Technology

Things that catch my geeky interests that don’t fall into a more specific tag.

Devil Duckie USB Flashdrive!

by

Devil Duckie USB Flashdrive

I tell you, if I didn’t already have my iPod (and therefore no need for a flash drive), this would be so tempting!

He may be a representative of the dark side, but it’s hard to resist those tiny horns and cute chubby red body. At 4 1/2 inches long, our stylish and strange Devil Duckie Drive is a High-Speed USB 2.0 (1.1 compatible) personal data storage device for people who are going places.

Once you reach your destination, plug your Devil Duckie Drive in and put him to work. His expressive (and often hypnotic) eyes will blink as he reads and writes your data.

(via MacMinute)

FedEx making The Switch?

by

Interesting rumor via MacRumors:

According to one unconfirmed source, Federal Express may be looking to make a significant purchase of Macs to replace their current PCs.

Reportedly, the move is under consideration due to the recent wave of viruses that have swept the PC world.

While Macs are not inherently immune to virus attacks, most viruses have been written on the Windows/PC platform.

Now, this is “one unnamed source”, so it could easily be entirely fictitious, but it’s interesting to think about, at the very least.

As an added bonus, the MacRumors discussion thread for this item has a much higher signal-to-noise ratio than what I’m used to seeing in their forums, and I found this wonderful little point buried within, from MisterMe:

…there is more evidence for ghosts, UFOs, and Big Foot than there is for MacOS X viruses. People have actually reported seeing ghosts, UFOs, and Big Foot.

iTunes: “Thunder Kiss ’65 (Swinging Lovers)” by White Zombie from the album Nightcrawlers: The K.M.F.D.M. Remixes (1992, 4:46).

I’m 100 percent British!

by

I'm 100 percent British!

Jolly good, wot! Anyone for tennis? That’ll be ten ponies, guv. You’re the epitome of everything that is english. Yey :) Hoist that Union Jack!

How British are you?
This quiz was made by alanna

Incidentally, I think I’m going to have to come up with some special prize for the first ‘net quiz I run across that gives you “Put this in your blog!” code that is actually well-written, doesn’t use unnecessary tables, properly opens and closes paragraph tags, uses proper break tags (<br />, not <br>), and so on. I always have to re-write the tag soup they give me before I can post the results here…

An insider’s view of MS Word 6.0

by

Microsoft Word for the Mac versions 4 and 5 were my introductions to Word, and in the opinion of myself and many other people, were the pinnacle of Microsoft’s Mac programming.

I had a single 1.4Mb floppy disc on my first Mac (a Mac Classic) that had the MS Word program and every paper I wrote for school that year, and it ran quite happily in the 1Mb of RAM that my lil’ Classic had in it. Word 5, while not that small, was the perfect combination of features and usability, adding useful functions without becoming too much of a memory, space, or speed hog.

Then came Word 6.

Huge. Bloated. A memory hog. Dog-slow. And a truly hideous interface that only a Windows user could love (or even feel at home in).

Things have improved since then, thankfully — Word (and Office) for Mac OS X is actually useable, though I tend not to bother unless I have a really pressing need (such as getting into old archived documents laying around on my system), as the majority of my writing these days is either coding my site in BBEdit or posting via Ecto.

Still, it was quite interesting to find this look at the creation of MS Word 6 from Rick Schaut, one of the people on the team for Word 6.

Shipping a crappy product is a lot like beating your head against the wall.  It really does feel good when you ship a great product as a follow-up, and it really does motivate you to spend some time trying to figure out how not to ship a crappy product again.

Mac Word 6.0 was a crappy product.  And, we spent some time trying to figure out how not to do that again.  In the process, we learned a few things, not the least of which was the meaning of the term “Mac-like.”

(via Scoble)

iTunes: “Homey Don’t Play Dat” by Bonnie ‘n’ Clyde from the album Terminator X and the Valley of the Jeep Beats (1991, 4:12).

Apple out of debt

by

Impressive, really — even with the economy in the shape it’s been lately, Apple has been doing so well that they were just able to pull themselves out of debt, according to this internal Apple memo:

Team,

Today is a historic day of sorts for our company. When I arrived back at Apple in mid-1997, the company was burdened with \$1 billion of debt. Through everyone’s hard work we turned Apple around, paid off the majority of our debt and began to amass a war chest of cash in the bank which has grown to about \$4.8 billion! But there was still \$300 million of remaining debt, which we decided to hold to maturity.

Today we used \$300 million of our cash to pay off this remaining debt.

Apple is now a debt-free company — for the first time in over a decade!

It sure feels good.

Steve

(via /.)

iTunes: “The Moon, Part 1” by Speakeasy from the album Common Ground (1995, 3:33).

More on the genealogy project

by

I spent some time last night following up on playing around with software for tracking my family’s history on our website. So far, things are actually looking fairly good — with the one caveat that I only have so much information in my head.

The first piece to the puzzle is GEDitCOM, a Mac OS X application that reads and writes standard GEDCOM files (I had no idea that there was a standard file for genealogy software before I started looking into all this). While it’s not the prettiest application in the world, it does appear to be very powerful, and I’m quite pleasantly surprised by the amount of information that the GEDCOM format supports.

Of course, I’m not sure why I’m surprised — I’m obviously not the first person to look into how to track all this information using a computer. I guess we all just like to think that we’re the first to come up with a good idea… ;)

The second piece is the web package I stumbled across the other day — PhpGedView. A set of PHP scripts, it was very easy to install and get up and running, all I had to do was copy the scripts into a directory on the webserver, tweak the permissions on two files and one directory, and I could log into the interface and start putting things together. Again, it’s not as pretty as it could be, but it does look like nearly (if not entirely) all of the functionality that I was looking for is there.

Once PhpGedView is installed, all you need to do is upload a standard GEDCOM file and PhpGedView parses it and creates the final website. Here’s the one spot where I ran into problems: each time I uploaded the GEDCOM file that GEDitCOM created, PhpGedView wasn’t able to parse it correctly, and I got a bunch of garbage data.

Turns out that the solution is fairly simple, and ties into an age-old issue between Mac and PC file formats. Mac systems use a different character to signify the end of a line than PC (DOS/*NIX) systems do, and when the scripts tried to import the GEDCOM file, they saw it as one really really really long line. I was able to get around this by running the file through BBEdit and switching the line break style, I’m sure there are many utilities to do just that floating around the ‘net for people who don’t have BBEdit.

Once I got that figured out, the import went smoothly, and as a result, the first version of our family tree is up. It’s very bare-bones at the moment (though not as bare-bones as it looks at first — just click around and experiment a bit to move around the tree), but mom promised to send me copies of the family’s “history box”. Once I get that and pop more information in, the tree will look a lot less sparse than it does at the moment.

Even better, though, is that PhpGedView does handle one of the bigger items on my wishlist — user accounts with editing ability. I’ll need to put together a simple “user’s manual/how-to”, but this will allow other people in the family to add and edit information to the database. Once changes are made, I can then download the updated GEDCOM file from PhpGedView to my computer, re-import it into GEDitCOM, and keep all the information synced between my personal workspace and the website. Not bad at all!

Every few years of my life, the genealogy bug has bit me — now that it has again, it’s great that I’ve got the technology at my fingertips to be able to store and present it like this.

Now, mom — about that box… ;)

iTunes: “I Was Walking” by Poems for Laila from the album On a Wednesday (2002, 2:50).

iPhotoToGallery

by

Adding photos to my family photo gallery, the old way:

  1. Choose the photos I want to send to the gallery in iPhoto.
  2. Export the photos to a folder on my hard drive.
  3. Copy the photos to a folder on the webserver.
  4. Log into the Gallery software on the website.
  5. Navigate to the album I want to add the photos to.
  6. Choose Add photos….
  7. Enter the URL of the directory I just copied the photos into.
  8. Upload.
  9. Done.

Adding photos to my family photo gallery with iPhotoToGallery:

  1. Choose the photos I want to send to the gallery in iPhoto.
  2. In iPhoto, choose File > Export…, then click on the Gallery tab.
  3. Choose the album I want to upload the photos to (or create a new album).
  4. Click Export.
  5. Done.

Very, very nice.

(via Forwarding Address: OS X)

iTunes: “New Style Baby, A (’91)” by Pink Stanly Ford from the album Technomancer (1996, 6:47).

Genealogy software wishlist

by

Okay, so here’s what I wish I had available in a software package. Any mad coders out there feel like putting it together? ;) (This has been submitted to the LazyWeb.)

  • A web-driven genealogy software package (PHP/Perl/Python with a database backend?).
  • One page per family member, able to display (at minimum, though not all items would necessarily exist for every page):
    • Links to immediate family members (one degree of seperation: parents, siblings, spouses, children).
    • Vital statistics (birth, marriage, divorce, death). This could be expanded to include christening, baptism, etc. for situations where such dates are recorded.
    • Biographical and/or historical information — stories, memories, etc.
    • Pictures.
    • Contact info for still-living members.
  • User registration.
  • Logged-in users would be able to easily edit any individual page on the tree to add memories, stories, information, etc. (Wiki-style ‘edit this page’ links?).
  • Logged-in users should also be able to create new pages for family members not already in the tree. New pages should follow a template to ensure that a consistent look-and-feel is maintained as much as possible.
  • Wiki-like ease in adding pages and linking pages together. IE, one of the things I really like about the Wiki concept is how easy it is to (in this concept) let the tree grow. When creating my page, all I had to do was add WikiWords for my relatives, and I could then jump to and create/edit their pages. Functionality such as this is far easier than having to log into a central database and create new records for each new entry and then have to go back and edit all pages that would link to the new entry.
    • I’m still not sure how to best work around the issue with multiple family members with the same name.
  • Administrators should be able to review and approve/disapprove new users, get a list of recent changes, possibly approve/disapprove page edits before incorporation (this is optional, I think).
  • HTML output should be clean, standards-compliant, using CSS for styling, etc.
  • RSS/XML/Atom feeds of recently changed/added pages (preferably with an option to subscribe to either ‘minimal’ feeds listing only changed pages, ‘short’ feeds listing the edited page and the changes, and ‘full’ feeds listing the edited pages and the full text with changes marked in some way).
  • (This might be pipe dream territory) A dynamically-generated (Java? DHTML?) overview of the tree or branches of the tree. I’m visualizing being able to start with a simple tree of one nuclear family. Lines leading away from members would indicate further information along the branch. Clicking on a member (parent, spouse, child, etc.) would “slide” the display to that member’s nuclear family. “Zoom out” would allow more branches to be viewed (and would need a “Zoom in” control to return to a single-family view. “Detail” links on each member would lead to the individual member’s page (which would have a “View tree” link to switch to the dynamic tree view).
  • Possibly more as I come up with it.

If I had the time, I’d start diving heavily into PHP (or Perl, or Python)/MySQL and start attempting to build this myself. However, I don’t have the time, and something tells me that this might be complex enough to be fairly overwhelming as a first project.

If this software existed, I’d gladly pay for it (hopefully it would be within my price range, of course). At the moment, if anyone feels up to attempting to code it together, I’d gladly beta test!

So how crazy am I? How does this feature wish list sound? Is there already something out there on the ‘net that might cover some or all of this (aside from Wiki, which I’m already exploring) that I haven’t found yet?

Questions, comments, and words of wisdom are, as always, appreciated.

Update: Hot damn — PhpGedView just might be it!

Wanted: advice concerning Wikis

by

I’ve got a project running around in my head that I believe a Wiki would be a good solution for, but I’ve not done much to play with/experiment with Wikis in the past. I’d like to start playing around with this project soon after I get home, so if there’s anyone out there who might be able to give some advice or recommendations, I’d appreciate some “expert assistance”…

For a while now, I’ve been hosting The Hanscom Family Website. While the original intention was for it to be a collaborative weblog for the entire Hanscom family, so far it’s been acting primarily as my dad’s weblog (and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that!). Hopefully we’ll be gaining more authors soon, though, as I’ll be sending a “how to” tutorial to Susan, Eric, and possibly Doug and Pam also once I’m home.

One of the original ideas I wanted to include on the website (and actually was started on an earlier incarnation, but lost in a server mishap) was a genealogical record of the family. As I don’t know of a really good way to do a web-based family tree, my idea was for each person to have a single page listing important dates (birth, death, marriage, etc.), contact info (if desired), and biographical information. Each page would also have a set of links to immediate family members (parents, children, siblings) that would allow the user to navigate their way through the family tree. We could then, over time, create a genealogical database (of sorts) of the family.

One of the big reasons I’ve wanted to do this (and this was brought up in a major way during a conversation with my mom last night) was the number of stories that are scattered among all the various family members — some written, but many only currently locked in the vaults of memory.

The difficulty I had in the first implementation was that each person’s page was just a static HTML page, and if there were to be any changes to it, they’d have to be done myself. I’d need to have information and stories sent to me, at which point I’d make the changes to the static pages and save them to the server. It’d work, but it would be slow and somewhat kludgy, especially as it would rely on my own time constraints in order to get any additions actually incorporated into the pages.

Last night as mom and I were talking, though, it occurred to me that a Wiki could be a perfect solution to this problem. The page structure and layout would be essentially the same, but it would allow any of our family members to click an “Edit This Page” link on any one of the pages and add whatever they wanted, be it more biographical information about themselves, memories of other relatives, stories that have been passed down in family lore about ancestors, or other such things. In theory, at the very least, this could work very well.

My limitations (and worries) are simply that I’m by far the most technologically- and web-literate of my family members, and I need to do everything I can to make sure that the interface is as simple and easy to use as possible. I also want to ensure that the site is not publicly editable, so there would need to be some sort of account registration system so that I could grant global edit rights to family members, but prevent random passers-by from making unwelcome changes. I also want to have the system be as resource-friendly as possible, as it will be running on a 350Mhz G3 that is already hosting three websites, two of which use the MovableType weblogging system (which I love, but I also realize that Perl can be a major resource hog as sites grow, and my webserver only has so much firepower at the moment).

I did a quick web search and found the Wiki Wiki Web’s list of Wiki engines, but truth to tell, it’s a little daunting, as there are so many different engines available. Even if I narrow it down to the two languages that I’m sure my system can easily run (Perl and PHP) there are still a large number of possible choices, and I’m not entirely sure which scripting language would be the better choice as far as conserving system resources and ensuring that response time for serving/editing/saving pages is fairly reasonable.

So, to sum up, here’s what I’m looking for:

  • A Wiki (or similar) engine to allow for collaborative decentralized editing of a set of web pages.
  • User accounts or some form of access control and management.
  • As simple and ‘idiot-proof’ of an editing interface as possible.
  • Low (or as low as possible) system resource overhead.
  • The host webserver is a 350Mhz G3-based Mac running OS X 10.2 (i.e., the Apache webserver, Perl and PHP supported, UNIX-based).

Any ideas? Recommendations? Questions, comments, words of wisdom? Any and all would be appreciated!

Atom feed now available

by

Seeing as how an Atom-enabled beta of NetNewsWire just hit the ‘net, I took a few moments to get an Atom newsfeed up and running for Eclecticism.

While TypePad has supported Atom for a while now, Atom feeds were only automatically included on sites using any of the Basic or Plus level auto-generated template sets. Those of us using custom coded Advanced template sets (especially those created before TypePad added Atom support) need to manually add the Atom template to our template sets.

The template code for my Atom feed is in the rest of this entry. It’s almost exactly the same as the template provided by TypePad — the only change I’ve made is to substitute AtomEnabled for the “more info” link rather than www.example.com. Posting this is just a convenience — while finding the template code wasn’t really difficult it did involve a few steps (creating a new advanced template set from one of the default system-provided template sets and go into the template editor to find the code), and posting it here will make it a bit easier if I need to track it down again in the future.

Here’s the template to use:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<feed version="0.3" xmlns="http://purl.org/atom/ns#" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
  <title><$MTBlogName remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$></title>
  <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="<$MTBlogURL encode_xml="1"$>" />
  <id>tag:typepad.com,2003:weblog-<$MTBlogID$></id>
  <link rel="service.post" type="application/x.atom+xml" href="<$MTCGIPath$>atom/weblog/blog_id=<$MTBlogID$>" title="<$MTBlogName encode_html="1"$>" />
  <modified><MTEntries lastn="1"><$MTEntryDate timezone="UTC" format_name="W3CDTF"$></MTEntries></modified>
<MTBlogIfDescription>
  <tagline><$MTBlogDescription remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$></tagline>
</MTBlogIfDescription>
  <generator url="http://www.typepad.com/" version="<$MTVersion$>">TypePad</generator>
  <info type="application/xhtml+xml">
  <div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">This is an Atom formatted XML site feed. It is intended to be viewed in a Newsreader or syndicated to another site. Please visit <a href="http://www.atomenabled.org/">AtomEnabled</a> for more info.</div>
  </info>
<MTEntries lastn="15">
  <entry>
    <title><$MTEntryTitle remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$></title>
    <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="<$MTEntryPermalink encode_xml="1"$>" />
    <link rel="service.edit" type="application/x.atom+xml" href="<$MTCGIPath$>atom/weblog/blog_id=<$MTBlogID$>/entry_id=<$MTEntryID$>" title="<$MTEntryTitle encode_html="1"$>" />
    <id>tag:typepad.com,2003:post-<$MTEntryID$></id>
    <issued><$MTEntryDate format_name="W3CDTF"$></issued>
    <modified><$MTEntryDateModified timezone="UTC" format_name="W3CDTF"$></modified>
    <created><$MTEntryDate timezone="UTC" format_name="W3CDTF"$></created>
    <summary><$MTEntryExcerpt remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$></summary>
    <author>
      <name><$MTEntryAuthor encode_xml="1"$></name>
    </author>
<MTEntryCategories>
    <dc:subject><$MTCategoryLabel encode_xml="1"$></dc:subject>
</MTEntryCategories>
<MTWeblogIfFullRSSContent>
    <$MTEntryAtomContent$>
</MTWeblogIfFullRSSContent>
  </entry>
</MTEntries>
</feed>

iTunes: “Steamroller (Skatenigs)” by Pigface from the album Industrial Mix Machine (1996, 3:29).