CogBlogged in ‘2004’

flickr foto A Presentavailable on my flickr My last day this year in the office, and there is a new present I ought to be playing with… replacing a 2.5 year old G4 Powerbook with a shny new… Today is our last official day of work until after New Years. Trying to take care of some year end wrap up, catchup on 1000 other projects, and then this happens! I was not expecting to get a new laptop, but when the boss says, “We have some extra funds– should we upgrade your llaptop?” what else would be the response? My current workhorse, 1 MhZ G4 laptop is fine, but is also at least 2 years old if not more. Given my track record, getting a new one means that in a month, Apple withh announce a breakthrough in a new technology (G5 laptop??) and I will be owner of a [...]

I have barked some about “information density” something lifted from the Tomes of Tufte — in my web travels I come across some sites that just have way too much in the gutters, banners, et al, and not much meet. Since Clara Peller is not around much, I have to ask, “Where’s the Beef?” So take for example a recent article from Lockgergnome. Now I am not picking on them, though it sure looks that way, and I do get a lot of good RSS leads from their article feeds. This is just an exercise in seat of the pants analysis. The content in question is “RSS for Mom and Dad”– where there are lots of ads, links galore, and related content links, but the article boils down to 5 paragraphs, or 2567 characters, or 8k of information. My summary of all the web page content is 112k of total [...]

A frequent question we get from our Writing HTML tutorial is: “what code can I use to prevent people from viewing/stealing the source code of my web pages?” and the answer is very similar to what i say to people when they want to protect their images on web pages from being stolen- if you do not want someone out there to “steal” your web images– keep them off the internet. All of the techniques out there, JavaScript disabling of right mouse clicks is baby stuff to circumvent. But rather than respond with my own tirade, I typically gently suggest that it is more trouble than it is worth, and seed them with a good google link for reference resources, for the above question: http://www.google.com/search?q=hide+web+page+source+code Top of that is a great site from Vortex Designs, How to prevent theft of your source code!, that starts with this bit of humor: [...]

I’ll leave the academic wrestling over Google Scholar to the academics– I was more humanly curious what I could find there… so did a self Google to see if I could find a reference to my previous life. Before materializing as an instructional technologist at Maricopa, I was a graduate student in, of all things Geology (hence my e-mail signature “was geologist now technologist” (see more semi-sordid history). Before I got burned out on a narrow field of research, I did manage to publish a paper in the Geological Society of America’s Geology, then the top journal in the field. Their rigorous guidelines limited authors to 4 printed pages, and as their tagline then said, “I would have written a shorter article if I had more time.” It was accurate, as it took my advisor and myself a full year not only to summarize the research, but to write, create [...]

Disregard my recent suggestion for making Skype links written has callto:/myskypename– My new Finnish colleague Teemu just noted that it conflicts with the ugh-ly Netmeeting. There is supposed to be a way from the Skype Site to create a “Shype Me Button” ( could not find it there and had to Google to get close): You can even add a Skype-Me Button to your website or e-mail signature. For complete instructions, please visit the Share Skype site. but the link it provided http://www.skype.com/community/share/ had no answer.

As reported a few times before, I have been prying time here and there to work on a prototype web site, that replaces a current, hand edited Low Threshold Applications web site with a dynamic one authored in MovableType. I am just polishing off a new add-on hack that uses PHP and mySQL to dome nifty magic. We are making progress on moving the old content over, but one of the last features to tackle (I think) was a dynamic generated equivalent of the LTA Contributors List where it lists the authors names, emails, organizations, and a list and links to the content they had authored. After exploring the available tags in MovableType, plugins, I was still not finding a simple way to do this. Yes, MT can sift through entries sorted by authors, but you have to know all the author username in advance, so every new author would [...]

My call for some skypers paid off this time, the phone has been ringing off the hook… Just as I was checking email this monrning, I got the notice of Will’s comment that he had just downloaded Skype, and just as I was adding him to my Skype contact list, he called! The audio quality was great, from Arizona to New Jersey, and it was looking like a good thing. It looks like some browsers will support the URL link structure of <a href="callto:skype_name">call me</a> Sa,y hey call me… There is even a slick little test account you can call to verify your SKype-ability- callto:echo123 a computer generated voice answers (you can test your audio out), then offers to record your voice, and plays in back so you can verify that your microphone is working. Even that little bit is a nifty trick. I got two more invite notifications while [...]

Oi, have the spammers gone wacko. Bonkers. What are they smokin’? Got a notice yesterday one tried to insert a bunch of typical “win poker cialis v*iagra celebrity beastiality pix enlarge your _____ shrink your ______ bad credit erased” URLs into one of our sites that allows honest people to design a customized style sheet. As my childhood hero would chuckle, “What a Maroon! What an Ignoranamus!” hahahahaha Even if this spam attempt actually landed on my web site (which is does not), how exactly would spam URLs in a CSS file gain an advantage for their insipid enterprises? Are they that desperate to shove their crap in every web form on the net? How does that work, spammer? I still seek to understand you, where are you? Why won’t you write? What a moroon, indeed. All of’ em.

Maybe I barked and whined about podcasting, that does not mean I’m not interested in audio! I am trying to give Skype another round of tests, but cannot find anyone I know with a skype account. Is anyone up to some internet telephone tag? I’ll try to keep the application open the next few days, and I can by skyped as cogdogblog. Woof Woof!

Wow, bonus feedback. This is from someone who has used our free jClicker Slide Show template to customize and use for showing off their model design and fabrication work: Alan, I just upload my personal portfolio on the net that I built my self. I am so happy with it. Base on jClicker slide show, I modified to fit with my need, clean design. I hope you don’t mind with it. If you can put my site, www.asw-design.com in your example list, I will be proud and happy. Thank you so much for creating jClicker and publish it for public use. Take care, Addy If you check our Addy’s Works, there are some amazing images alone worth looking at, regardless of the use of our little slide show template. From model prototypes to woodworking, this is someone who has some real talent (as opposed to us you spend their days [...]