jclark.org/weblog

Extreme Closeup!

Sean bought the Canon Digital Rebel a couple of months ago, and has been taking some good pictures with it. He just got a new lens with macro functionality, as well as a diopter kit for image magnification. He has a review of the new equipment, which includes some great pictures. What a camera. He also has other camera stuff, and I’m sure he’ll be adding more.

The 80 minute 45?

Verbatim has a cool new CD-R product available - Digital Vinyl:

It’s a CD-R disc that’s made to look like a vinyl record… complete with grooves. Of course, I think they should have left some room on the ‘label’ (painted, not paper) for a description of the contents.

Gagged

We’re visiting family this week, and staying with my parents. Much to my delight, they recently got DSL service from AT&T. Being a good son, I gave my Dad a router for Christmas (he has some spare PCs he wants to network, plus a work laptop). Being me, I made it a 802.11g wireless router.

Last night, we hooked it all up. Of course, I managed to make it much more difficult than it needed to be. I have a cable modem at home, which creates a direct connection to the web, and then acts as a DHCP server to my PC (well, to my router). The DSL modem also acts as a DHCP server, but does not make a direct internet connection. Instead, it connects over PPPoE, which requires a user name and password. The username was visible in a dialog box, but (of course) not the password. I asked Dad for the password. He didn’t know it. Didn’t remember having one. Didn’t even recognize the user name. It seems that the AT&T software automatically logs in upon startup.

So, we looked through all of his documentation. Tried guessing the password. Searched the support website. Uninstalled and reinstalled the software. All to no avail. And then I tried something I should have tried an hour before… In the AT&T software setup is a checkbox “I am using a router to connect to AT&T“. I checked it. And Lo, a textbox appeared with the username and password I would need to feed my router to enable a PPPoE connection from the router. It worked, and my Powerbook was once again online.

All was now right in the world. Yeah, right. I could get my mail, but I could not send it. Via either of the SMTP servers I normally use. Upon further investigation, it seems that AT&T blocks port 25 (they use an alternate port for their servers), and that you must request to have the port unblocked. After you’ve been a customer for 30 days. What a crock.

We requested the port be unblocked via the WebChat interface (PhoneDrone? We’ve got Webdrones!), and after a brief but unpleasant Spanish Inquisition (Bloodtype?), I was promised the port would be unblocked, within 15 minutes.

That was an hour ago. I’m still gagged.

Update: After trying again (and failing) several hours later, I had inspiration to try having the router log out and log back in to the PPPoE connection. Now, everything is working.

New Toys

Santa brought me some new toys! Well, my wife and children did, at any rate. Here are the goodies for my Powerbook:

• Powermate from Griffin Technologies. I have the aluminum model. Just about the coolest USB device I’ve ever seen. I’ve got it configured to act like a mouse scroll wheel, which is wonderful when reading long web pages. In iMovie, it acts as a shuttle control. The only issue I’ve had is that the light doesn’t work after a reboot unless I unplug/replug it, or reset it in System Prefs. I appear to have the latest driver. I’ve emailed support, I’ll post more here when they respond.

• Firewire Harddrive from LaCie. 160gb, “Design by F.A. Porsche” model (whatever… but it is slick looking. There will be several more posts about this one.

• DVD Burner, also from LaCie (D2 design). Haven’t played with this one yet. I recently got a new MiniDV camcorder (which I’ve been meaning to blog), which neccessitated this. It has analog in, so one of my first projects will be to import all my old analog Hi8 stuff (now you see why I wanted the Firewire HD), and burn it to DVD for archival purposes.

I received other gifts as well… most especially, another wonderful Christmas with my family.

Merry Christmas to All…

… and to all a safe and blessed day.

Come to Order

Since my recent writeup of the web-based aggregators Bloglines and myFeedster, I have been using Bloglines as my regular aggregator. I continue to be very happy with it. I’ve only had one complaint. You can put your feeds into groups and re-name them, but you can’t re-sort them within a group. Or so I thought.

When you add a feed to a group, it appears at the top of that group. Now, (assuming your group’s feeds were already in order, and you just want to move the new guy down a bit,) check the box next to each of the feeds you wish to move above the new feed, make sure the drop-down box at the top of the left pane says “move”, and click submit. When prompted to choose the destination folder, choose the same folder. The selected entries will be moved ahead of the new entry, remaining in their original order.

Of course, getting your feeds initially sorted can be more work, but if you import your inital feeds from an OPML file, bloglines keeps the ordering found there (although not the groups, at least for my NetNewsWire-Lite-created OPML file).

Semantics? I’m Always Up For Some Antics!

SimpleQuiz is an ongoing discussion on best practices for standards-compliant and sematic XHTML markup, in the form of a series of quizzes, and the ensuing discussion of the answers. There’s a ton of good information here, I’ll be going back to read further. (via BUZZ)

The host site, SimpleBits, is a firm reminder to me that I am no designer. As generally pleased as I am with the design I have evolved for this site, when I look at a site like SimpleBits I am awed. It is both stylish and subtle. There are many little things, minor attentions to detail, that come together into a very coherent whole. The “Slate” style (see icons at top right of page) is my favorite. Extremely sharp looking. The next time I’m ready to do a redesign, I intend to stare at SimpleBits for a while and just try to grok the whole feel of the thing.

Having no training in design (I’m a programmer, ’tis true), I presume at least some of what I see is part of the education of a designer. Some of the things that catch my eye include the subtle shadow effect at the edges of the content area, the sizing of the fonts, the extremely great use of color (the colors really pull everything together into a coherent whole), the extremely subtle line under the headings in the right-hand pane, and the use of a black line around the content area, but a colored line (darker version of sidebar color) between the sidebar and main panel. There’s alot to learn here.

Okay, I’ll stop gushing now.

Look Ma, No Aggregator

In the comments of a recent post about NetNewsWire, Ben suggested I try Bloglines, a web-based aggregator. The Bloglines server subscribes to the rss feeds I want to read, and allows me to read them via my browser. This offers two features I value - location independance and platform independance. No matter what computer I’m on, or what OS its running (I switched nearly a year ago, but the rest of the world hasn’t caught up), if there’s a browser available, I can read my feeds. Plus, the status of what posts I have or have not read is managed centrally, so I can always read only new items.

I didn’t get around to using Bloglines until this week. The next day, Feedster, the rss search engine, unveiled their new service myFeedster, a web-based aggregator. Feedster is a great service, so I thought I’d give myFeedster a try as well. Both web-based aggregators have some interesting features. Here are my observations/comparisons, in no particular order:

• Both sites cache old entries, so you can view posts that have rolled off the RSS feed.

• myFeedster lets you search a single feed or all of your feeds. You could do this previously using Feedster’s advanced search, but you had to supply the URL of the feed or your OPML file. Bloglines lets you search your feeds or all feeds. The all feeds search lets it compete with Feedster, but Feedster clearly has the edge in searching.

• The feed for this site is RSS 2.0, and contains both a brief plaintext description (in the element), and the complete xhtml content of the post (in an xhtml element with appropriate namespace declaration). myFeedster only shows the description, but Bloglines shows the full content. Bloglines saves me alot of time by showing me the whole post.

• Bloglines supports categorizing feeds, like NetNewsWire. myFeedster does not. Bloglines did not import my categories from my OPML file, however. I don’t know if this is a Bloglines problem or an issue with NetNewsWire Lite’s OMPL export. Bloglines’ OMPL export does include categories.

• Both services offer blogroll features, but Bloglines lets you mark individual feeds as public or private. Private feeds are not included in your blogroll. Another very cool Bloglines feature is your public feeds view, an url that allows others to see all of your public feeds in the bloglines interfaces. Check out my public feeds.

• Both services allow you to export OPML.

The number one issue, however, is the interface:

• myFeedster provides a simple list of posts - all posts updated within a timeframe you specify, within a specific feed. You view one feed at a time. You can see a list of feeds updated within a given time. Reminds a little bit of screen shots I’ve seen of Radio UserLand.

• Bloglines is a two-paned aggregator. I can’t decide if I like it better than a three-paned aggregator (like NNW), but this is enough to make it the hands-down winner for me. Click the link above for my public feeds to check it out. All the feeds and categories appear on the left in a tree view. If you select a category, you see all new posts, across all feeds in that category. You can also choose to view all posts within a given timeframe. Select a feed and see only the posts for that feed. It also shows you how many unread posts you have for a given feed.

It will be interesting to see how both products evolve. For now, I’ll be using Bloglines to read my feeds, but myFeedster to search them. Speaking of search, while looking up references for this post, I found a couple of interesting things via Feedster:

• There’s a new web-based aggregator: Fastbuzz. I know little more than the name and url so far, but I’ll try to check it out later.

• Best title I’ve seen for a post about news readers:
  Talkin ‘Bout My Arrrggggregation at Low Grade Panic. Don’t try to dig what we all S-S-Say.

Monday Night Football Wrapup

The Philadelphia Eagles have now won nine games straight. They also won a game in Miami for the first time ever.

Just thought you should know. GO BIRDS!

UrlGetPart, and the Parts it Won’t Get

This is a narrow post. If you don’t understand or don’t care, do skip it (you won’t be missing much). For the rest, and for the search engines, here’s some trivia.

There are a bunch of handy functions in the Win32 Shell API for handling file paths and URLs, provided by SHLWAPI.DLL. One of these, UrlGetPart, is described thusly:

Accepts a [sic] URL string and returns a specified part of that URL.

Very handy function, until you realize that the one part of an URL you can’t specify to be returned is the path. For example, in the (fictitious) url:

http://bond:007@example.com/topsecret/martini.cgi?method=shaken+not+stirred

I can use UrlGetPart to retrieve the scheme (http:), the username (bond), the password (007), the host (example.com), and the query (?method=shaken+not+stirred), but I cannot retrieve the path (/topsecret/martini.cgi).

So, How do extract the path from an URL using UrlGetPart? You don’t. Instead, use InternetCrackUrl, in wininet.dll. If you need to do this from VB6 (and this may work with VB5, but I’ve not tried it), take a look at this helper class, which also supports a few other handy URL-handling functions.