Category: Geek

Posted on

Data as Art: Musical, Visual Web APIs

Loose notes from SXSW 2008 session “Data as Art: Musical, Visual Web APIs” with:

Peter Kirn cdm: Create Digital Media
Joy Mountford VP Design Innovation, joymountford.com

Amazing data visualization demos. This field is going to become increasingly important to journalists looking for new and compelling ways to tell stories online that go way beyond shovelware. The tools need to get easier, but they’re getting there. These notes can’t begin to convey how impressive the interfaces we’re starting to see are becoming.
Continue reading “Data as Art: Musical, Visual Web APIs”

Posted on

Responsible Web Design

Loose notes from SXSW 2008 panel Responsible Web Design with:

Greg Rewis Adobe Systems Inc
Stephanie Sullivan Principle, W3Conversions

This session was a bit elementary, focused on basic standards-compliant development practices, but stayed with it to hoover up a few teaching tips. It’s always a dilemma at these things… by the time you realize you wish you were at a different discussion, it’s halfway over, and the one you wish you were at is two blocks away. Sometimes better just to ride it out.
Continue reading “Responsible Web Design”

Posted on

Expression Engine 2.0

Loose notes from SXSW 2008. Panel session on upcoming massive update to CMS Expression Engine 2.o:

Now powered by code igniter — fully objeect-oriented OSS PHP framework. The ingredients of EE left uncooked. So now EE is built on a framework. This is a big deal. Code has merged, communities are merging. Faster, easier development for Ellis Lab and for 3rd party devs. Instant increase in capabilities of both systems.
Continue reading “Expression Engine 2.0”

Posted on

The BeOS Tip Server Is Back

Back in the BeOS days, I created a public database of tips and how-to information for BeOS users, called the BeOS Tip Server (betips.net). The site had grown to around 700 tips when Be, Inc. finally went under and I went looking for another career. At that time, I handed ownership of the Tip Server over to a still-avid BeOS user, and didn’t think about it much again.

Late last year, I discovered that links to betips.net were dead. I contacted the owner, only to learn that the database and the site templates had been lost in a data disaster. I combed through my backups and archives and couldn’t find any sign of the templates. However, amazingly, I still had a copy of the mysql database. Dug my old x86 laptop out of the closet, booted BeOS for the first time in eons, and found the original site templates tucked away in a buried folder. Eureka! But ewww… all table-based and mid-90s looking… just fugly.

Even though I have almost no interest in BeOS these days, I was once proud of the site, both for the content it had amassed and for the method I had used to serve it (TrackerBase).

Trackerbasethumb

Couldn’t stand the thought of the whole thing being lost to history, so decided to resurrect the site. Took a fair bit of grunt work to clean up the data and get the tables into shape as a WordPress back-end, but the work is finally done, I’ve got control of the domain again, and intend to leave the site up for posterity. There’s a standing offer for any current BeOS/Haiku users to help clean up old content and start adding new.

BeOS has an open source descendant called Haiku. I’ve never run Haiku, but expect that most of the content on the site will apply for that OS as well. I’m also interested in having new Haiku-specific content added to the repository.

Happy endings.

Posted on

ARD Lite

The screen sharing feature in Leopard and in the new version of iChat already partially mitigates the need for Apple Remote Desktop in some environments, but this hack turns screen sharing into something very close to ARD by adding a bunch of additional features and controls. In other words, the screen sharing feature apparently is ARD with features stripped out – this hack lets you pop ’em back in. I can imagine this hack being disabled in the next software update….

Music: Henry Threadgill :: Grief
Posted on

Obsolete Skills

Robert Scoble came up with the idea to make a list of obsolete skills – things we used to be good at but no longer need to be, including:

  • Dialing a rotary phone
  • Putting a needle on a vinyl record
  • Shorthand
  • Using a slide rule
  • Optimizing 640K-worth of memory
  • Refilling a fountain pen
  • Operating a dictaphone
  • Using the eraser ribbon on a typewriter

A wiki sprung up to flesh out the list, and there are now hundreds listed (I added “Cleaning ball bearings in skateboard wheels without losing them”).

Music: Herbie Hancock :: Edith And The Kingpin feat Tina Turner
Posted on

AT&T Shocked by iPhone Usage

Proof of what a good UI can do: Web-enabled phones have been able to use search engines forever. But Apple Insider reports that “Google has seen 50 times more search requests coming from Apple iPhones than any other mobile handset. They were so shocked, in fact, that they suspected that they had made an error tabulating their data.” ZDNet blog:

According to the Financial Times Vic Gundotra, head of Google’s mobile operations, said that if other handset manufacturers follow in Apple’s footsteps and make Web access easier on their handsets the number of mobile searches could outpace fixed internet search “within the next several years.”

And:

In related news René Obermann, CEO of Deutsche Telekom AG, says iPhone is driving up average wireless data usage as much as 30 times higher than on other phones.

Will be interesting to see whether Google’s own Android will be able to match the iPhone’s search numbers. The gauntlet has been thrown.

Music: Herbie Hancock :: Tea Leaf Prophecy feat Joni Mitchell
Posted on

Notes on a Massive WordPress Migration

Cdthome At the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, we use WordPress heavily as a content management system for student and organization publications, knowledge bases, student handbooks, podcast publishing systems, online magazines, etc. Over the past couple of years, I’ve found again and again that WP is not only up to the task of serving as far more than a blogging platform, it’s a great content management system for many types of sites, once you learn a few tricks.

Just wrapped up a marathon coding session, converting one of the J-School’s most popular sites, China Digital Times (CDT), from Movable Type to WordPress. We launched the new site (with a new design by Devigal) a few days ago. This was by far the most complex WordPress installation I’ve worked on, involving around 16,000 posts and 6,000 tags. As with every site launch, I learned a few things in the process. Thought I’d post some notes here for the sake of others going through a similar process.

Nutshell version: Though SixApart (who make Movable Type) claim that their static page generation approach is great for high-performance sites, we’ve reduced the time it takes to publish a new article from almost 15 minutes to a few seconds by moving from Movable Type to WordPress.
Continue reading “Notes on a Massive WordPress Migration”

Posted on

crestmontschool.org

Crestshot-1 Birdhouse Hosting welcomes crestmontschool.org – the web site for Miles’ K-5 cooperative in Richmond, CA. I inherited the site a few months ago, and bid for the opportunity to host it at Birdhouse. Converted the site from Joomla to WordPress a month ago, then got started on a new design. The new look is based on the excellent Mimbo theme (though the end result barely looks related). Even had the opportunity to contribute a few tidbits to the WordPress Codex in the process.

Music: Nellie McKay :: Oversure