Brian Fitzgerald

Where do you stand on software/video piracy? I don’t know anybody that’s all for it, but we all seem to have a line that we think is all right to cross. This video compares piracy to things that are pretty absurd…

WebWag is another AJAX-driven start page. Looks great.

Digital Web Magazine - News - Article: The Big Picture on Microformats: You've heard the buzz about microformats, and you've probably been meaning to use them on your sites—perhaps they're sitting somewhere near the bottom of your list of things to do. In his new article, John Allsopp gives us a snapshot of what's happening with microformats today, and he challenges us all to move them closer to the top of the pile.

Bytespring is a content management system built in ColdFusion. Jason Sheedy has posted a FAQ

I haven’t posted for a couple of days, but it’s not because I haven’t been blogging. Several months ago I started to move forward with creating a site where video tutorials could be shared. I had gotten frustrated with the cost of commercial services for what they were offering, while at the same time depressed by the free alternatives. Chris Pultz and I each created one series of videos to get started, and neither of us got further than that. What got in the way? Well, I should say that the new site got in the way of time that we would both rather spend with our families. Who wants to work when you leave work?

So, what about the site? Well, Chris noticed after we began working on the site that screencasting (the new term for narrated screen recordings) was starting to take off and that quite a few folks were beginning to share them on the web. Indeed, in just the few months since I set up the site, tons of these screencasts have been published. Why should we replicate everyone’s effort? Hmmm…

So welcome the new Vuedo.com! I am combing the Internet looking for helpful screencasts so that there is one easy place that people can come to find help with what they are doing. Of course I still plan on creating my own screencasts, but now I’m just filling in the holes I see in what everyone else is already doing.

Visit Vuedo and Subscribe! Let me know what you’d like to see there.

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Ben has a new article up on the Adobe developer center regarding using PDF Forms with ColdFusion MX7. While he notes that these abilities pale in comparison to what will be possible with Scorpio (Next major version of ColdFusion) they offer some things that could be useful now.

The two uses that he illustrates is populating a PDF form with database data AND extracting form data from a PDF form. It requires a custom tag, but looks to be very easy once in place.

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An article on Vitamin today discussed why the author does not use social sites. The ending argument was that the author didn’t have time for their own work and they certainly didn’t have time to be social on one of these new sites.

I understand where they are coming from and have felt this myself from time to time.

Then I think of all of the times (multiple per day) that I have searched and found the answer to a problem that I had on a person’s blog or buried in a forum somewhere. While it would be nearly impossible to thank each person that you receive help from via the internet, I do feel a very strong responsibility to give back to the system. If I save a day of work that I would have struggled to figure something out because somebody took the time to detail their solution on a site, the least I can do is put my own experiences on the web. I rarely comment on others' sites and just as often participate in forums, but if I get it out there somewhere (such as on my blog) then I know that it will be indexed by the search engines and somebody may find an answer to a problem that they run into. Heck, since I run into the same problems over and over, I find the answer to some of my questions on my own blog.

Social sites like del.icio.us and flickr that encourage everyone to chip in can make that goal easier. If I post my bookmarks to somewhere like del.icio.us, then everyone can benefit from things I find instead of them being locked up on my computer. Flickr allows photos to be shared and aggregated, giving views of places and events from many perspectives. These services, among others, can probably be tied into tools that you are already using and can be used in creative ways. I almost never visit these sites. When I take a picture on my phone or export it from iPhoto, it goes to Flickr, which publishes it in such a way that my blog can display it. My browser, Flock, can publish all bookmarks to del.icio.us, which then appear on my blog also. These sites become middleware agents that allow data to be liberated in exciting ways.

So forget about any feelings that if you use a social site that you need to be commenting and participating in that community. Find a way to contribute to the larger community of the internet. Use these services as a way to save time, to work contribution to the internet into what you are already doing, and to perhaps without even knowing it, help somebody out.

Barely 8 hours after saying that I wouldn’t be doing a link dump anymore, I found something to keep it going. A pre-beta (scary) of NetNewsWire is available and one thing it does is allow you to make on easy post with links to all of the tabs that you have open. Sooo, I can read through all of the news and pick out the few articles that I think are interesting, then with two clicks post links to those tabs to the blog.

I considered that maybe this is a duplication of effort since I still want to get these into my del.icio.us list, but there are a lot of things (such as the PDF newsletter this morning) that are interesting and will be good to read, but are not long-term assets that I want to bookmark. So, we’ll try this out for a bit and see how it works out. Am I crazy? Let me know.

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I was getting frustrated with a single sidebar on my blog since so many things were ending up too far down the page, so I have redesigned. I like this much better and it gave me room to add my delicious links to the side, so I will probably stop doing the link dumps that haven’t been working for me very well anyway. Enjoy!

I’m sure I’ve brought it up before, but TextMate is an incredible text editor that hides behind a very simple interface. A new video on their video cast shows some simple features that make great use of Google APIs in creating links in HTML documents.

Went to our county ‘event center’ today and watched my brother-in-law Aaron race in an autocross with his new Nissan. I taped it and threw it up on Google video…

I've mentioned here before that I started using the LAME mp3 encoder to prepare audio files for publishing to a podcast (if you are using OS X, you can use darwinports to install it for you). While it is a little usability-challenged since it's a command-line tool, once you have the settings figured out, it's easy to use. My big reason for not using iTunes to do this is that I was getting a lot of file clutter putting files into iTunes, encoding them and then receiving them again through the podcastâ??ultimately giving me three files. I don't want them in my iTunes library until I get them via a subscription like everybody else.

I thought that everything was going well with the settings that I've been using until I tried listening to an episode in Odeo and got a earful of chipmunks. Odeo, and a handful of other podcast subscription sites uses flash applications to deliver audio files through the web browser. The flash player requires that audio files be resampled at bitrates that are multiples of 11.025khz. This apparently is not a standard way that mp3 encoders work.

So, here are the settings that I have settled on for encoding mp3s for podcasts:

== lame --preset voice --resample 44.1 --nspsytune -q 1 --lowpass 6 --noshort file.aif file.mp3 ==

I got the most help on establishing this from the Hydrogenaudio forums and then tweaked it to work for Flash.

technorati tags:lame, osx, podcast, flash, odeo, itunes

The development community is divided into two halves: the designers and the coders. I never know which one I am. Many may look at my designs and code and say that I'm neither. I would prefer (for my own self-confidence) to think that I'm both, although the two disciplines tend to sabotague each other. It's very difficult to design effectively after days of looking at source. It is equally difficult to build and maintain an application of any size when the design part of you shuns conformity and structure.

My latest clash of these tendencies is version control. For those of you that are familiar with Dreamweaver but unfamiliar with version control, consider the check-in/check-out feature in your Site Definition a light version control sytem. Check-in/check-out in Dreamweaver prevents multiple people from editing a file at the same time and thus, hopefully, prevents versioning errors that could occur if multiple people edited and uploaded the same file around the same time.

Preventing multiple simultaneous edits is one thing, but there are many other things to consider that Dreamweaver does not tackle. What if you want to return to a previous version of a file? What if you do want to 'fork' a document allowing development to continue on the original while also allowing development to begin on a new version of the document?  What if you need some accountability as to who changed what and when? What if you find a need to merge two versions of the same document? All of these things and more can be handled by a true version control system.

The most popular (it seems) system today is called subversion. It is a server application that can run on nearly any platform and, once installed, can be accessed by numerous client applications that have been written or by the native command line interface.

So here I am. I know I should do this. I know it's needed. I want to know how to use one. I have downloaded Subversion and installed it on my laptop as a way to begin learning it. Now I need to force myself to learn and use it. I hope that this is a great experience and something that will improve my development... If only the design part of me will allow it.

technorati tags:subversion, dreamweaver

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.

technorati tags:quicktime, ichat

If you didn't see the announcements at yesterday's WWDC keynote, you can find them at Apple.com.

Impressions? First, I was intrigued a little by the tag-team presentation format. Steve handed off to three other Apple execs throughout the keynote in a way that felt to me like a bit of a "American Geek Idol". Are they trying to find someone that has a bit of the aura that Steve carries? None of the presenters yesterday qualify -- especially Phil.

Second, While the hardware announcements are probably the most important, they do not excite me. I get giddy about the software. Time machine looks great. Time machine is a backup solution with a fantastic interface that allows the user to take any finder window or compatible appliction and rewind it to a state that they need or restore a piece from that past version to the current. Of course for many of us that run with a pretty full hard drive, this will require the purchase of a large external drive, but if the backup can be transparent and reliable, it is worth it.

The iChat improvments look great. I'm most excited about the ability to share a screen with a buddy to either collaborate with that person OR do troubleshooting. I can't count the times that I've been chatting with somebody and just wished that I could see what they were seeing and help them out.

Universal Access in Tiger is way better than what's been in OS X before, but it's got a long way to go and I'm glad to see that it is such an important part of Leopard that they featured it in the keynote. I'm hoping that it's functional enough that I can, as a web developer, really get a feel for how visually-challenged folks are receiving a page and to then make them as easy to digest as possible.

Finally, spotlight is kind of boring, but I don't know what I did before it. I welcome the ability to do more advanced searches with it and to be able to search network volumes with it.

Now, we just have to wait until next spring to receive the goods. Tiger was released during the last weekend of April in 2005. Perhaps we can expect a similar release this time.

technorati tags:apple, wwdc, keynote

This morning (or noon-ish central time) Steve Jobs will take the stage in San Francisco to address the attendees of Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference. This is the Apple version of the MAX conference (for those develop using Adobe products). I read one web site that anticipated a "flurry" of announcements. While I'm sure there will be some surprises, here are the three things that are expected:

• MacOS 10.5 “Leopard” - Apple has made no secret that it’s going to be talking a lot about Leopard. What is a secret is what’s in Leopard. A list going around lists the following improvements: ** Spotlight 2.0 ** Dashboard 2.0 ** Safari 3.0 ** iChat 4.0 ** Automator 2.0 ** QuickTime 7.2 ** Mail 3.0 ** iCal 3.0 ** Address Book 5.0
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I'm pretty unimpressed with the Leopard list. While it may be true, anybody could go through the Apple-provided applications on their computer and increase the versions by one. I hope to see a lot of eye-candy! We'll just have to see what Stevie shows us.

Beyond that, who knows. I would be surprised to see any iPod announcements, but it's been a while since the video version came out and there have been rumors for months of an iPod with a larger video screen on it. There have also been rumors of a redesigned Nano with an aluminum case similar to the iPod mini that it replaced.

technorati tags:wwdc, apple

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I found these instructions by Mark Andrachek to install ColdFusion on an Intel-based Macintosh via Ben Forta’s blog. I tried them originally with a fresh install of Apache 2 and it didn’t work very well, but I removed the Apache install and used OS X’s built-in Apache and it worked fantastic!!

technorati tags:coldfusion, macintosh, intel, macbook, apache, jrun

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