web 2.0 ish
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Yesterday, Adobe announced they are open sourcing Flex, their all wiz bang Flash based web application builder. This seems to stem from their concern about Microsoft Silverlight/WPF/WP or whatever they are calling it today. This looks to be a Adobe’s last ditch effort to save Flash aka to Sun open sourcing Java. There is a reason Flex has never taken off, Adobe sucks at writing tools & programming languages/API for developers. Macromedia was bad (see Actionscript), Adobe is worse. Some companies can compete with Microsoft in terms of IDE & programming languages (Borland does a decent job) but Adobe is not one of them. Not to mention their Eclipse based IDE is not part of the open source release.
Most Flex/Flash users are designers in nature that want to go further so they pick up action script for a programming language on the side. Now you want these people to tear into some Java code? This could get ugly real fast. I’m not saying Silverlight/WPF/WP is going to be the end all, but sorry Adobe who cares?
Trying to write your own Java or Flash
code? It might be easier to start with
custom PHP/Perl script writing. Writing code can be tricky if you’ve never
attempted it before, so look at
free PHP scripts online first.
Custom web programming is great if you can pull it off.
Written by Tim on April 26th, 2007 with no comments.
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I kept getting this annoying authentication method when trying to remote desktop from Vista into a Windows 2003 server machine at work today. By navigating to the “Advanced” tab I could change the Authetication option to : “Always connect, even if authentication fails”, but Scott Forsyth has a registry edit that works perfectly:
Add a DWORD registry entry called AuthenticationLevelOverride in the \\HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client\ and set it to 0.
Written by Tim on February 22nd, 2007 with no comments.
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Revised: Krugle - It might survive
Revised: Krugle - It will survive, their people in power get it
After reading Robert Scoble post on Krugle I ran over to krugle.com to see what type of advertising I could get (we write software development tools so it should be a nice fit), this is there business model right? Some red flags went off when it became a chore to find advertising info. Finally I came to their “Contact Us” page where I found Bill Daniher VP Finance & Corporate Development as the contact for advertising. More red flags - Why is a VP of Finance handling advertising? Maybe their VP actually do work, so I send him an email. He responds back that Krugle doesn’t have an automated way to do this yet, but he can manually add an ad to the site for a selection of keywords. I’m thinking this is going to be ugly to deal with, but still worth a try. I give him the word we want to proceed, what are the next steps? His response? Well, there is no response. So your a start up and someone wants to buy your service and you don’t respond? Not good. My email probably slipped thru the cracks, but that is why a VP shouldn’t be handling this. Then I read today that they partnered with Yahoo! to do their developer code search. I sure hope Yahoo! is paying them enough to survive, otherwise it won’t.
This is a big reason a lot of .com companies don’t survive. They put more stock into partnerships and VC funding then doing what they need to do—earn revenue and become profitable.
Written by Tim on February 15th, 2007 with 4 comments.
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I’m a big fan of using wikis in the workplace (In fact I was part of a team that got Proctor and Gamble to start using Wiki’s for their Metamucil team back in 2003 when no one had heard of Wikis). Mike Wilson pushed wikis on me back then and I have never looked back. Our IT team uses one with a passion. Today while I was going over my “to do” list I realized that a personal wiki for everything me, would be perfect. I know Scott Hanselman pimped TiddlyWiki so I am giving it a try. I have three sections - MyIT, MyMarketing, MyLife (I believe Tiddly uses camel case, which is old school wiki style I love). It’s set as my default page on my browser. I’ll report back on if this works out.
![CropperCapture[1]](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/163/384749376_d4ca49dbf7_m.jpg)
Written by Tim on February 9th, 2007 with 1 comment.
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For almost a two years I had been using RSS Popper. It integrated very nicely into Outlook, but recently I ran into some performace issues with Outlook and it turns out RSS Popper was the cause. I gave Google Reader a shot but it turned out to be way to slow. On the advice of The Nix Guy I turned to Bloglines. I’m loving it. It’s interface is very simple, the reader is fast and the way the post are rendered makes it for easy reading. My only wish would be some way to read internal blogs at work with it. Those blogs are behind the firewall so it would have to be some type of Grease Monkey script or Firefox Extension that plugged in.
Written by Tim on February 6th, 2007 with no comments.
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This took longer then it should, but someone finally realized Google funds terrorist. Here is the truth about the Google corporation.
- They are an Advertisement company 100%
- They have no shame about selling ads on anyones site about anything, including terrorism, kiddie porn, and crack sites
- Google wants to decide what laws they want to help enforce, they are against slander against gays, but for kiddie porn
- Their site advertisement is a scam (yes, the Google ads on my site are worthless). Advertisers who pay for these must be idots
- Their Adwords (ads on google.com) are slowly following this trend, a few years ago ROI on these were acceptable, this is happening less and less
- Google only wants some fraud PPC, they make money on fraud clicks but they don’t want too much to drive away the advertisers
- People who do SEO are in cahoots with Google, Google helps them make a living and they keep hush about these truths
- Their search engine hasn’t gotten better in a few years, why? - See #1
- Google does good things for the Open Source community, but I bet they get sued real soon for not following the GPL. Most of the software uses GPL but where is the source code they are required to release to the public?
- They dislike in order: Microsoft, Ebay, Amazon
- They like in order: Yahoo!, Apple, AMD
- Google stock, Google Advertisements, and Google itself is a bubble that will burst. Google has a place but right now they are too big and going in the wrong direction.
Written by Tim on December 7th, 2006 with 4 comments.
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Ever wonder how to turn rss xml into a podcast mp3? Me neither, but it struck me as a really cool idea when I ran across Talkr.com, a online services which does this. I then found Audiolicious and found you can do it in 7 easy steps.
Audiolicious allows you to point it at any valid RSS feed and create MP3 Podcast. It converts the text to speech using Windows and Ruby technology.
Instructions:
- Unzip the Audiolicious zipfile to a directory on your computer.
- Install Ruby.
- Install the Microsoft Speech API.
- Install the Microsoft Mary voice.
- Test Audiolicious by running audiolicious.bat. The MP3’s will appear in the output directory.
- Configure Audiolicious by opening audiolicious.rb in your favourite text editor and changing the rss_feed and output_dir.
- Setup up audiolicious.bat to run daily using Windows Scheduler.
Written by Tim on November 30th, 2006 with 2 comments.
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Yahoo! has been accepting sitemaps very similar to what Google is doing with their Sitemap feeds. One exception, they do not provide you with a tool like Google does, that might make too much sense. I guess Yahoo! was behind in the game and went public without offering webmastes any tools to submit a text file containing your URL list in a plain text file. Initially I thought I could use something like Xenu - a link checking bot that gives you a list of valid html pages with no broken links. However it puts a bunch of goofy jargon in the source code that makes it very very difficult to create text file of plain jane URLs. So I ended up using Google sitemap tool to first build my url list.
See Google Sitemap help for detailed instructions . Here are the steps you need to make this happen.
- Download Google’s sitemap tool from sourceforge.
- Run this code to generator a sitemap:
$ python sitemap_gen.py --config=
This will generate an sitemap.xml.gz file in the location you specified in the config.xml file. You then need to :
$ gunzip sitemap.xml.gz
- Next, open this sitemap.xml using your favorite text editor - I use UltraEdit. Do a search and replace with nothing for:
Use a regular expression to search and replace with nothing for:
*
*
Then you should record a macro to delete the extra line breaks and leading space. I’ve attached the Macro I used in Ultra Edit. Download the Google_to_Yahoo.mac macro. Pretty straight forward. Let me know if you have an eaiser way. I do have over 5,000 URL’s so doing by any other way then automation was out of the question.
Written by Tim on November 29th, 2006 with no comments.
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When I found out IE7 was going to implement a native javascript object, xmlHttpRequest, in addition to their own Microsoft.XMLHTTP object, I was thrilled. This meant once IE 6 was phased out of the world, all my ajax stuff wouldn’t need to check browser before proceeding. For the most I use ajax frameworks (http://www.ajaxpro.info/) that already have this built in but I do write my own xmlhttp request on occasion.
For an internal application I have an ajax search functionality built that queries a database and returns customers names on key entry. So I type in “Acm” I get a listing of:
Acmanda
Acmat
Acme
This is very similar to Google suggest, but I display the results in a fixed height div tag with auto scroll enabled. The ajax returns li tags with href tags around the company names. This works on IE 6, FF, and Safari. However in IE7, there is some real slowness to this. When I use Fiddler I see the Request returning from the AJAX calls but the results do not show up. I tried setting the page cache to nothing, but still no luck. I then ran into several articles questioning the XmlHttpRequest javascript object.
I also found out IE 7 is slow on some Google sites where a ton of XML traffic is being returned, like their Google Maps.
I started playing around with IE 7’s options, turning off Phishing filter, testing, no luck and so on. When I turned off the native XMLHttp support as seen below, my application ran perfectly fast on IE7. IE 7 is set up to fall back to the Microsoft.XMLHTTP Active X object if this gets turned off.
So this makes me wonder.
- Did the IE 7 team really implement a native javascript XmlHttpRequest object?
- If so, did they follow the spec?
- If so, is their object code buggy or just plain slow
OR
- Is their native XmlHttpRequest object really a javascript object or did they cut corners and implement an object that acts native but in all reality is a deformed active x object?
- If so, why would you ship with this option turned on by default?
This has egg on the face written all over it.
Did you know you could browse IE with
handheld computers? Modern technology makes
everything more portable, like
barcode readers and mobile computers.
Zebra card printers are now portable, too, so you can
print on the go!
Written by Tim on October 25th, 2006 with 11 comments.
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I ran across a great example of why to refactor code. We have a system that users fill out some forms and processes are kicked off that route that data to a database and send out emails to different people based on certain user input. Before we rewrote the system in January of 06, to change who got a certain email took at least a 1 hour of coding time and an half an hour of QA. It was way out of wack. We totally rewrote the system in January but because of delays to other parts of the project the system didn’t go live until August of this year. So for 8 months we could have sat on our new code which worked. Instead every 2 months we revisited different code blocks and refactored. At most we spent less then an hour refactoring. This particular code block ended up getting refactored 4 times.
Today, I got a request to route emails to different people, based on new business rules. The end result took 2 minutes of code changes, and 3 minutes to QA. We use Watir to run automated test. Because we use source control I did some auditing. Looking back these are the number of lines of code that would have needed to change for today’s changes.
| Refactor Date |
Lines of Code to Change |
| March |
51 |
| May |
22 |
| July |
15 |
| August |
8 |
Refactoring code rocks!
Written by Tim on September 28th, 2006 with 2 comments.
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