07.23.06

Webvisions: Day 1, Portland

Posted in General, Tech, Web at 10 am

So Thursday and Friday were kinda busy:

Web Strategy by Jeremiah – Webvisions: Day 1, Portland: “I can hear the chatter from Ross, one of the event coordinators on the squak boxes Γ’β‚¬β€œthese guys mean business and are well organized.”

There’s more of that from this post too.

Hey cool, that’s me. Nick did a great job organizing the “webvisions06” tag for everyone to use. A simple google search comes up with a bunch of stuff.

It was a great conference this year. The crew of volunteers that were helping out really f’ing rocked!

04.25.06

How To Buy Domain Names

Posted in Tech, Web at 8 am

There’s a few pages that walk thru the process:

* Domain Name Registration Article at About.com
* Domain name Tips article at About.com

You need a few things to do this:

1. A credit card
2. A website hosting service (Easystreet, rackspace.com, etc.)
3. The list of 2 “name servers” from the hosting service (ns1.easystreet.com, ns2.easystreet.com, etc.)
4. A domain Registrar: (NetworkSolutions, Doster, GoDaddy, Yahoo, etc.)

The Registrars that we use at work are http://www.NetworkSolutions.com and http://www.Dotster.com. There are hundreds, but I generally like Dotster. Personally I use http://www.000domains.com (but they simply resell Dotster’s services).

04.10.06

Ajax, meet Comet. Comet, this is Ajax. You will get along fine.

Posted in Tech, Web at 1 pm

Ajax is client side asynch communication. Comet is the Server-side equivalent.

Comet: Low Latency Data for the Browser:

So what makes these apps special? What makes them different from other things that might at first glance appear similar? Fundamentally, they all use long-lived HTTP connections to reduce the latency with which messages are passed to the server. In essence, they do not poll the server occasionally. Instead the server has an open line of communication with which it can push data to the client.

As is illustrated above, Comet applications can deliver data to the client at any time, not only in response to user input. The data is delivered over a single, previously-opened connection. This approach reduces the latency for data delivery significantly.

03.02.06

South by Northwest

Posted in People, Web at 8 am

From the places I’d like to be, conferences I’d like to attend file:

Digital Web Magazine – News – South by Northwest:

South by Northwest sponsored by Blue Flavor, Bryght, Newsvine and Raincity Studios. There will be lots of beer, wine and margaritas to suck down. Be sure to bring your digital cameras because there is nothing more bloggable than drunken web geek celebrities.

Have a great time guys!

09.10.05

Catching up with August 2005

Posted in Apple, Career, General, Life, Media, Tech, Transport, Web at 9 am

For the first post of September, we’ll be covering August and the last few weeks with QuickNotes™…

1) I’ve got a new laptop: 15″ PowerBook. Woo Hoo! It’s teh hot! Seriously, switching from the plastic-cased iBook to the aluminium wraped 15″ PB has given me a new appreciation for thermodynamics. (But still the PB is FAST! So much faster than the iBook.)

2) Tiger is okay, but little to write home about. The UI inconsistencies in OS X from the system and iApps perspective is becoming more obvious. But I could be just railing against the fact that part of iChat crashes on a regular basis, just after I switched back to using it instead of Adium because iChat can now do multiple accounts including Jabber accounts.

3) General instability is the call of the day. Some things are craping out way too easily. I’m letting Steve use my iBook while he’s out in Astoria for school, and I’ll be putting Panther on it.

4) Went and saw part of the Woodburn NEDRA electric drag races. Took some video and put together some movies for John Wwayland over at plasmaboy racing.

5) The new iTunes interface is an unecessary change unless it’s carried out to the rest of the iApps. The name for it seems to be “Polished Metal” as opposed to the older (and reviled) “Brushed Metal”. The iPod Nano looks cool but it took me days to find out it was solid-state flash and not hard drive-based. The ROKR iPhone is for SUKRs. Totally crippled and nothing new hardware-wise. Apple can’t build the whole widget, so the widget is a total compromise.

6) Our living rooom television died. Would like to replace it with a flat LCD, but they’re still more money than I want to invest in Home Entertainment. If anyone’s got a recommendation for a $200 to $300 television with *LOTS* of input and output jacks, let me know.

7) I’ve got a freelance project launching in the next could of days. I’ll point to it once it’s got a bit of burn-in time.

8) I’ve been seeing a new testing probe-bot that’s crawling around Contact forms. It’s already hit LazerQuick where we’ve patched it and just last nite it hit my feedback form on OrderSomewhereChaos. Nasty little bugger made me dive back into Perl code that I’ve not touched in 6 or 7 years. The mail is being sent to the (probably compromised) AOL account of “jrubin3456@aol.com”. They’re looking to find tons of spamming reflectors. I’m sure they’ll find *LOTS* of them.

9) Amy and I are off to see the final regular-season game for the Timbers! Mighty Mighty Timbers!

07.19.01

Flying My Time Machine

Posted in General, People, Tech, Web at 12 pm

I feel like I’m hurtling through this week without a single point to stop and catch my breath. I’m helping out with WebVisions, going to developers’ group meetings, and playing with a new toy.

Ah yes the new toy. It’s a Wireless Cam. Imagine your ordinary Lo-rez web cam, except with a wireless transmitter. It’s powered by a 9 volt battery, so you can put it anywhere you want and get a web cam set up.

The cam is available online for $80 (it’s a ‘C Video Camera’ from TrendMasters. (I would link to their site, but it sucks.)) However, the Software Etc. over at Clackamas Town Center has them for $30. Like I said, they’re low rez, but for a toy to play with, it’s very cool.

Good thing Bob loaned me an old ATI video card that has an RCA Video In that can bring in the signal. Thanks Bob!

Yes I will try to set up a WebCam, but the modem connection is only good for intermittent access, not a dedicated video feed.

Updated Nov 2007 to fix links in first paragraph.

03.26.98

avant-garde

Posted in Apple, Career, Media, Tech, Web at 6 pm

I’m slowly transfering my work machine to be based on MacOS 8. I’ve had it the 2 gig sitting in my machine for quite a while but have been slow to transfer over my preferences and set it as my startup disk. I finally moved my TCP setup over and I’m starting to get Malph re-setup piece by piece.. I know I could just copy over the Preference files, but it’s nice cleaning things out by hand. Though time-consuming to be sure. But damn, it’s _so_ responsive. Of course I haven’t installed all my fonts yet, either… πŸ™‚

Forest Puzzles is looking good. In fact, here’s the URL for it: <http://www.omsi.edu/~rosso/forpuz/> That’s not the final place for it, so don’t bookmark it. However Busytown has reached it’s final destination at: <http://www.omsi.edu/busytown/> which is aliased to a longer more logical pathname as the site structure goes. It’s still got to get through Paramount’s okay (they own the rights to the characters), but it’s looking good.

I’m switching over to Netscape 4.0 as well. I’ve been sticking with 3.0 for a while, because I use the mail client to read my personal e-mail (and Eudora for my business mail). I really feel that Communicator is way overblown. I wish you could install just the parts that you want. For me, it’d be the browser and the mail client. OpenNS 5.0 perhaps?? Maybe I’ll try to find a different e-mail client, though Eudora is such a landmark, it’s hard to think of another one to use. Wait, didn’t Bare Bones come out with one? Time to do some research.

Spiritualized’s Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space has been a constant soundtrack for my life lately. It’s really a beautiful CD. VW recently used the title track in a commercial. This fits in with the concept that TV commercials are more (avant-garde) musically than commercial radio. Isn’t that sad?

This week shaped up to be pretty active and productive. These are two words that haven’t been part of my vocabulary for a few weeks lately. Winter doldrums? Hopefully I’m looking at an upturn here. I’ve certainly got enough projects that could use some work. And a partner who could use some attention.

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03.19.98

Postcard Postoffice

Posted in Career, Tech, Web at 10 am

Took a warm bath last night. It was nice. Did a little reading. (The Art of Human Computer Interface Design is a 600 page large format tome of a book. I really gotta get it finished soon.)

I’ve just about finished of the Busytown site. It’s a part of the Busytown exhibit which OMSI built about the Richard Scarry characters. It’s a very playful site, though there’s not much depth. It’s somewhat of a side project. It does however have a cute little postcard postoffice facility that I’m thinking of re-purposing for the OMSI site. I’m thinking it needs cool shots of the OMSI logo, the building and famous scientists. If you know any good repositories of famous scientists portraits, drop me a line. I’d appreciate it.

I think I’ve just about got the the archiver for this journal thought through. Piece by piece, it’s coming together in my head…

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03.12.98

She's a Peach

Posted in Career, Life, Meta, People, Web at 7 pm

Toady I’m doing part of a teacher workshop put on by OMSI. These are teachers with little or no experience with web development, and I’ll be giving them the basics. I’ll be trying to show them a way of critiquing sites so they can understand the difference between good and bad design. I’ve only got half and hour, so we’ll see how it goes.

Amy and I had a great night last night. Details unavailable. πŸ™‚ “She’s a Peach…”

I got caught up on my e-mail back to about late Monday. I’ve still got stuff back to early last week… πŸ™

I finally got a counter on this page. It will be interesting to see how many I’m getting. As well, I implemented that new error page for OMSI. It’s working really well from what I can see. The only problem is that if it works well, then no one will know it’s there… :p

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03.11.98

The Art of Human Computer Interface Design

Posted in Apple, Meta, Tech, Web at 1 pm

Home and finally done for the day. The meeting for the Webmaster’s group was a lot of fun. But I think I may have been a bit too enthusiastic. I started going off about virtually every aspect of developing the OMSI web site from the Server Side Includes to the CGIs that I’ve worked up. I asked a couple of times if the other people there minded me just digging into the aspects of these web pages. They encouraged me to keep going, but they may have just been being nice.

Amy says she pointed a link to my journal in her journal at < <http://www.spiritone.com/~giovanni/> >. Tit-for-tat… πŸ™‚

Oh, books I’ve been reading: The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design which is basically a manifesto by Apple circa 1990. Also Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, which is an O’Reiley book, plus all the usual web journals:

<http://www.webreference.com/>

<http://www.webreview.com/>

<http://www.macosrumors.com/>

<http://www.webmonkey.com/>

and I’d like to read <http://www.builder.com/> from c|net, but I can’t stand how slow their web pages render. Waaaaay too many tables. (Can you see I’m getting a lot of use out of this auto URL linking?)

I wonder if/when my family will find this journal.

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