Category: Technology

All things geeky.

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Image Resizing of the Future

Wow! Seam Carving Image Resizing. Take time to watch this (that link is a better video but at its quota…youtube link here) particularly if you are a programmer or artist. The people removing at the end is remarkable!!

Of course, this mirror made of wood is pretty cool too. If you aren’t sure what you are watching in that one, I’ll explain. There is a camera in the middle of this frame with 830 tiles mounted to 830 servos. There is a light angled from the top onto the tiles. The software interprets the image the camera sees and changes the angle of the tiles so that each one reflects a different amount of light thereby simulating pixels and creating the ability for the wood tiles to form an image. Very cool!

Update: This is a hot topic! See also.

UPDATE: Resize your own images online demo.

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What is your domain worth?

Do you have some domains laying around? Think they
might have some value? LeapFish has a domain name appraisal tool. My disclaimer: I am not affiliated with LeapFish and I do not know their criteria for valuing a domain name. I simply found it entertaining.

I trust 1&1 for my domains – Get yours for $5.99 today!





  
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Are you valid?

OPML for the Top 20

HTML is hypertext which is nonlinear navigation between related or unrelated documents, ie. links, and markup language with is symbols (in web speak, tags) to indicated to the printer (in web speak, browser) how the content should look and be presented.

The term markup is derived from the traditional publishing practice of “marking up” a manuscript, that is, adding symbolic printer’s instructions in the margins of a paper manuscript. For centuries, this task was done by specialists known as “markup men” and proofreaders who marked up text to indicate what typeface, style, and size should be applied to each part, and then handed off the manuscript to someone else for the tedious task of typesetting by hand. A familiar example of manual markup symbols still in use is proofreader’s marks, which are a subset of larger vocabularies of handwritten markup symbols. [Source]

Sidebar

Many non technical people mistakenly think The Web and The Internet are the same thing. To avoid too much of a digression from the topic of this post, let us distinguish the different by explaining that the Internet is the physical network of wires, radio signals, and computers that are linked together to share information. The Web is documents and other media (like videos and pictures) which are linked together for the ease of collaboration and sharing. For example, by reading this article, you are using the Web over the Internet. By checking email, you are simply using the Internet and it has nothing to do with the World Wide Web.

As bloggers, we tend to write quickly and proof later (yes I generalize but you will see this post on my first draft). The array of blogging tools out there provide handy little WYSIWYG editors to help rush content out. Personally, I disable WordPress’s wysiwyg. These tools allow us to be sloppy and produce bad code/markup. The W3C is an international member organization with the mission of creating Web standards and guidelines. The W3C does not define the World Wide Web but because Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited with inventing the Word Wide Web in 1989 while working for CERN, also created the W3C, and so many industry experts are part of the consortium, W3C recommendations are highly regarded.

The W3C provides tools to validate your markup against the HTML specification. By making sure your website, and a blog is just a website that updates often, has valid HTML you can be assured that page will present its information in most any browser or news reader as you want the person reading it to see it. Non-valid markup can send a browser into quirks mode and the outcome may be unpredictable. Valid markup also lends to more favorable search engine placement. A blogger who takes the time to make sure their site template is valid HTML and that their regular posts are valid HTML making the entire site valid HTML may get higher placement in a search engine than a comparable blogger who does not validate.

That said, there is an argument that validation for bloggers may not be all that important. According to Bug Leak, all the blogs in Technorati’s Top 20 fail to validate.

This probably means that complying to the W3C standards is not a priority for the most popular content creators on the planet. [Source]

The article lists these 20 blogs and the number of validation failures. I was curious to find out what separates these great content creators from RealityMe (of course, I can guess that they have focused topics, thousands of links in, huge readership, more regular posting, etc.) so I added each to my feed reader to gander daily for a bit. I have saved the RSS links as OPML so that anyone can import the same 20 blogs into their readers. Bug Leak points to a great tool for WordPress users called XHTML Validator plugin. This plugin checks the content going into the database (not the actual template) to make sure that your posts are valid. How does one write valid code without knowing what constitutes valid HTML? Simply install the XHTML Validator plugin and begin posting. When it shows you errors, correct them and learn by doing!

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Practicing what I preach

I have bemoaned that we could get the United States onto the metric system if we started using it. You know.. put up speed limit signs that show both metric and English measurements. Of course if both the metric and English measurement appeared on the same sign, people may continue to ignore the metric. What if the English measurement sign was a half a mile before the metric. Confusion? We don’t confuse a yield sign with a speed limit sign. I think this could be worked out. Make metric the prominent measurement on all things and the English measurement the smaller. Right now my speedometer shows English measurements very large and shows metric speeds in a smaller, darker print.

What can I do? I am going to commitment myself to using metric as often as possible. I will find a thermostat for the house that displays in centigrade. When I give distances to the Scouts, they will be stated metrically first. And so forth. I know I can do this! I already drink out of two liter bottles.

Update: What is a meter?

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We are going to war!

The squirrels have been sent in!

A few weeks ago, 14 squirrels equipped with espionage systems of foreign intelligence services were captured by [Iranian] intelligence forces along the country’s borders. These trained squirrels, each of which weighed just over 700 grams, were released on the borders of the country for intelligence and espionage purposes. [Source]

I can’t get the squirrels out of my attic. How do you capture trained spying squirrels?! Perhaps Boris and Natasha were on contract! "We’v ‘ave Moose on our side now as doolble agent." Thank you Ray Kurzweil!

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What kind programs do you write?

I often get asked, "Now, what do you do?" and when I try to explain it I get these blank stares and gapping mouths to which I pause then say, "I make web pages." Their eyes light, heads nod, and they declare, "OOooh!" Quickly followed by a subject change.

What do I really do? Right now I am writing an application that allows service providers to advertise their services. So someone seeking a service goes to the website and enters what they are looking for and the matching providers pop up. Sounds simple enough right? Well, if I do my job correctly it will appear amazingly simple to the end user. The behind the scenes programming complexity is awe inspiring. As a minor example, the administrator has to take requests from service providers to be apart of the website. Then the administrator has to create the service provider profile which implies an administrative website that only the staff can access (roles based security). A profile! That’s simple right? Just a database table with all the descriptions of the provider and services offered right? Not really. In actuality it is a very complex system of related lookup tables. Since I cannot predict all the variants of services and pieces of services that may be offered, the system was built to allow the administrator to dynamically add and remove qualities from the service profile. Certainly a detailed specification could have made that simpler but would have resulted in a limited application where as this one can grow to meet the future needs of the client (I know..the simpler approach would have produced more billable hours in the future..blah blah).

Of course, the service provider has to have their own website to be able to manage the details of their service without having to labor the administrator. However, the client does not want the service provider to be able to make certain changes to the profile without approval. So I have had to create a change request table in the database to accept pending changes from the service providers to be accepted or rejected by the administrator. Now there’s a level of complexity that echoes changes throughout the site!

I love my work!

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Tech Issue of the Day

Today’s terribly frustrating error causing a long delay in a short process is:

Parameter index out of range (1 > number of parameters, which is 0).

It is the result of this simple insert:

<cfquery name="createrole" datasource="#application.gDataSrc#">
    INSERT INTO #application.projectidentifier#_theroletable {
       fooASInt,
       barAsInt
    } VALUES {
       <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="CF_SQL_INTEGER" value="#fooAsIntValue#">,
       104
    }
</cfquery>

UPDATE: Whoops. I see the typo! There is a big difference between {} and (). Should have been:

<cfquery name="createrole" datasource="#application.gDataSrc#">
    INSERT INTO #application.projectidentifier#_theroletable (
       fooASInt,
       barAsInt
    ) VALUES (
       <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="CF_SQL_INTEGER" value="#fooAsIntValue#">,
       104
    )
</cfquery>

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And an afternoon of troubleshooting goes to one line

So IIS v6 wasn’t letting form variables post. <cfdump var="#form#"> would show an empty structure. CF’s built-in webserver on the development box worked fine. Changing the method from post to get made things even stranger with the query string using &amp; instead of &. I finally found the solution. I had used the obscure html tag <base"

<base href="http://domain.com/">

IIS v6 did not like this. Removing that one line fixed the problem. So much for trying to be the perfect coder.

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Oh! That acid rain…

Wow! The things that we miss. I just learned that Pennsylvania has had an underground fire burning for 45 years and that it is likely to burn for another 245 years!

An exposed vein of coal ignited in 1962 due to the standard policy of burning the garbage on a weekly basis in the borough landfill, located in an abandoned mine pit in the southeast portion of Centralia. Attempts to extinguish the fire were unsuccessful, and it continued to burn throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
…
There are no current plans to extinguish the fire, which is consuming an eight-mile seam containing enough coal to fuel it for 250 years.
[Source]

Apparently, at $42 million, it is cheaper to move a town than extinguish the fire.

The federal and state governments gave up trying to extinguish the fire in the 1980s. “Pennsylvania didn’t have enough money in the bank to do the job,” says Steve Jones, a geologist with the state’s Office of Surface Mining.
…
Across the globe, thousands of coal fires are burning. Nearly impossible to reach and extinguish once they get started, the underground blazes threaten towns and roads, poison the air and soil and, some say, worsen global warming. … The United States, with the world’s largest coal reserves, harbors hundreds of blazes from Alaska to Alabama. Pennsylvania, the worst-afflicted state, has at least 38—an insignificant number compared with China and India, where poverty, old unregulated mining practices and runaway development have created waves of Centralias.
…
Scientists estimate that Australia’s BurningMountain, the oldest known coal fire, has burned for 6,000 years.
…
…in the United States; near Glenwood Springs, Colorado, for example, an old coal mine has burned for the past 100 years.
[Source]

So, why are we still using coal?