Yeah, all 12 of you. Speak up! Back during the first dot.com heyday a host of different companies all jumped on the ‘We’ll offer free online disk space!’ business model. Software pirates and music enthusiasts worldwide thanked them for assisting in their distribution efforts before these services went out of business. Now I find myself needing such a service.

We have this dilemma at Skidmore, which I also had at Bowdoin - namely how to enable file sharing between faculty at different institutions. Sad but true, mostly they’re too technically illiterate to use, say, IM transfers (and generally the firewall gets in the way anyway) and college’s have an inherent resistance to adding accounts to their own authentication systems (not without good reason - what happens is, they add these accounts, and everyone forgets about them, and suddenly you wake up one day and find you have 55k accounts in your ldap directory and only ~6k that you can readily identify). Never-mind that these issues could be resolved by simply applying good management practices. Sounds great in theory, in practice it just doesn’t happen. At Bowdoin they punted and licensed ftp space from an outside vendor. I’m looking for alternative solutions and am all ears. Basically I’m hoping for a free file storage service similar to the once free xdrive. Any suggestions? Pipe up in the comments. Oh and the ‘use gmail as online storage’ won’t fly since it doesn’t really enable sharing and also see my earlier comment about lack of technical acumen on the part of the folks who will be using this. It needs to be drop dead simple.

Check out the timeline clock. I wouldn’t mind seeing it spruced up a bit visually but this is pretty cool nonetheless.

Taking niacin for your cholesterol? This stuff from GNC is awesome. I’ve been taking 500mg of Niacin 2x a day for years now. As daily pill regimens go it’s relatively benign, but the 10 minutes or so of hot flashes and flushing 20 minutes after you take the pill sucks. I thought the no flush version from GNC would be a gimmick, and it’s a good bit more expensive, but man, it’s worth it. No flushing, no itching, no hot flashes. Well worth $15-20 more a month. If you’re taking Niacin you owe it to yourself to try this stuff.

My mom’s cats have been stalked off an on by a feral cat that’s taken up residence in their neighborhood, and at least once one of her cats has ended up in the hospital as a result. Her most recent adventure follows, in her words, edited slightly by me:

Picture this: I’m minding my own business–taking a bath (okay, don’t
picture that) reading my latest escapist lit when I hear a crash in the
house. I am alone; the door is locked; the lights off in the living
room; only the cats are in attendance. I hear no strange cry out, meow
or anything. So I just wait then call out “everything okay out there
boys and girls?” and hear nothing for a bit. Then I think I hear
something, but it sounds like young girls talking. No TV, radio, etc.
is on. We have no phone machine that records out loud, we have no close
neighbors…so I get out, wrap a towel around me, and go check. I find
nothing wrong in the kitchen, but when I turn around, I see Black at
attention looking toward the living room. I head in that direction. As
I pass the staircase, I see the screen has fallen from the sky light
and is a bent mess midway up the stairs. All my cats are in these days
because of the recent injuries at the mouth of the local bully cat. I
can guess what’s going on at this point. The hissing and growling
confirm that said bully cat has just “dropped in.” What follows was
not fun. The living-room was dark, I’m still barefoot in a towel, so I
get a robe and sandals on and go in carefully to turn on the light. The
other cats are getting defensive so I lock Black in my room. Meuller is
crouched by the corner next to the couch, so I don’t worry about him so
much and Kitty Girl is somewhere out of the way. The feral cat is
throwing itself against the screen in the open window seat window. I go
over, turn on the lights and try to open the other window– that now
has a broken screen thanks to one of my boys– (discovered after Black
kept getting out one day last week). The cat hissed and growled at me
and made those little raised claw gestures to me, then ran out of the
living room. I went to open the front door and he ran back to the
window seat. I followed him and tried to calm him and coax him out and
he eventually figured out it was an opening and he bolted. Such
excitement.

How much do I hate that cat? The cat fell at least 10 feet! It couldn’t
have broken its neck and died? Every time I think it has gone to a new
territory I see it and have to start my “count” again. But this was too
much. Now I have to worry about it falling through in the guest room
which is closed off to keep the AC in the other room. It would tear the
room apart. No one would know it was in there if it happened during the
day. What a nightmare.

I was number 50 something for the have-a-heart trap at the pound two
weeks ago. They said it would be a few weeks.
That cat is damn scary I’ll tell you. It is truly a wild creature.
Beautiful, but wild.

Other than that, sure, I’m fine if you overlook my pulled back gained
when I reached and bent (bad combo) to pick up the lysol can to give a
little relief to the room because at least one of the cats is relieving
him or her self on the bathroom floor just outside the cat box–too
lazy to go in? I think not. They are pissed (literally) cause I won’t
let them out!!!!!!!!

[/end mom adventure]

It’s funny, I never thought of a feral cat as much of a nuisance. We used to see them behind the restaurants I worked at when I was a kid, but they were skittish and seemed harmless. How bold would you have to be to jump through a screen on the roof of a house? That screen she is describing is at least 8 feet off the ground too, it opens over a stairway. Hard to imagine a cat leaping through that hissing the kitty equivalent of ‘I kick all your asses now!’ My mom’s cats are, sadly, declawed, which is why they are getting their heads handed to them. If she manages to do away with the feral kitty from hell or gets it trapped and shipped off to kitty penitentiary I’ll post a followup.

The Demoroniser ought to be in every self-respecting web geek’s toolkit, even if I can’t vouch for it being any more useful than, say, the tools in Dreamweaver designed to to do the same thing. It’s a perl script designed to help clean up the unholy mess that is the html microsoft word writes if you use its html export function. Even if you have no intention of downloading it its worth visiting the site just to read the humorous jibes directed at Microsoft by the script’s author as he takes them to task for being so clueless about html and text encoding.

…come home to discover they’re all corrupt and you can’t get any of them off your compact flash card. Sound like the plot to a bad tv sitcom? Actually it happened to me. I spent a glorious 5 days on Lake George during the first week of August, took tons of pictures and then got home and discovered every single one of them was corrupt. Did I give up in frustration? Smash my camera in a fit of angry geek violence? Go steal someone else’s vacation photos off of flickr and then try and pawn them off as my own? Nope, none of the above. Instead I did some research and found Smart Recovery, a free win32 utility for file recovery off of corrupted memory cards. There are plenty of commercial products designed to deal with this problem, but I’m cheap and impatient and this filled the bill nicely - in fact it also recovered photos that I had taken at Roger’s Rock earlier in the summer which had also gotten corrupted (and which should have tipped me off to something being wrong with the camera - at the time I thought it was just an aberration since it had never happened before). Anyway this should definitely be added to your toolkit if you’re on the pc.

A slightly ironic aside - a couple of days after I recovered my pictures an instructor at Skidmore called to thank me for the help I had given her with some materials she was using in a book being published this fall. She had just sent the final version off to the publisher. During the course of the conversation she told me her horror story of losing a ton of materials she had on her 1 gig thumb drive that had gotten corrupted just days before she had to send it in, and how thankfully it only cost her $90 for a technician to recover them. I told her to call me next time, I would only charge her $45. I was kidding of course, but it is worth keeping Smart Recovery around for these kinds of episodes.

I’ve mentioned how fantastic the ad block firefox extension is in the past. Properly configured, you need never look at an ad again. I’ve also linked to the location of a great, regularly updated set of filters at pierceive.com. The problem is you have to remember to update periodically, and given the struggle going on between the advertisers who want you to see their ads and the rest of the world who would rather not, you really need to update pretty regularly, which is something of a hassle. Enter the Filterset.G Updater, a firefox extension that will automatically update your filterset every 5 days. Sounds like an anti-virus checker, doesn’t it? It’s still in beta but has been working fine for me since beta 2 (they’re up to beta 3 now). If you’d rather not see ads when you’re browsing, get this up and running. And install the most excellent Flashblock extension while you’re at it, so you can opt out of any non-essential flash content.

Well, actually just across networks, where it’s the most infuriating. If you run servers and you’re sick of having to clean up the bajillions of .DS_Store files macs dump everywhere on your drives, get the mac support person/s to read this brief documentation then get them to make the appropriate changes on the macs attached to the network. It won’t make the problem go away, but it will reduce the volume somewhat. I understand the usefulness of these files but I think Apple is being a bad network citizen by shipping their machines with this setting on by default. It makes sense on an all-mac network, which exists in maybe .01% of the networks in the world. The rest of the world’s networks would appreciate Mac’s keeping their metadata to themselves.

…and it was good. But then it stopped being updated, and there was some small gnashing of teeth. But then the good folks at Genii Software took over and started updating it again, and there was much rejoicing in webgeek land.

Thanks for being you. This article brought a wistful smile to my face this morning. Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes are to be blown into the sky via fireworks from the top of a huge double-thumbed fiberglass fist. It’s so perfectly appropriate. If you’ve never read any of his books, go get Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. You’re in for a treat.

Evernote is most closely related to Macintosh tools like Hog Bay Notebook and Aquaminds Notetaker - it’s a note taking/personal organization tool. It distinguishes itself in a couple of ways. Firstly it has an attractive and well designed interface. It also supports a ton of data formats and input methods, allowing you to draw together web pages/snippets of html, handwritten text recorded with a tablet or digital pen, imagery, and data from a spreadsheet all into one collection of materials. It also has native support for Tablet PC’s ink and has handwriting recognition. It has a couple of useful tools for organizing your content - the somewhat standard categories and the timeline ‘tape’ view which lets you see your content as you added it over time. Additionally it has some built in templates for things like todos, shopping lists and other personal organizational tasks. It also features rudimentary outliner support and comes with excellent documentation. This is a really promising and well designed app that’s worth a look for windows users looking for some help organizing their digital (and analog) lives.

I mentioned camstudio recently. Today I found an alternative solution, also free. Wink. It can’t output to video (it only outputs to flash) but it’s more featureful in terms of markup and presentation tools you can use to overlay instructions, text, audio, pictures and so on onto the screen recordings you make. It also runs on Linux as well as windows. Again no mac version unfortunately, though since this runs on linux there is at least some hope that it will ultimately run on a mac. This is another package that we’re evaluating for training and documentation purposes. If you need to do screen recording on your windows or linux machine this is well worth a look.

Holy coolness, check out this hand built kayak made from saplings and $25 worth of hardware (most of which is the cost of the tarp that serves as the kayak’s skin). There are plenty of photos of the process to check out. Apparently it actually works pretty well and is really light. I’m very tempted to make one or two of these for when friends visit and just for the fun of actually putting something like this together. I wonder if I’d be legally liable when they crash into a rock going down the rapids on the sacandaga river near my house.

A little change of pace - some talk of coffee, my favorite vice. I bought myself a Bodum mini electric Santos a few months ago, which is a very cool vacuum-based coffee maker. I bought it on a whim after my other pot (a black and decker which was incapable of pouring a cup of coffee without spilling) spilled one splash of coffee too many. After the novelty of the pot wore off I was at first ambivalent about it but I’ve grown to really like it. It has some downsides - there is more cleanup than a drip-based coffee maker and it takes more coffee to make a rich pot than a drip machine does - but on the other hand once properly run it makes a better cup of coffee and it’s much faster than my drip machine was. These things are worth checking out if you’re in the market for a coffee machine. Also if you’re curious I happened across this history of the vacuum coffee pot, where the author speculates that the vacuum coffee pot is poised to make a comeback. Apparently for a period of time ending in the late 50’s the vacuum coffee pot was the preferred pot in american households before being displaced by the drip based pot, but the vacuum pot is trending up.

As of yesterday the xserve I’ve been working on most of the summer went live. I’m particularly proud of one project in particular that’s hosted there, the Saratoga Census Project. This project builds off of work I did at Bowdoin (especially the Romantic Audiences Project) and also manages to incorporate some ideas I’ve been working on since my junior thesis back at Wooster College. (not that Wooster actually let me go with the thesis I had hoped to - basically I was asking them for more than $20k for research and outside of my major I was one of the biggest underachievers you could imagine, so I don’t blame them for laughing at me). Anyhow, the site is a wiki designed to help students at Skidmore and residents of the Saratoga community build out a body of knowledge about the region they live in. It features an underlying database of the actual 1850 and 1860 census data for the community which is both searchable and integrated into the wiki itself using an extension to the wikipedia engine which we developed.

It’s something of an experiment for the instructor, Bill Fox, and the site itself is only now going live so there’s not much in terms of actual historical data in the site yet. But our hope is that this is successful enough to allow us to continue to feature it as a component of courses here at Skidmore and to write grant/s against it so that we can add additional census datasets, add features like maps, GIS encoded datasets, and more.

I love this project. Ever since Wooster I’ve been interested in the idea of having academic resources that are grown and nurtured over time by successive generations of students, and this is the first time I’ve been presented with an opportunity to really see how well this could work. Much depends on how this first semester goes, but so far things are promising. I’ll post again about this by January if not sooner with a followup on how things went.

This is pretty cool actually - check out flashearth.com, which is a flash-based interface into the google and microsoft map data. It generally runs a little smoother than the dhtml-based interface on google’s site, and more importantly it lets you switch dynamically between the datasets. This is a really handy and time saving feature. I hope the developers keep enhancing this, it could easily become my default interface into the map data if they get to feature parity with the google and microsoft sites.

Pretend you’re me for a second. You’ve just come off a job where you pulled together a fantastic (ultimately award winning) large scale website redesign project, css based layout, standards compliant, the works (www.bowdoin.edu). You’re proud of your accomplishment and gratified at the recognition you get. You take a new job and quickly discover that the folks at your new job are clueless about css. They argue against the box model on the grounds that it’s too hard to make it work across browsers (translation - they don’t know how to do it, thus it’s too hard), they lay everything out in uber-complicated tables, and they pull shit like putting a call to the same stylesheet multiple times in a single html file because they use dreamweaver and they want their files to correctly appear in wysisyg even when they’re only working on a section of a page. In short, they’re best practices website design retarded. What would you do?

If you’re me, you’d go to battle with these folks by collecting as much data as you can to refute their position, which is what I’m in the midst of doing. Today I found a really great presentation that was given at Seybold San Fran years ago called why tables for layout is stupid (which is, by the way, 3 years old, hopefully serving to further make my point with the folks still stuck in a table-based layout world). Anyway, if you find yourself in a similar position my bet is you’ll find this useful in your discussion with the powers that be. And if you have other handy resources along these lines, please pass them along in the comments below.

(There’s also a great slide in a another presentation from the same timeframe demonstrating the scale of savings one can achieve by moving to CSS just on a bandwidth basis, which they demonstrate by looking at what happened with a redesign on the ESPN site. Check it out - this more than anything seems my most likely leverage point, I’m going to try to use it in a conversation with the CFO).

For years now one of the first things I’ve done on a new machine or new install of a web browser is to set the preferences such that by default I get a blank page when I first launch the browser. I’ve no interest in the ad-laden default pages the various browsers give you by default, and even Firefox’s default google interface represents network resources that need to load when really I’m wanting to go somewhere else. Yes, I really am that impatient. Anyway, that changed today when I installed the bookmarkshomefirefox extension. Basically it allows you to turn your default browser page into an organized, aesthetically pleasing presentation of your own bookmarks, including your ‘live bookmarks’ (ie RSS feeds). Simple, free and useful. Check it out.

So there’s a large crab apple tree in my backyard. Soolin and I are in the habit of playing fetch after I work out every day, and normally I stand at the foot of the tree and toss the ball the length of the yard. Two days ago we start playing and after a few fetches, all the sudden Soolin starts doing the doggie version of the funky chicken, writhing about and rubbing her snout furiously. As this is happening, I discover my hair is full of something and it’s moving. It dawns on me that somehow we are now in the midst of a swarm of very pissed off yellow jackets and they are stinging the crap out of poor Soolin. I go into full panic mode ‘COME!’ I shout as I book off towards our barn. We scoot in and I pull the sliding door shut behind us. Soolin is still FULL of bees, they’ve crawled in under her coat and are slithering about trying to get at her to sting. Fortunately there is a pair of leather gloves right there so I pull one on and proceed to try combing the bees out of her hair - all told I get 6 or 7, with occasional pauses to battle other bees who either got in the barn before I pulled the door shut or have taken off her to attack me.

Amazingly I was only stung once, and it was really minor. Soolin took a complete beating though, the left side of her face swelled up so much her eye was mostly closed. To make matters worse, the next day my neighbor took the dogs to play in the yard while I worked out, and 10 minutes later HE came running into the barn in a panic. A slightly less awful version of the same deal had gone down, and he’s allergic to bee stings. So now we’re trying to figure out how the hell to get rid of these bees. They see the crab apple tree and the surrounding area as their territory and go ballistic if you get close. They nest underground which is most likely how the surprised me so completely, and why they went after Soolin more than me (she’s closer to the ground). I should mention that Soolin’s fine - her face was back to normal by the morning and yesterday when she got stung I gave her a benadryl. Wish me luck - this weekend I go to battle with the damned things.

I mentioned some time ago that I had become a contributor to the academic commons, a website devoted to investigating the role technology can play in education. They officially went ‘live’ with their site yesterday, and my stuff is now up and online, though some of it still shows as having been published by my old boss Peter. It’s all content repurposed from here and edited slightly, so if you’re a regular reader it may not be of much direct interest, but it’s worth mentioning. And of course I’m pleased to have been asked to contribute as well.