Tech

My opinions on all things tech related

There are 271 posts filed in Tech (this is page 23 of 28).

Printability in Blogs

Walt Crawford’s newest issue of Cites & Insights is out! It contains a well-executed article about printability of blogs, or rather the lack thereof.

Of course, the whole issue is worth reading, not just this article.

But I’m very happy to see that Hidden Peanuts made the A-List of printable blogs! But as he says, that doesn’t account for content. 🙂 I thank WordPress more than anything I’ve done; there’s been no conscious effort on my part to make HP any more or less printable.

That’s why I like the article so much. It’s something I’d never even thought about before, but now strikes me as an issue worth considering. I don’t imagine that many readers would be interested in printing out what I have to say, for any of Crawford’s three reasons, but of course other blogs lend themselves to that much more ably.

After reading the piece, I checked out HP in print preview out of curiosity. Interestingly, I get slightly different results between browsers. If an image straddles a page break, Firefox just cuts the image in half – one part on page 1, the rest on page 2. IE is a little more intelligent, and bumps the whole image to the second page. I gotta give Microsoft the edge in this department.

Webcasting

At the end of last year Fox started airing a ‘reality’ show called My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss.

The Premise: On the surface, a clone of The Apprentice.
The Catch: The boss doing the firing, and everyone else besides the contestants, is an actor. The whole thing is a setup.

The boss and company then proceed to mess with the contestants hilariously. My favorite challenge was the paintball one: Each team must try to protect one of their members from a paintball attack from the boss, while accomplishing everyday office tasks.

Unfortunately, it was cancelled after just five of the ten episodes aired.

Thankfully, Fox put episodes 6-10 online! They’ve been up for about a month now it appears, but somehow I’d missed the anouncement.

First Battlestar Galactica, now this. I’m crossing my fingers that studios are finally catching on to the possibilities of online TV show distribution.

ColdFusion

I need to take a moment to sing the praises of Macromedia’s ColdFusion.

Before you yell at me, yes I’m sure there are better and/or more efficient ways to do database-driven web sites. PHP, ASP, etc. But ColdFusion is simple. The basic code is almost human readable, and anyone who knows a bit of HTML can pick it up quickly.

For the scale of what I’m doing (a class project), CF gets the job done and does it well. I’ll save hours!

Google Satellite

Google Maps has added Satellite pictures! Or maybe they’re aerial photographs, I can never tell.

I used to love playing with Microsoft’s Terraserver, which has similar content. Google’s version is much more user friendly for browsing.

The pictures are a bit out of date, however. Looking at my hometown, it shows a bridge that was replaced at least a few years ago.

Digital Photo Preservation

Because I’m a native son of Rochester, NY, I still read the local paper online now and then.

As the home of Kodak, the city has always had an interest in photography. Today there’s an article on the pitfalls and perils of digital image preservation in the home/consumer environment.

The issue of image loss is a big one. My brother ran into some Windows issues a couple years back and ended up losing almost every digital picture he’d taken. They weren’t backed up anywhere.

I’ve been paranoid ever since. I back up photos regularly on an external hard drive, distribute CDs of photo sets to friends, and now have uploaded the majority of my snapshots to Flickr. I think I’m safe, but you never know.

Think of it like a digital shoebox. I’ve got piles of ‘traditional’ pictures as well, and really should see about getting them scanned in.

One of the more cogent points in the D&C article is that digital photos have no inherent backup. Film at least provided negatives to derive reprints from should the worst happen.

The article also mentions the advantages of keeping your digital photos organized. Maybe I’m weird, but I actually quite enjoy organizing my pictures. But even so, I wish I’d started sooner. I did a major overhaul of my organizational scheme, which was haphazard at best, about a year go. In the process I discovered that my old camera had very often not recorded the correct date. So I wasn’t able to classify some of the pictures accurately. The best I can do is narrow it down to the year. But now that my scheme is in place, dropping new files into it is a breeze.

Digital preservation and standards creep like this always interests me. Will the JPEG format still be readable 50 years from now? If so, will the storage device they’re located on be readable?

Happy Anniversary

A Cnet interview with a Google high muckety-muck brings some insights about Gmail to light. Appropriate, given that tomorrow is the 1 year anniversary of Gmail’s debut announcement. You might remember that just about everybody (myself included) thought it was an April Fool’s joke. One gigabyte of electronic mail storage? Poppycock! That’s what I would have been thinking were I British and a fuddy duddy. I’m in a strange mood tonight, don’t mind me…

Back on topic!

Now Google is upping the ante to 2 gig! I’m guessing this is in response to Yahoo’s recent matching of Gmail’s 1gb storage limit. Not only that, but the storage limit will steadily increase beyond the two gigabyte frontier, and the sky’s the limit! The details are a little muddled at this point, but it sure sounds interesting.

It’s amazing how just a year ago even the best webmail account rarely exceeded 10 megabytes.

And in closing, a reminder: Don’t believe anything you read online tomorrow, being April first. Every year I fall for some dumb hoax, even if only for a moment, but this year I pledge to remain skeptical!

And I’ve still got tons of Gmail invites if you’d like one.

Behold… the power of Blogs!

The debate topic testerday in my management class was whether or not digitization was a good idea. Naturally, Michael Gorman’s name came up in the discussion. The points made on both sides were interesting, and this was the first topic in the class that I felt everyone in the class really engaged with. Most debates peter out with a question or two, but yesterday the prof eventually had to cut them off for time!

The really interesting part came during the break immediately afterwards. Gorman remained the topic of chit chat among the desks; the topic turned to his remarks on bloggers, which as you might remember caused quite an uproar in the LIS field and beyond. Suddenly the guy who sits next to me turns and says:

“So Chad, you were at Computers in Libraries, right?”

I was taken aback, I couldn’t recall ever mentioning this to him. It turns out that he saw my picture on TameTheWeb!

I swear, the Internet makes it a smaller world every day.

Flickred Out

Hoo boy. I’ve spent my free time yesterday and today uploading and sorting and tagging pictures into my new paid Flickr account. As of right now I’ve got 511 photos in there. I need a break.

At first I was uploading everything. Then I realized how ridiculous that is and started uploading only the good ones. That’s enough of a backup for me. But as a result, 1999 (the first year I took digital pictures) has more pictures than any other year. Thankfully I’ve been remembering to tag with the year so I can bring you this handy data. I’m caught up to February of this year in my uploading now and I’m pretty proud of the organizing job I’ve done so far.

If for some reason you’re interested, the sets are viewable here. Every picture I’ve put up is in one of those sets, even if just the Miscellaneous one.

I just gotta say how unbelievably awesome Flickr is. However, it would be even more unbelievably awesome if my camera had recorded the correct date on every picture.

I’m off to have a drink on my 18 inch balcony. Still 62 degrees out, woo!

I’m all Flickred up

I took the plunge and decided to spend my annual partial-tax-refund-indulgence on a Flickr pro account!

Now that I have the capability to sort things into unlimited albums instead of the three Flickr’s free version limited you to, I’ll be uploading pictures beyond my standard one a day. If you’ve been following my year in pictures project, here’s the new URL directly to it:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hiddenpeanuts/sets/195162/

The old one will take you to my main Flickr page, which will henceforth have more photos than what I’ve been doing up till now. I plan on using the increased upload capacity to back up large chunks of my existing photos, as losing them is a subject of constant paranoia for me.

To see everything I upload, go here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hiddenpeanuts/

I feel so elite!