I’d seen somewhere on the blogosphere (perhaps on John Dowdell’s blog?) that Macromedia was running a public beta of the Flash 8 player, and that it apparently kicked some serious performance ass over the current version.
I just downloaded it on one of my systems, and holy crap is it fast. Why wasn’t flash this fast all along? Loads fast. Almost psychically responsive (things happen instantly, with no lag).
One thing that has been bugging me since moving my blog to GoDaddy for hosting, is the PITA that MySQL backups have become. Back when I was on the Learning Commons’ webserver, I could just create a crontask to dump the MySQL tables every morning. No SSH or shell access to my GoDaddy account means using a web interface to backup, which is less than automatable.
WordPress to the rescue! There’s a WordPress Database Backup Plugin that can easily download or email database backups to you, and when tied with WP-Cron (a cron-like plugin for automating stuff), it’s fully automatable! I now have daily database backups gzipped and emailed to my GMail account for safe keeping.
I’ve got the Live8 Concert(s) [wikipedia] on in the background, and Sir Bob just played a segment from the original Live Aid concert - ending at what I thought was a child that had just died in it’s parent’s arms.
Bob went on to say that the child was probably 10 minutes from death, but that they were able to step in and help, and that the child had just graduated from agricultural school in Ethiopia. Then, he introduced the now-grown child on stage. One of the most powerful moments I can remember. She is now an amazingly vibrant and glowing young woman. Thank god she wasn’t written off 20 years ago! It boggles my mind to think about all of the other kids that didn’t have that one-in-a-billion chance…
I’d seen Autostitch when it was first announced - as a research project by a couple of students at UBC. It’s a really cool app that takes in an arbitrary set of photos that were taken of the same scene, and stitches them together automagically without user intervention.
Very cool software, and it does an amazing job.
But, it’s Windows only. It runs OK in Virtual PC, but it’s slow (as expected). I would really love it if this was somehow included in iPhoto 5 - imagine being able to select a set of photos and say “stitch these together for me” - and have it actually do it…
The Norman family got back into town yesterday afternoon, after what felt like a 24-hour journey home. Checked out of the hotel at 10am Sunday, returned home 3pm Monday… It was sunny and warm in Honolulu, cold and shitty and rainy in Calgary. I want to go back… :-)
There’s a whole bunch I want to blog about, including rants/raves about spending 2 weeks in Honolulu (and some tips for anyone else planning on doing the same).
Apple and the NECC are doing some serious podcasting from this year’s NECC conference. I’m blissfully unaware of details, being stranded in Honolulu for another week ;-) but I’m sure I’ll have a lot of podcasty goodness to catch up on when I get back into town next week…
PS. I know this breaks my self-imposed blogging vacation. Evan’s sitting on the counter at the Ala Moana Apple Store, grooving to the Fly Guy while Janice is in Williams Sonoma getting her fix…
Josh, King and myself put on a session this morning called “Creative Action at a Distance” - where we outlined the tools that we use to collaborate while building the Pachyderm 2.0 software.
King iChatAVed in after 28 hours of sleep deprivation, shortly after landing at the Calgary International Airport - apparently there’s wireless in the food court now…
It was surprisingly well attended - we had a full house (even if nobody wanted to sit in the front row…)
Thanks to a pointer from Sameer D’Costa, I just used a handy shell script to export all of my Safari RSS subscriptions to an OPML file that can be imported into Wordpress to update my links/blogroll. Easy peasy.
I hadn’t realized how much my subscription list had grown… It’s now up to 469 feeds, and I didn’t even realize it - that’s 100 new feeds since switching to Safari RSS.
Update: Almost forgot - had to modify the .opml export slightly. Out of the box, the script exports urls as “xmlUrl”, but Wordpress expects “htmlUrl” - easy to change using a batch find/replace, and easy to fix the script, too.
