It's so simple now...

From the "I wish I had said that" file comes:

"you do know that Facebook is AOL 2.0, right?"

Courtesy of Jason Kottke.

[via evhead].

Starting from square one - update

An update on my journey back to square one...

I've installed a lot of the apps I normally use that don't come pre-installed in Ubuntu Feisty like Rawstudio, Inkscape, Avidemux, vlc, mplayer and beep media player. No problems there. You gotta love linux distros and their repository systems. In Feisty, there are 21,000 odd packages available for installation and they're just a click away.

I took a stab at installing the new Compiz-Fusion compositing system for those lovely desktop effects, and while it worked, the startup of Compiz was painfully slow and the configuration app seems very kludgy compared to where Beryl is. It also seemed to bring instability to the performance on my system. So off it went.

After verifying that the desktop performance of standard Metacity was up to snuff (it was), I have now installed a fresh copy of Beryl and I'm a happy camper once again.

Problems? A single small one at the moment. My dsl seems to disconnect at random times. Sometimes it will stay up for hours and other times will go out every 10 or 15 minutes. I end up having to do a 'pon dsl-provider' in a terminal window to get it back up and running. It's strange. I can't seem to figure out what could be causing it. I thought it might be the suspend or sleep mode of my system, but I've turned that off and still get the behaviour. If anyone's got any clues on what might be turning it off I'd be thankful. I don't have a router and run straight into my DSL modem, but don't know if that matters or not.

Anyway, the system is running much better that it used to. I am the proverbial Happy Camper right now.

Screencasters Update

There has been significant discussion over on this thread at inkscapeforum.com about our screencasters.heathenx.org site. We received several good suggestions and as a result we've updated the site slightly. Kudos to heathenx for his successful journey through video encoding hell, and his patience with my absolute skill at butchering his CSS work. ;)

Here's the low-down on the changes:

- tweaks to the css to make it suck less in IE browsers

- we're now streaming the swf files and offering up avi files for direct download (the avi's are encoded with xvid and mp3 codecs for those interested).

- we now show the size of the avi file so that you know what you're about to download

- we added anchor links for each episode so if great people like Ryan Lerch and Nico Buculei and other Inkscapers want to blog about specific screencasts they can link directly to the specific episode

That's pretty much it. If you've got more suggestions, keep 'em coming. Although now maybe heathenx and I can concentrate more on coming up with some new screencasts.

Speed Linking? Didn't know it was called that - but I like it.

David Airey posts about 'speed linking'. I had never heard the term before, but I've seen plenty of it. In fact, Kent Newsome's Evening Reading posts could be termed speed-link posts and are among my favourite reads.

It's actually a pretty accurate term too. I find myself zipping through Kent's ER posts very quickly. I find them to be low commitment - that is, I go in knowing they're not going to be in-depth dissertations on a single topic - which in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. I enjoy a good long well-written post, but at times I want something lighter and fast-paced. He gives me his quick take on a variety of topics and provides the links should I want them. No pressure. In and out.

And it's not a simple link blog post. I get to see what things are piquing Kent's interest at the moment along with his take on them. And it's fun - because I never know what I'm going to find in there. The writing style has a lot to do with it too. Someone pointing me to their delicious links or to their Google Reader shared feeds is NOT the same thing.

I'm not sure how long Kent (or David) spends crafting these things. I fly through them quickly and they 'read quickly' if that means anything, but I imagine they're not so quick to put together. I'd be interested in hearing for instance how long it takes Kent to put together one of his evening reads. David? Kent?

Clean Slate

After about 2.5 hours of backing up my XP and Linux data to my new USB external hard drive, I popped in the Fiesty install CD and wiped the slate. In a relatively quick 40 minutes, I was back up and running. I had no problems with the install at all. Very nice.

But boy did I ever do a lot of tweaking and customization to my system over the past year or so. You don't realize all the fiddling you've done until it's all stripped away and you're back at square one. I've got a lot of re-tweaking ahead of me, but at least I'll now be running XP-free on this machine (at least in the non-virtual sense if that means anything). Anyway, it's sometimes refreshing to start with a clean slate.

I've now got about 90MB of updates to download and install - seems like the perfect time to let it do it's thing while I sleep. ;)

All revved up, not sure where to go...

I spotted a good deal on a 500GB external USB 2.0 drive, and decided to pick one up this morning. It's an IOMagic drive and cost me $170 CAD (plus taxes of course). While I know kind of what I plan to do with it, I'm still mulling over the finer points. If you've got suggestions I'd love to hear them. Here's what I'm thinking:

My machine has been a mess ever since I set it up as dual boot XP/Linux box. I've never been fully pleased with the performance of linux on this box and I think part of the reason is that the boot drive is a SATA drive, which caused weird problems with early versions of Ubuntu. I could never really get the dual boot setup working right, and performance on the machine is quite spotty.

Since upgrading to Feisty, things have been much better, but still at times it feels like it's got a P3-800 chip on it and not the P4-3Ghz chip that's actually on there. Processing operations are sometimes slow and other times rebooting seems to cure the problem - something that should NOT be a problem on a Linux box.

Anyway, I plan to use the new drive to back up all of my data that resides on my XP and Ubuntu partitions and wipe everything clean, starting from scratch. I'm going to install a fresh copy of Feisty on it, and then run XP in a virtual machine - yes, there are still a couple of things I need XP for... :(

So here's where my questions begin - pardon any stupidity:

1. Do I have to format this 500 GB drive? I'm assuming that I do. Should I do it in multiple partitions? And what type. I was going to do the whole thing in ext3. I can see all my XP data from within Linux now, so I'm assuming that's the best route.

2. Once the backup is done, is there a definitive 'best' partition setup to use for the fresh Ubuntu Feisty install on my internal drives? I've got 2 - 160GB internal hard drives. One is SATA the other is IDE. I can let Ubuntu do it's thing automatically. Is this the best way? Anybody got any pointers on this?

3. Is there any point in trying to preserve the various app settings and configurations that I have? I was just going to really start fresh. And that means reinstalling and configuring a lot of things from scratch. I'm a bit worried that if I try to migrate system settings that my past performance problems might follow me.

4. Is there anything I definitely need to save before wiping out my existing system? I've got all my ISP info on paper, and I generally don't use saved passwords and logon info from my browser so that's likely not a problem. But should I grab device info (like hard drive info) before starting the install? Is there a way to easily get this data? (maybe the dmesg logs?)


Those are my main questions right now. I will be taking the plunge this weekend whether or not I get any suggestions or advice. I'm far too impatient, especially when it comes to geeky stuff like my pc, to wait ;).

A New Site is Born...

Well we've gone and done it. Fellow Inkscape screencaster heathenx and I have spent the last month or so putting together a home for higher quality versions of our screencasts. You can see the fruits of our labour at http://screencasters.heathenx.org.

About 6 months ago I uploaded my first Inkscape screencast to YouTube and soon after heathenx started doing them too [he does nothing but copy me ;)]. We've had plenty of views on YouTube, but two things always bugged us. The quality/size of the video, and the 10 minute/100MB limitation on uploads.

So while we won't be abandoning the YouTube posts, we're going to be putting our screencasts over on the new site and likely posting versions to YouTube in tandem with that.

We've got all of our 23 episodes up on the site right now. We decided to encode them in flash format (.swf files) for two reasons really: ubiquity of the flash format and easier streaming capability. You can download the swf files to your local machine and view them in your browser or any flash capable media player, or watch them right on the site in your browser. The site also has an RSS feed which will serve mainly as a outlet for announcements - ie. not as a video blog per se, at least for the time being.

Call me a masochist, but I have to say that the hurdles and challenges we had to overcome to get the site the way we wanted was the most fun I've had in a while. Both heathenx and myself are engineers and because of that, I think that we're pretty much in our element when stuck with a problem and left to our own devices. The fact that we share the same dry and sometimes childish sense of humour didn't hurt the fun factor either. A quick check of the About page will illustrate that fact quite clearly. :)

And that's really the whole motive behind it. Fun. Sure, we could easily use the site to make millions (after all, we developed a completely custom-built content management system for it - in 80 lines of python [cough cough]), but we're far too modest for that. ;)

So if you've enjoyed any of our past screencasts, or want to check them out, head on over to the site at: http://screencasters.heathenx.org

We'd appreciate your feedback to help improve the site, so if you've got any comments or questions, you can comment on this post, or email us at: screencasters AT heathenx.org

And of course, if you like the site (or hell, even if you don't) spread the word to your screencast and/or Inkscape loving friends.

Wiki research in mindmap format... nice!

I've always been a fan of the concept of mind mapping, but for the most part, for me, it has remained in the realm of pencil and paper. I've found a few good tools, but just haven't put enough effort into any of them thus far.

Will Simpson posts about a great online app called WikiMindMap which pulls the search results for any term from wikipedia.org and displays it in a mindmap format. The output is great for this type of data since it let's you expand different nodes to effectively drill down without the clutter.

I've seen a few posts in my feed list about mind mapping in the past. What tools are people using to do this stuff on the desktop? Leave a comment and let me know.

Daddy's day...

To all fathers out there. Happy Father's Day.

Make sure to celebrate it with those that make you a father. Namely
your sons or daughters.

Hope you all enjoy the day.

Another Twist on the Quick Chill

Here's a twist on the cold beer hack I spotted over on lifehack.org this morning. That post suggests using a tray full of salted ice water in the freezer to quickly chill a room temp beer. If, like me, you haven't got any room in your freezer, a trick that I've used to good effect in the past to achieve similar results is as follows:

1. Pour a sink or bucket full of cold water, some ice and some salt. Make it deep enough that the entire bottle (or can) of beer can be submerged including the air trapped in the neck of the bottle - that's crucial.

2. Grasping the bottle top in your fingers, spin it back and forth keeping it as vertical as possible. Higher rpm is better but don't strain yourself - you're chilling a beer after all ;).

3. A couple of minutes of that will drop the temperature to a respectable degree.

4. Dry off the bottle and add a side of nacho chips, chicken wings or pizza to suit. Enjoy.


I think spinning keeps the beer from foaming, and also keeps moving the warm beer in the middle of the bottle out to the sides where it's nice and cold. The part about submerging the air in the bottle neck is crucial since this can inhibit the chilling effect.

If you're good, you can spin two at once and enjoy that beer with a friend. :)

While you should be able to do it with cans, spinning them might be more difficult. I don't normally drink canned beer, but give it a try. What the heck.

My personal recommendations for a hot summer day are Pilsner Urquell, Creemore Springs or a nice Sam Adams.

On the DoFollow Wagon...

Following the lead of a few of my favourite reads, I've decided to disable the nofollow attribute for commenting that's built into my Blogger™ template. So to encourage commenting and discussion if you leave your link in the comments, you will be justly rewarded.

Now of course I manually moderate the comments - and oh boy, it's such an onerous job with the hundreds of comments I get on each post ;) - and any spam comments that show up will of course be swiftly dealt with. I've even put up an ominous commenting policy over on the right, but that's more just to encourage people to participate rather than lay down the proverbial law.

If you've got a Blogger™ blog and you're want to spread the Google juice to your commenters then check out this post.

It's All Text

Via Chromatic's post at the O'Reilly OnLamp blog, I tried out the It's All Text Firefox extension and I have to say I love it!

This extension lets you quickly bring up your favourite text editor any time you need to enter text on a web page. I find my own Blogger comment entry box for instance woefully small and inept. With this add-on installed, I can either right-click in the text box and choose "It's All Text" from the popup menu, or click the semi-transparent edit button that the extension puts at the bottom right of text boxes. If you haven't set an editor preference yet, it'll ask you to do so the first time.

From then on, once you do it, your editor of choice (gVim in my case) will pop up and when you save the document, the text gets pasted into the text box. Nice and simple.

I don't think it works in Gmail's rich text mode when composing an email, but a quick switch to plain text mode reveals the edit button once again. You shouldn't really be in Rich Text mode anyway should you... ;) Of course you can always compose the bulk of the text in plain text mode and then once it's been pasted in, switch to rich mode to add links and such.

All in all, a very useful tool. If you do a lot typing on the web and miss using your favourite offline editing tool, check it out.

Do you still email Word documents?

Kent Newsome cites Ed Bott, who writes about receiving MS-Word documents that inadvertently contain revision history and comments. Granted, I'm not in law, but I would assume that the engineering documents we send to our clients (sealed drawings, letters and reports) are every bit as much contract documents as what the lawyers are sending. But I have to say we very rarely ever send MS-Word documents or AutoCAD .dwg files to our clients. These days, the drawings, letters and reports that go out to our clients via email almost always go in PDF format.

The main advantage to us is formatting control. With drawings, the print quality and line weight issues have traditionally been a problem. We'd have to do a lot of futzing around with pen settings files that would have to go along with the drawings, and depending on the recipient's printer, we'd still have no guarantee that what they printed would accurately resemble what we intended. PDF solves that problem for us. The PDF we generate from AutoCAD (I use CutePDF) prints the same on the recipient's end as it does in our office. In addition, we can protect our PDF's so we can more securely send drawings with a P.Eng seal and signature - although the effectiveness of this is still a hotly debated topic among consultants.

If the documents we're sending are letters or reports to be reviewed and marked up by the client, they either have to do it using a PDF editor, or they hand mark it and send it back. If CAD drawings and plans are to be marked up or used by the client, contractor or another engineering consultant, we will send them AutoCAD .dwg files, but those drawings have the P.Eng seal and signatures removed (in fact those things are linked to documents on our servers and never get sent out anyway). But any drawings containing signatures and a seal are sent out in PDF format or hardcopy.

While we do use .doc format internally for some things [I try to use OpenOffice of course ;) ], I am always surprised and a little amused when someone sends me a Word document via email. Almost everyone in our business seems to have moved to PDF for document exchange.

Maybe Ed and Kent are talking strictly about clients being able to make revision-trackable comments and changes to documents. In that case, I can see the familiarity of MS-Word being an advantage, but the lack of protection, formatting control problems and the inadvertent escape of sensitive metadata makes me wonder why it's still the format of choice for them.

Now there's a Linux Ad...

I know you've likely seen this one before, but this IBM commercial about Linux is a heck of a lot more appealing to me than any Mac-ad spoof.

If a Tweet falls in the forest.. do I care?

I think I've officially lost all interest in Twitter. At least for now. Granted, I only have 7 friends (and 8 followers), but either Twitter is busted or nobody in my tiny circle of friends is using it anymore. There's only one who seems to be posting with any kind of frequency and he's not even what I'd call a personal contact.

I have failed to see the usefulness (for me anyway) in this style of short message posting. And believe me, I'm all for useless but fun web services, but I don't even find it fun.

I guess it's no surprise that I haven't posted a lot on Twitter - there are many things competing for my attention at the moment and it's survival of the fittest. My lack of Twitter postings (or tweets or whatever you call them) are clearly indicative of how far down the ladder of interest it is for me.

I won't close my Twitter account, but suffice it to say it will likely drop off my radar completely in short order.

In fact I think it's in a race to the bottom with Facebook at the moment. ;)

Planting The Seeds of Decent Grammar

Faithful readers,

Having read this blog, you know full well that I am not much of a grammar nazi. But I try to use proper grammar and full, reasonably coherent sentences. Sure, I throw the odd semicolon around with wild abandon, but I don't normally go around chastising people for their dangling gerunds (I looked that up btw). However, I draw the line at the increasing use of "Good" as a response to "How's it going?" or "How are you doing?".

I attempted to head this off at the pass this morning as I drove my sub 6 daughter to school:

"How is so-and-so doing?", I asked.

"Good", she replied.

Attempting to seize the opportunity and right the listing ship, I tactfully say, "Y'know... it's proper to say 'well' when someone asks you how you're doing or how is it going."

"No it's not Daddy."

"I'm pretty sure it is, cupcake.", I reply, deciding immediately that this is neither the time nor place to introduce the concept of verbs into the conversation.

"No. I'm right, and you're not Daddy."

Perhaps weakly, I resort to the standard, "This would be a good thing to ask Mrs. X".

Mrs. X being her teacher of course. The one person who can overrule whatever nonsense it is that Daddy tries to pawn off on her as knowledge.

Based on a multitude of similar conversations I've had with her in the past, this tactic usually works. Normally, I won't bring it up again right away, but (hopefully) I'll notice her slipping in the 'well' in place of the 'good' on her own accord.

Perhaps the job is just to plant the seed. All you can do is water it, care for it, and hope it grows.

Speed test anyone?

It's probably been at least a year, if not two, since I last checked into the speed of my DSL connection. I remember back then that I was supposed to get 1500 down and 500 up and that various speed tests were showing me at about 80-90% of that.

It seems my service has improved since then. (Click the graphic to visit the site and test your own connection).



Nice to see things improving.

Half the Geek

Whoa! I guess I'm not half the geek I thought I was. Scoble posts his top 35 favourite feeds of the month.

I read only three of those 35 (Digg, Lifehacker and Thomas Hawk).

I dropped Engadget a fairly long time back. Too many posts, too little interest.

Boingboing boinged it's way off my feed list about 9 months ago. Too many posts, and a little too weird. Sport jacket made entirely of meat anyone?

All things 'crunch' - I grew very tired of web2.0 startup news. I am finding this area of news more pretentious and less interesting every day - and it's not just Mike. But hey, that's just me. When Steve Gillmor closed the circus tent, I started losing interest - quickly.

Actually, I'm finding that that there are so many good and interesting relatively low-traffic blogs grabbing my interest that they are slowly but surely shoving aside many of the incumbents in my feed reader.

The old guard had better watch out.

Conversation with a Facebook Refugee

A friend of mine recently told me he was 'done with Facebook'. Naturally, I asked him why. He said that old "acquaintances" were coming out of the woodwork, and while it was great that his wife was (and still is) a Facebook member, he was uncomfortable seeing scrawlings on his wall from partners from days gone by. Clearly, he didn't want to deal with the potential problem of the 'crazy ex-girlfriend'.

He also lamented the fact that it became a way for friends and acquaintances to shoot cheeky responses around at each other. Now if you combine this with his demographic (mid to late 20's - very recently married - but very much a guys night out type of guy) you can safely assume the banter back and forth was not always G-rated (but probably quite fun.)

We soon got around to discussing the things people do and write on the web. And that while it might be fun to post outrageous things on someone's "Wall", you can't really count on being able to take them back. And further, you can't count on something you write (anywhere on the net) being really deleted or somehow disappearing into the ether after a year or two.

Now this guy is not that tech-saavy - doesn't blog, frequents YouTube but not Digg - you get the picture. So I thought it'd be fun to show him the Internet Archive's WayBack Machine. Needless to say he was amazed that so much of what has (and is) going on on the net is being archived and captured.

I have a feeling that most people in the mainstream who are now just starting to generate and publish (however inadvertently) things on the net, don't really get the potential permanence of it.

As I've said several times before, be proud of what you write (or at least not embarrassed) and you'll do fine. If you don't, you'll never know when it might come back and bite you.

ps - While I have never found Facebook very compelling, my interest in it is declining even further day by day. But then again, so is my interest in Twitter. But that's another story, for another post.

How is Technorati *supposed* to work?

I was checking out the newer, faster, better, Technorati today and did a search on 'inkscape' to see what new things people were doing. I noticed quite quickly that my YouTube hosted screencasts are there in all their glory but no mention of my blog at all. I didn't expect it to see it under the 'posts' tab since I haven't tagged anything 'inkscape' in the last few days, but I do have probably 20 or 30 posts tagged 'inkscape' on my blog so I kind of expected it to show up under the 'blogs' tab.

Hmm. I thought the Blogger(tm) labels were like any other blog tagging system and that they'd be picked up by Technorati. Maybe I've got to add Technorati specific tags to my posts like Kent does?

I signed up and 'claimed' my blog there a couple years back, but maybe I've got to be doing more to be visible there?

Anybody care to educate me on this?

Someone please tell me how this is supposed to work.

2012 Olympic logo - [cough cough] fugly [cough cough]

David Airey is not impressed with the new 2012 London Olympic logo that was recently unveiled.

I can't say I'm awestruck either.

At a rumoured $600,000.00 cost.. maybe dumbstruck is more accurate.

Ok Scoble, but what about search feeds and starred posts?

I was watching this video of Robert Scoble discussing his feed reading system. I found it quite interesting and Scoble, as always, seems so honest and enthusiastic about what he does. You can tell he really loves it. Nice.

Of course there were snippets that undoubtedly would rile up some segment of small struggling tech bloggers, like scanning the headings and bylines for authors he knows and relegating ones he doesn't to the trash. There was also his mention of how he finds the small guys by paying attention to what the 'A-List' bloggers link to. Not exactly what "Joe Smith" was wanting to hear I imagine.

But one thing I didn't hear Robert mention was search feeds. I know that I have several Technorati and Google Blogsearch result feeds that give me posts that I would completely miss otherwise. I've found many new and wonderful blogs that way. I've got search feeds for things like 'Inkscape', 'Vim', 'wxPython' and some others. I've also used Chris Pirillo's gada.be engine (now called tagjag it seems) to good effect as well.

So why wouldn't Scoble use a Technorati feed with the term 'tablet pc'?

Sure these blog search feeds do generate a fair amount of noise, but it's fairly easy to sift through, and like I say, you can find some gems that you'd have otherwise missed. The other benefit is that they're transient. I can delete, or modify those search result feeds as my short term interests change (which they do all the time it seems).

So the questions go out to Robert and everyone else, do you use Feed searches? If so, what blog search engine do you use? And how do you use them?

ps - I'm also a huge fan of the 'starred post' feature in Google Reader. I use this as a rudimentary rating system so that I can quickly scan feeds and mark off interesting ones for later reading (I don't have all day to read these things) so it's nice to be able to keep track with something easier and far more efficient than something like say, del.icio.us .

The bigger picture - Facebook? Uh.. no.

Kent Newsome weighs in even more on the Social Networking v. blogging issue. His last statement strikes a real chord with me:

"I think the social networking closed site as online Mecca story is a myth driven by people who want to keep the content producing public behind the walls so they can make money off of the content they produce."

And while I'm not focused on making money on the content I produce (would be a nice side-benefit), I am interested in getting it out to the world - not to my fellow Facebook members or my MySpace friends. I want the meager contribution I make to be reachable by anyone wanting to read or watch it.

And the conversational aspect is no different. I want to hear from people interested in what I'm interested in, no matter where they are, no matter what their stripe.

I want to participate in the bigger picture - as Dave Winer put it the other day, "the wild wild web, the unbounded frontier". Facebook, MySpace, Virb and the like, are definitely not the bigger picture, no matter how much money they make for their
creators.

LIC - do you have it?

Penguin Pete outlines the symptoms of LIC (the Linux Insecurity Complex).

Describing one of the typical symptoms, Panic Attacks (thinking about how MS will sue Linux out of existence), Pete writes,

"You could drop nuclear bombs on every Linux user on the planet, but you'll miss at least one server housing the source code, to be found by some future archaeologist, and there it will go spreading again. Linux is creeping charlie. It is rooted too deeply to budge. Why do you think Microsoft is so afraid of it?"

So if you're a Linux user, you owe it to yourself to read his post and start showing some dignity! :)

Free commenting system? What free commenting system?

Yours truly (a.k.a. The Idiot Blogger), proudly posted about freeing up my comment system, proceeded to disable comment moderation and then forgot to hit 'Save Settings'.

Some ten hours later, idiot (me) finally gets home to realize commenters on his post are locked in moderation limbo.

Apologies to Chris and Will (btw - I'm not entirely sure that's you Will Simpson or some other Will, but I'll take the chance - I've already been an idiot once today, might as well bask in it).

Gee, you'd think I would have been automatically removed from the gene pool by now.. ;)

Freeing Up The Commenting System

Chris Brogan is someone I've enjoyed reading for quite some time now. And while lately he's been knee-deep in the 'new media' space, every now and then he gives some sound solid advice for those of us who are doing these things solely for enjoyment and nothing else.

With my recent experimentation with screencasting, inkscape, linux, twitter and other things tech, I have not spent a lot of time improving my blog (or my blogging). Chris wrote a recent post on making your blog more friendly. One of his first points was about making commenting easier, citing the fact that captchas are a hurdle that should be avoided if at all possible. He also wrote that some blogging software (like blogger.com) makes it mandatory.

Hmm. I know I had captchas enabled, but never really checked if that was mandatory. Lo and behold, it isn't. A quick switch of a radio button in the commenting settings will turn it off.

I put a high value on the few comments I do get because of the opinions, ideas and discussion that can show up there. Therefore, I've turned captchas off and for that matter I've also turned off comment moderation just to see if anything changes. I'll still get email notification of comments and can go in and delete comments if they are in fact spam.

So for now I've freed up the commenting system - no moderation, no captchas. Now on to much tougher things like improving the writing and posting frequency...

Dell to sell PC's in Wal-Mart stores

I haven't seen any chatter on the very recent news that Dell is going to be selling a model or two of PC's in Wal-Mart stores starting in June. This will be in Canada as well as the US. They will be custom spec models exclusively for WalMart. I'd say that's pretty big news for a company that has so far resisted any real retail presence other than a few mall kiosks.

I'm not normally one to break any tech news but I actually knew about this a few days ago. I now have a little birdie flying around the hallways there. :)

Unfortunately you can bet your first born that the models destined for Wal-Mart stores won't be the ones running Ubuntu. But then again, stranger things have happened. ;)

Why Facebook and not blogs?

Kent Newsome asks the question:

"What is so much better about Facebook (and MySpace and other similar platforms) than an ordinary blog on a popular platform- say WordPress?"

I joined Facebook a little over a month ago - and while it does have it's uses, it in no way would serve as a replacement for this blog (or blogging in general). To me it's a completely different animal.

Facebook has put me in contact with two or three old friends (an old friend with whom I'd lost touch, one French teacher from high school and a former university house-mate of mine). The rest are people I already know and interact with. But that's really the extent of it for me. It's not a place I visit to learn anything new other than whether or not Joe OldFriend has kids or not or some other personal info people are willing to share.

But that's just it. It's all personal. It's all relatively closed. It's only as open as people are willing to make it. I don't login often. Maybe because I'm not a social butterfly by nature. Maybe because it's just been a series of 'hey long time no see, what ya up to' type private messages.

Sure, there are people who cross connect, join groups and share pictures and interests. If that's what you're looking for then it serves that purpose too.

Blogging on the other hand is much more expansive. And a lot more work too. But you're opening yourself up to discovering many more new things and people (and being discovered by a much wider range of people too). It's a completely different thing. If your into learning about new things, expanding your horizons and really participating in a global conversation then Facebook is not the place to do it. Granted it's not meant to be, and frankly I get the impression that the vast majority of people there are not that lofty in their ambitions anyway - which is perfectly fine too.

Of course there are the more subjective aspects. Facebook is very constrained design-wise and not at all pretty. It's a big step up from MySpace, but my home page seems like a sea of user names, widget headings and a big fat annoying ad on the left side, all drowning in a sea of too-tiny text. I imagine you can play with it, but every Facebook page I've seen is the same. It's just too constrained for my tastes.

It's also a closed system. So there is absolutely nothing that advances the cause of the most underappreciated internet technology - RSS. I don't think Google can crawl Facebook and for some people that might be a good thing - if they even care. Maybe it's only people who understand the value of a feed aggregator that will care about that anyway.

It still reminds me of Classmates.com. It hasn't added any value to my life other than reconnecting me with a few long lost friends. But a quick google search of my name could have done it a lot quicker. But alas, not everyone has a web presence and this might be the way in for the 'great unwashed'. If only it wasn't so closed. Maybe a buyout might go some way to solving this.

What is telling for me is that for each person I reconnected with, I always ended up telling them it was better to check out my family blog or this blog if they really wanted to see what I was up to. I've been really using it as a way to climb in there and say - 'come out here and see what you're really missing'.

Make no mistake, not everyone is cut out for blogging. Not everyone wants to write more than a few misspelled lines in a comment on someone's 'wall'. Not everyone cares about well designed pages, trackbacks or RSS. Maybe Twitter/Jaiku/Tumblr addresses all that.

To me, blogging is so open-ended and has so much potential in so many ways and Facebook has none.

I think the winds of change are always blowing too. There's been Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, and now maybe Virb or something else. Maybe it's good you don't put a lot of hard fought effort into your content on Facebook. You likely won't be able to move it when you transition to the 'next big thing'.

There's some food for thought Kent. :)

How not to impress anyone on a job interview..

I have not been in the job market for over a decade (and don't plan on being in it the short term either), but we're interviewing people for entry level design and drafting positions at our firm and I'm mystified by something.

Why do people show up half an hour late dressed in casual clothes for a job interview? Has society changed so much in the last 10 years that you no longer need to dress appropriately and show up on time for an interview?

About 11 years ago I remember sitting in my car, dressed in my suit, half an hour early for my interview, nervously waiting for the appointment time. I remember even taking a drive a few days earlier on the weekend to scope out the place so I'd know where it was, where I could park etc. I didn't want to get lost or have to walk 5 miles and be late for that interview.

Overprepared? Maybe. But the last few people I've seen come by here for interviews have been late and are dressed pretty shoddy. We work in a casual dress environment (think golf shirts and khakis), but this is a job interview - aren't you trying to make a good impression?

I'm not the one doing the hiring so I can't really speak to their experience or skills, but man, these people don't look like they're trying to impress anyone. At least they're achieving that.

Nothing like a bit of humour to send you into a long weekend...

Thank you to DanteDefiance, who's digg comment got me chuckling at the end of a long Friday afternoon:

"How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if the woodchuck was Chuck Norris?

...all of it."

Here We (lo)Go Again!

Here's another logo contest for those interested in exercising their creative muscles and learning Inkscape at the same time. This one sounds especially interesting and fun too:

From debianArt.org :

Debian Jr. is a Custom Debian Distribution (CDD) project.
Their goal is to make Debian an OS that children of all ages will want to use. Their initial focus will be on producing something for children up to age 8. Once they have accomplished this, their next target age range is 7 to 12. By the time children reach their teens, they should be comfortable with using Debian without any special modifications.

The Debian Jr. needs a logo and all designers are welcome!

Check out the contest's About Page for all rules and deadline (July 16th).

Update: If you want to incorporate the standard Debian 'swirl' in some way, I found a scalable SVG version of it on the debianart.org site right here.

How to get me to stop watching TV in one easy step...

So it sounds like CBS is cancelling Jericho. I quite enjoy it. In fact, it's the only TV series I've watched with any amount of loyalty in the last 5 years.

Of course they've got to make sure everyone gets their fill of frickin' CSI-whatever shows, that's for sure.

Bahh. I'm angry.

Anybody know where else a guy can get his fill of post-apocalyptic entertainment?

Photos + Music = Much more

One thing I lament is the lack of an equivalent to MS-Photostory for linux. The awesome effect music can have on a series of photos has always amazed me and Photostory is a simple way of achieving that. (Photoshop Elements (and likely iPhoto) can do the same sorts of things).

If you've ever wondered how much music can influence imagery, check out this wonderful (but of course flash-heavy) site that I found via digg.

A couple of years ago I made a nice slideshow using the 'Ken Burns' pan and zoom effect and a series of pictures of my wife and our daughter from the first 4 years of her life. I had a lot of pictures to choose from after all.. ;) With the beautiful song 'Promise' by Tracy Chapman as the audio backdrop, it still elicits tears from family (including myself, and I was the one who made it!).

So put your headphones on and check out that site. Once you're clicking through the photos, turn the music off (speaker icon at upper right) and try and tell me it doesn't make a huge difference.

Come to mention it, wouldn't it be nice for Flickr to offer a similar service? Maybe they could build a library of creativecommons music to build an online flash generated slideshow with music. Or maybe someone else already offers this? It would be a great way to build this stuff and promote cc music at the same time.

Ever seen one of these in a store?

I can now bid goodbye to burning CD-RW's for podcast listening in the car. For some strange reason I thought the USB input on my new car's stereo was for some special connection to a dedicated mp3 player (a la iPod). Turns out you can plug any USB key into it and play the mp3 files that it contains! Kia supplies a short black cord for this connection. I've tried it and it works flawlessly with the 1GB key I keep in my briefcase.

The stereo's face has a female 'mini' usb jack on it, and the supplied cord has a male mini-usb on one end and a female usb type-A connector on the other end. The type-A connector is the 'normal' thin and wide jack type that is used on virtually all usb keys and devices. So you can plug the usb key right into the female end of the cable.

And while the cable is not too unsightly, the geek in me is now in search of a direct 'female type A to male mini-usb' adapter to eliminate the cord completely. Effectively I want to plug the USB key right into the face of the stereo, eliminating the cord.

I've done some online searches at BestBuy and TheSource (aka RadioShack up here), but the best I can seem to find is a female to female version.

This is exactly what I want. Anybody seen it available in good old brick and mortar electronic shops?

RSS in rewind?

Maybe it's just me, but I find it funny that the person I consider to be the 'father of RSS' seems to upchuck a bunch of posts from a couple of years ago every once in a while. You'd think he'd be the last person with publishing bugs. I guess it's the price you pay for doing development work.

In any case Dave, I almost thought New Orleans was flooding all over again.

:)

That new car smell baby!

Well, it finally arrived today! No more ass numbness from the blatting exhaust of my 95 Integra. I got my new Rio5 today! It's 'copper graphite' ... dark-metallic-grey for us non-marketing types. And I love it. It's a fully loaded Ex-Sport model. For a feature list, check out my post of about a month ago where I first pondered the decision.

Nuff said, here's a couple of pics:

Jericho -mmm mmm good, and mushy link love to boot.

I just finished watching the latest episode of Jericho I had recorded from Wednesday night. Awesome awesome awesome!

I've watched the series from the beginning (based on an initial critique from Kent Newsome by the way - a testament to the power of 'word of mouth'), and it's just kept me always coming back for more. I don't watch much tv otherwise, so I've tried to figure out what it is about the series thats so compelling to me.

I think it comes down to two things:

1. The way they are able to intermix the personal and global storylines so well. They manage to give proper attention to each, without diluting either; and,

2. The show manages to provide satisfactory and substantial milestones in each episodes and also supplies unexpected plot twists and great setup for the next episodes to keep me coming back for more.

Kudos to the people who create Jericho. There is still something to be said for damn good television.

Following on from David's good practice and at the risk of copycatting Kent and now Earl, a couple of 'Thank You Links'(tm) go out to my inkscape screencasting compadre heathenx, and nate who commented on my recent post about mp3 splitting.

I really appreciate all you guys.

You have got to be kidding.. right? No?

How's this for a twist?

1. Man diagnosed with pancreatic cancer - given one year to live.

2. Man stops paying mortgage, quits job, spends all his savings, family trips, lives life to the fullest - even makes funeral arrangements.

3. Man notices symptoms going away.

4. Man told he was misdiagnosed - it's inflammation of the pancreas, not cancer.

5. Man left bankrupt, in dire straits, but alive.


Talk about a rollercoaster. A great wave of relief followed by dawning realization and terror.

He's asking for compensation, and failing that will sell his house and/or sue the hospital. I don't think he'll win, but you gotta have some sympathy for the guy.

Good audio book - but I'd like to chop it up. Any Suggestions?

While perusing the comments on a Digg post about Richard Dawkins, a link was posted to a freely downloadable mp3 file containing the audiobook version of Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World. I started listening to it this morning and have done enough driving as of lunchtime to reach the two hour mark.  So far it's a really interesting and thought provoking narration of science and society. The whole thing is listed as 13hrs and 19min long (!). It's a 137MB download no less.

Therein lies the problem. I am appealing to anyone out there who might know of an automated way to split any given mp3 file into a number of chunks. I could do this in Audacity manually, but for something this size an automated splitter app would do wonders.

As I've mentioned in the past, I burn my podcast mp3 files onto an mp3 CD-RW which I then listen to in the car. The  fast-forward and rewind capabilities of the car deck are fully capable for a 4 minute music file, but they become clunky and extremely inefficient when you're talking about 30 minutes let alone 13 hours. ;)

I like the audiobook, but it would be nice to be able to stop and listen to some music files or something else for a while and then come back at least close to where I left off. So I'm thinking of splitting it into half-hour or 15 minute chunks. Anybody know of a free and effective tool for the job?

If I found an effective solution I'd probably run the splitter on any podcast longer than an hour since it's been more than once that I've inadvertently forwarded to the next track when trying to skip ahead a minute or two.. doh!

Do cars have feelings too?

I think my car knows it's the end of days. The new car (a silver, fuel-miserly, and decent looking Kia Rio5 - Ex Sport) is hopefully available in the next day or two and my current car - a '95 Acura Integra 4-door - is flailing in panic.

Since putting down the deposit on the Korean car at the end of last week, my Integra's automatic tranny has started hunting for gears at odd times, and what was once a slightly louder than normal exhaust note has developed into a bellow on full acceleration. It's almost as if it's now given up and is beckoning me for one final expensive repair job.

Flail away buddy boy. You've been a decent car under indecent conditions, but your time has come. I've managed to go from around 200,000km when I got it to just over 340,000km in about 2.5 years. Not too much of that is city driving, but a fair amount of it is dirt and rough road travelling - so I don't feel I was jipped.

But nonetheless, it is a little embarassing these last couple of days driving around in something that sounds like the truck from Sanford & Son.

But maybe if I tilt the seat way back, people will assume I'm just another two-bit punk driving an Integra with a big soup-can muffler. I better get me some hip-hop goin' in the car too for authenticity.

Yo yo yo. Word.
:)

What's in a name...

Todd Cochrane blogs about a recent WSJ article on the importance of how well your name Googles. It's been a while since I Googled my own name, but back in the day, I was the 2nd or third entry. There are relatively few benefits to having a last name like mine. But in the age of Google, it definitely ain't hurtin' my page rank. ;)

Currently when I type my first and last name into Google I get 30,600 hits. The first result that is not 'me' is at the very bottom of the third page!  - I pwn Google biatch! :)

But with great power comes great responsibility... I have been at the same engineering firm for over 10 years now. If I ever went looking for a new job, I'd better be proud (or at least not embarassed) about what pops up in those first three pages of results.

Scanning those 29 hits, my only concern might be that you'd think I was a programmer/graphic artist/photographer - there is nothing about structural engineering anywhere in those first three pages. While I enjoy what I do, it's not something I blog about or participate in online.

Besides, I'm happy where I am, but if I did end up switching jobs, I'd probably be keen for something in programming/graphic arts/photography. :)

What's your Googability?

ps. I've also got Meandering Passage riding my coattails at the bottom of the first page of results. You're welcome Earl! ;)

One Reader at a Time

Ron K. Jeffries mulls over his blog stats today. In his post he quotes a New Yorker article which states:

"Of the blogs that review products, Engadget, now owned by AOL, has the biggest audience; it gets about eight million unique visitors per month. …"

Ron will be glad to know that I don't subscribe to Engadget. But I do subscribe to him. :)

Number generates big numbers...

Geez, I never thought anything would ever beat the 22,000 diggs that the iPhone announcement received... nevermind by a 13,000 digg margin.

Steven's Old School Linux experiment begins...

Steven Rosenberg is truly going old school.

He's starting an experiment where he's going to the command line for a month. No Gnome, no KDE, no XFCE, nada, zip, zero. Here is his Day 1 Post.

I look forward to seeing how he makes out.

Under Feisty, I do a fair amount of things at the command line (or more accurately the pseudo-command line - I'm talking about  terminal window within Gnome). I still love and use MOC for playing music, I do a lot of my file management from the command line, Vim is my editor of choice most of the time, and ImageMagick has proved useful and efficient at times - if only I bothered creating a list of the various tools.

Good luck Steven - hopefully you post some progress reports.

SCTV Genius - courtesy of YouTube

I'm not sure if there are any SCTV fans who read this blog, but back in the day it was one of my favourite shows.

Thanks to YouTube, you can watch the classic Gerry Todd show. It gave me a good chuckle on so many levels (the DJ voice, the video effects, the commercials, it goes on and on - video bloggers take note!).

Part 1 has the start of the show and classic Gerry Todd - bring up the super.

Part 2 has a hilarious Doobie brothers carpet warehouse commercial and a Christopher Cross / Michael Mcdonald video at the end that is pure genius.

I forgot how awesome SCTV was. Thank you YouTube!

We're not paying you to use Facebook...

I've written about the seemingly ubiquitous Facebook a couple of times. While I have a Facebook account, I've hardly every used it. A couple of friends and relatives have beckoned me to post some things there (on their "walls"?) but to this point I haven't really complied.

A couple of newsworthy things about Facebook:

1. It was recently reported that Toronto is the 'facebook capital' meaning that this area has the largest facebook contingent (NYC supposedly has around 250,000). Is this a good thing? Dunno.

2. I spotted a CBC story today where the Premier of Ontario (Dalton McGuinty) has stated that he doesn't see how Facebook adds any value to the workplace. As of yesterday, provincial government employees were banned from accessing Facebook. (and YouTube) through their workplace computers.


The article also mentions that more than a few provincial and federal politicians have Facebook pages, so it's not only the 'grunts' that might be pissed off about it.


With records showing these sites being checked more than 20 times an hour in some cased, I have to say I'm glad to hear it. We (Ontarians) are paying the salaries of these people are we not?

My Most Narcissistic Post Ever.. so far anyway

Like many avid photographers, I've got thousands of photos on my hard drive, of which, I'm in maybe 5 or 10.

I just wasted 30 minutes trying to find a decent photo of myself to use for my Twitter badge. I quickly remembered that I generally hate photos of myself. It is very rare that I like any of them and that's why the photo in my blog profile has never really changed.

I did manage to find a couple passable ones. The first one I chose I happen to like quite a bit, but it looks far more serious and contemplative than I actually am. I would feel like I was pretending if I used that one. It was actually taken with my 50mm F1.8 lens at arm's length while I was looking out a nearby window.


I finally found one a little more in character for me. Of course it was taken when I'm at my absolute happiest - when I'm cuddling my daughter.


So until I go get the glamour shots done at the mall, that's the one I have to settle on for my Twitter badge. ;)

Of course the backup plan is to do some very very minor touchups to my blog profile photo using Inkscape... can you tell which one's the original?

The Real Landscape of the Web

If you were looking for a Map of Online Communities (and related points of interest), look no further. Beautiful. I love how the 'Mountains of Web 1.0" separate the Icy North (Yahoo and MS) from just about everything else. ;)

Kevin Rose between the proverbial rock and hard place

There has been a lot of unrest on Digg lately after they started pulling posts that contained HD-DVD crack codes as part of a cease and desist order. Users were adamant that this was wrong and started digging posts up to the front page, effectively spamming the system.

Kevin Rose, in what is either a cool move - or dumb move - depending on your perspective, wrote yesterday:

We hear you, and effective immediately we won't delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be. If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Errr. You just might. Either way too. Piss off enough users and you lose credibility and page views, get sued up the ying-yang and you lose too.

No wonder I heard Kevin mention that he's working on a new web app (the first really separate thing from Digg) during a recent Diggnation episode.

It's a tough call.

Ubuntu To Jump Shark - free admission

Given the impending news of Dell shipping systems preloaded with Ubuntu, I guess there is no doubt now that Ubuntu has jumped the shark. What's next? Trying to get Linux slapped on the side of an IRL race car? At this rate, there will be people using Linux who've never even compiled a kernel before!

Oh the humanity!

Honestly, I don't see the march towards free and open source salvation (or disaster depending on your point of view) stopping any time soon either. I'm not going to join the geeky hordes in calling this the 'Year of the Linux Desktop' - even though this year it seems somewhat more realistic than the last ten, but looking at the surroundings, it does give you pause for thought.

Some interesting things from my perspective:

1. Free and open source development is not slowing - people not getting directly paid for developing things hasn't been a major stumbling block to this point.

2. The general public is getting more tech saavy. It doesn't matter if they are switching to Macintosh. At least they are beginning to realize that there are completely viable non-Microsoft alternatives. While awareness is growing at what seems like a snail's pace, it is growing - inexorably.

3. If Vista hasn't been a failure, it sure hasn't been the runaway success that it needed to be to maintain utter long term dominance.

4. Virtualization may make the choice obsolete. If I can run XP in VMWare, or XP in Parallels on a Mac, then the sacrifice of moving from one platform to another will vanish.

5. The pace is relentless. Who can move faster? Microsoft, Apple or FOSS developers? Doesn't releasing an OS every 5 years leave you a little hog-tied when technologies rise and fall so quickly? Apple sounds like it is trying to make some big steps with Leopard. It has to. I haven't heard of one thing in Vista that could be considered a big step ahead. Linux will undoubtedly scramble, catch up and likely surpass Apple's best efforts within a year anyway. Such is the tenacity of riled up developers when the gauntlet is thrown.

6. Free and open-source software is empowering the people who make and do interesting things. Open vs. closed models is becoming the big debate more and more often. Witness Silverlight v. Adobe.

7. If you can succeed as wildly as Ubuntu has, with a default brown theme, you can do just about anything! ;)


So the shark-jumping is not the end. It's hopefully only the beginning.