This is some really cool image resizing technology. I was so impressed I had to share.

Here’s a great presentation:

“The JavaScript Programming Language”

by Douglas Crockford of Yahoo!

Part 1 of 4

Part 2 of 4

Part 3 of 4

Part 4 of 4

It has been almost forever since I’ve blogged. I finally updated to the latest version of WordPress. Apparently the theme I was using is not compatible with this new version, so I had to change.

I checked out http://themes.wordpress.net/ and found way too many to choose from. I only looked at 40 pages of themes. I downloaded and tried a bunch. I setteled on “Thirteen” by Becca Wei. She has a bunch of nice themes for WordPress.

I’m probably a little late to the party, but this FUSE concept is sort of cool when you see it this way.

Some of the MacFUSE examples don’t seem so practical, but I’m really digging all the remote network storage implementations. I especially dig sshfs for mounting remote servers as local drives. I can definitely see this sort of think taking off as a way of easily integrating remote web services.

I’m amazed at how people already have strong opinions on the Apple iPhone. We won’t really know how good or bad it is for another few months. Maybe it sucks, and one of the unspecified features is that it kills you after 5 hours. Maybe it is the greatest thing ever and it release endorphins in your brain that make you euphoric. Either way it is not cheap, and it is not out. So wait it out folks. Don’t be so quick to judge. Besides, other manufacturers will begin making devices with similar if not exactly the same functionality soon.

I picked up my new Sony Ericsson W810i phone from the post office this morning. It was really easy to set-up. I just pulled out the SIM card from my old phone, and put it in the new one, and viola the phone was up and running. None of my contacts or other personalized setting were on the new phone, so I’ll have to take care of that. The battery had almost a full charge out the box. I was able to use the phone right out of the box. I surfed around the menus on the drive into work this morning.

When I got to work, the first thing I tried was plugging the phone in over USB into my Windows XP workstation. Windows was very good about finding drivers, and this thing needed about 4 different drivers. I’m not what all the functions of the device are, but I am able to put the phone into “file Transfer” mode and the phone and the memory card show up like removable drives in My Computer. The coolest thing, is that the phone charges over USB. That’s so cool!

Now that I have the phone plugged into my Windows PC charging, I turned on the Bluetooth to get my contacts from my Mac onto the Phone. The Mac Bluetooth Set up Assistant got it up and running in no time. iSync swooped in and zapped all my contacts over to the phone.

That was fast! while I’m working, I like to monitor my phone with BluePhoneElite. Since the new phone was already paired to my Mac, it took all of 2 seconds to change BluePhoneElite’s preferences.

THe first thing I’ve noticed from using the new phone, is how fast it is. It is really responsive to commands and getting around the menu is fast.

On the way out to lunch, my coworker Jonah[you know, from Jonah's secret blog] asked if it mounts as a drive over USB on my Mac. It does, and iPhoto detects it as a camera and prepares for import. That will save some time.

I encoded some aac audio files, loaded them over USB and bam! Walkman!

To get data access to the phone, all I had to do was go to this link, and make a few selections. They sent em the configuration via SMS, and BAM! Internet access. This is going great.

Now that I have internet access, I thought I’d try the built-in software update. 2 seconds to find out I have the most up to date. With internet access I thought I should get a decent Web browser. Used the crappy built-in browser to get Opera Mini. Just go to mini.opera.com using the phone and download and install. DOUBLE BAM! We all love google maps right? How about using it on on you phone. On your phone, go to www.google.com/gmm

Setting email is slow and kind of sucks since I have to use the stupid number pad to enter in server names and email addresses. Now I have to install certificates for the SSL encryption to use Gmail. I had to do this for the old phone. WHAT A BITCH!!! There is little documentation and help on setting up google mail on the built in mail client. Here are the settings:
Email address: USERNAME@gmail.com
Connection type: POP3
Incoming server: pop.gmail.com
Username: USERNAME@gmail.com
Outgoing server: smtp.gmail.com
Username: USERNAME@gmail.com
Encryption / Incoming Server: SSL
Encryption / Outgoing Server: SSL
Incoming port: 995
Outgoing port: 465

Now here’s the magic ingredient… The W810 doesn’t ship with the proper certificate to verify the SSL encryption. You need to install it yourself. You could probably find the right certificate online somewhere online, but I couldn’t. Here’s an easy way I found. On Mac OS X 10.4, open the Keycahin Access application. Select the X509Anchors from the Keychains list on the left. Find the “Equifax Secure Certificate Authority” certificate. Select just that certificate. From the File menu, select Export. Export the certificate as a .cer file. Know send the new .cer file to the phone via bluetooth, and your done. It is simple, yet hard to figure out.

I grabbed a bunch of free themes from Esato.com.
I downloaded a bunch of free games from SonyEriccson’s WAP site.

Well that’s enough for now, But I’ll share my new ringtone with you.
Ring Away: Macarena.m4a.

Still to do:
Get my Mac to use the phone as a modem over bluetooth
Get the phone to use Cingular’s high speed Edge network
Explore Media management software
Get some sort of Instant Messaging software for the phone
probably more…

I’ve been working on this small site. I wanted to do it with as much CSS as I could since I don’t have a lot of experience with it. I didn’t use tables at all, and I used <BR> tags sparingly. Once I had most of my code complete and tested in IE win, Firefox and Safari, I opened it up it IE Mac just to see. There were a few minor issues.

I don’t think any would notice or even care, about these minor display bugs in IE Mac, buf if I could resolve them easily, I should. I used the IE Mac CSS comment hack to fix it. Basically you define a class definition for IE Mac, and then redefine it for the others putting a comment block around it so IE Mac ignores it. Like this.

.myClass {attribute: value_For_Mac_IE;}
/* ignored by IE Mac \*/
.myClass {attribute: value_For_Other_Browsers;}
/* */

I’m sure all you css masters already know this, or even better, know how to avoid having to use this trick, but I’ve never had to use it before. I’m glad we could share.

When Google announced their IM service, they also announced that it was their intention to connect their IM service to all the other popular services. This intent was further solidified when they made a large equity acquisition of AOL. A little blurb in the press release about the AOL deal mention that Google and AOL would link their IM services sometime this summer.

This idealistic goal to unite the IM services took another step forward today when Google linked their service to the open network of Jabber servers. They also give instructions on how anyone can connect their local Jabber based server to Google’s

So now I can IM myself from my google talk to my jabber.org account.

As soon as AOL and Google are linked up, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before AOL releases Apple of their assumed exclusivity agreement and .mac and Google Talk will be linked up. Unless Microsoft try’s to bully this alliance, they will be forced to join in. Hopefully .mac, AOL, and Google Talk can all agree on some VOIP protoccol that will emerge as a standard. Hey Skype, are you listening? Is anyone listening?

Eh, it’s only a matter of times before things get a lot better and we’re part of one big happy IM family.

I posted this last night, and this morning they put another notch in their bedpost. Looks like things happen quickly.

This article offers some great insight. It really illustrates how this is a small step for IMs, but a giant leap for IMkind.[I know, sometimes I try Too hard.]

Apple Computer announced several new software and hardware products this week at Macworld Expo in San Francisco, and her is my take on the new offerings.

Apple Retails Stores
Basically Steve thanked us all for spending our money there. They made a ton of money. I used to make a point of making purchases from the Apple Store as my way of showing support for Apple. They were there for me when I needed them, and I thought I should show my support in return. Now that they are making money hand over fist, I guess it would be appropriate for me to go back to my cheap bargain hunting ways.

iPod & iTunes
They’re doing well, they’re great, everyone loves them, yadda yadda yadda. Now that prices of music and videos seem to be going up a bit, its probably more cost effective to actually go out an buy CDs again since CD prices have dropped a bit, and you get the higher quality audio. I guess the money you spend on audio video from the store s a convenience charge since its so easy to use and you don’t have to invest any time in encoding your stuff.

Mac OS X 10.4.4
We Mac OS X 10.4 users have suffered long enough with a bunch of bugs. Most of these bugs are just things that should have worked form the get go. I’m actually rather disappointed with 10.4 in general. I like that it is more stable and generally less to worry about. I just don’t feel there are any new features that I care enough about to have spent the money on an upgrade, but in the name of progress I upgraded. I had hoped that the 10.4.3 update was going to fix all the issues I was having. The update was hyped in a way that I believed everything would be solved by it, but they were not. I hope 10.4.4 fixes the bugs that 10.4.3 should have, and bugs that should have never been there to begin with. I’m really not bitter about it at all. I have always used a mac since I felt like the UI and system never seemed to get in my way the Windows does. It’s just that with 10.4 the Mac seemed to get in my way and slow me down just enough for me to bother me a bit.

iLife ‘06
The updates to iPhoto look great. I really like the Full Screen editing. It’s like Aperature for simple folks. I started to notice the trend in iPhoto 5 that it seemed much more like an adult application that software for kids. It’s a nice mix of great powerful features that are really easy to use. After all, that’s Apple’s strong suit.

The new podcast studio feature of Garageband makes things easy. It is the missing link in podcast production. Why would you want to use anything else.

Now I don’t use iLife all that much. I tend to use the more professional grade applications. There is the rare occasion that I use iMovie or iDVD for quickly getting small projects done. I love the new templates and features here. I can’t wait to get a copy for my folks and see what they do with it.

I’d like to get them a copy of iWeb too. I think my folks would really make some beautiful sites about their grandkids.

All in all iLife ‘06 brings all the best and most practical features of their professional software and make it so extremely easy to use. I think it’s really interesting the way Apple’s professional applications learn from how people use their consumer grade applications, and in turn then their consumer grade applications inherit some of the great features that stem from the powerful core technology that’s developed for the pro apps.

iWork ‘06
Honestly, I don’t care. iWork is nice, it’s pretty, and easy to use. I don’t think anyone should pay for it though. I’d love it more if it were free with every Mac. But I just don’t see the market for it. Who needs something that easy to use, but needs to make presentations or newsletters?

.mac
The only real update here is compatibility with iLife & iWork ‘06, and the Photocasting thing. Photocasting sounds like Flickr for .mac. No rocket science going on here. However, I don’t think .mac is a waste of time/money. I use it. I like it. It makes my life easier. I just wish that there were tools available for implementing sync on non .mac servers to give people a choice.

iMac (with Intel Core Duo)
Basically the same old iMac with a whole new brain. I wonder if someone will do benchmark comparisons of this iMac to the current low end PowerMac to see if the cheaper of the two is actually the better buy. The new x1600 graphics card struck my interest. That’s actually a whopper of a card for a laptop. The interesting thing to me is how ATI has been working towards offloading H.264 encoding onto their x1000 series cards, and how everyone seems to be complaining about H.264 encoding times. There’s no doubt that H.264 is the future, especially for video and the Mac. This card and the Mac just seem like the perfect marriage. I can’t wait for Apple to update the OS so it uses the GPU to encode H.264.

MacBook Pro
What’s with this cooky name? My guess is that the PowerMac/PowerBook name stems from the PowerPC processor, and since they’re not using that chip anymore, they should change the name.

Finally a laptop that isn’t severely underpowered in comparison to their desktops. Unless you’re a pro user with steep requirements, a laptop is really the way to go these days. At this point, there’s very little difference between a laptop and a consumer grade desktop. THey both have a hard drive and optical drive, keyboard, basic USB/FireWire/etc., and they both have LCD screens. Granted a laptop my have less expandability, but if you’re the average user, you’re probably going to replace before you outgrow the expandability.

The MacBook Pro comes with Front Row. BFD. Who hasn’t hacked Front Row to run on their mac yet. My guess is that we’ll see Front Row, with or without the remote, on every Mac within the next 6 months. The funny thing is the little IR port. When I had on old PowerBook G3 a long while back, I had an IR port. I rarely used it, but I loved that it just another tool at my fingertips for when I needed it. I used it sync my Palm and phone at the time. I even used to it to communicate with cell phone and use my cell as a modem a couple of times. It was sort of the precursor to BlueTooth. It never made sense to me why they would remove the IR port since it was so cheap and fairly handy. Oh well, it’s back.

The iSight camera probably costs them about a buck to include. It’s just like the IR port. Not necessary, but handy.

There are a few new ports and few missing ports. The new magnetic power cable is a great idea. I’ve tripped on my power cable a ton of times, and this small change is a huge benefit. There’s no FireWire 800 port, and I don’t care. I never used it anyway. I actually use a 800 to 400 adapter so I can plug 400 devices into the 800 port. It just sucks that they went from two FireWire ports to one. Um Hello, WFT is a ExpressCard/34 slot? What was wrong with the PC card slot? This seems like a really bad decision. Do you have any idea how many PC cards on the market Apple is alienating with this decision? On the bright side, the 15″ finally has an optical audio out. I’ve been waiting for that. I actually expected this feature quite sometime ago, but was previously only available on the 17″ PowerBook, iMac, and PowerMac.

Like the new Intel based iMac, the new MacBook Pro has the x1600 graphics card. If Apple starts offering a way to offload H.264 encoding to the GPU, they will have delivered the same feature to mobile users in one swift move. I just hope that they don’t make us all wait until 10.5 before they do this, and make people have to pay for an upgrade to get the H.264 encoding times we should have received in 10.4.

All in all the MacBook Pro is what PowerBook users have been dying for. It’s somewhat future proof and has al the power and flexibility anyone would want. Hopefully it will not be too little too late, and the MacBook Pro will evolve nicely and in a timely manner to meet the current needs of users.

I got a copy of Apple’s Aperture program over the weekend, and started playing with it. It’s nice, and for a version 1 of a program, it’s rather robust and mature. But let’s not focus on that.

I was looking through the Apple Support site Aperture docs seeing if I can find anything that might be enlightening when I found this:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302820#five
Why does Aperture unexpectedly quit (”crash”) a lot when I’m editing externally?

Are you messing with a lot of the unsupported color modes we just discussed? Try refraining from that for just a few minutes to see if that is your issue. Try working in a project that contains only supported images.

That language doesn’t seem particularly friendly. Why not something a little less arrogant like:

Aperture currently only supports the RGB color mode, and not CMYK, Multichannel, or other. Try refraining from using unsupported color modes to see if that resolves your issue.

In fact, read the rest of that document to find such gems like:
I just saved in Photoshop, but I don’t see the changes in Aperture.

Take a deep breath. If applicable, loosen your grip on the caffeinated photo editing beverage for a moment…

In the amount of time that took you, your image may have finished saving, and the changes will appear in Aperture. The issue is that PSD and TIFF files used for intermediary editing can be very large, and they may take slightly longer to save than you expect. Watch the progress bar in Photoshop, and wait for an image to finish saving before you try to view it in Aperture.