choose 'Add a Keyword for this Search'
3. Name the keyword search.
4. Add a keyword. So for this one I entered 'gg'
5. Click OK.

For then on, when I want to google search something like 'favourite sandwich', I open a new tab (Ctrl-T), type 'gg favourite sandwich' in the address bar and hit 'Enter'. This launches a google search for whatever I typed after the 'gg'.

I find this feature to be infinitely useful for a variety of searches. I personally have the following keyword searches saved:

gg <search terms> - Google Search
gis <search terms> - Google Image Search
gbs <search terms> - Google BlogSearch
tn <search terms> - Technorati Search
mdb <search terms> - IMDB Search
wkp <search terms> - Wikipedia Search

If you're comfortable typing, you'll undoubtedly find this to be a real timesaver. The nice thing is that by hitting Ctrl-T to open a new tab, it plunks the cursor up in the address bar anyway - so just hit Ctrl-T, and type away people!

Problem sending large Gmail attachments.. Anybody?

On my windows box here at work, I've always had a problem sending
attachments of any significant size through Gmail. If I try to send an
email with a 150kb file, no problemo. But if I try to send something
that's say, 1.5MB, it just sits there and never sends it.

I'm connected through a LAN which runs through a proxy server
(FreeProxy) here at work, so maybe that's the problem. I don't have
any of these problems on my home machine.

I've tried increasing the dom.max_script_run_time setting in Firefox's
about:config page, but this seems to have done nothing to help me.

Anybody out there have any clues?

Quick Command Line Tip - for XP users no less

I'm always eager to shout about the benefits of the command line to whoever will listen, even if it's XP.

I had a colleague here ask me about how to get a printed out listing of files in a given directory. He was told by a friend that he could use MS-Paint to...

whoa whoa whoa.. I stopped him in his tracks. I'm sure MS-Paint is a solution for something (doubtful, but maybe), however printing out directory listings is definitely NOT it!

I showed him how, by opening up the XP command line, you could navigate to the folder in question and then just do:

dir > filelist.txt

Which of course does the 'dir' command but puts the listing into a text file of your choosing instead of displaying it. The text file I argued, was infinitely more useful than a bmp image. The only downside I told him was having to navigate to the folder you want with a series of cd commands. I demonstrated the TAB completion that XP has in its console window to aid in this regard.

However, a quick google search yielded this page, which describes a few different methods of getting a 'Open Up Command Prompt Here..' function into your right-click context menu in Windows Explorer.

Very useful! ;)

Mis-Advertised price. What would you do?

Okay, it's ethical question time again. Have I ever asked an ethical question here? Dunno. But here goes:

You go visit the Acme Co. website and notice that they're showing their rocket-powered roller skates on sale for $24.99. You're impressed, mostly because those specific skates are normally listed somewhere around $125.00.

Soon, Acme Co. realizes that the pricing shown is a mistake and erects some sort of electronic barrier to block the page. Some enthusiastic shoppers (who obviously love rocket-powered roller skates) are able to circumvent the barrier and find the incorrect listings. They place orders. Lots of orders.

Shortly thereafter, Acme issues a notice describing the mistake and offered those customers a discount. Normal orders on those mis-priced roller skates increase by 200X over the weekend.

Now would you:

A) Take the discount and be happy.

B) Accept the discount, grumble and tell Acme Co. that it should be more careful.

or,

C) Capitalize on Acme's mistake and fight - for four years -right up to the Supreme Court of Canada.


For me, it's either A) or B) depending on the situation. For a Quebec man and his dealings with Dell Inc. it's C).

There are lots of other minute but important details to the case. But it just drives me nuts when I see people try to capitalize on other people's mistakes in that way.

No, I'm no saint. I've had people undercharge me for things, and later, when I realize it, I've been pleasantly surprised. But there are many more times where someone has undercharged me and I realize it right there and then. I tell them. They appreciate it. I feel good.

Maybe I'm just hokey. Or does the idea of spending 4 years fighting for my right to capitalize on someone else's mistake sound perfectly noble to you?

Pre-Hammered Sinatra

I finally got around to watching Steve Gillmor's Bad Sinatra 1. Since I don't own an iPhone (and have no desire to), I decided I'd use the nifty program DeVeDe to burn it to a DVD and experience the full glory of Gillmor on my living room TV. With a slice of cold pizza in hand, I hit the play button and watched.

After it was over, I was pleasantly surprised that I didn't feel as though it was '38 minutes I'd never get back'. Clearly it's not polished. Hopefully it never will be. Steve still has his magic. His ability to annoy, cajole and make me chuckle has remained untainted over his months of relative silence. I'm glad.

High points? Dan Farber, definitely. Devoid of the scene-stealing, attention hungry bravado of Calacanis, Farber continues to forcefully right the apple cart that Steve is constantly trying to upset. I admire his attempts at pinning Steve down on some of the issues. Never quite successful mind you, but it's sure fun watching him try.

Other things I liked - Doc Searls of course. Pre-hammered shit and the state of VRM. Now there's a white paper for you. He made me laugh - more than a couple of times.

I wasn't impressed with a lot of the other stuff, not because it wasn't important (to someone), but it wasn't to me. If it was up to me, it would be the Steve, Dan and Doc Show all over again - there is long standing magic there I think - you can hear.. er.. see it. And just to ice the cake, put Jon Udell on speakerphone in every episode and pan away to a lovely scenic shot just as he's about to make his big point on the crackly speaker. That was classic too.

Annoyances? Damn Robert.. straighten the hat and adjust the camera if you need to. I know it's cool to be a nerd these days, but c'mon, that just couldn't be comfortable.

I'm interested to see where it goes. If it's anything like the Gang of old, I'm sure Steve has no idea where that is. ;)

Oh yeah... Note to Steve. The USB input on my new Kia's stereo, combined with my 100km daily commute says to me that audio podcasting is anything but 'dead'. I must have listened to 35 Diggnation episodes and have only ever watched two and they even have hot babes on there sometimes ;) - The power of video podcasting is not as strong as you'd like to think.

I guess the true test will be if I create an audio version of your video show and feel I'm not missing anything. Wanna pull a Diggnation and save me the work by providing an mp3 only feed too?

Didn't think so. ;)

Expanding the Dell Linux experiment...

Dell's interest in Linux is getting thicker... and Leons getting larger...

25 absolutely free Inkscape screencasts to anyone who can tell me in
the comments where the 2nd half of that line comes from... ;)

7th Son podcast now back from hiatus.. Finally!!

Almost forgot!

JC Hutchin's fabulous audio trilogy 7th Son is finally back from hiatus. Book Three: Episode Zero is now up (and looks like it was posted on July 4th).

If you're into listening to audiobooks, and you're a fan of the great action/thriller/sci-fi genre, you owe it to yourself to subscribe. I was initially pulled into listening to it via a mention on Chess Griffins' LinuxReality podcast and before long I was completely hooked. It's very very well done and I recommend it highly.

[update: Episode 0 was just a recap of the story so far.. Good news though, JC has Episode 1 up on the site now, right on schedule. ;) ]

Web Design Gone Bad...

[** WARNING ** People prone to epileptic seizures beware!!! Seriously!]

You just know a Digg comment thread is going to be fun when the title of the post is:

http://digg.com/tech_news/Ever_wonder_what_the_worst_looking_site_on_the_internet_is

Lots of good... er.. bad ...er... horrible competing sites in the comment thread. Makes MySpace look like CSSZenGarden.

Screencasters... The Blog

Lock up your daughters... Screencasters now has a blog!

If you want to keep up with new episodes, leave your comments on how good (or bad) you feel the work is, or just want to discuss something inkscapey, screencastey, or anything else, then head on over to screencasters.wordpress.com and subscribe to the feed.

Cheers.

RQ

iPhone, Woodstock and Peeing in Nature.. you figure it out

I was listening to Twit103 earlier today and of course it was iPhone mania. I have absolutely no interest in the iPhone, but at the same time I understand the enthusiasm of others. However, I have to draw the line at the statements made in that episode comparing the wait in line for an iPhone to Woodstock. I mean puhhhleeeeze...

No, I'm not old enough to have gone to Woodstock. But this past weekend we took a short 3 day trip over the border to Buffalo and got stuck in line at the border (Queenston/Lewiston bridge) for 3 hours. Now I would never compare this to Woodstock, but people were wandering off into the bushes on the side of the highway to relieve themselves or 'pee in nature' as my 5 year old daughter likes to put it. That by itself makes it more like Woodstock than any iPhone line.

Sheesh people. Get a grip.

Neon Sign Effect - Inkscape Screencast

I've done a new Inkscape screencast. This one quickly (very quickly) demonstrates how to easily achieve a neon sign effect. Maybe you're putting together a tawdry pr0n site or something. ;) What's next you're asking yourself... flashing Unicorn gifs?? :)

Check out this episode and all of our other Inkscape screencasts at screencasters.heathenx.org where you can view the flash version online or download a high quality avi of your very own.

My Open Source Oasis

I first started dabbling with Linux almost three years ago. In the past year it became my primary OS at home, and now it's the sole occupant of my home pc. But at work we run AutoCAD on XP Pro, so there's no escaping the giant from Redmond I guess. However, I have managed to maintain my little 'open-source oasis' in this proprietary desert. Here's how I cope:

First, I run windows versions of my favourite Linux apps. Inkscape, GIMP, and GVim get a full workout here on my XP box at work. More recently I've been pleasantly surprised to find that Avidemux (which I use for a bunch of screencasting tasks) has a windows version too. As does Blender, the 3D modelling and animation application that we used to create that 15 second animation for our screencast intros at screencasters.heathenx.org. Oh, and don't forget Audacity which I use for a bit of audio editing - which has a perfectly serviceable windows version. And let's not forget OpenOffice which I try to use in lieu of MS-Office whenever I can. Of course Firefox goes without saying.

Next, I run Cygwin, which is a Linux-like environment for Windows. It isn't an emulator and won't run native linux apps on windows, but you can recompile linux applications from source to run on Cygwin. However my needs are much simpler. I mostly use it as a terminal for file management and my todo list duties. There is even a port of the X-Window system called Cygwin/X that allows you to run many graphical Linux apps inside of windows. For some reason I can't seem to get that working - something to do with our proxy server setup here at work. A head-scratcher that is...

Interestingly, I ran Cygwin from a shortcut on my desktop but was frustrated by the fact that it ran inside a DOS window. This limited my font choices to raster fonts or Lucida console 12pt. I could do various things to customize the bash shell (colours etc..) but the font limitation seemed to stick. That is, until I found these instructions for running rxvt on top of Cygwin.

Now I run a shortcut to rxvt and set up the shortcut to launch with whatever font I want. Here's my current shortcut launch command to get rxvt up and running:
C:\cygwin\bin\run.exe rxvt -sl 1500 -fn "Consolas-14" -bg black -fg grey -sr -e bash --login -i



Now you combine this with the recent excellent blog post (and comments) by Kyle Pott at Lifehacker about turbocharging your terminal, and you've got a perfectly serviceable linux terminal inside of XP.

So there you have it. That's how I get my Linux fix at work. If you're a lone Linux fish swimming in proprietary waters, how do you cope?