Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend

So, it looks like Google is going to bring out Picasa for the Mac later this year. Yay. I'm glad. Now address some of the serious shortcomings in the software. Stuff that I blogged about back in June of 2006 like real handling of tags, multiple levels of rating image quality (i.e. not just "STAR"), better searching, custom cropping ratios (16x9 anyone), plugins, better movie handling, etc. Please. Otherwise I'll end up stuck with iPhoto which has some good features and lots of UI stuff that just sucks (have fun printing!) and Picasa, with all its numerous flaws.

Someday I hope to have one of the high end packages like Lightroom or Aperture. That's not going to happen anytime soon, and it does nothing for the vast majority of users who need a tool like this for all their pictures who aren't going to sink a couple of hundred bucks in software to act as their digital shoebox.

Posted by John Munsch at 5:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yahoo! has made a lot of cool resources available for web developers. They have libraries to login using Yahoo! credentials, perform searches, etc. But one of my favorite, one that I think has no equal even from the mighty Google is their Yahoo! User Interface library (YUI). It's a great collection of JavaScript pieces which have been beautifully tailored to be useful to total JavaScript know nothings like me and experts as well. They then marry those with a set of excellent CSS files to handle common needs and test the whole mess on every major browser (or at least the ones making up 95% of the traffic to your site). Regular updates to expand the library or the documentation, and keep it up with the latest advances in browser technology are also de rigueur. If you've ever found yourself needing menus, tabs, color pickers, calendars, etc. for your website, go to the YUI site.

However, if you're using Ruby on Rails to do your web development these days then you know that Rails is already well integrated with the JavaScript libraries Prototype and Scriptaculous. If you're like me, you don't want to give up that easy integration and you may still be too new with Ruby and Rails to figure out how to use YUI's JavaScript parts instead. Anybody doing a website that is for Internet use rather than internal business use can't afford to use both sets of libraries on their pages because of bandwidth and time costs. But that doesn't mean you have to throw all of YUI out. After all, there's still the CSS!

YUI offers four CSS files at present:

I used them on LOL.com and was very happy with how uniform they made my pages look across different browsers. It's usually hard work to do a layout with many parts to it and lots of formatting and test it various places. With YUI CSS I was able to do it once and do some fairly light testing and still get a very consistent look.

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The upcoming beta of Firefox won't have the UI makeover but before it gets released it looks like Firefox will have changes that will make it look native to the Mac or to Vista as well as usability changes to try and make it clearer and easier to use: Catch a Glimpse of Firefox 3's Sleek, Sexy New Digs | Compiler from Wired.com

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Microsoft is famous for having a really bad case of 'not-invented-here' syndrome. They don't like to accept any protocol or standard or even take a perfectly working piece of software and include it. It wasn't invented at Microsoft so it's automatically crap. They have to "fix it". Yahoo! appears to have turned that on its head.

Yahoo's biggest competitor is arguably Google. Google invented an algorithm for data processing called MapReduce. They use it to process the terabytes and petabytes of data they grind through on a regular basis. They piggy back that on top of their storage system called GFS (Google File System). Because Google published papers on all this software, even though they don't make the software itself available, there was enough description for people to start developing their own versions of the Google tools.

Yahoo has now decided to both use and endorse the toolset Hadoop. Hadoop encompasses implementations of both GFS and MapReduce so arguably Yahoo is now running software that is based on ideas from their direct competitor. They aren't shy about it either, they aren't hiding it, rather they are telling the world that the software is good, they like it, and they intend to support it.

Bravo. I'm impressed.

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I hate cheap pens that have bad writing characteristics with a passion. If they skip, leave smears, feel flimsy and light in my hand, etc. I just won't use them. So, I have settled on the Pilot G-2 (about $1 each) as my pen of choice. But thanks to a neat set of instructions somebody posted online I can try out what it would be like to have a really nice pen.

This Instructable points out that a certain Montblanc refill can be had for about $6 and with a minor modification it will fit into a G-2 shell, letting you try out the same ink used in multi-hundred dollar pens.

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This is a really excellent list of security applications and sites that you can use from a PC and at least one (OpenDNS) that could be used from any machine: http://content.zdnet.com/2346-12691_22-95490-1.html 

The author shows a screenshot of each tool/site and explains how it can be used to protect you.

I thought that I knew the basics because I was used to using AdAware (or SpySweeper), ZoneAlarm, and AVG to secure PCs in their basic respects. But this list taught me a whole list of new tools and also recommended some alternatives to my old favorites that I'll have to check out.

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Google has a regular internal lecture series on mostly technical topics with guest speakers and some of their own employees. This is their TechTalks Series and the best part of it is that you and I can see them too. They record and digitize the talks (close to 300 of them to date) and make them available on Google Video, using a consistent tag on each one so you can easily search for them and see if any interest you. The link above will do the search and show you all the videos so far.

Some of the titles that caught my eye:

Privacy Preserving DataMining

Turning Email Upside Down: RSS/Email and IM2000

Strike Up The Brand: How to Design for Branding

Ruby And Google Maps

Ruby Sig: How To Design A Domain Specific Language

Note: I'm not endorsing any of these, I haven't had a chance to view them yet. They just looked interesting to me.

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I have no idea if Wil Wheaton is paid to do his blog at TV Squad. If not, we should take up a collection to make sure he continues. In each entry he takes an episode from Star Trek: The Next Generation (on which he appeared as Wesley Crusher) and does an episode "recap" with commentary.

I won't claim that every paragraph is comedy gold, but every one of them is worth reading and there are usually multiple times in every one where I actually laugh out loud. Even if you aren't particularly a fan of the show, and I certainly wasn't of the first two years, this is worth reading.

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ComicRack represents a step in the right direction for reading eComics. It attempts to do more than a simple reader like CDisplay because it catalogs the comics, shows you the covers, even lets you note which ones you have and haven't read or which are favorites.

Like CDisplay it handles any CBR or CBZ file, both of which are just a collection of JPG images wrapped in a rename RAR or ZIP file. Because the author is interested in more than just displaying a single issue for you, he can think in terms of bigger picture features like allowing you to read the comics on one machine from another remotely, just like iTunes. Give it a try, it's under constant, almost daily development so improvements are coming regularly.

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I recently downloaded Ubuntu 6.06 and tried it out on my laptop (an HP zt3000). It comes as a "Live CD" which means that you can insert it into a PC that only has Windows installed and when you reboot the machine it can load and run Ubuntu Linux directly off the CD to let you try it without installing anything. But you can also use the same CD to do an installation of the OS onto a machine as well.

I had thought that the laptop would be kind of a worst case scenario. I've heard of past versions of Linux having trouble with the unusual hardware that sometimes appears on laptops. I figured if it could handle that it could probably handle most standard hardware people are likely to see day-to-day. Graphics, audio, the touchpad, even the wireless networking hardware built into the laptop were all detected and worked perfectly. I typed in the WEP key for my network (using a simple to find dialog for setting up networking) so the laptop could get onto the network and it all worked perfectly and fast. It also had no problems browsing the file server I use (a Buffalo Teraserver) or any of the Windows machines on my network either.

You can install tons of software once you've installed the OS itself. Debian has always made that really easy (easier than software installation on Windows in fact) and Ubuntu is based on Debian. But the live CD has to include a set of software for people who just want to try it out and for those people Ubuntu includes some simple games, the latest version of Open Office, Firefox, a good email program, The Gimp (a photo manipulation application), and quite a bit more software to let you see quickly whether this is the ticket for you.

Update: Just since I tried this out last weekend it seems that a new version of Ubuntu has been released (6.10) with, they claim, many "exciting new features".

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I love the name of both the group producing this software and the software itself. I talked about Participatory Culture before on my podcast a long time ago when they brought out an early version of their BitTorrent based broadcasting software Broadcast Machine. Now they've managed to get out early versions of their client software for the Mac and Windows. It is named Democracy Player and I think that's just great.

Having played around with it for a while, here's what I can tell you about it:

Pros:

• The interface is easy enough for anyone to use and it comes pre-loaded with a set of channels so you can anticipate that there will be more channels in the future and a much better selection as well. It will never hit podcasting levels of popularity (i.e. 10,000 channels in less than 18 months) simply because it is so much more difficult to produce video than it is audio, but channels could easily number in the hundreds by the end of 2007.
• Their website is channeling Firefox and their software interface is channeling iTunes. As far as I'm concerned, that's just right.
• They did a lot of things right. They understand that the costs of distributing video would make it completely impracticle and even setting up servers to deliver a lot of content at high speed is daunting so they've relied on BitTorrent to handle that from day one. Apple should have done the same thing with their iTunes client and there wouldn't be a single podcaster out there worrying whether it was going to cost them more than they could afford for bandwidth or straining under an audience that keeps getting bigger.
• Participatory Culture has based everything around RSS channels just like in podcasting but made sure that you've got a server that is easy to use to publish your video channels via Bittorrent and a client that can receive them. Just as with podcasting you don't have to use their server or their client but can instead mix and match. Talk to any server that can handle Bittorrent downloads and RSS with the client or vice versa, serve up your channels to any client that can work with RSS and Bittorrent. They've just provided an easy turnkey solution.
• Their Mac client software was out before the Windows version so it may be more stable. Nevertheless, I used the Windows version to browse various channels, pick videos to download, download them, and watch them all from within the Democracy Player.

Cons:

• I've had problems with it crashing repeatedly and with it being very unresponsive to me wanting to change to look at a channel after I start playing a video and I decide I don't want to watch it all the way to the end. By very unresponsive I mean 30 seconds to a minute of delay before taking action on a click.
• The video controls at the bottom of the screen on the Windows version do not appear to update and only sometimes control the video functions.

If you want an early look at a tool that is going to be as indespensible as iTunes has become for many people, download this and start playing with it.

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I did a Fedora Core Getting Started Guide once upon a time. For many years it and HotSheet competed every month to see which would be the most popular item on this website and many months the Fedora Guide took first instead of second. People crave an easy way to not only get Linux and install it, both things that have been well addressed by Linux distributions of the last few years, but also to get it setup to use in a manner similar to what they were comfortable with under Windows.

They want Flash and Java in their browser, they want to be able to listen to their MP3 files and play videos from off the web, install new fonts, plug in their USB key and have it work, etc.

While it doesn't address all of these, EasyUbuntu is a program which Ubuntu Linux users can run and get set up automatically to play MP3 files, get Java/Flash and get them installed, as well as several other improvements which are fundamental to re-creating the computing experience most of us expect these days when we sit down at a computer. Everything it does is optional and the UI is designed to be simple. Just check the features you want installed and off you go.

I'm not running Ubuntu at this time, but it seems to have overtaken Fedora Core in the hearts and minds of many as the most likely candidate for a desktop Linux sufficiently friendly to be installed in a normal non-guru computer user's desktop. EasyUbuntu takes that even further and is exactly the sort of thing I had envisioned Fedora Core getting someday but Ubuntu has it first.

Here is my one and only piece of advice for the EasyUbuntu guys. Beginning Linux users don't need multiple ways to do the same thing. Don't be afraid to go ahead and make some choices for them. For example, you list both Wengo and Skype as Voice Over IP solutions you'll add. There's no need for that. Pick Skype and be done with it, knowing that the end user will have the most common VOIP solution and will still be able to talk to multitudes of users still on other operating systems. For the majority of users who need something like EasyUbuntu, choices are just confusion. They will install both, or neither, and have no way to judge which they should be using.

Posted by John Munsch at 6:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This is just a quick plug for a Firefox extension I don't hear anybody talk about. Everybody extolls the virtues of Session Saver, Greasemonkey, and some others but I also like Ted's Tab Preview. When you have multiple tabs open in Firefox, it shows you what is on each tab in a miniature preview as soon as your mouse moves over the tab. So, if you have multiple tabs that have the same title, no title, or you've just forgotten what you are doing, you don't have to click on each one and wait for it to draw.

Posted by John Munsch at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On two previous occasions I've written about websites which were doing free audio books. One of those two sites closed and the other was never anything to shout about and hasn't gotten any better with time. However, there's now another new site named LibriVox where people are trying to do the same thing. I already like it better than the other two for a couple of reasons.

Pros:

• They are offering BitTorrents of the books both for faster download and reduced bandwidth costs for LibriVox.
• They don't offer any of the low quality downloads that one of the previous sites offered. Their gimmick was that a very low quality was free and you paid if you wanted higher quality. LibriVox by contrast seem to be sticking with 64kpbs and 128kbps MP3 as well as Ogg Vorbis.

• They have several group projects where multiple people are reading chapters from the same book. It greatly increases the chances that a book will be finished but the quality can be all over the place. Hopefully they will allow multiple readings of the same material in their library and we will be able to rate the results and pick only the best ones. The alternative would be readings with strange pauses, a lack of re-recording mistakes, mispronunciations and varying pronunciations chapter to chapter, hiss, hum, noise, etc.

I read Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles quite recently so I listened to the beginning of that recording. It was not a group project, it had been recorded by an individual. It isn't quite as smooth as most commercial audiobooks but it seems very listenable.

Also of note are two commercial companies selling audiobooks without any kind of DRM restrictions. One I've mentioned before is Telltale Weekly. They are giving away some audio and selling other using both PayPal and BitPass. The other is unabridgedbooks.com. I haven't purchased any books from either of these companies so I really can't comment on the quality or what kind of value you are getting for your money. If anybody tries these out I'd love to hear about it. I'll happily publish reviews if you don't have a venue to put up your own or link to what you write about them.

The website for unabridgedbooks.com seemed to have some issues when I went. I didn't see any price on the page where I could look at the details of the book and when I tried to add a couple of items to my cart to check their price that way, one worked and the other failed to get added to my cart. They may have some issues to iron out.

Posted by John Munsch at 7:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Same song, second verse. I've published all the RSS channels I subscribe to with my aggregator, here are all the podcasts (both audio and audio/video) I subscribe to in iTunes:

• APM's Marketplace
• Bluegrass Radio Show
• Diggnation w/ Kevin Rose & Alex Albrecht
• dl.tv in H.264 (Video)
• Ebert & Roeper
• FOO Casts: Podcasts from O'Reilly and Friends
• Infected by Martin Sargent
• Inside the Net
• NOVA ScienceNOW
• Photoshop TV (Video)
• PodCheck Review
• Rogue Syndicate
• The Dawn and Drew Show!
• The Java Posse
• The Web 2.0 Show
• this WEEK in TECH
• What's New Now

Sadly, iTunes doesn't offer OPML export so I can't offer all these in an easy to import form. You'll have to search for them in iTunes or whatever your favorite podcast client is and subscribe to them one at a time. If anybody has a good idea for how to put links up here that would allow for quick subscriptions, please leave a comment and I'll be quick to approve it.

Posted by John Munsch at 7:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm not going to claim you'll be playing any of these games for months and months on end. Likely you will get bored with either of them in a month or three. But in the meantime they're free, they're fun, and you can play either of them from anywhere you've got a browser available. Perhaps most importantly neither one involves any big time commitment. They can easily be picked up and started but the total time needed to play either one is literally just a few minutes per day.

Urban Dead

There is no "death" in the game as you turn into a zombie if you are a human character and you take enough damage to die. Even if you are a zombie though, there's always the chance you can be re-vivified by some technology available to some of the human characters. A fun game with exploration, skills to acquire, combat, equipment (when you are human), and no real reason to quit until you get bored. Total time to play all your moves per day is no more than 10 minutes.

Travian

The total time to play this one is greater than Urban Dead. I don't think there is any way you could possibly play it for ten minutes a day and get very far. But it's still probably not more than 30 minutes total and you can spread it throughout the day with just a minute or two here and there.

MPOGD

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• Sushi Documentary
• Developers, Developers, Developers - Watch Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer lose it on stage.

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I like these little page corner bookmarks. They are easy to make and you could do some clever custom variations with little effort.

I printed some on 110lb. cardstock and while they seem nice and very durable, I think they might be more likely to fall off the corner of a page because they are so stiff and solid. In this case a flimsier paper alternative may be a better choice. I intend to manufacture some to see.

While I'm talking about paper I'd like to plug two more paper project related things. One is the awesome pair of scissors I use. They are made by Fiskars and you can see them in the photo. There is nothing unique about small bladed sharp scissors intended for cutting small projects, what sets these apart is that the handles are actually large enough for my hands. I don't know who they intend most fine point scissors for, but they are positively medieval in their design for non-Lilliputian people. There is never any padding, just a tiny metal loop for you to squeeze a finger into and cut cut cut. I've used little detail scissors like that before for projects like the paper automata cupid but my beloved Fiskars would make that same experience faster and ten times less painful to do all over again.

The other thing I'd like to plug is Jaime Zollar's Paper Forest. It's a cool weblog devoted to paper automata, cardstock models, etc. with regular postings of neat projects. It might not be as complete as some of the link farms you see out there for paper projects but he makes up for it by highlighting some of the most interesting things and offering pictures of most everything he talks about.

Posted by John Munsch at 7:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A lot of people already use Audacity for sound recording and/or for editing of podcasts. So any new release, especially one with some new features for podcasters is likely to be a big deal. The new version is still considered to be very early and too crash happy to be really used, it's intended more as a technology preview of new features including:

• Various changes to make editing easier and the UI friendlier
• FTP upload of files directly from within Audacity

Sadly though, there's still no way to set the genre to "podcast" in the ID3v2 data from within Audacity when you are exporting your MP3 files. Thus most podcasters will still end up using iTunes or some other program to set the type, etc. and that invalidates the idea of doing FTP directly from Audacity. It's just not a one stop shop.

So that brings us to podcasting tools like EasyPodcast. You pick the MP3 file, it applies tags to the MP3 as well as a logo, it creates the RSS, it uploads both the RSS and the MP3 file.

Personally, I think this is a great idea, sort of. I don't need the RSS generation, that's being handled for me by Blogger and FeedBurner but I can see a whole host of little utilites that could all be hooked together for you to progress through to prevent errors and streamline the process. Right now I record with Audacity, then edit (also with Audacity), use iTunes to apply ID3v2 tags to the resulting MP3 file, gather the times of various events in my show, create a Blogger entry to go with the show, upload my show via FTP, and finally post my new Blogger entry to my weblog and the show is done. In the background FeedBurner notices the new weblog entry and updates the RSS feed it is providing to anyone interested in the show. Seven steps plus an automated one. I'll bet others have even more.

Software to take you through all of that could be cool. Especially if you have multiple people having to upload things or several people working on the same show. But do I want a special tool for podcasters that includes a dozen different podcasting steps and I select and order only the ones I want (not just the three that the EasyPodcast guy thought I needed) or would I be better off with a tool that was all about creating the workflow?

But then that thought leads to the Automator software that ships with Mac OS X. Because, I mean, it's all about the workflow. They just realize that a simple linear workflow is not that complicated a thing and with steps that can be written by anybody we can have simple ones (rename this MP3 file) to highly sophisticated ones (scan the file for dead air and isolated "um" and "uh" noises and strip them from the file). Then I can mix those into any workflow I can come up with. Perhaps even one that includes show prep or post show activities. Why doesn't a simple workflow tool like that exist, doing one in Java that would work on any major OS would be fairly trivial and tools like the Java Plugin Framework should make it pretty easy? Good question.

Posted by John Munsch at 12:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I recently mentioned that we installed Jive Messenger at work to get a good instant messaging server that we could control and which didn't result in important conversations leaving the building to talk to distant servers. In the time since I wrote that, Jive Messenger has been renamed to Wildfire Server and it has had a dramatic speed improvement. Jive Software: Wildfire Optimization is an article briefly detailing the optimization Jive Software did for the new version of the server and might be instructive if you haven't done optimization on a Java project before.

Posted by John Munsch at 6:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Internet has seen a large set of text, image, and video items which circulate around through email and forums for years and years. Some of it is urban myth, obscene, funny, strange, amazing, and everything in between. But videos typically don't get passed around as much in email just due to their sheer size. Google Video has become a catch all for these videos so you can just point to them and everybody can enjoy. Here's a few of my favorites.

• This is one of the oldest video snippets I can recall ever hearing about. Dave Barry wrote a column about this one long ago. Now anybody can watch them blow up a whale and see how very very wrong it can go
• Online massively multiplayer gaming with Leeroy Jenkins
• Two Chinese students lip sync an American pop song (Backstreet Boys perhaps?)
• Computer Controlled Christmas Lights

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The original Macintosh was a righteously cool machine that was massively different than any IBM PC or Apple II of the time. Folklore.org: Macintosh Stories is a really cool website that is working to preserve stories about the creation of the machine and the software on it written by the people who actually worked on it.

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I don't like all of them but there's at least a handful of really cool Christmas cards at this site: Happy Holidays!

They are giving away the PDF files you need to print the cards and they are adding more over time.

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When I needed a web design for my still uncompleted project Lunarcoast or for a couple of projects at work I turned to the site OSWD.org (Open Source Web Design) to find a design I liked that would hopefully look good, and would be well designed to use CSS for most of its formatting so I could change its look quickly to conform to the way I wanted it to look. I'm still happy with what I got there but the site has recently undergone an internal conflict between people running it. The result has been that it has been unavailable for some time and that's really unfortunate. There are designs there for all kinds of web sites and people need what they are offering.

Unfortunately it doesn't look like they worked out the conflict amicably but it has been resolved in a way that will allow people to once again get access to web designs. Just go to the new Open Web Design to find a new website which will be serving the same function and which seems to have all the old designs OSWD had. At the same time, OSWD itself has opened back up and is undergoing a makeover as well. Maybe we'll all be lucky and the competition will produce two great sites for web design.

Posted by John Munsch at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We were communicating confidential information back and forth between each other using an instant messenger which regularly sent messages outside the building to servers we didn't control. To get it back to being an internal only thing, I setup Jive Software: Jive Messenger XMPP (Jabber) Server and had everybody connect to it with Jabber compatible clients like Gaim, Psi, and Trillian.

Setup was a breeze. I had it up and running in 30 minutes and was connecting our first machines to it. It has a nice admin console (accessible via browser) which I've barely had to use so far. It's open source, it's written in Java, it's easy to setup, what's not to like.

If you need instant messaging and you need to control your own server, I think you will be happy with this.

Posted by John Munsch at 4:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Introduction

Even before its debut a lot was written about Google Print and The Open Library managed to snag some columnar inches as well when the project announced that they had funding to scan some 150,000+ books which had fallen out of copyright in the US.

While I can't pretend that this is going to be in any way a scholarly take on the two services I do want to discuss how the two services differ from each other as well as from the much older Project Gutenberg archives of digitized books and do so in more detail than I was seeing in article after article that barely discussed what actually using the sites was like.

This article about the Open Library gives you an overview of how the books end up in digital form and it's doubtful that there is a lot of difference between how this is done in Google's project or The Open Library. If you are at all interested in the mechanics of the process, it's a good read and not particularly long.

Note: Because The Open Library is only going to do books right now which are in the public domain I picked the Henry James novel An International Episode for most of the examples below. In its original version it had illustrations mixed with text, it is long out of copyright, and the same edition is available from both Google and The Open Library making for easy comparison of how the two services deal with the same book.

Continue reading "Google Print vs. The Open Library vs. Project Gutenberg" »

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It's Google's world and we just live in it...

Is there any week in which Google doesn't announce some new service, feature, piece of software or something? Recently they have released a new version of Picasa, my favorite choice for photo album software, shown a pre-beta version of the Google Reader (a future commentary), debuted Google Print (which I will be talking about in detail shortly), and brought Google Desktop 2 out of beta.

Let's talk about this last item right now as I don't think I've ever mentioned Google Desktop here. With Microsoft maybe choosing to remove their own sidebar software from the next version of Windows to offer you easy access to information tools, you should take a look at Google Desktop. It is an interesting piece of software you can download now and not worry about what Microsoft may or may not do in the next version of Windows.

You can use Google Desktop as just a piece of software which indexes all your local documents (email, text files, Word documents, etc.) and then use a local search to search both it and the main Google website. It's arguably much faster than crude search systems like the one built into Windows, it doesn't cost anything, etc. But if you only use it that way you miss out on some of its best features. That's because if you have the screen real estate to accomodate it (as I am lucky enough to on my widescreen laptop and on my dual screen system at work), it will display news, weather, pull email from various accounts (including Google Mail if you already use that), updates to web pages you've visited recently, etc. Plus, it allows all sorts of plug-ins to expand both its ability to search into different file formats and offer other features (like Google Maps support). If you have some screen real estate you can devote to it, this is a good app to start and leave running. I'm certain you'll find yourself using it.

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Howdy friends and neighbors, and welcome to another hour of old time bluegrass music! Brought to you by The Bluegrass Preservation Society of Gassaway West Virginia. I'm your host Ewell Ferguson and my bluegrass kittycat Buster is here to man that sound board and push them buttons.

And thus begins another episode of one of my favorite podcasts. Every show is local musicians from the W. Virginia area recorded playing bluegrass songs both old and new. It's a fun show and Ewell and Buster are naturals for the radio.

The only way people are going to find good podcasts is if we tell other people which ones we like and this is one I like. Give it a listen.

Posted by John Munsch at 3:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

If you're interested in what the recent beta of the next Windows release (Windows "Vista") will have, here is an interesting review from just a few days ago: PCNX.com Reviews :: Microsoft Windows Vista Codename 'Longhorn', Beta 1.

The answer so far appears to be, "Not much." After all, the graphical changes and other alterations mentioned in the review would amount to the kinds of things we see in the regular six month release of Fedora Core. They certainly wouldn't be treated as a major improvement to the OS worthy of a new name and an all new box with an all new price tag.

Perhaps we'll see a lot more stuff included between now and the end of next year. If not, Apple's move to the Intel platform and a steadily improving Linux platform could put a sudden sideways jog in the upgrade path of a lot of existing Windows customers.

Posted by John Munsch at 5:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you were a fan of the old TechTV show The ScreenSavers, head right over to Leo Laporte's weblog to download the MP3 for the first episode of his podcast The Revenge of the Bleep. Bleep in this case stands in for "ScreenSavers", something that Leo can't really say because he's no longer doing his TechTV gig. But that didn't stop him from getting together with Patrick Norton, Kevin Rose, and Robert Heron (you may remember him as one of the best lab guys from the old days) to record a podcast about tech stuff. Very very cool. At the end they start talking about crazy ways they could do video or a new TV show and I really would love to see that.

G4 (and what is left of TechTV) doesn't really hold much interest for me anymore. The "tech" seems to have left the house and what is left isn't even particularly entertaining. A new show with these guys would be great.

BTW Leo, you missed one place where you said ScreenSavers :)

Posted by John Munsch at 9:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Desktop publishing meant that anybody could create books, magazines, etc. and if they had the talent they could make it look as good as a major publisher. The World Wide Web was much the same thing again except that it went beyond just the creation of material, it included a distribution method as well and we've all gotten to enjoy the results of that great experiment.

Podcasting has given us narrow cast radio for any topic and stars and shows that are so far removed from "radio" that I could almost dance for joy. Of course part of that might come from the fact that I live in a radio market with at least four Clear Channel stations in dominant positions on the dial and another channel that prides itself on how different it is but in truth it's just a station sans DJ run from a hard drive. It's like borrowing someone else's iPod except that they added commercials to their playlists.

I'm going to jabber on at lenth about podcasting in the future but I just wanted to put in a quick plug for Tim Shadel's Zdot podcast. It's all about professional development using Java and other tools like Subversion which are language agnostic. If you do development for a living it's well worth dipping into the archives for a listen. My only complaint is that sometimes he's not working from a tight set of notes or watching the clock so you could probably cut 5-10 minutes out of every show without any real loss of material. But that's easy for me to say, I'm not doing a show myself :)

"Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte." I did this one (letter) longer only because I didn't have the time to make it shorter. - Blaise Pascal

Posted by John Munsch at 11:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The creator of the most popular video game ever is back with yet another radical design for a new game. Back when Will Wright was first showing off The Sims everybody who got to see it was clearly amazed. They had never seen anything like it and their ability to describe it in PC game magazines wasn't exactly stellar. Nevertheless you quickly got the idea that it was something you might want to keep an eye out for. Now this article talks about an entirely new game he's been working on and it sounds very different from anything else out there. GameSpy: Will Wright Presents Spore... and a New Way to Think About Games covers his talk about his new game and offers several screenshots of what it looks like and descriptions of what the gameplay may be like. Just as with The Sims, the description seems to be lacking, but maybe, as with The Sims, we just haven't seen anything like this before and we aren't quite sure how to talk about it yet.

Posted by John Munsch at 6:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Recently I've been posting some links about photography and I think this has to easily be the king of all links. BLUE VERTIGO | Web Design Resources Links has piles and piles of links to photo sites both free and commercial as well as links to sites containing logos, fonts, sounds, vector illustrations, and more.

Posted by John Munsch at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I often find uses for photographs. Whether it's for a website design or fresh desktop wallpaper or the design of a greeting card, the perfect photo is the start of a great project.

In the past I've plugged iStockphoto on several occassions. But they've had multiple price increases in the last couple of years that have made buying an image about six times what it used to cost and that is assuming that you are willing to buy a bunch of "tokens" at a time. If you only want to buy one image at a time the costs (using BitPass) would be 12 times what they charged when I first signed up. On top of that the "tokens" you buy now expire in time if you don't use them. After all, everyone knows those bits rot over time...

stock.xchng is new to me but obviously not new to the net because they've already amassed about half as many images as iStockPhoto (more than 100,000 as of Feb 17th 2005). I can't really say that they are at the opposite end of the spectrum of pricing from iStockphoto because really iStockphoto isn't that expensive compared to commercial sites like Corbis or Getty. But if you need a lot of images for some project and you need them high resolution you could end up spending several dollars per image at iStockPhoto, Stock.XCHNG is free. Yup, at this point entirely advertiser supported.

I don't know if Stock.XCHNG will be able to stay free indefinitely. Hopefully they will. Also, I hope that they will eventually shift to using Creative Commons licenses for images so everybody can pick the license they want easily and they'll be licenses that people are used to seeing from other areas. Currently they just have some one line descriptions of the options you have for uses people can have for your pictures. They aren't as flexible, as recognized, as well explained, and perhaps not as legally binding.

Here are my pictures at the Stock.XCHNG.

Posted by John Munsch at 11:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Picasa 2 is a new version of the photo organizing/editing/viewing/etc. application that Google purchased. Why Google chose to buy software like that might be a question for you, it is certainly one for me and and I have no answer. Perhaps it was a bargain with the rebate that they had to send in. It is available for free download (like Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0 Starter Edition), quickly loads all your photos and will easily add more as you take them. It offers good printing options, ordering prints from services, etc. Again, all like Photoshop Album 2.0 SE. I don't think it has tagging of images with their content that is of the same caliber as Photoshop Album's free edition but it can do labeling. It more than makes up for sub-par labeling by including the ability to back up your photos. Adobe saw fit to remove that feature to encourage people to upgrade to their commercial product. Unfortunately, if your pictures are important to you, it makes using Photoshop Album a gamble unless you want to buy it. It was a bad move and definitely a callous one, but a not atypical one for Adobe. As a result of the huge improvements in Picasa though, I'm definitely encouraging everybody who doesn't have a good photo storage/cataloging/printing/etc. application right now to go download Picasa and use it. If you are already using Photoshop Album Starter Edition, switch to Picasa instead.

Posted by John Munsch at 10:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sometimes stuff just kind of comes together. Yesterday I was lamenting the fact that I don't have a calendar/to-do system that I'm really that happy with so I decided that I'd try the Mozilla Sunbird project. After all, I love Firefox for web browsing, let's see what else they can do. I was very happy with it, it's simple and it was quite simply to import a calendar file with US holidays and just pick and choose the ones I wanted put on my calendar. Simple and straight-forward. While I was looking at it I noticed that it has the ability to work with remote calendars and for you to even share your own calendar and work with it from multiple places using WebDAV if you have a server that supports that. Again cool. Then later, after a conversation with Don about project management I remembered the application service provider Basecamp. I had been meaning to try out their project management software to see if it worked well. Yes, you can go get project management software and install it on a server somewhere for free, that doesn't mean it is necessarily the best thing to do nor what you want to do. I am perfectly willing to pay for a service if it really gets me something. Basecamp offers a variety of service levels at different fees so I tried their free account. It only allows for one project but it would be good enough to try out. Since it is all about projects, it naturally has a lot of stuff related to... calendars. And interestingly enough it even has iCalendar format calendars of tasks to be performed which you can subscribe to remotely. Hmm, would Sunbird hook up to that? Yes, indeed, you can add it as a remote calendar to Sunbird and you can connect your project administration to your desktop calendar. I like that...

Posted by John Munsch at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm really fond of using Inkscape to do illustrations and various graphics. It has several features to recommend it:

• It's free
• It's available for both Linux and Windows
• It outputs .SVG files which I can use within Java programs to have scalable graphics

There is a neat overview of the changes in the newest version available over at OSNews: Introducing Inkscape 0.4 - OSNews.com

Posted by John Munsch at 4:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This woman's story about her spouse developing games for EA sounds like the worst case of employee abuse I've read of for the gaming industry but by no means is it far outside the norm.

If you are really thinking of game development as a career I think you need to rethink that idea. There is better money and reasonable hours available elsewhere doing software development.

Posted by John Munsch at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

del.icio.us is a web based way to store your bookmarks that works better than the folders that your browser supports.

Instead of a simple folders method of storing things, del.icio.us asks you to type in keywords as you add the bookmark to your list. Those tags give you lots of ways to get back to the same bookmark so you are much more likely to find it again when you need it. Those same tags also give you a way to look into what others have chosen to bookmark. Add searching and a way to see all recently added bookmarks and you've got an excellent service that you should start using right away.

Posted by John Munsch at 11:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The idea of syndicating audio weblog entries rather than text entries has a certain appeal. Some people simply cannot write well, I unfortunately am one of them, so trying to talk to people via a broadcast is tempting.

But here's the thing I don't get. Lately there has been a lot of rending of clothes and lamenting over the load imposed by and amount of data transferred by a popular RSS channel feed. After all, people keep coming back over and over again and asking for all your new stuff even if the end user never even bothers to look at it (or in this case listen to it). So when you run iPodder for the first time it downloads a sample MP3 for the sample channel. It's only 38 seconds long but almost 600K. Now, compare that to a typical RSS text channel which may run in the neigborhood of 10-20K. While I haven't been worrying about the load put on my servers by people downloading my RSS text channels even I have to give some thought to the impact of huge numbers of downloads of large files every time I feel like saying something.

There are some mitigating factors here, the sample file was digitized at 128kbits and was in stereo. Taking it to mono and dropping the quality significantly would not be very noticable for human speech but then the length of a given audio weblog entry is likely to be significantly longer than 38 seconds too. So it may all even out.

Posted by John Munsch at 12:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)