Dave's Place / Metamusing

Life and times of a webgeek

Monthly Archives: October 2005

Last of the weblog design tests

As most will note, I changed the templates for the weblog one last time. I’m not fond of the color scheme this time around but I do like the layout otherwise and the utilities on the top right (font size changes and whatnot). It’s down to a choice between this one and theme wuhan, the first one I experimented with. If you have an opinion drop it in the comments. Figure one way or another I’ll choose this week and then roll out the theme to most portions of the site. Also figure I’ll be playing with the color scheme of whichever one I choose, so if you’re going to comment, keep in mind that the colors are likely to change. For Andrew’s sake, I promise no lime green will be involved.

I also added the old ‘about’ and ‘contact’ pages back into the site – an old flame found me through google then had trouble figuring out how to get in touch with me. Embarrassing, that. Anyway the links to those pages run across the top and can be found to the right as well.

[edit]
Two more to consider:

Twilight
http://themes.star-shaped.org/2005/10/28/twilight-theme-for-wordpress/

Copperleaf (which looks nothing like what it sounds)
http://www.copperleaf.org/

Friday fun – puki

It’s not what it sounds like. It’s friday so it’s time for a fun link, check out the flash-based puki, a simple, stylish little corridor shooter that runs nicely in your browser. Don’t blame me if your boss catches you goofing off. You’ll note mine won’t because I checked it out on my lunch break ;-)

Enjoy!

Ajax libraries cataloged

All this buzz about Web 2.0, ajax, webapps and so on, it’s the second coming of the web hype machine, and maybe a bit more. But if you’re interested in reviewing all the library options available to you, check out the Open Source Applications Foundation’s wiki page for Ajax Libraries. It’s not comprehensive but it covers the big ones and there are some useful comments about each of the libraries to help you judge which might be most appropriate for the project you’re working on. For what it’s worth I’ve played around with a couple of these now just to see what’s entailed in implementing this stuff and the biggest issue is not so much finding a library to work with, it’s finding one with enough documentation and examples that you can figure out how to handle implementation without tearing your hair out in frustration. The community seems to be well aware of the issue though so hopefully we’ll see better documentation emerge shortly. Meanwhile you can get a head start on most folks by starting to experiment now.

Home arcade cabinets make the mainstream

Ok this is pretty cool. I’m longtime fan of M.A.M.E and occasionally daydream about building myself one of those excellent MAME cabinets you might have happened across, but time, money and other priorities have always kept it as mostly a pipe dream. This christmas might change all that for me as Target will be carrying a pre-built arcade cabinet for around $500 that has a large collection of Midway games on it. The cabinet also has a collection of AV inputs on it so that you can connect some of your other equipment – videogame consoles and so on – to it. No word on whether the controls built into the cabinet can be easily connected to any add-in equipment is my one concern with this unit. Hopefully my local Target will get one in stock so I can check it out in person. Siblings note: you all could also band together to get this for me for xmas ;-)

Musings on absinthe

For reasons that go back to my college days and my love of drink, I’ve developed a passing interest in Absinthe, and I’ve written about it here a few times. If you’re not familiar with it, it was a liquor that was very popular during the latter half of the 19th century. It was pretty much globally outlawed in the early 20th century because of fears that some of the compounds in it cause addiction, dementia and other ills. I was at a cocktail party this summer where the host brought out a bottle of it and this led to some controversy around the table – the host was under the impression he had purchased an actual bottle of it, whereas others (including myself) were convinced that what is sold as Absinthe in Europe these days bears little in common with the Absinthe of the 19th century beyond the name. Wired is running a pretty interesting article that sheds light on this – it turns out everyone was in fact partly right. Much of what is being sold as Absinthe is pretty much junk but you can actually buy some decent vintages, thanks in large part to the research of Ted Breaux, the subject of the wired article I linked to.

It’s still illegal to buy or consume Absinthe in the US, unfortunately. It’s also easy enough to find an importer willing to sell it to you though, a quick example being absintheonline.com, who happens to carry the vintage discussed in the wired article for ~$100.00 a bottle plus shipping. Their FAQ claims they’ve been shipping to the US for years with no legal problems. As before I am sorely tempted to order myself a bottle but I worry about the potential legal consequences, something the Wired article fails to cover. Any thoughts from my readers? Anyone interested in an Absinthe fueled New Year’s eve this year? $100 a bottle plus shipping sounds expensive but what price a unique experience? To me it seems pretty damned cheap when you think of it in that context. Any takers?

Crop that image online

The scenario – you just walked into a public lab, coffee house, your friend’s house, wherever, and you need to crop some images from your digital camera or whatever. You can’t find an image editor to work with. Solution? Head to imagecrop.com and use their tools. Free, fast, simple as pie to use. My first reaction to this was …? Who needs that? All it can do is crop images? But in general the approach actually seems pretty viable in terms of single-purpose tools supported by adwords. No harm to the consumer, and easy to access tools for folks like my mom, who can’t figure out photoshop to save her life. Of course it really needs some additions to this toolset though, like gamma and other color correction tools, but this is a start to something potentially fairly useful.

Improved ebay search

If you get frustrated with ebay’s clunky search tools you might like the-winning-bid.com’s approach. The site provides you with sliders and drop down menus that let you tune your search and it also provides keyword suggestions based on what you’re looking for that you may find helpful. Honestly there’s not much here that you won’t find in ebay’s advanced search tools aside from the decent keyword suggestions but the interface is much improved over ebay’s setup. There’s a small tradeoff in that they’re paying for this by adding google adwords on the right side, but chances are most folks have already learned to tune those out anyway if you spend any significant time browsing the web.

Handy XHTML character entity reference

Check out the digitalmediaminute.com character entity reference. Remember those charts of the periodic elements you had to learn back in high school chemisty? This is similar but for html character entities. Next time you’re trying to remember how to stick in that © , on a public/friend’s machine with none of your usual web development tools, you might find this useful. It’s also got a few interesting features, like letting you preview what the entities look like in a variety of fonts and styles, and sorting tools so you can quickly find, say, those pesky latin characters.

Encyclopedia of open source

That’s perhaps a bit grandiose as this needs a bit more time to develop, but Swik is a pretty slick wiki devoted to open source projects that mixes in tagging and blogging to bring an added level of community involvement and oh, we’ll call it serendipity, to the process. What I mean by that is best illustrated by way of example – if you went and typed in WordPress, the weblog system I recently switched to, you’ll get a brief introduction to what wordpress is and on the right you’ll get a list of related projects and terms. One of those terms is weblog, and clicking that will take you to a whole list of weblog-related topics. For those of you familiar with del.icio.us or other web apps using tagging this is nothing revelatory, the difference with Swik is the focus solely on open source projects. If you’re ever trying to track down info on a project, or see me mention something here and wonder what the heck it is, the chances are fair to good that Swik will actually be more useful to you than a google search.

Another cool sql editor

This time, no flash required. Check out the WWW SQL Designer, this is a pretty damned slick ajax/javascript app that lets you visually build out your database tables, and you can then either export your tables as SQL to import into your own database server, or you can download the script and connect it to your own server and write the tables natively. Even if you have no interest in such a thing it’s worth checking out the demo just to see such a well designed ajax interface.

Annual Toys R Us sale underway

For the past several years Toys R Us has run a ‘buy 2, get 1 free’ videogame sale around the holiday season. This year’s version started Sunday (yesterday) and runs through Saturday night. This is for console videogames only – xbox, ps2, gamecube and so on. If you’ve got gamers on your shopping list for the holidays, this is a quick and easy way to save yourself $50, $40, $30 or $20 depending on which tier of games you buy. You can also buy them online if you prefer to do it that way. I’m heading up to Glens Falls this week to get myself a copy of Shining Force Neo (ps2), and two other games from the following list: X-men legends 2 (ps2), Shadow of the Colossus(ps2), Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance (gamecube), or Digital Devil Saga 2(ps2), with Socom 3 (ps2), Battlefield 2 (ps2) and The Warriors (ps2) as possible dark horse picks, we’ll see what I feel like and what they have in stock when I walk in the door saturday morning.

[edit]
If you prefer to do your shopping online, The Frugal Gamer has a very handy collection of links to each of the sales for each of the consoles.
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From the picture is worth a thousand words department

Check out krazydad’s coverpop.com. This has been making the rounds but it’s cool enough that I figure I’ll mention it here, plus browsers for more genres (graphic novels, Mad Magazine, and more) have been added since folks first started talking about it. If you haven’t already seen it, it’s a flash app that gives you a view of ~1000 covers to various genres of print works. Roll your mouse over a cover and it shows you a larger view, click on it to go a webpage (amazon.com for some of them for example) or just to an even larger view of the cover. Loads quick and is fun to play around with, especially if it covers a genre or two you’ve read a lot of. Check it out.

Space Rangers 2, unbelievably excellent game no one has heard of

So a best selling Russian cross-genre computer game – Space Rangers 2 – has been released in the US and almost no one seems to know of it. This post is my attempt to rectify that since the game is absolutely fantastic. Simply put it’s one of the finest computer strategy games I’ve ever played, and it allows tremendous freedom in game play styles, has a wealth of different game play modes (turn based strategy, RTS, text adventure (!), rpg), most of which you can choose amongst, ie you’re not forced to play the modes you don’t care for. I’d go on and on about the game, but really I can’t say it much better than Bill Harris did in this post on his blog. I’ll also note that gogamer.com has it on sale for $28 for the next 72 hours. If you’re a pc gamer and a fan of turn-based strategy and rpg’s, you simply can’t pass this one up, assuming you have a DVD drive on your machine (the game ships on DVD only).

In which I almost spend a night out in the woods

I almost made a huge mistake Friday. I took the day off to go hiking since it was looking like the last opportunity to get out and see the fall colors before they were gone. I decided to go hike a stretch of the tongue mountain range on the west shore of Lake George – which piece I figured I would play by ear. There was a loop trail that judging by the map would be about 8 miles. Turns out that was as the crow flies, not as the Dave and Soolin hike. I got there at around 11 and hiked on the west side of the range along the lake. This is a gorgeous, relatively easy hike, most of which is right alongside the water. Soolin was in heaven – plenty of swimming to be had, falling leaves everywhere to chase, and chipmunks which she thinks are squeaky toys. We had a blast hiking in. By 1:30 we were at the southern tip of the range and had hiked about 6 miles. I stopped briefly for a snack then had to decide – back the way we came, or up into the range to complete a loop. This is where I made a mistake – I should have headed back the way we had come. Instead we headed up into the range, with three peaks to summit ahead of us.

I knew as I set off I would have to make good time in order to make it back before dark so Soolin and I kept a brisk pace. What I didn’t know was how rugged the terrain would be. Andrew and I had done the northern section of the same trail earlier in the year and while there were some steep cardio buster sections of that trail, overall it was a fairly easy 8 mile hike. Not so the southern section. There were tons of scrambles up and down ledges, boulder and scree fields, and in and around crevices in the rock faces. Normally I love this stuff but by the time I got to the second peak of the three it was after 3 and I knew I was in trouble. Soolin and I entered into forced march mode, which was especially tough since I had already been pushing us hard and my hips were hurting, my knees were literally killing me, plus I was occasionally cramping up and having to stop and massage the backs of my legs.

By the time we made it to the side trail to 5th Mountain peak’s lean to, I was completely shot and could barely walk downhill because my knees were so sore. It was a little after 4. Even so I decided to head down, which was about a 2.5 mile hike but all downhill, rather then spend the night with little food and only a liter of water. It was the right call – I made it to my car at 5:40 – by 6, it was dark. If anyone had seen me coming down the mountain they would have thought I was a 75 year old ex-football player because of how hobbled I was by my knees. It’s a good thing I had done this last stretch of the trail a number of times since it let me shave off a good bit of time by ignoring the switchbacks and just blazing straight down since I sort of knew my way.

That all sounds pretty dramatic, but for family who might be inclined to worry about such things – the worst that would have happened is Soolin and I would have spent a thirsty night huddled around a fire in 5th Mountain’s lean to. I’m still mad at myself even though the consequences would have been negligible though. I should know better, and I should be better prepared. I keep a small emergency kit but I had forgotten the flashlight in my car and really I need more gear than I currently have, particularly water treatment gear.

So, that’s my big adventure. I’ll put up pics in my album as soon as I have time to prepare them (I’ll post again when I do). I’ll be back next summer to hike that lakeside bit of the trail again, that place would be perfect for an overnight trip or two next summer.

The final tally btw was somewhere between 14-17 miles. In terms of marked trails it should have been around 13, but Soolin and I took several side jaunts in the beginning so she could swim and so I could check out the absolute southern tip of the range. Confusing matters was the fact that before the batteries died my GPS claimed we had already done 14 miles and that was at the second peak’s summit with at least 4 miles to go back to the car.

An internet enabled clipboard

The scenario – you have multiple computers sitting at your desk and you often find you need little snippets of text that are sitting on one over on another machine – an email address, your sig, a phone number, whatever. Synergy is one way to handle this – I’ve blogged about it before and it’s a fantastic, free app. But maybe you don’t want or need screen sharing, you just need the ability to paste text across machines and platforms. If you’re on a mac or win32 box, check out Crossclip, cross platform clipboard sharing utility. At $20 it’s a little steep for what it does, especially when Synergy is free, but it’s also simpler and a heck of a lot easier to get configured than Synergy is, and their plan is to add the ability to move binary data around also (ie copied gifs, jpegs and so on, which synergy can’t and probably won’t ever do). If you’re running a firewall be aware you’ll have to poke a few holes in it to get this working – there are some great pictorial tutorials on the product’s site to help with that though.

Another couple of days, another theme to test

k2 (the previous theme I was testing) added a lot of nifty features but also added too many bugs. This isn’t a knock on k2, it’s still in beta and bugs are to be expected. But I want to get this site out of beta as soon as I can, so now it’s on to the next theme, Almost Spring from beccary.com. It’s a little too bland across the top but I can address that if I stick with this one.

I have a couple of other ones I want to test and then I’ll settle on something and clean up the rest of the site, maybe by next weekend I’ll have this all resolved.