gveloper.com

Fox Jumping on Trampoline

2009-02-13T17:14:00.001-05:00

Coding away at the Hacienda

2009-02-07T15:18:00.001-05:00

Working today on an exiting project with a deadline in a couple weeks. Always doing something...

Subwoofer Cat

2009-01-20T21:17:00.000-05:00

Cancelling Tivo and Cable

2009-01-06T19:10:00.005-05:00

You know, something that really upsets me is when a company makes it purposefully hard to sever your relationship with them. I believe this should be illegal. For instance, there is no way to cancel tivo service from your account online. In fact, anything you look up about canceling is actually just articles about how stupid it would be to cancel and how you just don't understand the value. So you have to call... you select the option for billing issues, then for cancellation. You are then subjected to 16 minutes, not of just holding, but holding to energetic music with a voiceover telling you how "if you're thinking of using a cable company's dvr, think again" and that you have no idea how valuable your tivo is. Then the customer service rep picks up (finally... I'll be setting up new service would not have put me on hold so long) and she gives me the same spiel. I have to listen to her talk, even after cutting her off mid-sentence... she picked it up anyway.... And I had to explain why it is that I was cancelling. Then... back on hold for a few more minutes... finally the cancellation.

Now don't get me wrong... I liked the tivo service, but times are different now, every penny counts, and well, most content I want is available over the air and over the net.

Cancelling cable tv was an entirely different matter... worse... I wanted to cancel my tv and change my internet cable package but that was like opening a huge can of worms... they wouldn't give me the online price, the people online couldn't do it for me... I must be wrong about the rates I was reading on their website (after logging in to my account), etc etc etc.

Anyway, I'm not the only person out there "decabling" - check out http://decabled.com/

The Macbook Wheel

2009-01-06T17:08:00.003-05:00

This is hilarious

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

Picasa for the Mac

2009-01-06T15:32:00.002-05:00

Today iWork '09 and iLife '09 were released, but yesterday, news of another photo management suite on the mac was making it's rounds.

Very interesting TED talk on Chinese Food

2008-12-26T21:41:00.000-05:00

Long time, No Write

2008-12-16T22:14:00.001-05:00

I know, I know… First let me say Merry Christmas. The season brings a lot of reasons to write and start trying to bring communities of friends back together. And with that, some of the current projects on my plate.

DekiWiki

From MindTouch, I’ve been slowly replacing some cobbled-together legacy infrastructure based on wordpress, mediawiki, phpbb, etc with a dekiwiki. So far it has been able to replace all that software and more.

Firewall

I’ve replaced my Endian based firewall with a symantec SGS 1620 from ebay, and I must say that it is an extremely capable unit that so far is handling everything we through at it, save for one exception… A webserver I use sends what the SGS considers an invalid response and refuses to pass the traffic.

Browsers

Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Konqueror and Flock. I have been back and forth more than I’d like to be, which is more an indication that none of them stand out and are perfect by themselves. On the mac, I am still using safari full time, and on windows I have been leaning toward chrome, but not for any google integration, just for speed and simplicity without sacrifice. On Linux, it’s still firefox.

Design

I still have been working on some design projects, but nothing I am releasing at this time. I have been working on Mail.app templates, general art and logos, as well as some internal designs on novcon.

House

Everything is at a new location now, all wired up, but had a very hard time getting a broadband connection out here. But now the office and everything is all set up and back in operation. And most importantly, the cat has settled down.

Tidying Up Art

2008-11-22T21:44:00.001-05:00

I was rolling from this one...

Flock 2.0 Beta2

2008-08-13T17:52:00.001-04:00

I downloaded the latest beta of Flock 2 (I'm a little behind, I know) and I must say the speed improvement is pretty good. I was hoping for some fresh UI additions though, so far none. Not to say the the UI is dated, but Flock is known for a very clean/modern UI and for keeping up with design. This post is being sent from inside flock as a test as well. The blog editor is simple, but adequate.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Mail.App Stationery Templates

2008-06-14T11:27:00.000-04:00

I've designed a few templates for Mail.App's stationery feature. Please check out the templates here.

Common Craft explains social media

2008-06-07T09:51:00.000-04:00

I love Common Craft, and they have yet another video, this time explaining social media.

FriendFeed

2008-06-01T14:01:00.000-04:00

So I know I am WAY behind the curve with this one, but I've finally set up a friendfeed here. So far though, doesn't appear that many of my friends or people I follow are on it, so maybe I'm not that far behind after all. Feed aggregation is great and all, but I really wish somebody would come out with a truly aggregated client, the pidgin of microblogging if you would. Something that can update twitter, jaiku, pownce, blogs, tumblr, etc. I know that this is one thing that flock is working toward, but I'd like to see something much lighter weight for this than a browser. It could be built on AIR I suppose, as that would probably be one of the easiest ways to get it on all platforms at once. I like what I've seen out of AIR apps, but am admittedly waiting for full integration in CS4 before delving too far into it. So anyway, one single friendfeed running for all gveloper news. Well, most of it...

Evernote

2008-06-01T13:48:00.000-04:00

This week's screencast from ScreenCastsOnline was a member's only show about evernote. I had used evernote in the windows world some time ago, but it has since grown into an app/service hybrid in beta testing now that looks indispensable if you use it right. One of my biggest complaints about google notebook is the interface. I don't like working in web-only applications with no local syncing and wish google would come around to the fact that not all of us like being browser-bound. So for note taking I use, DevonNote, DevonThink, SOHO Notes, Word, and now EverNote. And yes I said Word. I think some of Microsoft's best people are on the Mac team there. I really like the notebook view in Mac Office (or is it Office:Mac? Anyway...). Evernote I like because you have local and remote synchronization, can access on mobile devices, has an iphone-specific interface, has OCR (optical character recognition) that works for all uploaded photos, meaning it can search for words in signs, tshirts, even handwriting, and has beautiful local clients for both the mac and windows platforms. The new platform is in beta right now and you need an invite, so either email me or head to SCO's forums to get yours.

I am playing around with a public notebook as well, and chose security as the generic topic for it (of course). You can see what a public notebook looks like by viewing it here. Hopefully I'll have a few of it's more powerful features utilized in this notebook soon. I think that evernote is a pretty valuable tool for anyone from bloggers to students, and with it's ease of use in publishing these notebooks to the web, maybe soon many professionals will publish their notes as well. So far I haven't seen the ability to make notebooks collaborative, but one can only imagine that it would be in the plans for something like this.

RapidWeaver 4

2008-05-31T19:17:00.000-04:00

So I've upgraded to rapidweaver 4 for this site. I have some changes in mind for the theme and design, so stand by for that. In the meantime, I'll be trying out some of the extensions and default themes available in the new app.

Updates

2008-05-03T19:40:00.000-04:00

So the blog was offline for a little while at gveloper.com, but was still available from blogger. This has been fixed now and should be good for the foreseeable future.

I'm writing this update from the rooftop terrace at my building because it is so nice out this evening and I don't get outside nearly often enough. Which is sad considering I rented this place because there is so much here to go to locally.

We had some serious weather in the area last week. The news channels are saying that we had a whopping 8 confirmed tornados in our immediate on monday. For some of my closest friends, it was a pretty close call. Emergency services were dispatched out from all the surrounding municipalities to help cope with the severe destruction in several neighborhoods. I myself was out of the way of the storms altogether. It is crazy though, mostly since the area is so unprepared for something like tornados. We hardly ever have them, nevermind 8 in one wave, one of which may be the strongest ever recorded in the tidewater area.

At home I've learned the joys of trying to repair berber carpet. Then I learned the joys of letting the professionals do it. I would always go with the later when you can ;-)

I am keeping an eye on the rumors that twitter is leaving ruby-on-rails as their platform of choice. It seems that this is very interesting move in the web2.0 world. It would be a major blow to the platform if a player as big as twitter leaves them for scalability concerns.

Twitter in Plain English

2008-03-15T19:43:00.001-04:00

Bloggers gone lazy

2008-01-08T20:56:00.000-05:00

Tech blogger Steve Rubel has posted an article with a good observation. The recent posting says that tech bloggers have gotten lazy. I see the same line of observations in my own blogging, though I only wish I could be counted in the ranks of the great tech bloggers. So Steve has proposed a new resolution for us: to think again in 2008.

So I resolve to have more articles here on actual thought and less announcing the next greatest "link of the day" ;-)

This of course got me thinking... So I thought I'd start off with some commentary on what this means for all of us (get ready). Never before has so much information been available so quickly to everyone. There's the internet in general, for sure, but it goes much deeper than that. Google and other very equally capable search engines index the web in such a way that a keyword can be found across billions of pages in a fraction of a second. Wikipedia makes knowledge and facts available to us in just a matter of keystrokes. So much video content is available online, begging for our attention, from college seminars to youtube, much of which is not really a waste of time, but truly valuable information. Tivos and DVRs help us catch the information and entertainment we want as it goes by so that we can access it as we have time. There's podcasts that keep us up to date every day. Like you very own customizable radio and tv stations that play whatever you want, whenever you want it, they keep us in tune with the latest in our professional fields and interest. Newspapers (yes I still subscribe to one) and rss feeds keep us up on the news, locally and globally, like never before. My apartment building even has HDTVs mounted to each treadmill so people can still watch tv while working out, not having to miss a minute of their favorite programming.

It used to be there was a world of information out there, like the Library of Alexandria, but the access to that information was limited and restricted, so it's effect on the daily lives of everyday people was limited. This is no longer the case. As society has progresses, the amount of information recorded and produced has increased and the destruction of it has decreased. And not only has the amount of recorded information increased exponentially, but the access to it has increased to an absurd level of ease and availability. What does this mean for us today?

For me it means I have gigs of podcasts to catch up on during nights and weekend, a loaded tivo, a stack of books queued to be read, and RSS list that is a mile long. But this huge influx of information could have an unexpected downside. Even the content generating bloggers, writers, and intellectuals are being bogged down by this information producing one or more of several results.

The first is obvious, if everyone is busy consuming content, less content is being produced. I want to be up to date on a broad range of my interests. I have the desire to learn many things from existing knowledge available in history books, encyclopedias and other existing traditional content. But the longer I spend researching new things, the less I can write about the things I know. The longer I spend taking in entertainment, the same is true. But more on entertainment later.

The second effect is a shift on who generates the newly available content. If people who are really experts on a field are required to spend so much time researching all the new and old information available on the field, they become unavailable to that field. This is why I believe the true experts in a field are rarely heard from. But the negative affect of this is that there are those who have the opposite situation in practice. They are the spokespeople for a given field, the so-called experts referenced in the media, consultants, and others who are outspoken about their knowledge. The problem is that the longer they spend being in the limelight, the less time they can devote to their trade and staying on the cutting edge. And so they are the content generators, more than the experts, which makes the new content less useful, less potent.

The third is something I see a lot of personally and it piggybacks on the second effect. The third effect is the automation of content generation. This is necessary since no one person can possibly read, summarize, analyze and present information faster than our computers. There are many reports and analysis that I no longer have to personally write because I wrote scripts and applications to generate that content for me. Now, for the most part this is more aggregation than true generation of new information, but not always. With the continuing development of algorithms for the analysis of information, the automated generation of content has more and more potential to both save us the trouble of going through a few of the mountains of information available to us, as well as replace us to some extent in the actual generation of content.

Now there is something to be said for priorities, objectives, organization and discipline. I would certainly consider myself an information junkie. I spend 6 hours a day or so online, gathering, ready, thinking, and goofing off. This is beyond my time at work, where I am also online, gathering information, thinking, trying to understand the world, but for the goals of my company. My friends sometimes think I've fallen off the end of the world as I am usually days behind in email, voicemails, and lets not even talk about letters and the people I haven't written to. Many of these fall through the cracks, hopelessly lost until friends send the courtesy "just in case you didn't see the last email" email. I am one of many trapped under the flow of information. But is it necessary? Is it profitable? And where is it taking us as a society?

Obviously not all information is useful and certainly not necessary. I try not to get caught up in games and other amuzements, but if you know me, you know I can lose as many hours as the next guy to desktop tower defense. That, and I do own a couple nextgen consoles and a subscription to gametap... but other than that... If I watch tv and it's not the news or a documentary, it's while I'm also online trying to catch up on email, rss feeds, new tech news and toys, etc on my laptop. This is my life. The tv shows I like most are detective shows in their own right; problem solving detective shows. Perhaps I could contribute more to my quest for knowledge without these entertainments and amuzements, but then all work and no play makes Dave a... a... makes Dave jump out a window.

There is a tipping point in our lives as individuals for the influx of content and information. Many people reach that long before me, but then many people have lives ;-) I choose to stay in the flow because I find myself most excited when I'm around new things, new ideas, new information, useful or not. Many others have a smaller place for this flow of information in their lives, and I think this is the key to surviving the information age as a society. We have to prioritize the flow individually to determine where to spend time learning and where to spend time participating. Not everyone can spend all their time reading or no one is writing new things to read. Not everyone can spend their time writing or no one is learning and the writing becomes stale.

In our personal lives, the balance of our intake is important as well. Sometimes I find myself amused by tv, and I lose track of time and I wonder what I could have taken care of on my checklist during that time. The balance is different for all of us, and finding it is the journey of a lifetime.

Enough of the rambling for now, more to come.

I'm off to play some tower defense...

Regular Updates to Resume

2008-01-05T14:28:00.000-05:00

These last few months have been a blur. Lots of new technology, lots of new work, a new apartment, and new things to keep me busy. But I hope to get back into the swing of things here. You will notice the new theme based on one from realmacsoftware. I'll probably keep working on the customizations for a while until it is my own. This site is still managed using rapidweaver, and the integration with blogger is done through rapidblog. I know the front page needs a lot of work, and I'll get around to it eventually.

Mac Demos and Tutorials

2008-01-05T00:49:00.000-05:00

If your a mac user and are not yet familiar with ScreenCastsOnline.com, it's time you were introduced. Every week Don produces a video tutorial on a different application or process, half of which are available in a free itunes podcast feed. All shows are available to paid members which is a small fee, $25 every six months with long term subscriptions available and a one-time $20 fee for which you get access to the full archive of past shows (since 2005). If you don't do anything else, check out Don's "new to mac" series available here.

IMAP access for gmail?

2007-10-24T07:55:00.001-04:00

It appears that it has finally happened. Gmail has imap access, at least in testing. This is big news. You can read the details here, here, and for the iphone here.

Not having IMAP was one major drawback to gmail before, requiring me to have a complicated setup of forwarding email between my webmail providers and my dotmac account to keep everything in sync, a method I was surprised to see I was not alone in using. Now with imap on gmail, and yahoo working on it, I can work with multiple IMAP accounts in mail.app and/or entourage if 2008 is any good, and have all my mail in one place without forwarding duplicates all over kingdom come.

Blogged with Flock

Apple Credit for Early iPhone Adopters

2007-09-16T12:39:00.001-04:00

Well, I got my certificate and headed for my local apple store and picked up a brand new 24 inch iMac. So, apple didn't lose a cent on me, even with a $100 voucher.

Petition to repeal ridiculous fines in VA

2007-07-15T22:57:00.000-04:00

The fines went into effect this month, and there is a petition to repeal the new laws. These are laws that snuck by the public and went into effect on July 1. The petition is here. There's a writeup of a few of the laws here. If you are a Virginia resident, please add yourself to the list!

MacUpdate Software Promo

2007-07-14T23:28:00.000-04:00

If you are a mac owner, be sure to check out the MacUpdate promo. Only 3 days left to get a ton of mac software for 49 bux. Click Here for the details.

Pownce

2007-07-09T23:22:00.001-04:00

I have a few invites for pownce.com. Email me or leave a comment if you want one.

Blogged with Flock