Brian Fitzgerald

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 I went to the Dynex web site to see if they had a newer version of the drivers, but they didn't. Viewing the readme for the drivers told me that Dynex actually had a company called prolific make the drivers.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).

• Del.icio.us has a very nice new add-on for firefox that does a full replacement of the Firefox bookmarking system with a del.icio.us-based one. Now anything I bookmark in either Firefox or Flock ends up in the same place (and a place that is available to everyone).
• Performancing is a decent blog posting tool that integrates with Firefox. I'm using it right now to compose this. I haven't explored everything that this tool does, but it does give me access to my categories and lets me add tags.
• 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)

There are plug-ins that try to account for some other Flock functions like tying into Flickr (flickrFox) and doing news reading (sage), but they don't even come close.

• del.icio.us/help/firefox
  Del.icio.us has a new firefox extension that is superb! It replaces the built-in bookmarking in Firefox with a del.icio.us powered one. It makes it very easy to create, tag and search your favorite sites in a way that is accessible to others that may be i
  (tags: delicious firefox bookmark)
• Repository of Recorded User Group Presentations (by dozens of speakers)
  A searchable database of Acrobat Connect (Breeze) presentations that have been created for user group use.
  (tags: cfug mmug breeze coldfusion dreamweaver adobe macromedia)

• Security Bites Podcast: Firefox 2 beats IE 7 | CNET News.com
  (tags: ie firefox security)

See photos from max attendees here

Max 2006 is over so I guess that means that its time to take a look back over the last couple of days.

One thought that was going through my head this evening was how much this conference confirmed my feelings that web development is getting more exciting and doing anything but standing still. There was so much excitement at this conference around new ideas and directions such as Apollo, Flex and integration of PDF and Flash technologies.

Second, Adobe needs to lighten up a little bit. The 2006 version of Max had a much more corporate feel to it, and it didn’t feel right. There were a few more suits and ties this year that I remember from the past. There were fewer freebies to be had. There were more disclaimers before discussions. Adobe tried to play cool by providing all the pop and candy we wanted, but I don’t think anybody’s love was getting bought. It may sound stupid, but sending everybody out of the conference with an Adobe jacket or other strongly branded item would have helped solidify a little loyalty.

Third, the conference needs to either focus on coders (not my choice) or expand and bring the whole design community together (awesome!). The Max signs all said “The 2006 Adobe Conference” and yet, except for PDF jockeys, the traditional Adobe user would not have found much for them at this conference. Go BIG! Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator should all be covered and celebrated. Do sessions on Premier and After Effects. Become THE creative conference. It would be amazing and certainly the event of the year.

These are some pretty basic ideas and certainly not the most important things I’m taking from this conference – just things on my mind right now. Tomorrow we travel back to the great plains. I’m pretty excited to see my family and begin trying some of the things that I’ve learned here.

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.

The Blue Man Group opened this year's MAX conference. Fun to watch, but sure seemed like a commercial for their nightly show here at the venetian. $99 a ticket?! Ha ha ha...

I’m out in Las Vegas this week with some co-workers attending the Adobe MAX conference. It’s a little different this year as it is the first year since Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia (whose conference it was before). Here’s what I’ve taken from today:

1. Adobe is providing an unlimited amount of PDF kool-aid. I don't think that many have much against the format itself, but most everyone I know and talk with groan when we think about the Acrobat player.
2. Flex is where we are going. Flex has really matured over the last two years and its time to take it seriously. ColdFusion developers are in a perfect position to fly with it.
3. THE MAC VERSION OF THE FLEX BUILDER IS NOW AVAILABLE AS A BETA!! I have it installed and can't wait to start working with it.
   
4. Apollo will be everywhere. We don't all write applications to run in browsers because we just can't get enough of Firefox, Safari and Opera. Apollo will allow us to liberate our applications from browsers and turn them into desktop applications.
5. Flash may be what saves makes PDF bearable. Today's release of the document reader beta from Adobe demonstrates an application that is only a couple of megabytes, yet allows one to select and read PDF files. Its about time that Adobe realize that people don't want to install a 30M file just to read PDFs.

I'm looking forward to tomorrow. Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe, will be anchoring the general session. I'll be attending sessions covering HTML/Javascript/AJAX usage in Apollo, prototyping with Fireworks, creating learnable applications, integrating flash video into sites and manipulating images with Coldfusion.  Finally, Adobe is hosting a party at the Palms tomorrow evening. Another long and exciting day...

powered by performancing firefox

I nuked my MacBook last week and this morning reinstalled ColdFusion using these instructions that I found earlier. I also installed the latest MySQL 5.1 which required some extra work detailed here.

technorati tags:coldfusion, mysql

Mozilla has made release candidate 3 of the upcoming Firefox 2 browser available.

technorati tags:firefox, mozilla

• FatBits: John Siracusa's Journal: Open Apple
  When the big thing on the web now is corporate blogs (and I LOVE them), where are Apple's? I personally find Adobe's, Microsofts and others' blogs the most informative places to learn about what's going on. It seems to me that Apple could say and communic
  (tags: apple blogs)
• Eudora to Become Open Source
  Eudora has long been dead in my opinion. I still see people use it from time to time, but generally by those that are either resistent to change or just stubborn. The email client landscape on the Macintosh isn't anything spectacular, but there are much b
• 1.2 Million Libyan Kids With Laptops
  This is really an amazing initiative and I'm glad that Gates didn't convince investors that $100 computers were a stupid idea. They may not fly well in the U.S., but internet access is internet access (sort of), however the thought of Wikipedia becoming
• A Reformed take on the Supper
  (tags: HSLuthBlogs)
• A seven course meal
  (tags: HSLuthBlogs)
• Baby Baptism
  (tags: HSLuthBlogs)
• Why I Homeschool - Part VI -...
  (tags: HSLuthBlogs)

• Any Thoughts on Crucifixes?
  (tags: HSLuthBlogs)

• The End of the World
  (tags: HSLuthBlogs)
• Pray continually
  (tags: HSLuthBlogs)

• Evangelical Lutheran Worship
  (tags: HSLuthBlogs)
• ABC News: Google to Buy YouTube for $1.65 Billion
  I don't understand dot com finances. How can anything like this be worth 1.65 Billion dollars? I realize that it is stock, but the fact that Google can spend that much is just ridiculous too. It's like play money.
  (tags: google youtube)

• The Nativity Story
  (tags: HSLuthBlogs)
• Chart DrillDown Animations
  These drilldown animations done in Adobe Flex are amazing and the source code is available to see how they were done.
  (tags: flex)
• Google releases code search service
  Ars Techica details a new beta service from Google allows visitors to search through source code.
  (tags: Google)
• Does every church need two websites?
• famfamfam.com: Silk Icons
  Nice, Free Icons!
  (tags: icons)
• Where is the Cross?
  (tags: HSLuthBlogs)
• Markup Maker
  This is a cool web application that lets you feed it a series of DIV names (for a proposed web page) and it kicks back the HTML shell including the an embedded css style sheet with the requested DIVs.
  (tags: css markup xhtml)
• CSS Sync :: Mozilla Add-ons
  This is a great firefox/flock add-on that I found today. It tells firefox to reload a page's css every second. This allows you to have a page you are currently designing up in a browser window while you are coding in another. Every time you commit changes
  (tags: css mozilla firefox flock add-on)

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).

technorati tags:acrobat, 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

• Redefining content management
  Everyone's using content mangement systems but is anyone effectively managing their content?
  (tags: cms "contentmanagement")

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