I’ve seen references to it often, but have never really understood what it was. Besides learning that it is pronounced Lay-Tech (the x is the greek “chi”), this post explained it use and benefits better than anything else that I have seen.
technorati tags:LaTeX
I've been working today on building a new LPS WWW box that will use ColdFusion as it's primary scripting language since the NetCloak that we have used for around 10 years has been discontinued. Here are some quick notes of things that I have either learned or been reminded of today.
One of the greatest things about CSS is the ability to create styles for non-screen delivery. Digital-Web features has a new article called “CSS Styling for Print and Other Media”.
Google’s code search allows visitors to search publicly accessible code for answers. It now includes ColdFusion.
technorati tags:coldfusion, google
Adobe has launched a new design center on their web site specifically for Fireworks. If you are looking to get the most out of Fireworks, this will be the place to stay tuned to. There’s already some neat articles up there including one on how to “Create a night scene with Fireworks” and “Creating lens flares using Fireworks”. Interested in participating in the Fireworks 9 beta? You can sign up for that also.
I started visiting Brightcove a couple of years ago when Jeremy Allaire (creator of ColdFusion) mentioned it at the 2004 Macromedia MAX Conference in New Orleans. It took a long time before it became publicly available, and even then it seemed to be geared towards professional media producers and not something available to the masses.
I'm not sure when things changed, but recent visits have excited me as it became clear that Brightcove would make it very possible for non-professional media producers to get their content online in a way that was easy and looked great. Brightcove (and DiVX's Stage 6) allow for the creation of "channels" so that you can put an organized set of media online that can be browsed and viewed easily. The other nice thing about these channels is that it provides the content creator some ability to provide custom branding around the videos instead of having the hosting company's logo all over the place (like youtube, yahoo or google).
I have begun a new player at LPS. It will be a while before it goes public (if it ever does) but consider this your invitation to take a look and let me know what you think. I'm just going to start throwing whatever video I have access to up there.
technorati tags:video, brightcove
If you tried visiting my blog yesterday, you may have seen a short-lived experiment as I considered moving my blog from Wordpress to Blogger. My only real reason for trying Blogger is that I've really become pretty fond of Google's other tools and figured that I might as well do everything that I can in one place. I discovered quickly that Blogger is no Wordpress.
Today, Ted Patrick of Adobe found his blog's feeds broken as in Google's upgrades of Blogger, they disabled all RSS and RDF feed publishing and moved everybody completely to Atom. Of course the biggest problem with this is that you just broke the feeds of thousands of blogs and are going to force millions of readers to fix their subscriptions. Bad bad bad...
Adobe put out the first non-beta release of the Flash 9 player with full-screen video this week. Brightcove is already utilizing it.
Try it out here…
technorati tags:flash, brightcove, adobe
Ryan Stewart uses Google Trends to compare Rich Internet Application technologies and shows that Adobe Flex is ranking best compared to other environments like OpenLaszlo. I ran his query then added AJAX and they were blown out of the water - basically flatlined at the bottom of the graph.
technorati tags:flex, apollo, ajax, openlaszlo
I've always been a map/navigation freak, so it's no surprise to me that I have found this geocaching quite addictive. I enjoy the creativeness of the quests. I like how each of the caches that I have found so far have introduced me to a place that I would probably have not otherwise visited. I'm also pretty stunned by how big the community around this is. Here's a couple things that I have learned in my short time doing this
technorati tags:geocaching
I mentioned the term geocaching in my last post. Geocaching is a sort of scavenger hunt, or hide-and-seek game where someone hides a small “cache” and then puts information online to help people find it. The clues online include GPS coordinates to where the item can be found typically with some vague visual clues to help once there. My wife and I tried our first last night as there was one only a few blocks from our house. We struck out through the neighborhood with our GPS in hand and found a small park in the middle of a large block accessible only by a narrow sidewalk that divided two houses. Once to the park, we went about search every nook of every tree, bush, hole until we found the cache. Generally caches have a log where you can record when you found it along with goodies that you can take provided you leave something in its place. It’s a fun activity and could be fun for a whole family. It’s amazing how many caches there are, probably hundreds just in the Lincoln area. It could also be a very fun way to get to know somewhere you are travelling.
Learn more at geocaching.com
I've written before about geotagging photographs. This has become super easy since Flickr has added a geotagging function in the last few months. Sometimes, this may not be enough though. Tomorrow, my family and I are headed to Maine and plan to do a little boating (cold boating). I was interested in the idea of taking my GPS and my camera and finding a way to link waypoint data from the gps with photos that I take. I found that a program that I have used before, JetPhoto, will do this and I was off to trying to make it work.
First, I needed to find a way to connect my GPS (an old Garmin GPS 3 Plus) to my macintosh. I found a data cable for the GPS, but USB was just finding its way onto the first iMac when my GPS was made, so it has a PDA-like serial cable. I figured that I could then maybe use a Palm USB Connect adapter to convert the serial to USB, but there weren't appropriate drivers available for it. So, I found a similar adapter by Dynex at Best Buy that said it was OS X ready. I plugged it in, installed the software and... nothing. I went to the Dynex web site to see if they had a newer version of the drivers, but they didn't. Viewing the readme for the drivers told me that Dynex actually had a company called prolific make the drivers. I downloaded those and things were starting to look up.
Since JetPhoto only seems to match up GPS data with a list of photos, and doesn't actually connect to the GPS itself, I needed to find a way to connect to the unit. I downloaded GPSBabel, which seems to be the current GPS transfer application of choice for the Macintosh, but my GPS proved to be a little too old (I think) for GPSBabel to deal with it. So, I did something that I almost never do, went looking for older software. I found GPS Connect, a discontinued GPS connection tool for OS X and Garmin receivers. Finally, I had something that could see my GPS. I was able to download content from it and put things on to it. With this running, I was also able to effectively use LoadMyTracks which put my GPS information directly onto Google Earth and Geocaching menu which makes it easy to put coordinates from Geocaching.com directly on to your GPS.
All of this done, I'll see if I can't do the photo/gps thing on wednesday when we head to Casco Bay.
The sour feeling that’s in my tummy this morning tells me that today is Student Vote at Lincoln Public Schools. This is the fourth time that we have done student vote online (we do it every two years) and I’d like to think that I’ve gotten a little better at it each time – until this year. Things have really felt like a mess this time around. The biggest thing that has killed me is not having ballot information until the middle of October. Last student vote, I was able to demonstrate the finished application to those attending the vote kickoff in mid september, this year I didn’t have it completely ready until last week (Halloween-ish). On top of that, LPS was not in session last week, so many people are going to be trying to get all caught up this morning as students come in. I’m expecting a lot of unhappiness and frustration today and hope to be proven wrong.
While Flock is still my favorite browser, I’ve been working a lot with Firefox to see what I think of it. I like it. As is typical, I think that the appearance of the windoze version seems a little more polished than the mac one (which is funny since they used different themes for them this time). I think the greatest thing that was added in this version is a built-in spell checker that checks anything you type into any web form. I know we’ve spent a lot of time at LPS putting spell checkers in web applications when that functionality really does belong in the browser. Here are some things that I’ve done recently to make Firefox more useful to me (read: more flock like).
I'm using the GrApple (Uno) theme along with the Uno mac theme and with a couple of differences, you can barely tell the difference between Firefox and Safari (or even Camino once applied there)I attended a session today covering the use of HTML and Javascript with Adobe’s upcoming Apollo product. Among many other things, Apollo will allow web applications to be deployed as desktop applications. For this to happen, Apollo must have its own HTML rendering engine. To my great surprise, that chosen HTML renderer is WebKit (the same used in Apple’s Safari). Want to make a web application apollo-ready? Design for Safari. Cool.
If you haven’t seen a demonstration yet of Acrobat 8 and Acrobat Connect, you can catch one here (done of course with Acrobat Connect - formerly Breeze).
Have you seen songbird? It’s an open-source application that looks a lot like iTunes. I’ve always thought it was an iTunes knockoff to give all those poor folks on Linux something to feel included with. This screencast on the songbird site showed me and will show you that while it looks like iTunes it is much different and if you like audio files on the internet, may deserve a place on your computer.
technorati tags:songbird
A newly available flash plugin supports full-screen video. You can download the plugin here, then try out some samples here. It looks great and is very welcome on the Macintosh where full-screen video is hard to come by. Quicktime doesn’t support running embedded movies as full screen. Real does, but few use it anymore and DivX also supports it but again is rarely utilitzed. Prepare to see it everywhere.
technorati tags:flash
A co-worker of mine sent this out today. It’s called “How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot in Any Programming Language”. My favorite is CSS: “You shoot your right foot with one hand, then switch hands to shoot your left foot but you realize that the gun has turned into a banana.”
It’s a Web 2.0 application that serves as a directory to Web 2.0 sites. I wonder if it lists itself…
I have noticed lately that the camera icon in my iChat indicated that my MacBook Pro was unable to host (or participate in) a multi-party video chat. Since I know that it is able to, I went looking for an answer to this. Here’s what I did to fix it: I opened the Quicktime system preference and changed the network speed setting from ‘automatic’ to ‘intranet/lan’. iChat must have been asking quicktime if I had enough net-speed to succesfully chat and quicktime was telling it that I did not. Liar.