joleblog 0.7.5 non-release

I have an extremely experimental release of joleblog here that is unstable in all ways. Most of the result pages are just print outs of arrays, so beware, this is only for those who want to play with the new stuff.

What's new you ask?

  • TipiWiki-style markup
  • Entirely restructured file tree, presumably making it more secure
  • Much more reliable posting with the new markup, preventing errors caused by quotations marks
  • Early AJAX attemps for auto-saving (right now it just throws stuff to saves.txt)
  • Easier post manager (in progress)
  • Complete rewrite of pretty much all the code

And quite a few bug fixes. Grab it off Google Code, and please don't use it. Hack it, don't use it. Don't even try to upgrade either, because the I haven't written a converter to upgrade existing data.ini files.

Grap (grab) it here.

Big Organisation Website Planning

Right now I'm working on two different websites for two different organizations, both non-businesses.

It's fascinating to me how slow going these processes are. Unlike a business or enterprise, organizations are like student drivers shoulder-checking three times at each lane change and covering the break on stale green lights. As I work with the administration with these organizations, I begin to see their perspective on things.

Mostly I think of things as easy, quick, simple to do things. Build a website? I can have you up and running in a couple hours, a day for something more elaborate. But the legal, privacy, and representation are all stumbling blocks.

It's too bad really. If they were to think more in terms of "Let's build a nice website, and we'll make it better as we go along" there would be progression instead of just working and having nothing and then having everything, rather than having something and getting to everything.

Perhaps I'm too Web 2.0. Let's make things BETA. Let's release it now and squash bugs later. Maybe I need to rethink things.

Hardware Review

It's been about a year since I've bought a Windows PC, and things always change.

I often help people buy their computers and equipment, and today I had the opportunity to help someone setup their new Vista Laptop. Now, I'm no expert, but wasn't Vista supposed to be easy to setup? Wasn't that the idea?

Here's the play by play.

Power On.

Toshiba BIOS.

Weird Toshiba What language are you? Win 2K looking Wizard.

English.

Continue.

All of the sudden it goes into this bizarre Default Factory Restoration Procedure for like half an hour. I have absolutely no clue what's going on (and I know my PCs) it's writing the hard drive back onto itself? There's no CD it's reading from, it's literally just sitting their wasting electricity. After that's done, it does another odd CV key generation of some sort for a couple minutes, and finally reboots.

Toshiba BIOS.

Annoying and ugly console telling me Windows is getting ready to run for the first time. Sure. 5 minutes.

Reboot.

Toshiba BIOS.

Loading progress bar in quasi-GUIness.

Finally I see the chubby white cursor for Windows Vista. Black screen otherwise, waiting.

A few Toshiba BIOS's later, I get the Vista Welcome. Language, Country, Username password, and then more waiting. Somehow Vista still hasn't finished installing it's Files, and needs to force me into watching and endless looping slideshow of what Vista's new features are. That's great Microsoft, would you hurry up the progress bar?

Reboot.

Toshiba BIOS.

Boot up, login. Good. Time to get started.

Windows alerts me UAC is off. I'll turn it on. Whoa nelly all of the sudden my screen flickers, changes resolutions a couple of times, even gives me a blinking console windows for a split second, then returns back to Windows Desktop, but only to start Shutting Down. A little notice next time Micosoft?

Toshiba BIOS.

Boot up, login. Uh oh, a weird Installer is covering everything up with it's giantness. Please wait in very unVista like hard fonts face me. Waiting fr 10 minutes, nothing has happened but blinking HDD lights. Fine. Ctrl alt Delete. It's been an hour of nothing so far and I already have to give it the three finger salute.

Task Manager, end weird task. Oh! Bye Windows! It decides to Shut Down again. Fine.

Toshiba BIOS.

Boot up, login.

Finally I get the privilege of running Windows Update, and then rebooting again.

Toshiba BIOS.

Boot up, login.

Install Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware, and a couple of other programs. Anti-Virus? Of course you need to reboot!

Toshiba BIOS.

Boot up, login.

Finally, I can start downloading Firefox.

Total Reboots: 8.

Now, I'm not talking about Upgrade here people. I'm talking about Open Box, turn on new computer. How hard is this? Really? What were the Toshiba people thinking when they came up with this? Now, I hate to be an Apple Fanboy, (ok I love being the Apple Fanboy) but I left WestWorld Computers with my MacBook on Day 1, and by the time I got to the Whitemud Freeway, I was already in Mac OS X playing with Safari and iPhoto. Now, for those unfamiliar with Edmonton, that's about 5 minutes.

Honestly, I was expecting Vista to be more streamlined, less of this insane setup processes and whatnot. I'm afraid I am mistaken. I guess I won't be out of work setting up PCs after all.

(No, I'm not making this up.)

EDIT: Just to add to this, Futureshop wanted to do this whole process (basically standing and waiting) for my client for $200 (CAD). Yes, that's right two hundred dollars. Good thing I do it for $30.

Dedicated Server

jolephoto along with all of my other AHTR websites are now being hosted on a dedicated server of mine located at AHTR HQ. Currently I am running lighttpd on it, which seems to be working quite well. (Although I'm not quite sure if ImageMagick is working or not, which could be problematic)

In any case, expect a few delays here and there while I update things and mess with things. A new version of flickrer will be available soon!

Server Status-o-meter

If you haven't already, check out the server status information on the AHTR homepage, written by yours truly. It is fully automated; pinging machines and writing it out. As of right now, it pings up a storm every time you reload the homepage, but I'll soon have a caching system of some sort.

ahtr.net

1000-in-1 Super Post

Well it's been busy. To be honest, I'm not sure what was really busy about the past few weeks, but it's just been a lot of work. As this semester is going into full swing, I haven't gotten around to doing the things I love like blogging and taking pictures.

I have finally posted the last of the Nakamun Lake pictures however, which are available in the gallery. Also there are some sweet pictures of my new Axim, and a few shots of laser fun

So let's get down to some reviews. First off is my new Dell Axim. Overall, it's a great little machine. Out of the box, it was pretty lousy. Sure the WiFi worked ok, but Bluetooth downright sucked. For some reason, Dell decided to switch the way Bluetooth was implemented on their Axims, and replaced the old "stack" with the Microsoft version. Wow. It sucked.

So I went in hunt of a better replacement, and found my solution on the Aximsite forums. Thanks to them, I'm living life with full Bluetooth support, PUSHing OBEX objects back and forth and enjoying the cordless freedom of Bluetooth

I'm beginning to understand why Pocket PCs are going down the drain though. WiFi networking is far from easy on such a small device. Switching from network to network isn't exactly seamless (at all), and not being able to connect at any time could be a big downfall for many people. I understand now why people might want to pay 60 bucks a month. Nevertheless, I still love it. The screen is gorgeous, WiFi speed is very decent, and I have yet to see it even stutter for any video playback or CPU intensive operations. My next accessory for it will definitely be one of those SD/USB cards though. That way, I'll be able to transfer videos directly over USB onto the SD card, and then just pop it into the SD slot for instant playback.

I survived the first couple days without even touching the USB cradle. But after a while there were a few applications I couldn't install without a PC. Nowadays, there are two ways of getting a program on to a Windows Mobile device. Either via a setup program on a regular PC, or through a .CAB file which simply is a nice little bundle that Microsoft came up with ages ago, and adopted for use on the Pocket PC.

Essentially they do the same thing. When you download setup.exe it simply extracts the CAB file and then sends it off to ActiveSync. But really, it's a pain in the butt. There have been some petitions created and signed apparently about how this really needs to change. Nowadays, few people even sync their PDAs with their PCs anymore, and it's much more useful to just download the CAB from the author's website and away you go. Overall, most of them have modernized and offer the straight CAB file download. Thank you to those developers that have. No thanks to Microsoft and Adobe who decided they realllly need a setup file to do all that nothingness.

Which brings me to Parallels Desktop for Mac. Being frustrated with having to walk over to my Dell crapbox every time I wanted to install one of these annoying programs, I decided to actually install and use Parallels Desktop. After all, I had just discovered a gold mine of hard drive space after realizing I had made duplicates of every song in my music Library when I restored the music after my hard drive crashed.

So away I went, with Trial Key in hand, and Win2k in the other, I installed. I got the beta, and I'm very impressed. The new "coherence mode" is spectacular. The virtual machine simple erases the background and allows for native Windows applications along with the Start Bar to be overlaid on top of Mac OS X. It's truly beautiful, and because Windows 2000 is well…old, it runs ridiculously fast, yet meet my needs of IE6 (for web testing) and ActiveSync (for backing up my PDA).

For ANYONE who wants to run Windows on a Mac, this is really the way to go. (Ydelang!) There's literally no speed penalty, and with Parallels excellent virtualization, very little CPU usage is used even when running Windows 2000 in the background.

So, what about joleblog and flickrer? Well they're both coming along nicely. Now that I'm developing both, I'm realizing how common they are, and who knows, maybe someday they may simply merge into a joleweb suite of some sort. As I learn certain PHP techniques from one project, I'll transfer them over to the other.

Right now I'm almost done RSS/Atom support in flickrer, and am in the process of testing it. What really excites me is it's ability to produce iPhoto-compatible Photocasts without using dot mac. (Project #3, export from iPhoto?) For joleblog, I'm undergoing a real rewrite of the underlying functions to simplify the coding and future expandability.

Hopefully I'll be releasing a new version soon, and Happy February everybody!

Axim

Sorry I haven't been keeping up, life's been busy.

I did get my Axim last Monday, and it's great. I wrote a nice post about it already but then I lost it because I closed it by accident. Time to start writing auto-save into joleblog…

Pictures will be soon.

Axim…

So I ordered a Dell Axim on…Tuesday? Top-of-the-line x51v on sale for one day only for $150 off of $499 regular price (CAN).

Naturally between the time I ordered it, and the time it will be arriving on my doorstep:

  • Windows Mobile 6 is released
  • Windows Mobile 6 Pocket PC's are called Pocket PC Classic
  • Aximsite.com forums report that Dell will be selling out their stock of Axims, and that'll be it for the Axim
  • Just today, one of the Axim models have disappeared off the Dell Website
  • My shipment is still In Transit in the U.S.

Wow. I guess I'm just a Classy guy buying a non-HDSPA or GSM/EDGE phone-pocket PC. I guess I'm just too rational for that kind of market. No, I don't want to lock in for 3 years on a 60 dollar-a-month plan for a device that will be old the day the next model comes out.

There's really no PDA market anymore, which makes sense. Blackberry killed all that. I'm the only person too cheap for the monthly bills. But I'm still looking forward to it! I'll be loading it up with all sort of apps for video, eBooks, remote access, email and other goodies.

I would buy a Palm, but they're dead in the water as much as Pocket PC classic is, and they're devices kinda suck.

When I get a bluetooth phone, I'll be browsing for free too. So who wins?

jolegallery is now flickrer!

It's finally here! The moment you've all been waiting for! jolegallery is now here, under it's new name: flickrer! (pronounced flickr-er)

Yes! You can see it in action right now in my gallery!

Yes! You can download it for your own fooling around with right here!

Yes! It is Database-free!

Yes! It parses EXIF data!

Yes! It requires no administration!

Yes! It uses Lightbox JS!

Yes! It's everything you ever wanted in a photo gallery!*

*Except tagging, bug-freeness, RSS support, and automatic resolution adjustment, coming RC1

Vista Released, Coloured Shuffles

I'm still confused about this whole Vista thing. Microsoft has a press conference in NYC for a product that is being released the next day, and have random little kids "launching" it that day. But…it's here today? Either way, it's here, and so far the world has not ended. I'll be checking my server logs to see if anybody's visiting on a Vista box. (And hacking your IP do death! Just kidding.)

In other News, Apple has released some new coloured iPod Shuffles. They look really neat, and once my other shuffle dies, I'd consider buying one. The Orange one looks pretty sweet. Check them out.

jolegallery coming soon…

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