Archive for April, 2007
PortableApps.com: Taking Your Apps on The Road
Posted on April 23, 2007, under Development, Operating Systems, Software, Tools and Services.
A while back I read about being able to install Firefox on a USB drive and being able to plug it into any computer and just use Firefox right of the key fob. Better yet, no personal information; passwords, history, cookies, etc. would be left on the computer… it’s all on the USB drive. I didn’t realize that this functionality had bee made from other great software I use until I came across PortableApps.com.
PortableApps has many popular software titles available to be installed right on a USB drive for portable use. They mark themselves on Convenient, Open, Free. If you are a developer looking to make your application portable there is a very helpful development page and forum available.
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Digg API, Flash Development Kit, and Contest Launched!
Posted on April 20, 2007, under Tools and Services.
Posted just two hours ago, Digg has announced the long anticipated Digg API and thrown in a Flash Development Kit and contest on top of it. I took a quick glance at the API and it is apparent that they have been working on this for sometime. Digg Tools has always used the API, but it was never publicly available. I am sure they must have been working to make sure it scales, especially now that there is a contest and prizes on the line. Also looking at the prizes, they are nothing to turn your nose up at:
First Prize:
Custom Falcon Northwest Mach V PC with hand-painted blue flames (see a pic):* Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 CPU
* 2 gigs Corsair memory
* Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS graphics card
* Silverstoen 750Watt power supply
* 250 Gig hard drive
* Logitech keyboard, mouse & Z-10 speakers
* Viewsonic 21″ LCD
* Windows VistaA huge catalog of PC games from EA:
* Madden 07
* FIFA Soccer 07
* Command and Conquer Tiberium Wars
* Battlefield 2142
* Black & White 2: Battle of the Gods
* The Godfather The Game
* Need for Speed Most Wanted: Black
* NBA Live 06
* NHL 06
* Battlefield 2: Special Forces
* The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for MiddleEarth
* Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
* Nascar SimRacing
* TimeSplitters Future Perfect
* Command and Conquer Generals: Deluxe
* Battlefield 2
* Ultima Online: Samurai Empire
* Armies of Exigo
* The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for MiddleEarth
* The Sims Complete Collection
* Command and Conquer Generals
* Medal of Honor Pacfic Assault
* The Sims Superstar
* Battlefield 1942
* + 35 other titles!Adobe CS3 Master Collection combines:
* Adobe InDesign CS3
* Photoshop CS3 Extended
* Illustrator CS3
* Acrobat 8 Professional
* Flash CS3 Professional
* Dreamweaver CS3
* Fireworks CS3
* Contribute CS3
* After Effects CS3 Professional
* Adobe Premiere Pro CS3
* Soundbooth CS3
* and Encore CS3Second Prize:
Adobe CS3 Web Premium Collection combines:* Adobe Dreamweaver CS3
* Flash CS3 Professional
* Photoshop CS3 Extended
* Illustrator CS3
* Fireworks CS3
* Acrobat 8 Professional
* Contribute CS3
* Bridge CS3
* Version Cue CS3
* Device Central CS3Palm Treo 680 etched with a Digg logo.
Third Prize:
Adobe Flash CS3 Professional - the most advanced authoring environment for creating rich, interactive content for digital, web, and mobile platforms.
If I had more time on my hands lately, I would definitely be putting something together for the contest. It will be really neat to see what people come up with, and maybe they will land a job with Digg along the way.
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Think Twice Before You Sell Out
Posted on April 19, 2007, under Development, Search, Tools and Services.
It’s been all over the blogosphere lately Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert have resigned from Google where they have been employees since May of 2005 when their company Dodgeball was acquired. An official quote sheds some light to their reasoning behind the departure.
It’s no real secret that Google wasn’t supporting dodgeball the way we expected. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us - especially as we couldn’t convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space. And while it was a tough decision (and really disappointing) to walk away from dodgeball, I’m actually looking forward to getting to work on other projects again.
This isn’t the first time that Google has shelfed an acquisition, I have been waiting to see something out of Measure Map for sometime but feel it’s a lost cause. Google isn’t alone with this, it’s not too uncommon for large companies to acquire a smaller company for the technology, talent, or just to remove them from the market. And while some might think selling out to the man is a great deal: you get some cash, stock options, and going to work for the #1 company to work for; at the end of the day there is still a direction to take the service or product that is being acquired. Entrepreneurs have a great deal of passion for their product, and sometimes being acquired means more resources and a wider audience, sometimes it means having to deal with someone else telling you the new direction of that product.
Many have balked at Kevin Rose of Digg.com and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook for not selling out when the price is right, but I say that this just proves they are more motivated by making the service better than a pay day. Turning down millions, and sometimes billions, of dollars isn’t easy, I guess it depends on your driving force.
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Download of the Day: Synergy
Posted on April 18, 2007, under Software, Spam.
Synergy is an open source, cross platform, solution for those geeks that have too may computers and monitors on their desk. Synergy allows you to share your mouse and keyboard across two or more computers, much like a KVM switch, but completely with software. You setup a server, or main computer, and your other computers are clients to that main machine. Synergy has great features like clipboard sharing, but unfortunately lacks the ability to cut and past files across machines.
I have Synergy setup between my main desktop and my laptop that sits beside my three monitors. There are other products that do the same thing, but I have found Synergy to be the easiest to use and does the best job.
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AJAX and the Endless Scrolling Feature of Pages
Posted on April 17, 2007, under Development, Tools and Services.
AJAX has brought a lot to us in the department of usability, and in turn people have created some really slick features in web services. One I have noticed becoming more popular lately is the endless scrolling of pages and lists, as appose to using next and back buttons to get more results. DZone just went under a site redesign and features the endless scrolling in their lists. I must say I like the feature from a usability perspective, just continue to scroll for what I am looking for. While looking into examples on how this is done, I found some downsides to this technique.
- If you count page views for statistical information or ad revenue, you will need to figure our a new way to track such efforts.
- If you are concerned about SEO you will probably have to create a site map or a backend static page for search engines to crawl and index.
- If your user does not have a scroll wheel, using this features is difficult. Not only is it tedious, but the scroll bar length just keeps on growing and never ending.
- Along side with #3 the memory that the browser is allocating on the users machine will continually increase, because the page is continually increasing. I got Firefox up to 180MB before stopping.
- If your back end that is serving up the data between the page and the data source is slow for any reason, the endless scrolling hangs and it ruins the smooth effect that it brings.
There is always a plus and a minus to these such things, and these problems are not problems to every one or every service that wants to implement the endless scrolling feature. These are just things I noticed when kicking the tires on it, and looking under the hood.
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How To Deal With PDF’s Without Adobe
Posted on April 16, 2007, under How To, Software, Tools and Services.
PDF’s are useful in select situations, but dealing with Adobe’s PDF products is unbelievably frustrating. Adobe over the years, like some Microsoft products, have become bloated, memory hogs, extremely slow, and just not fun or productive to use. So how do you deal with PDF’s without using Adobe’s products? Here are some solutions for you to implement.
PDF’s in the Browser:
Nothing is more frustrating than clicking on a URL that unknowingly links to PDF. Inevitably locking up the browser and ruing your current web surfing mojo. PDF Download for Firefox will give you a download prompt for all PDF’s links in Firefox.
Creating PDF’s:
PDFCreator gives you a simple, effective, and free way to create PDF’ from virtually any source. PDFCreator adds a printer on Windows that when used will crate a PDF file. This means from Word, Notepad, a Browser, anywhere; you can create a PDF.
Viewing PDF’s:
There are many ways to view PDF’s without using Adobe’s Acrobat Reader. My favorited are Open Office and Foxit Reader. Foxit Reader is a small, fast, and quick way to view PDF’s
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Online Maps are Getting Scary Detailed
Posted on April 13, 2007, under Search, Tools and Services.
Every now and again I like t take a trip down memory lane and lookup old houses I grew up in, on the many maps services on the Internet. It’s been amazing to see the satellite imagery updated and get more accurate. However, it’s gotten to the point where it’s scary detailed; and Microsoft’s Live Search takes the cake. Take a look at the detailed view of the Googleplex, not even zoomed in all of the way. (Yes I am aware of that I am looking up Google’s address on a Microsoft service.)
Click me, I get big.
My house has the same amount of detail, and it’s scary. Add in services like Virtual Globetrotting (a great time waster by the way), and you have a stalker’s best friend.
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My Move to Mosso and GMail: Part One
Posted on April 11, 2007, under Blogging, Databases, Development, Email, Networking, Web Hosting.
I have used many web hosting companies in the past, and always used Plesk as my choice of a control panel. It seems the same thing happens every time with a new web hosting company: at first the service is great and the resources are fast and responsive. Over time, quality degrades as resources are spread thin. Then the inevitable happens where the hosting company wants to up sell me on my current solution. There is always a point where one needs upgrade a web server, but there are also times when you have to ask “if you can’t manage my current solution, how do you expect to sell me on a bigger and more powerful solution.” I have reached these cross roads with my current hosting provider, and have not been impressed with the way they have handled major problems over the last several months so I am once again switching providers.
I have always wanted to be in control of my hosting solution, a nice balance between an easy to use control panel and the back end scripting to optimize things. Lately my time has been too pressed and too valuable to continue taking on the “server management” roll as well as wear many other hats. Sure, I could pay someone that knows 100 times more than me in the area of server management, but that’s more expenses on top of the actual box that I am already paying the hosting company to keep up and chugging.
So I have reached the point where it’s time to outsource. My plan is to move the many sites of mine, and the ones for friends and family, over to a new scalable solution that I need to have very little hands on work to make it… well work. The same goes for email, I am sick of tweaking spam filters and managing quotas for in boxes and worrying about uptime and downtime. So what’s the answer? Well for me, the plan is to migrate my web sites over to Mosso and my email over to GMail for your domain. Shouldn’t be too hard right? Well, we will see.
So why did I choose these solutions? Here is a little break down.
Mosso:
Mosso has an interesting approach to web hosting. For $100 you get a an all-in-one, scalable, flexible, hosting solution, for an unlimited number of domains. Sounds goods so far, but not unique. Well not so fast, Mosso takes the guess work out of the Linux vs. Microsoft debate and choice that one has to make when choosing a host. I have always preferred Linux servers for my own reasons, but I have freelanced on projects for a Microsoft shop that I need a real work test environment and have had to lease a server for a month or two at a time. Mosso has it all, and in one package. Furthermore any site can use PHP4, PHP5, ASP, or Python under one domain name… yup that’s right the ability to run multiple scripting languages and database back-ends under one site. Mosso has built a multi million dollar, and very unique solution giving you choices. The cherry on the cake is the very slick, powerful, and easy to use control panel that will make it easy to manage it all. There are some set backs however: You do not have SSH access, you do not have access to cron jobs, and no support for Ruby on Rails yet. These are minor set backs for me, and I have already researched work-arounds. While kicking the tires of the Mosso service over the last several months, I have learned that the support staff is friendly, hel, and fast to respond.. a big plus. Add on their service level agreement, that’s just about all I need.
GMail for Your Domain:
This one is easy: it’s Google, Gmail, it’s free, and my domain. There is really nothing more that needs to be said. I have yet to come across a scalable web mail solution, and am tired of bringing down IMAP servers with the large amount of mail I have. Add in GMail’s spam filtering features, and again… done deal.
Conclusion for Part On:
I am hoping that this move will go smooth, and for Mosso it could be the best real world client story and review yet. I have HyperSpin setup to monitor the performance and uptime of the new web host, and it should line up nicely with the re-launch of BlueCrestStudios and NetGrid. Stay tuned for further developments…
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Difficult Career Choices
Posted on April 10, 2007, under Site News.
I don’t usually blog too much about my personal life, but I wanted to apologize to my readers for not having the daily dose of Code and Coffee available today. I have been making a difficult career choice today, and deciding to leave my current job for another. I am joining a younger team, that is working with newer technology, and leaving working from my house for the last year. I have felt myself get cabin fever over the last year, and forgot how much value their is working hands on with a development team. As much as they would think so, my two dogs do not make very good development team partners. It’s hard to walk away from a job that your are secure in, and feel attached to on many levels, but also feel that you have outgrown and need to move on. Especially since the dogs will now be in the cages all day, instead of sleeping in fluffy day beds.
So I have been busy finishing things up today, and actually making my final decision. In two weeks I will be a new employee again. Even though I will not be working out of my home, Code and Coffee will not change.
Stay tuned over the next couple weeks, I may decide to disclose who my new employer is; you have heard of them.
Thanks everyone.
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How To: Synchronize Files Between Locations
Posted on April 9, 2007, under How To, Software, Tools and Services.
One can have source code control, backup solutions, and other software to manage data; but if you want dead simple synchronization, Microsoft’s SyncToy is the solution. A free power toy available for Windows XP and Vista, SyncToy allows you to synchronize files and folders across locations, including networked locations.
Setting up a new synchronization script is easy with a simple four screen wizard. You can several copy modes: Synchronize, Echo, Subscribe, Contribute, and Combine; each described in full in the wizard.
Some features include:
- The ability to type in a UNC path
- Support for longer folder pair names and ability to widen the left pane to see those longer names
- The ability to support the maximum length for folder paths, and documentation was added to the help file about how to set up a share to be able to sync deep folder pairs
- Better handling of the difference in precision between NTFS and FAT timestamps
- More discoverable link to the help file for information on how to schedule SyncToy using the Windows XP Task Scheduler
- Added a warning for users if the selected action will take some time to complete
- Added brief explanations of the actions in the user interface
- Improved behavior when choosing folders to include or exclude when there are large numbers of folders involved
- Improved support for accessibility modes
I use SyncToy to synchronize my data and preferences between my desktop and laptop when I am on the go. I can synchronize Firefox data, Outlook data, and make it so my laptop is just like my desktop.
My only complaints about the application is you can not edit a script once it is created, and it puts little text data files on your computer. Other than those small setbacks, it’s a dead simple synchronization tool.
