So, Jakob Nielsen is at it again, with a list of The Top Ten Weblog Design Mistakes. Surprisingly, this blog does relatively well at avoiding the stuff he’s pointing out. I could be linking posts together better - I’ve been relying on tags/categories/“related entries” to do that automagically, since links will likely break if I change blog software sometime in the distant future. However, more explicit links would be a Good Thing™.
Read MoreIn the Pachyderm presentation publishing code, there is a step where it compiles the various versions of images for use in the final product - resizing as needed, wrapping in the .swf file and burning in the metadata. It uses an XML format, provided by JSwiff, to replace the freeze-dried content of a templated flash file wrapper with the dynamically defined data (image and text).
We just do a simple find-and-replace, looking for special tags that we’ve placed in the templated .swf xml version - looking for things like “{tombstoneTitleShort}” and replacing it with “My Most Excellent Photo”. Seems simple. But I just came across a case where it failed. The extended text for an image included a $ - which would be fine, but it’s a Magic Regex Character, symbolizing the end of a line of text (likewise, ^ symbolizes the beginning of a line). And, it was unescaped (and not at the end of a line), so the String.replaceAll() method was barfing appropriately. I think this is what was happening… Looked like it from the debug output, anyway…
Read MoreI just poked around the Spam Karma 2 reports, and realized that for the first time, ever, it’s showing more actual approved comments than denied spam attempts. Usually, there are hundreds of spam attempts listed for every successful comment - I never see the spam attempts, except for in these reports.
But, here’s what Spam Karma 2 is telling me:
There were 33 successful comments since I last looked, and only 31 spam attempts. Normally, there would be about 100-200 spam attempts listed here. Of course, none of them would actually make it to the blog, and I wouldn’t even know about them unless I bothered to check the spam log…
Read MoreFor the last couple of days, I was experimenting with running Google Adsense on my blog. I’d tried it before - mostly to see how well it matched ads to content - and removed it then, too. I put it on, calling it my “iPod fund” - but felt kind of dirty. I didn’t like the feeling, but justified it in my head - figuring it wasn’t hurting anyone, and just might buy me a toy or two…
Read MoreThe first home game since the Flames made their dash for the Stanley Cup - the entire city has been waiting for this for a year. And the game is banished to CTV SportsNet? Why the hell isn’t the game on every single channel? Hockey Night in Canada should be doing a special event. Heck, even TSN could cover it - it’s part of the basic cable package, so would reach the whole city. CBC has decided it’s better to run Coronation Street and Canadian Antiques Road Show (from Montreal). Coronation Street? Really?
Read MoreIt looks like I’ll be doing a couple of campus-wide workshops on the whole weblogs/wikis/rss/etc… stuff here at the University of Calgary. I’m going to try to pace it a little better than previous rounds, so will be breaking it into separate sessions. The first session will be on weblogs and RSS, to give a tour of what this stuff is, and point people at a few places to get started - weblogs.ucalgary.ca and EduBlogs.org. I’ll follow up a couple of weeks later with a session on wikis - likely focussing on wiki.ucalgary.ca and the wikipedia.
Read MoreOn the left, the “Genres” selector from the iTunes Music Store for the US. On the right, the same “Genres” selector for iTMS Canada.
There’s no “TV” genre in the Canadian store. Searching for “Lost” doesn’t turn up anything related to the TV series. What gives? Some crazy licensing scheme where the Canadian networks are able to block distribution of an American show - which they already rebroadcast on Canadian airwaves?
Read MoreLarry Johnson just sent an email to the NMC list with news that Blackboard and WebCT are merging. Holy. Crap. I mean - there goes any sense of competition in the LMS game. What’s left to compete? Moodle? Sakai? Something else? I really hope there is more than one Big Player left in the LMS world…
Here’s hoping the new LMS behemoth doesn’t go all Microsoft on our asses, and is able to do something innovative with their new collective girth.
Read MoreAs of the previous post, this blog contains 778 published entries containing a whopping 160,266 words - around 205 words per post. That blows me away. I mean, I remember struggling to write 5.000 word essays. And I write this blog just to document stuff I’m doing, basically for kicks.
That’s not all - the 895 non-spam comments on this blog contain a stunning 52,668 words - about 59 words per comment.
Read MoreThis message from Jeremy Matthews just came across the WO-Deploy list, and I wanted to hurl a copy here to remind me to check it out. Looks like the latest stable build of Tomcat 5.5 may include some love for WebObjects… (emphasis mine)
FYI,
We just released Tomcat 5.5.12 installer for Mac OS X 10.2-10.4.2
What’s New:
more than 100+ changes from the apache group; view changelogs at:
http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/tomcat-5.5-doc/changelog.htmlChanged to the newest stable distro (5.5.12)
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Rewrote everything to work with the newest version (lots o’ changes
here…)
Updated Autostart script to declare WebObjects variables
Included JDBC adaptors from: Oracle, MySQL, FrontBase, OpenBase, and
PostgreSQL
Tons of maintenance changes
Resolved some mis-declared variables
Well, the One More Thing event turned out to be pretty spiffy. Cool new iMac. Some funky new software (but is it iMac-only?) The new video iPod looks sweet - and the high end one still costs less than my 3G 20GB unit did…
The TV-on-iTunes/iPod thing looks like it will be awesome. But… Where is Battlestar Galactica? I’d subscribe to the whole season of that. I will likely buy the rest of this season of Lost, as well - or at least the ones I miss “live”. But, BSG? Every. Single. Episode.
Read MoreI played around with Rails a bit today. I contrived an excuse to attempt to create a generic “event management” application. I’m familiar with the basic requirements of the app, and have a need to have a generalizable app available to share with groups and departments on campus. And, I want to play around with Rails and ruby to get a feel for what it can do.
Well, I had better luck than Stephen did, but still not quite the magic “30 seconds from concept to production app” wonder that has been whipped up around Rails. I was following the “ToDo” howto and going off in my own direction. It didn’t work too well, and I’ve just realized that’s because the ToDo chapter is written to Rails 0.9, and I’ve got Rails 0.8.something installed. Apparently, Big Changes were involved going to 0.9. OK - so that should discount some of these issues/hangups.
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