Tad's IT Blog
blogging
Little Bobby Tables
Apr 3rd
I just saw this on Stumbleupon and almost soiled myself from laughing.
Original is here, as I found after Googling. Hope you appreciate it.
When Computer Nerds Go to Birthing Class
Jul 23rd
Kat & I had another installment of our birthing class tonight – probably close to one of our last, seeing as though Kat’s in her 38th week now.
Definitely has been an intriguing experience. I wouldn’t have thought I’d have so much to learn, seeing as though my mom was a registered nurse working in Obstetrics & Gynecology for 15 years of my life. I was the only one in my 4th-grade class who knew what gonorrhea was. And, as my momma worked for a while for a company that made educational birth videos, she’d often take home ones for me to watch, like the action-packed thriller “Birth in the Squatting Position”.
However, now that all of these things are happening to my own wife, it’s a whole lot different, and I end up with a lot more questions.
Unfortunately, due to my nerdiness, I end up belting out zingers in class like today asking our instructor, “…if the baby is not in the correct presentation when she goes into labor, is there any way to edit that nondestructively?” I later realized that my wife was not a photoshop file, and the baby’s presentation had nothing to do with the presentation layer or the OSI Model, and that my question probably didn’t make much sense to the others.
Oh well, at least I’m learning. 
Also – here’s some more big-belly photos, so you can see the chronology.
New Spam Quiche feature on Gmail
Jul 2nd
As I was busy handling my spam box in Gmail today, I thought that the choice of Google AdWords ads was particularly entertaining:
Not particularly relevant to what I was doing, but enough to get me to click on it – as out of the corner of my eye, I though it said “Spam Cache” or “Spam Catcher” and I thought, “what’s this?”
I had just been poking around to appreciate the new drag & drop capabilities that Google just launched with Gmail, so I figured the Spam Quiche might just be another feature they added to round out their Spam Handling features.
Sweden’s Pirate Party: What is the Point?
Jun 8th
I wasn’t about to write a blog post tonight, so I’m going to keep this short. But in my little Flock homepage, I saw this little headline story about the Pirate Party getting a seat in European parliament.
I really, honestly, am pretty disgusted by this.
First off, while I usually have some sympathy for embattled little technology people who get embroiled in legal battles, as they’re generally good people. However, after reading this page on their site, I lost any sympathy I ever had for them. My opinion is these Pirate Bay principals have zero cognitive idea of the concept of exchange — meaning someone skilled creates something, and provides it in exchange for something valuable back. For example, if many, many talented programmers work for a long time on a video game, and they finally finish it, and it’s great, then they then sell it and if you like it you buy it from them. That way they get money, and can afford to keep making neat video games.
They just seem to be interested in being “pirates” in the truest sense of the word — where you take things that rightfully belong to others, with no exchange, and without their permission.
Now, we have a political party that has, as it’s goal, abolishing the copyright system, abolishing the trademark system, and convincing people that, and I quote from Rick Falkvinge, the leader and founder of the party, “…that the government is not always good.”
OK, I’m not a politician or a copyright lawyer, but I am someone who has benefitted from the inventions and industriousness of others who invent and thereby commercialize things they have created, based on their own ingenuity and resourcefullness.
Would someone please enlighten me as to what possible good would come about through abolishing copyrights and patents? The only thing I can see is negative effects, quashing people who normally would try to come up with great stuff and sell it — driving them into apathy.
As a Scientologist, I definitely understand the role of trademarks and copyright law, as without such someone could publish books on my religion where people did voodoo dances, and then say it’s “Scientology”. So, the continued existance of my religion depends on such laws being in place. All other religions and organizations also depend on the same — it’s a basic agreement that helps hold the world together.
So, I reiterate: what possible good could a political party aiming to obliterate copyright law ever come to?
Blogged with the Flock Browser
Just got the WP app to work from my iphone
May 20th
I’m about to leave on a cross-country trip to move across the nation, so I figured the easiest way to catalog the trip would be the wordpress app for iPhone. So, just got that to work on my self hosted blog (took a little doing) and now we’re a go!
Evidence is this post sent from my iPhone, with a live view from my iPhone camera. Hope this works out well!
The website design & prototyping production line
May 9th
It’s unfortunate, but I would be willing to wager that the grand majority of websites out there are a total short-circuit of any type of sensible planning & prototyping cycle. After a recent visit to Boxes & Arrows, I stumbled across an ad for Axure, a piece of software designed for the whole wireframe & prototype portion of the web development cycle.
It made me reflect on how much my own methodology has changed through the years, in terms of the production line for a website, and how it makes its way from an idea in your head, through to a finished product that people use.
Pre-Photoshop era:
When I was first making websites back in ‘95-‘96, the idea had not even entered my head that I could design my site in Photoshop and then actually make the item that I designed. Design tools were so primitive, and table support so bad & varied, that you couldn’t just make a design and know that you could execute whatever you designed. It was only with IE 3 that you could finally do tables with a background image (a revelation), and both Netscape and IE implemented that differently.
So, in any case, my prototyping environment at that time was something called Microsoft Visual Notepad [jk].
It was only after I first tried Macromedia Fireworks in 1999, and was then able to hack up a fully-designed page and output it as HTML and images, that I decided that prototyping might be more entertaining than programming 5 bad websites in a row before finally getting it right.
Working out the production line:
All of that said, through quite a bit of pain and bad websites, I finally ended up with a production line that worked. I, of course, didn’t make this all up on my own, as I had hit the books pretty hard trying to find out who had workable systems and methodologies that worked.
In terms of best references with respect to the website production line, here’s what I found to be the best resources:
- Communicating Design by Dan Brown (not the Angels & Demons Dan Brown – a different one) This has probably the single best explanation of the various sub-products and deliverables that go into planning out a website. A truly awesome reference that anyone – even web developers and Photoshop d00ds should read.
- Planning by Product – the Targets & Goals Booklet by L. Ron Hubbard: A free course you can take on-line, which gives you the basics on how to plan and organize any product or activity, and see it through to completion.
- Lynda.com has a great video on the website planning & development process, with tools and tricks you can use to communicate the design better to the development team.
Photo Album Test-o-Rama
Apr 30th
I figured, in putting Windows Live Writer 2009 through its paces, that I’d try one of these newly-touted features, which is an instant upload of a photo album. The above photos were some shots taken at Washington Park Zoo, and around Beaverton, Oregon, picked randomly from my local hard disk. While the instant-collage that it makes is pretty spiffy, the only upload option then is to upload them to Windows Live’s photo gallery, so they can be displayed there.
This was my first exposure to their on-line photo gallery product, and being a long-term Flickr user, that left a little bit to be desired. It actually now begs for a side-by-side comparison with the other leading photo services, but my initial comparison to Flickr is:
- Photos look terrible: ‘Kay, I’m not talking about my framing or my choice of lighting or whatnot, I’m talking about the fact that Flickr very obviously does some sharpening and some brightness/contrast to the uploaded photos to make them look sharp. The same photos uploaded to Flickr and to Windows Live look decidedly better on Flickr.
As an example, here’s a side-by-side comparo with Flickr and Live.
- Stats? Well, perhaps it’s because I used to work for WebTrends, but I’m a total junkie for stats. Even the free Flickr account will let you see how many views your individual photos are getting, and the pro acct will let you get all manner of analytics on your photos. I searched and can find no such option on Windows Live.
- Full Image Download: A point in Microsoft’s favour is the generous helping if disk space you get right off the bat. Flickr lets you upload 100MB/mo, but my free Microsoft account gave me 25GB to play with, and the instant ability to upload full-rez images. That’s pretty nice for sharing full-quality images with family across the country.
- Geo-Tagging: Okay, and maybe it’s also because I’m a total map junkie and am addicted hopelessly to Google Earth, but I really dig Flickr’s ability to geo-tag photos. For example, in terms of presentation, I was able to very easily just put together a map of my recent train trip up from Los Angeles to Portland Oregon, and display it as a map on Flickr:
Perhaps that’s not a real big feature for some people, but I find it a very powerful way to present photos, and an intriguing way to browse the photos of others, or a place I’d like to travel to.
In any case, I appreciate the work that went into making the instant-collage feature for Windows Live Writer 2009. I now just think that a little bit of tweaking to the Live Photo Gallery product could make it a real winner and a genuine competitor to Flickr.
War of the Blogging Clients
Apr 30th
I’ve written a number of different articles in the past, exploring the difference in the blogging experience between blogging via the browser (i.e. using the built-in WordPress 2.7 AJAX interface), or blogging with the best of the Linux clients (i.e. Flock) or Windows (i.e. LiveWriter).
Now that I’ve got the newest Windows Live Writer 2009 up and running, I’m preparing to make another go at this. But before I do, I want to make sure my list is complete, in coming up with the best blogging client and environment on the net.
Here’s what I’m comparing, and please comment if you know of a better one that I’m missing out on:
Windows Live Writer 2009: It’s what I’m writing this current post on, and has been updated as late with a new-look UI, and some nifty new features. Once more, it’s tough to beat the simplicity and speed of being able to paste the clipboard straight into a blog post as a drop-shadowed or reflected images like this can. Really pretty slick. - Microsoft Word 2007: After years of being an OpenOffice.org man, firing up Word 2007 surprised me when I saw the detailed blogging features it has. How about the ability to stick smart charts straight into your blog as an image! Looks cool, but has anybody even used that feature yet? I have yet to see an Office 2007-authored WordPress blog, so I don’t know – will have to test it.
- Flock browser: Another long-term favorite of mine is the Flock browser’s built-in blogging interface that remembers all of your blog accounts and allows a hotkey-assisted blog-this in any operating system – Mac, Linux or Windows. And I’ve blogged on each quite extensively, and haven’t seen anything else on Linux that’s as polished.
Now, unfortunately for me I know there are more (like BlogJet, ScribeFire for Firefox, etc) but will need to see how many of those other ones really bring something neat to the table. There have been some past reviews of the field from some months ago, but now I want an updated view.
- I’ll get back to you on this thread once I’ve gotten to wring some work out of these clients, but would welcome any suggestions or opinions!
Live: Broadcasting from Oregon
Apr 28th
Out taking photos in the Tualatin Hills Nature Park in Beaverton, OR
I’m firing up now my first self-hosted WordPress blog — broadcasting live from my temporary abode in Beaverton, Oregon. This first post is really just a test of my new server, analytics and hosting settings, as all of my other WordPress blogs have been on wordpress.com, and not using the WordPress.org blogging software.
I must say, as a web developer and search engine tweaker, it is an infinitely better and more rewarding experience to host it yourself, as there are so many more tools you can put to use and ways to manage and monitor what’s going on. Hope to have quite a bit of fun with this in the near future.
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