November 2007 Archives

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And more drive then a 3 toed sloth, i’d be all over this new PIM/online Calendar/GTD todo list stuff. I’ve been checking out Vitalist and Sandy, two interesting “Web 2.0” applications. Sandy is a bit like Quicksilver, but online and usable via email. Vitalist is an online Todo/GTD tool. I find that the more i use tools like these, the more i find that i want more integration. I want to be able to hook them all up together. Not just these two tools, but also Google Calendar, and any/all other online apps. Sigh. I know i could do a lot of what i’ve been seeing, but i just don’t have it in me to buckle down and smash out this stuff.

On the plus side, all these apps, or their successors, are getting better and better. So, if i wait long enough, i know that something will come along and meet my needs. Eventually. Until then, i’ll keep checking these out.

Oh, one other thing about Sandy, they are using this site Satisfaction for their customer support/forum/contant stuff. I’ve never heard of it before, but it is also a Web 2.0 style site. The idea is to make it easier for the company (whichever is using it) to get in touch with its customers, and for customers to help each other. Anyway, its seems quite good, so far. I have no idea how well this would scale to a product like Microsoft Word, with a user base in the millions, but for smaller products, its worth checking out.

I’m going to dispense with any semblance of trying to be rational and just go for fan-boy gusto.

Holy fucking shit, the new “final cut” of Blade Runner is totally amazing.

Peter and I watched it at the Regent on Monday night. I haven’t been to the Regent in, well, probably over 20 years, and didn’t really know what to expect. I’d forgotten that Theater D had bought it and given it the total update. Really a wonderful theater to watch films in, especially this one.

Everything about this new cut rocked. The audio was crisp, the film felt tighter, they fixed some of the annoying things that took you out of the dystopic world of 2019. If you get the opportunity, go see this on the big screen. I’ve watched this film many times, at theaters and at home. This is, without a doubt, the best version of the film i’ve ever seen.

I’ve asked for the crazy collectors edition for christmas. Five dvds, all 3 prints of the film, plus this hard-to-find work print. And the requisite documentaries, out-takes, lost footage, etc etc. Extra geek bonus, you get a model of the Sid Mead spinner, which is kinda cool.

In an amazingly short period of time, i’ve found solutions to two of my major computer multi-user headaches. The first was a photo management tool, which ended up being Picasa (you can read about that here), and now a solution to my shared contacts issues. Frustratingly, this “solution” i kind of looked at before, but thought there was a required server component. Not so. There is a plugin for Thunderbird called synckolab. It uses imap folders to store, and share, your data. If you have the ability to create shared imap folders, you can then share not only contact info, but if you are using the lightning plugin, you can also share calendars and tasks. I’m just working on integrating this info now, but this is a huge win.

I’ve been playing around with a new Python web-framework called Gluon. It was released last month, and has been slowly gaining some traction in the community. Things kind of flagged for me a bit, as there was no user group to chat with about it, but the author has since set up a google group for it, so i might try getting back into it.

It has a lot of nice things going for it - you can create, edit, do everything through the web. Its kind of like zope light, but that’s not really fair to either zope or gluon. It also makes creating a distribution of your application extra easy (on click!). Heck, its even got its own (obligatory) screen cast!

Anyway, if you like python, are interested in web applications and wanted an easy to play with framework (that runs on a usb stick!), you should check Gluon out.

I’ve been looking for the perfect photo categorization tool for quite a while. Heck, i’d settle for a half-bad one! Many times i’ve thought about writing my own. Some have come close, but have missed that one (or two or..) important feature which i really needed.

I’ve been using Picasa on and off for quite a while, and have been happy with it, especially for printing, but not totally investing in it, because i thought it lacked that one important feature.

What feature is that, you ask? Well, i store all our photos on a server in the basement, so we can see them from any computer in the house. I really don’t want to start adding meta-data into the photos unless it can be shared by all possible users. I thought Picasa used its own internal database to store all its info. I’ve since learned that this is not correct. This post explains that pretty much everything other then albums is stored either in the jpg itself (keywords) or in hidden files kept in the directory on the server.

I can’t believe that its that easy. Sure, there are things about Picasa which aren’t ideal, but, man, this is great news! I’ve very excited to finally (finally!!!) invest some time in tagging my photos, and having them searchable.

I’m not sure if i’m excited about google’s flickr service, but the fact that it is integrated so nicely into Picasa makes it very tempting, even though i’m pretty hard-core about keeping stuff on my own site.

So, in the end, the solution has been on my hard-drive for several years! Gods. Well, you learn a new thing every day.

Here are some shots of Conor’s Halloween costume. It is a T-Rex, if you’re not sure.