At the Hadrian Hotel

At the Hadrian Hotel

Monday, March 26, 2007

This is insane!

Kathy Sierra was supposed to be presenting a tutorial and keynote at this year's O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference. When we got here, there was a notice that her tutorial was cancelled. She spells out the reasons in this blog entry (*not* kid-safe!):

Creating Passionate Users: Death threats against bloggers are NOT "protected speech" (why I cancelled my ETech presentations)

The type of behavior Kathy talks about is disturbing, to say the least. While I believe in the freedom of speech, I personally don't include this type of threating speech among that which deserves to be protected. I wish Kathy well, and I hope that she can some day once again feel safe enough to appear in public.

Monday, March 19, 2007

spurgeonblog: Wichita Lineman

Going through my Google Reader feeds today, I came across spurgeonblog: Wichita Lineman. This seemed like a pretty interesting to do, particularly with the song Wichata Lineman. I actually used to like that song, back in its day but haven't thought about it for years. I wonder what ELP's Karn Evil 9 would look like....

On a side note, I met Chris Spurgeon at O'Reilly's ETech 2005 conference, after having heard his name for years on my local public radio station. He always has something interesting to talk about, whether in person or in his blog.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Spanning Sync

My buddy mojo pointed me to a really cool application for that Mac that keeps iCal in sync with your Google Calendar. I've been playing with the beta and I really like it. There have been a few problems, but it's mostly done what I needed it to do.

Well, today when I tried to sync my calendars, it didn't work. When I opened the preferences panel I found that there was a new, 1.0 version available. So, I cruised over to the Spanning Sync blog to see what was up and found prices that astounded me: You can either pay $25/year or a one-time purchase price of $65.

While I enjoyed the convenience of having my calendars in sync, this is way too pricey for me. I was planning on getting my wife and kids to use this to keep their calendars in sync. I even recommended it to members of our Boy Scout troop. However, at these prices, I think I will be forced to look elsewhere. Buying 2 or 3 copies of this software is not cost-efective for me.

I applaud the developers and wish them well in their business, but for the time being, I'm going to give gSync a try.

Friday, March 09, 2007

Project 365


Cry, Cry, Cry
Originally uploaded by Chris Tengi.
I'm one of a whole bunch of people on flickr who are trying to take a new picture each day. Of the 22 I've taken so far (I started on my birthday, rather than January 1), this is my favorite. Head on over to flickr to see my Project 365 pictures as well as everybody else's.

If you prefer viewing self-portraits, check out The 365 Days Pool.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Making it Easy to Bookmark Your Blogger Post

My buddy mojo recently started adding a cute little row of buttons to his blog entries that allow readers to post links to an entry on various social bookmarking sites. He tells me that he's doing it with a Firefox bookmarklet. I'm too lazy to be bothered with all that work every time I post to my blog, so I decided to add some boilerplate to my Blogger template.

Now, being that I'm an old skool kinda guy, I never converted my template to the latest-and-greatest drag-and-drop style that blogger makes available now. I have a number of customizations that I've not yet figured out how to "objectify" so I'll probably be staying with my current template editing mode for a while. The disadvantage, of course, is that I need to figure out exactly what should go where in the template. The advantage is that if I can write it in HTML, I can add it to the template.

If you have a Blogger Powered blog and would like to add these buttons to your entries, put the following HTML code in your template after the "<$BlogItemBody$>" line:


<div style="padding:0px;margin:0px;color:#444444;">
Bookmark this post:
<a href="http://blogmarks.net/my/new.php?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&amp;title=<$BlogItemTitle$>"><img src="http://blogmarks.net/favicon.ico" border="0" alt="blogmarks" title="blogmarks" /></a>
<a href="http://bluedot.us/Authoring.aspx?u=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&amp;t=<$BlogItemTitle$>"><img src="http://bluedot.us/favicon.ico" border="0" alt="bluedot" title="bluedot" /></a>
<a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&amp;title=<$BlogItemTitle$>"><img src="http://del.icio.us/favicon.ico" border="0" alt="del.icio.us" title="del.icio.us" /></a>
<a href="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&amp;url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&amp;title=<$BlogItemTitle$>"><img src="http://digg.com/favicon.ico" border="0" alt="digg" title="digg" /></a>
<a href="http://cgi.fark.com/cgi/fark/edit.pl?new_url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&amp;title=<$BlogItemTitle$>"><img src="http://www.fark.com/favicon.ico" border="0" alt="fark" title="fark" /></a>
<a href="http://www.furl.net/storeIt.jsp?u=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&amp;t=<$BlogItemTitle$>"><img src="http://www.furl.net/i/lil_furl_butt.gif" border="0" alt="furl" title="furl" /></a>
<a href="http://ma.gnolia.com/beta/bookmarklet/add?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&amp;title=<$BlogItemTitle$>"><img src="http://ma.gnolia.com/favicon.ico" border="0" alt="ma.gnolia" title="ma.gnolia" /></a>
<a href="http://www.newsvine.com/_tools/seed&amp;save?u=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&amp;headline=<$BlogItemTitle$>"><img src="http://www.newsvine.com/favicon.ico" border="0" alt="newsvine" title="newsvine" /></a>
<a href="http://reddit.com/submit?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&amp;title=<$BlogItemTitle$>"><img src="http://reddit.com/favicon.ico" border="0" alt="reddit" title="reddit" /></a>
<a href="http://www.spurl.net/spurl.php?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&amp;title=<$BlogItemTitle$>"><img src="http://www.spurl.net/favicon.ico" border="0" alt="spurl" title="spurl" /></a>
<a href="http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&amp;title=<$BlogItemTitle$>"><img src="http://www.stumbleupon.com/favicon.ico" border="0" alt="stumbleupon" title="stumbleupon" /></a>
<a href="http://tailrank.com/share/?link_href=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>"><img src="http://tailrank.com/favicon.ico" border="0" alt="tailrank" title="tailrank" /></a>
</div><br />


Note that there was a "<br />" tag in my template after the "<$BlogItemBody$>" tag that I chose to move to the end of my alterations. I also borrowed and modified the style information used for the "byline" for this div. Alter it to taste or remove it entirely if you like. Experiment with changing the font size by adding "font-size:80%;" after the "#444444" above and changing the "80" to whatever gives you the desired result.

There are a number of other social bookmarking sites out there that could be added to this list. These are the ones I've found by doing a (very) little research. If you come up with template lines for any others, please post a comment here to keep me updated.