I just switched the default theme of this blog to the latest K2 theme by Michael Heilemann at binarybonsai.com. Michael created the Kubrick theme that I was using before (and which was also adopted as the default for all new WordPress installations).
K2 is a really nice design, with some great thought to functional layout. It supports a boatload of useful plugins, and displays their magic if they are installed.
Check out the cool ajax-powered search dealie – just start typing a query, and out pops a list of matches. Pretty cool. Comment submission also uses some ajax juju, but it’s a bit funky at the moment, and isn’t quite fully baked yet. Still, quite cool.
So far, I’ve lost my fancy schmancy banner image rotator, but that’s not such a bad thing. I’ll work on adding it back in when I get a chance – I have to recreate the images for the new wider design anyway).
Also, while having another less-than-fully-productive day staying at home with The Boy™ while Janice is sick in bed, I was able to download (but not yet compile successfully) the Ming library for creating .swf files. King suggested this during the Pachyderm developer’s conference call (which I missed because I am out today), and it looks like a much nicer solution than Josh and I were thinking of – Ming would provide a nice happy medium, where we just alter how we generate our .swf-wrapped images, and the dozen flash template files don’t need to be any the wiser. The other option is JSwiff, but it’s a much lower-level library, meaning we’d have to be messing with the icky details of the flash file format. With Ming, we just create objects, and tell it to do stuff. Much nicer 
The Pachyderm project uses jGenerator to wrap images in a flash .swf container for display in the final product. That process does a few things that are pretty handy:
- Makes loading the images into flash easy – it’s just loading more flash…
- Lets us embed metadata in a “tombstone” display field, much like the cards displayed in a museum. These tombstones travel with the asset, and can be displayed automagically wherever appropriate.
- Provides a lightweight DRM – the images are useless outside of the finished Pachyderm presentation (unless you’re able to decompile flash, or take screenshots) – it’s not an overbearing DRM, just a way to make it easy to be honest.
(left) tombstone in “closed” state. Click the arrow widget dealie to expand it to view the full tombstone (right)
But, we’ve reached a point where a bit of a dilemma has been forced upon it. Josh was describing it as Gordian today, and I think the solution might be as radical as that.
The jGenerator library that we use to wrap images in .swfs has been acting more and more flakey over the last few weeks. Likely a result of increased load, we’re seeing what may be some kind of funky threading or deadlock issues deep in java.awt classes, which are relied upon for jGenerator to do its magic.
So, here’s our dilemma:
- Keep on using jGenerator, Hoping For The Best™ – we’d add some debug/babysitting code to detect the deadlock issue, and attempt to recover from it.
- Switch to the OpenLaszlo fork of jGenerator, hoping that they may have resolved whatever issues are plaguing it. That’s kind of a blind faith option, since we don’t know if/how the Laszlo folks have modified jGenerator in their fork.
- Take the sword to the knot, and dump our legacy tombstone/drm/swf-wrapping implementation. Build a new one, from scratch, waaaay past the 11th hour. We know what we would need to do in the authoring application to support a much more robust and flexible metadata-embedding-and-display strategy. The idea that we’ve come up with is actually more useful in many ways, as it can be applied to any media type – not just .swf-wrapped-images. We could easily create an XML-based lookup table that the flash templates would have to consult to gather metadata about assets in a presentation. That’s actually pretty straightforward to do in the authoring app, but every flash template file will need to be modified to teach it about the tombstone xml lookup…
I’m leaning quite strongly toward the third option. Let’s dump the bottomless pit of jGenerator, and focus on the future. There may be a short-term solution – drop tombstones altogether for awhile, taking some time to design the new solution without rushing it. We’d have to keep a snapshot of Pachyderm running, since Mavericks relies pretty heavily on tombstones – but even that needs to be fixed, since jGenerator barfs on characters like accents…
Basically, nobody’s comfortable with the status quo – it’s not stable, is unreliable, and can lock up publishing altogether. The Laszlo option might work, or it might not, leaving us no further ahead. The xml-lookup option is the most solid design, but would take more time than we have. Stupid dilemmas…
Update: Chatting with Josh last night, and he came up with a potentially simpler solution. No need for a lookup table, just have one xml file per media asset – change the filename from .jpg or .mov or whatever to .xml and you have the xml definition of the tombstone for that asset. No xml file, no tombstone. Actually, that could give us a bunch of flexibility – different types of tombstones for different sizes of an asset, for instance. This would be relatively trivial to implement in the authoring app, but we need to figure out what it would take to implement something like this in the flash templates…
Spam Karma 2 just keeps on chugging away, protecting my blog from the scum sucking spam roaches of the world. The roaches are getting marginally more intelligent – starting to try to game the spam blockers.
In the wee hours of the morning, some spammer from somewhere in Asia tried to get onto some kind of whitelist by posting a couple of innocuous comments – with no bad links or scary words. Those 2 comments got through, and then they immediately tried to dump spam into the blog. Those comments were automatically killed by Spam Karma 2. It was able to make a distinction from harmless (although pointless) comments from link spam-infested roach fodder.
All I had to do this morning was manually moderate the first two whitelist attempt comments as spam, which took a grand total of 5 seconds. I love Spam Karma 2!
My “golden ticket” invitation to wordpress.com came in today, so I surfed over and spent 30 seconds setting up a new blog to see wtf the deal was. Wow. That is one slick and easy blog setup tool. I shouldn’t have been too surprised, having already seen a preview of it implemented on James Farmers‘ Edublogs.org site,
It’s got a nice ‘n easy “presentation” selector utility – pick a thumbnail of a theme, and it’s set as the design for your blog. Doesn’t get any easier… Might be too easy, though, since there’s no way to customize a theme once you’ve selected it.
Also, the cool new HTML editor widget is built in, but it seems to create some really nasty funky-assed markup. Hope that gets fixed before it’s unleashed on the masses.
Aside:
Dang I wish I’d had this 6 months ago when weblogs.ucalgary.ca got kicked off. I’m pretty sure I would have gone with it off the bat – now I’m toying around with ideas to migrate our current (albeit small) community to it…
Turns out that most of the assumptions that I made about the requirements of a blogging service were technically correct, but largely irrelevant in practice. Looks like all we really need is a simple way for individuals and groups to create new blogs and start posting. The Drupal software puts so much extra stuff in it that it gets really confusing for the users…
We’re using jGenerator for the Pachyderm project – to replace the abandoned Macromedia Generator product – for wrapping images in .swf files for display within Pachyderm presentations. The .swf files provide value-add stuff like “tombstone” data, and a lightweight, unobtrusive form of DRM.
However, jGenerator has been rather neglected for 3 years now, and as a result it’s starting to show cobwebs etc… Remember my friend Murphy? Largely a result of these cobwebs.
Today, days after we thought we nuked the jGenerator problem, it came back in full force. Building presentations would occasionally hang (sometimes not reliably, or sometimes very reliably). We tracked down the problem thanks to the handy dandy java debugger jdb (handy document on using jdb in a running WebObjects app), and it was the result of jGenerator using java.awt.Rectangle classes rather than java.awt.geom.Rectangle2D.
The methods had been altered to use Rectangle2D in the signatures, but were actually passing around Rectangle objects instead. This apparently causes problems on MacOSX and other Unix-like systems, as was discovered by the OpenLaszlo folks. They had to start their own fork of jGenerator 2.2 to fix this (and potentially other) problems. We just did the same.
We had another round of Team Programming at a Distance – the three of us brainstorming and hacking and researching. That is soooo much more fun and rewarding than copying and pasting…
I had a total blast at Northern Voice 2005. It was probably the most laid-back-yet-productive conferences I’ve been to. It was structured, but not corporate. Loose, but not chaotic. It had a very strong feeling of community – a grassroots “feel” to it, even though many of the “big names” of the blogosphere were there. It was a total community event, and I met so many people from such a wide variety of backgrounds – a real eye opener.
The conference, and especially hanging out at Casa del Lamb the night before, was one of the highlights of the year for me.
It looks like it’s going to be an even bigger/better (but not too big – it’s still at Robson, so it can’t grow much bigger – yay!) event this year, with a pre-conference “Moose Camp” hands-on event. They also realized what a hot commodity the “Bloggable” t-shirt is, and are making them available (for a fee) to everyone. (I’ve worn mine so much that people are likely sick of seeing it It’s been to every conference I’ve gone to, as well…)
I’ve got no idea if I’ll be able to make it to Northern Voice 2006, but if there is any way I can swing it, I’ll be there! I might even try to convince some other Learning Commons folks to make the trip…
As for the issue of the “conference tag” – some software chokes on spaces in tags, so I’d vote for “nv06″ and/or “northernvoice2006″ – both of which are applied to this post.
It took over 2 weeks, but I finally got the pictures off of that Sony funkicam. They’re generally really nice photos, but the camera was apparently set to “auto photo screw up” mode. Every image has a bright red datestamp burned straight into the image like gramma’s camera does. Why on earth would a digital camera burn a timestamp into the image, when EXIF does a better job without screwing up the picture? grrr….
Some nice shots of Evan in the mountains, some nice shots of mountains, and a great shot of Dad. I’ve got some to stitch a pano of the valley, and will post that when it’s ready. There are more photos, but I won’t put them online because they have other family members in them, and they didn’t sign up for this dump-everything-online stuff…
The image quality (despite the lower resolution due to the teeny 32MB Memory Stick) is great. Man, I really have to get a Digital Rebel XT or something
Update: Here’s the pano. It looks much crisper than the ones I made using my little Fujifilm digicam, too!
September 15, 2005 · 1 comment
in Uncategorized
Cole just wrote 2 announcements regarding the Big ADCE Kickoff (which is great and exciting). I got both announcements via RSS feeds, and clicked through to see the full posts. I’m going to use pictures here to make it about as painfully clear as possible.
First, there’s the announcement on his ADCE Tools to Enhance Teaching and Learning blog:
Then, there’s the announcement on his own blog:
Now, I’ve got an account on ADCE. It’s even set to autofill for me so it’s relatively painless. But, guess which post got read?
September 13, 2005 · 1 comment
in Uncategorized
I originally posted this entry on May 18, on the Apple Digital Campus Exchange (ADCE) “Tools to Enhance Teaching and Learning” weblog. I’d post a link, but everyone (including myself) would have to login to the ADCE system to read it. So I’m reposting it here in the hopes that it might make some difference. I’m not holding my breath. I was almost convinced that a walled garden might have value, but on further consideration I have to agree wholeheartedly with Alan – and won’t be posting to the ADCE weblogs unless/until the walled garden is opened up to everyone.
One thing that the read-write model of the internet is pretty much diametrically opposed to is the concept of content silos, or walled gardens of content.
There has to be a pretty compelling reason to lock content behind logins and registration. Restricting publishing is another matter, but restricting access to content that is not confidential is just plain wrong.
People won’t create accounts just to read content. Walled Gardens will wither and die – quickly atrophying into irrelevance.
I can see having a requirement for a login to post in the discussion boards, or to comment on a weblog (although even that is questionable). But the concept of having to log in just to find the URL to a weblog is pretty shortsighted.
Hopefully that’s just an oversight that will be quickly righted (especially considering the fact that Google has already found the ADCE blogs).
Update: I’ve put a quick-and-dirty PlanetADCE site up, which aggregates all posts from all ADCE blogs into one easy-to-read page. Enjoy!
PlanetADCE remains the only way to read the ADCE weblog posts. At least until the walled garden stormtroopers decide to seal our backdoor entrance…
The only way this kind of walled garden would fly is if it were the first, the only, or the largest (by an order of magnitude or so). ADCE isn’t any of those, but it does offer some cool things. For me the biggest draw of ADCE is the fact that it’s getting Carl Berger blogging. If that was the only product of the project, it would be well worth it.
I just got back the 20″x30″ print of the panorama I shot at the top of Diamondhead (a series of photos stitched together automagically with Autostitch).
It looks absofriggin’ AWESOME. I mean, wow. Completely blown away at the quality of the print. Looks like a professional poster.
I goofed when I sent the image for printing through iPhoto, though – I forgot to manually crop or pad the image, so they just cropped it to fit the aspect ratio of the print, chopping off the mansions at the foot of Diamondhead, and the hotels at Waikiki. Next time, I’ll send a 4×6 aspect image, likely with white blocks at the top and bottom to pad the image so the full pano fits onto the 20″x30″ print.
Ofoto obviously noticed the croppage, as they slipped in an informative document into the package, explaining about cropping and the various aspect ratios. They also mention an option called “Zoom & Trim” which can be set to “off” to turn off autocropping. That option apparently isn’t exposed by the iPhoto “order prints” interface…
It cost about $30CDN (delivered), and took about 2 weeks to get to me. I might also shop around for places that can do the print locally for instant gratification.
Update: Duh. Next time I order a print, I’ll just stack 2 or three panos to approximate the 4×6 aspect ratio, and pad the little bit extra as needed. No reason to throw away half of the print!
