Subtle Changes

hammer_saw.pngKate‘s comment last week regarding content “above the fold” reminded me of my posts from last year on making an impact in less than 30 seconds and tools for more effective blogging. I realized that I hadn’t evaluated my own blogs in the intervening 18 months since I wrote those posts.

Much to my surprise, bloat had occurred on both blogs. Google and Amazon scripts plus my own CSS code had taken their toll; both sites had balloned to over 100K each. Now 100K might not sound too bad, but Google’s main page is a mere 10K and I’m not nearly as useful as Google :-).

Early last week I decided to take my own advice, so I implemented several changes to both blogs. On this blog the main change is fewer posts on the first page. I also revised the CSS to be more efficient, but you shouldn’t notice any real difference.

The photoblog had a pretty severe re-design, but for some viewers the changes will be invisible. The roll-over effect that presents more information about each photo has been changed to pure CSS, instead of the hybrid CSS/Javascript solution I had been using. While this is a really positive change and I’m happy with the leaner, meaner implementation of that feature, users of Microsoft Internet Explorer will no longer see the roll-over effect.
As it happens, the effect had been broken for some users of IE anyway (I think those who had certain Office components installed), so the loss bothers me less than it might have otherwise. Additionally, this frees me from having to support Mcrosoft’s constantly broken implementations of web standards.

Those of you still using Microsoft Internet Explorer to surf the web should really switch Mozilla Firefox, it’s standards compliant, fast, flexible, and free.

I’ve managed to get the pages cut down appreciably, and I’m going to continue streamlining as time allows. If you have any suggestions (I do plan on moving the HTML to 4.01 strict eventually) or tools you like, please let me know!

Blogging Proposition Results

Some results from my little experiment yesterday.

Based on the web server logs we had:

87 users come in from traffic exchanges
19 Blog Clicker visitors
39 Blog Mad visitors
36 Blog Explosion visitors

Apparently, 7 users are using multiple exchanges.

In total, we had 14 comments from visitors arriving through the traffic exchanges which works out to 16%. Truthfully, I feared it would be much lower.

I managed to visit all of the visitor blogs, and left comments on most. Two people only allowed comments from Blogger users, so I couldn’t leave them a comment.

I’d like to thank everyone who participated, and I was really gratified to see that many of my (male) friends read regularly.

RasberryLeaf and another car crash

My old friend rasberryleaf has a long running blog over at Hot Air. But she’s a bit down after a recent car crash, and I can totally sympathize (I’ve been in too many myself). But the odd thing is that one of the last times I saw her, we were driving between a wedding and the reception and got rear-ended in her car. That time she ended up in the hospital with a neck injury, and I managed to get away just a bit sore.

But the sad part is that this time, like that older incident, it’s not her fault, but the other driver is still trying to claim it’s not theirs. Luckly the police don’t believe them this time anymore than the last.

Feel better Laura.

Shooting in Raw

You should use your digital camera’s raw shooting mode.

It’s a simple statement, but many don’t use raw mode while making photographs. Their primary excuse seems to be that using JPEG mode requires less space on (expensive) flash memory cards.

But the simple fact of the matter is that unless you’re shooting in raw you’re throwing away information that can let you rescue marginal photos.

When dealing with any mode besides your camera’s raw format, information that might not be visible on the LCD or even your computer screen, is thrown out to save space. Many people are fine with this, until the time comes to correct problems with their photos. When an image is too dark, too light, or has a strange color cast from indoor lighting, raw mode gives you the flexibility to use the extra information recorded when you made the photo to correct these problems. While some image editting programs do not support editing raw mode photos, the software that came with your digital camera usually does.

Here’s an example of a photo that I shot 2.5-stops too bright, and the corrected image I created from the raw mode data.

megan+umbrella1.jpg     megan+umbrella2.jpg

Now, some would say that one of the benefits of using a digital camera is the ability to recognize failed shots, and retake them immediately. But unfortuantely, you can’t always recreate the moment. A fleeting expression on a child’s face, the once-in-a-lifetime brush with celebrity, or even just the particular fall of light, hair, and expression on your subjects face might never come again. Once missed the decisive moment may be lost forever.

So, how many of you use raw now, and are you going to give it a try?

Outage

I apologize to anyone who had problems accessing the blog and related sites today.  Heavy rains in the area knocked out our Internet connection for about 6 hours.  We’re back up for now, but the rains are expected to continue, so please bear with us.

Less Comment Spam

Comment spam has been on the rise lately, and I’ve been deploying anti-spam software on the blogs to counteract the recent increase in spam activity.

Akismet is a great tool, sorting out 99.8% of the comment spam I’ve received in the last couple of months with very few errors. Available as a plug-in to WordPress, and for many other systems, it has certainly reduced the burden of manually moderating every comment I receive.

But, I’ve enjoyed a couple of entirely spam-free days courtesy of WordPress Hashcash. This plug-in silently causes the visiting browser to perform a small computation that fails on some of the software used by comment spammers. I had to hack on it a little to force it to work on the photoblog, but otherwise it’s a great tool. I’m currently running Hashcash with Akismet still lurking in the shadows as backup.

I’m sure that spammers will eventually catch on; but minimally, Hashcash is going to slow them down. And, for the time being, I’m seeing zero comment spam!

Give Akismet and Hashcash a try, and let me know what you think.

Out with Windows in with…

This is the operating system I chose to install on the Shuttle XPC.


(Click to enlarge)

And here’s one of the entire rig.


(Click to enlarge)

With the correct tools from the Web, the entire process was pretty much point-and-click. Sound, video (Quartz Extreme and Core Image), and Rosetta were all working immediately; overall this wasn’t much worse than installing on any previous Mac.

There have been a few glitches:

  • The mouse occasionally leaves a bit of un-updated desktop behind.
  • The ethernet drivers supported my actual chipset, but needed to be hex-editted for the correct PCI id.
  • There are no drivers for the built-in (Prism3) wireless chipset.

It was difficult tracking down the right stuff on the Net, even though I already owned licenses and had installation media for Mac OS X 10.4. If you’re interested in duplicating my results check out the OSx86 Project.

You can find some notes on what I did to make my system work on this tech notes page.

Let me know what you think 😉

I don’t do Windows (anymore)

Well I finally did it; I dumped Microsoft Windows from all my personal computers.

Truthfully, this has been a long time coming, and this week I finally figured it was time to move on. Let me explain…

My main computers have been Apple’s Macintosh line since 1988. I feel like I spend more time on the Mac working with my computer; while Windows requires more time working on the computer. But, I’ve always kept a DOS/Windows machine around for compatibility and game playing.

Unfortunately, things have been changing in the Windows world. Windows has always had more viruses, more bugs, and more annoyances, but lately Microsoft has actively become hostile towards its users. With the release of Windows XP, Microsoft began requiring activation of every copy of Windows. I wouldn’t mind, since I own more XP licenses than I know what to do with (six by last count) but, every time I do any major hardware hacking on my system, I have to go back through the activation sequence. My University provides me with an enterprise license and copy of XP, so I can even avoid that annoyance, but the concept still bothers me. Microsoft requires law-abiding consumers to jump through hoops; essentially penalizing people with legitimate copies of Windows, and the pirates figured out how to circumvent the activation requirement almost immediately.

That last fact led to the creation of the “Microsoft Genuine” program. Now every time you go to download a Windows update Microsoft checks that you have a licensed copy of Windows. Again I might not mind, except that Microsoft has seen fit to give themselves total control of your computer. Once you install the “Genuine Advantage” tool, if Microsoft chooses to install a program and run it on your computer, you can’t stop them.

Now, Windows Vista is on the horizon (pun intended), and the outlook is pretty bleak (yup, again). Microsoft has been paring back features from Vista, and adding more and more DRM/HDCP/Trusted Computing nonsense that, instead of making the computer safer to use for the consumer, makes the computer safer for the RIAA and MPAA.

So I’ve deleted every install of Windows on the three computers I use most often (well, the Powerbook doesn’t really count). The Shuttle XPC got a cool OS install that I’ll write about shortly. The ultra-light laptop got a quick install of FreeBSD 6.1 and Gnome 2, but I’m not really sure that’s a great fit since the power management functions don’t really work, and the interface is awkward and somewhat ugly.

So does anyone have any suggestions for a good (non-Microsoft) OS for a laptop user? Is Linux better than FreeBSD for this application? Which distros should I try?

I’m tired of this…

Between our current lousy administration and the local government enacting legislation just to force students out of the community, I’m really getting fed up. This time, Congress has proposed cutting NPR & PBS budgets by 23% now, and completely in 2 years.

From an article in the Boston Globe:

On a party-line vote, the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees health and education funding approved the cut to the budget for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes money to the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio.

[…]

The same appropriations subcommittee called last year for an even more drastic cut of $223 million from public broadcasting programs. At the time, Republicans attacked the PBS for programming they said represented out-of-the-mainstream viewpoints, …

Check out the article yourself for more details, and sign the petition against this move over at MoveOn.org.