Yeah, I got one. I can see what all the fuss is about. The insanity is starting to sink in and remap my brain. I will do my best not to spam twitter with talk of my new “phone”.
In the meantime…
You knew the iPhone was coming
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Monthly Archives: October 2008
I dig sunsets
One of the things I love about living in Denver is the sunsets. With all the public skateparks here, a good bit of them have a great view of the front range. The Westminster skatepark has a great view, and one of my very first sessions at the park was spent watching the sun set. I took pictures with my camera phone, but it just didn’t work.
Last night I skated the newly named Brian Aragon Skatepark ( AKA Brighton Skatepark ), and besides spraining my MCL, we caught a shot of the sunset. This was taken on an iPhone and turned out surprisingly well. That’s me 50-50ing the deep end.
50-50 in the deep end
MTV launches video site
MTV has been off my radar for quite a while. Now it may be back on there with the launch of MTVMusic.com. Lots of classic music videos all at your fingertips.
http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:uma:video:mtvmusic.com:87619
Dreamweaver CS4 Feature Tour video
While I still wish Adobe would bring back Homesite, Dreamweaver CS4 is looking pretty exciting. Webkit powering Live View. Javascript code hinting, and more. Check out the feature video.
If you have any problems watching this video, go here and watch it on AdobeTV.
Flash10 and PixelBender is going to be awesome
Not a day goes by that I don’t hear of some new Adobe technique or technology that I want to learn. Today was no different. I started reading about Flash Player 10 and came across the Pixel Bender Toolkit. I’m not going to rehash what Adobe has already documented here, but I will show it to you.
webmonster pixel bended
This is an example using Ryan Taylor’s HSL Pixel Bender kernel. Check out the Pixel Bender Toolkit:Gallery for some other sweet filters.
OSX FlexBuilder Java Heap Space error
Here’s an error I’ve run into from time to time while programming Flex on OSX
[compc] Error: Java heap space
[compc] java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space
This error was a real pain in the arse. I found a lot of people having similar issues and they all fixed this problem by setting ANT_OPTS as an environment variable to increase the memory size. This didn’t work for me. I set ANT_OPTS in my .profile, as well as in .MacOSX/environment.plist. No luck. I never figured out why the environment variable route didn’t work, but I was able to fix this error within Eclipse.
If you run into this error while running Ant build scripts, try the following steps.
- Run Menu > External Tools > Open External Tools Dialog…
- Select your Ant build file on the left
- Click the JRE tab on the right
- Enter “-Xmx640m” in the VM arguments field ( without quotes )
- Click Apply, then Run
Flex JRE preferences
Hopefully this will get you going.
Buzzkiller.net got the fickes treatment back in the day
Here’s a side project I did back in 2002. It was a layout redo for one of my favorite websites of the dotcom era, buzzkiller.net. This is a collection of writers who were fed up with buzzwords of the time and where doing something about it.
At the time, I was working for a company that wanted to be much larger, and loved to use these sort of buzzwords and catch-phrases all the time. Having to read these emails was a bit of a chore, but not quite as bad as some of the shizz buzzkiller was documenting. These guys are actual writers, so I can imagine how irate they must have been having to deal with this day in and day out.
So here’s a before and after shot of buzzkiller.net.
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- Core Memory
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- Buzzkiller after redo
Buzzkiller.net is still going strong today, but now has a cleaner blogeresque theme going on. No worries, I can always cruise over to archive.org and pull up this design whenever I want to logon and surf down memory lane.
I still keep in contact theRedWorm. You’ve probably read his work in a handful of magazines. While he’s written for countless publications, I remember his work from Wired the most. My favorite is the article he did for Wired when he went through NASA’s hypergravity test. He flatlined for four seconds then came back and wrote an article about it. How wicked is that? In case you didn’t see this article you can read it here. I highly recommend checking it out.
Anyways, if you’re into rhobust, scaleable, highly integrated, synergistic komono opening writing,
check out this buzzword conversion chart. It should help you get through your next meeting or company ra-ra email a little easier.
10 .9 . 8 – A website becomes a man
Tonight is the next step in this year’s internet experiment. As you can see, I have upgraded the html page to a rhobust, synergy of bleeding edge, web two point oh! technologies. Ipso Facto, el WordPress-o.
This was the year I decided to bring it to the internets. Since I write code for a living, it’s been an endless dream to built the perfect CMS to power my name dot com. The constant struggle over which technology to use, how simple or complex to make it, and the endless ‘oh yeah’s. So I decided to roll old school and made one large html page. That was fun for a while, but I’m done the “webmaster” thing. I’m very excited and impressed with WordPress. Now if I can only figure out the rest of the system. So many themes, so many widgets, so little time.
So now it’s live, and on to the dribble. After the jump?
Been checking out Fuser lately. I had mistaken them for another Feed Aggregator, but turns out they do email and social. Gotta say it’s starting to grow on me. Another part of this year’s internet experiment was to dive back into the scene through RSS and the major social sites. I was cooking for a while, but started to get data burnout. I had to cut down on the input.
Since then I’ve steared clear of aggregators. I’ve gotten off RSS for Twitter and haven’t looked back. While I don’t see myself using Fuser everyday, I can see myself using it. It’s starting to grow on me now that I know it’s not a Flex app. Now I’m actually digging the BeOS-ish bubbly design. When I found the Exchange integration, that’s when I knew I’d be coming back.
Can’t wait to see what new site I’ll find tomorrow.
I am an award winning developer
Back in my VISTA IT days, Tommy and I put together a multi tier Cisco IP Phone management system. Remedy was the management platform, which was integrated to use Cisco Call Manager’s MS SQL database. Classic ASP was the server side web language. The end clients were Cisco 7960 IP Phones, and web browsers.
The 7960 IP phones are essentially dumb terminals with an embedded xml service browser. These lightweight xml services are transformed into ui on the phone just like html is transformed in your web browser.
When you setup a new phone, you have to register it’s MAC with your Call Manager server. Next, you have to subscribe each phone to any service that you want to make available to that user. Kind of like subscribing to an RSS feed today.
I built all sorts of apps for these phones just like I would a traditional browser. Hotel software, traffic software, flight tracking softwaare, etc. In fact, it was at the same time that Pappa Johns first introduced their online ordering sytem. I contacted PJ’s about their new service and tried to setup a proof of concept for The Innovation Through Convergence Expo, but they declined.
So our big idea for the show was an ip phone service management application. This was a big convenience app since back then you had to configure each phone, and the services manually. You’d have to register the phone, then assign services to each phone. Now do this for each phone in your office, keeping in mind that not everybody has access to the same services. Talk about a pain. So what we did was take the phone management piece out of Call Manager and used Remedy to handle that. You still need to register each phone with your server, but that’s it.
At the time, Cisco’s Call Manager ran on top of MS SQL server. Our Remedy system, and our ASP also ran on MS SQL, so it was an easy integration. So once you had your phones registerred with CallManager, you could log into the Remedy system and manage all your phones, and their available services with the same ease of a regular CMS system.
By running the management piece in Remedy, we received the following value adds :
- Familiar management interface ( we were a big Remedy shop )
- Access Control to services — Groups, Roles, etc… ( I don’t remember Call Manager doing this back then )
- Floating user accounts ( log in to phone or browser )
- Quick and easy updates to one or many phones ( Call Manager was one phone at a time )
- Remedy’s data was in sync with Call Manager’s ( we were a Remedy integration shop too )
I’m sure the application had a few more bells and whistles, but that’s what I can remember. The final thing that I was really proud of was the browser piece. While these web services were Cisco IP Phone specific, I built in some XSL / XSLT translation magic which allowed regular browsers to run the same applications.
This was mostly for testing and debugging, but it made for cool web integrations. These web services in the browser equated to web2.0 widgets. This wasn’t a big sell, but it was a cool concept to show off at the show. In fact, most people just didn’t understand what was going on. We had a cisco phone with it’s green screen, and a laptop running the exact same apps side by side. Since this app had user management, you could log in and use the same services from anywhere.
Funny thing about all this. I thought this application was such a joke compared to the things we were building at the time. I was really just excited to get out of my office and go to Dallas. I had no expectations of winning anything, and we did.
Sometimes I wonder if this was really just a pat on the head from cisco for being a partner. Either way, it’s pretty cool. After winning the award, Ron Pike and I went out by the elevators and threw our bouncy balls down into the lobby. SIX STORIES BELOW! All week we had been planning out the time, and how hard we’d have to throw the balls so they would bounce across the lobby and into the main fountain down below. We never got to practice since the lobby was always swarming with other conventioneers. Plus, these bouncy balls are the medium sized scwag balls you get at conferences that scream when you bounce them. You know the ones. They sound like a kid’s laser gun and have the pupil burning leds in them.
Yeah, we got some yells from the people down below, but that’s just how we roll.
Best Innovative Single Award from Cisco
I had cable, Fletch has the internet
My latest daddy revelation was Fletch is part of the internet generation. To me, the internet will always be like Love…. exciting and new. To Fletch, the internet will be like cable tv. You just assume everybody has it.
It’s funny rememberring cable being the hot thing back when I was in grade school. Back when fraggle rock was the cool show because it was on a pay channel. Way way back when MTV acutally rocked and played music videos pretty much non stop. By the time Fletch reaches gradeschool, I bet MTV will be the new CW.
The exciting part is the internet has already far exceeded the entertainment factor my cable provides me. Granted, my cable provider is substandard to say the least. ( HINT : they rhyme with komkast ) Realizing that I get all my fuel from the web makes me wonder on what devices Fletch will be receiving data from.
So now the fun part. The first two videos win my “best thing I’ve seen all day” award. The next few are blasts from the past, explaining some of my musings. Enjoy the inter-tainment!!
People in Order (correct version)
CES 2008: Bill Gates’ Last Day at the Office
The Love Boat
Fraggle Rock in english for my atlanta homies
( originally posted Jan 2007 )
