Wikis, like Wikipedia, are great tools for the creation and organization of content. The one thing that gets in the way however, is the special syntax needed to mark-up pages. Links are created by wrapping text in double brackets like [[ and ]]. Extra functionality can be expanded with different characters but honestly, it’s a lot to keep track of.
It’s hard enough formulating the words stuck in your head into a clear, well-written piece of content. Trying to translate your idea into cryptic wiki syntax is a brain-fart waiting to happen. For most folks introduced to an inter-office wiki, the syntax is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. You can kiss any chance of adoption goodbye when you explain that to bold text you need to have three single-quotes on each side of the text.
Thank goodness the MediaWiki+FCKeditor project is around. The goal is to build a usable WYSIWYG editor for the MediaWiki software (and they’re on the right track). Installing the extension is as simple as downloading a folder, copying it to your extensions directory, and adding a line to your localsettings.php file. Then presto, an easy to use interface that sits on top of the edit field translating hairy wiki-syntax to their visual equivalents. If your users can figure out how to use Microsoft Word, then they can understand the MediaWiki+FCKeditor extension. But fear not my die-hard wiki wranglers, the plugin lets you easily switch back and forth between the WYSIWYG editor and wiki syntax.
If you need to give it a try, check it out on this Sandbox page.
So adding one simple extension can make it easier for wiki-novices to get involved creating and editing content while staying out-of-the-way of the wiki-pros. If you need to get normal people involved with a wiki, make sure to add the MediaWiki+FCKeditor plugin to make life easier for everyone.
One of my favorite Android apps, City Caller ID, is no more today. The simple app displayed the city and state of the incoming phone number when you receive a call. Apparently the technology for displaying this information is patented by Cequint who has sued the developer of the free app. At first the developer was asking for help with donations and legal advice, but as of Saturday night, he has given up.
I can’t believe something like this can even be patented! From a programming perspective, it’s a fairly simple app. All of the area code data can be found on a site like http://www.bennetyee.org/ucsd-pages/area.html. When you get a call on your phone, a program can pull the first 3 digits and do a simple lookup for what state the phone number is issued in. It looks like no one will have the chance to download the app now, but I wonder what will happen to those lucky few like me who have already downloaded it?
I don’t think this will be the last Android city/state app for incoming calls as a Cequint employee introduced himself on an Android forum. Something must be up.
There are many things I would like to accomplish in 2010 (exercise more, lose weight, redo my website, create a new logo for myself, release some personal projects, read more books, read less feeds, get married etc.) But I can’t do any of those things unless I organize and plan my projects out more.
I’ve tried many things in the past to try and get organized including e-mailing myself, setting up a personal wiki, and various software tools. But I finally found something that works called GQueues.
GQueues is what you would get if GMail was a to-do app. With GQueues you can
I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and I am really happy with how easy it fits into how I work. It’s a simple organizational tool that doesn’t get in your way when you’re trying to get something done.
Picasa 3.5 brings a new feature that scans your photo library looking for faces so you can tag people in your photos. This walkthrough video embedded below from Google covers the basics of people tagging. There is also this written guide.
First Impressions
The face detection technology built into Picasa 3.5 works ok. The scanning processes is slow but Google is aware of this problem. When it works, Picasa can group together common faces making tagging people a breeze. But when it doesn’t work you can get all kinds of wrong matches which are tedious to go through and correct. It’s certainly not something you can set and forget as you will need to spend some time double checking the suggested matches.
With that said there are a few tips and tricks to make the process a little easier. Most of the following info was culled from a help forum post.
Tips for better tagging
Set the suggestion and cluster threshold to 85. By default both of these values are set at 80. You can change this in the following locations:
I found a noticeable decrease in false positives by bumping this setting up a notch, especially if your photo library is greater than about 10,000 photos.
Be careful tagging blurry faced photos. When you have a bunch of blurry faces attributed to a person, the number of false positives goes way up as Picasa struggles to make a vague connection.
To see the unknown faces for only one folder at a time just do a search for the name of the folder and select it from the auto suggest list that drops down from the search box. Now you can easily go through the unnamed people for that folder alone cutting out the noise of unnamed people from other photos.
When you’re combing through a bunch of faces, turn on the Faces filter at the top of the Picasa window. This will hide any photos that don’t have any faces in them saving you a bit of time when moving from picture to picture.
How does Picasa’s facial recognition work?
Picasa scans the photo looking for facial patterns. When it finds a match, Picasa adds two pieces of information to a picasa.ini file (hidden by default) in the folder holding the picture. The face data is stored like this:
faces=rect64(907574589cc58a78),a30bebdb5c1a778d;
The first part, enclosed in rect64(…), is the relative coordinates for the rectangle around the face. The second set of characters after the comma is a unique identifier linking the face with a name in Picasa’s contact database which is stored in the following locations on your computer:
The 16 characters enclosed in rect64(…) is a 64-bit hexadecimal number which can be broken up into four 16-bit numbers used to identify the position of the rectangle used to mark the face. If you divide each of the four 16-bit numbers by the maximum unsigned 16-bit number (65535), you’ll get four numbers between 0 and 1 which give the relative coordinates for the face rectangle in the order: left, top, right, bottom. To calculate the absolute coordinates, multiply the left and right relative coordinates by the width of the image and multiply the top and bottom relative coordinates by the height of the image. This way the faces will always be identified even when the image is re-sized.
The fact that Picasa stores the tagged people data in an external data is less than ideal for some. The .NET program AvPicFaceXmpTagger reads Picasa 3.5 face definitions for a given list of pictures and writes them as XMP metadata tags inside the picture files. It can also add the person’s name as XMP keywords and/or IPTC keywords which can be read by other photo programs.
I haven’t tried it out myself but it is worth mentioning as a workaround until Google addresses this problem.
Overall the people tagging features introduced in Picasa 3.5 are a nice start but there is still a lot of work to be done. Hopefully the future improvements will be frequent and steady as this is an exciting new vector of information to make digging through photo collections a joy. Things will really get interesting when it will be able to talk to other photo services (like Facebook) to gather and sync and kinds of metadata.
Firebug is the web developer equivalent of a hammer to a carpenter. In other words without this valuable tool hundreds of thousands would not be able to do their job and make the web what it is today. So even small changes to the interface are going to ruffle some feathers.
I spent a good half day trying to figure out why my precious Firebug wasn’t behaving like its usual self. For one thing, it wasn’t showing JavaScript errors in the status bar icon like it usually does. It also displayed a message saying “Reload to activate window console” whenever I would bring it up. This makes debugging impossible if I have to keep refreshing the page everytime.
It turns out the Firebug developers made a teeny, tiny tweak to the interface. The screenshot on top is the newer Firebug, version 1.4. The bottom half of the screenshot is from an earlier version. See the difference?
The ‘X’ used to hide the Firebug window in older versions has been replaced with an Off button. Unfortunately the Firebug developers changed the behavior as well. The Off button deactivates Firebug for that website which explains why JavaScript errors disabled in the status icon. The button that I have come to accustomed to for minimizing the Firebug panel is that circular down-ward arrow about 50 pixels away.
This is a usability nightmare!
The hide Firebug functionality isn’t where the user expects it, especially for long-time users who have developed a muscle memory
The Off button is ambiguous to what the action does (a better word would be deactivate, though that doesn’t quite fit)
The Off buttons breaks away from the rest of the paradigm of the interface (icons are for actions like inspect, and pause while words are for different tabs)
and the Off button is a much larger than the minimize button even though the minimize button is used far more frequently than the off button
I now have to focus in order to minimize Firebug taking mental energy away from my task. If I’m not paying attention I can turn-off Firebug for the site I’m working on and then I would have to reload the page to get it working again. These sound like little things but compounded one hundred times and it can drive you batty.
So while the latest Firebug update is not technically broken, a poor interface decision sure makes it feel like a buggy mess.
This might be a couple years old but I just happened to stumble upon this feature last weekend. Google has always had shortcuts built into it’s search results for things like mathematical calculations (10! / 2 -12), definitions (define: boisterous ), and local weather results (weather 90210). With Subscribed Links, you can add your own custom functionality to specific searches like nutrition data for food items via CalorieLab.com or a list of the cheapest gas stations in your area by GasBuddy.
This is a neat customization that I’m surprised has n’t changed much since it was brought back nearly two years ago. Adding custom functionality to your searches is kind of like adding custom programs to your command line. My only complaint is they don’t behave like I expect them.
For example, the subscribed links are never near the top. They always seem to be mixed into other results. If I explicitly signed up for added functionality and I need to use a custom syntax like “gas prices 20906″, I expect the add-on to be the first result. The Weather Radar add-on is a bit too small and cramped to be of any real use. It also shows up four items down below Google’s default 5 day weather outlook which comes up on top.
I hope Google has plans to expand these search add-ons. I can only imagine there are heaps of companies that would like to provide an add-on that puts their products and services front and center in the crowded search results.
Firebug started as an indispensable Firefox extension which takes web development to a new level. But after 2 years since it’s initial 1.0 release, Firebug has grown into a platform with a host of extensions built right on top of it. Here are my top 5 Firebug extensions that every web developer should have installed.
#5 SenSEO – SenSEO is a handy checklist of key SEO criteria. This Firebug extension rates your page on a scale of 100 against Google’s webmaster guidelines. SenSEO is most important right before a big launch to catch any simple tweaks that you may have overlooked during development.
#4 CodeBurner – CodeBurner is an HTML and CSS reference right at your fingertips while you debug. It adds a Code Example tab which gives a brief description of the HTML tag or CSS property you have highlighted as well as a code sample so you can see the recommended usage. If that’s not enough, CodeBurner provides a link to the Sitepoint reference page which has everything you could ever want to know. Man, I wish I had this extension when I was learning HTML and CSS (let alone Firebug).
#3 FireFind – FireFind does only one thing but it does it well: finding elements. Using a CSS selector or XPath statement, FireFind will highlight all of the matching elements on the page. This makes it a breeze to test CSS selectors with your site right in front of you. To boot, it also features a count of all the elements found. Even though this is possible through Firebug’s console tab when any popular JavaScript library is included, FireFind makes the process straight-forward and painless.
#2 FireCookie – If you have ever had to debug JavaScript cookies then you’ll wonder how you got by without this extension. FireCookie lets you inspect and edit cookies on the fly including permissions, values, and the expiration time. You can even sort all of your cookies as well as filter them out by domain. And when testing a script for your audience that has cookies disabled, FireCookie provides a simple option to disable cookies globally or just for the current domain. Now working with cookies doesn’t have to be such a stale experience.
#1 YSlow – Serious web developers are obsessed with performance and YSlow provides a smorgasbord of tools for measuring the speed of a site. YSlow is built around 34 best practices for speeding up a website which is the result of extensive research by the Yahoo Performance team. The extension provides a letter grade of each practice with advice on how to squeeze out every little bit of extra performance.
Another handy view is the Components tool which gives you an insight into all of the componets of the page. There are a bevy of stats that can be analyzed to pinpoint bloated waste.
Finally, the statistics tool gives insight into the weight of your page for users with an empty cache and a primed cache.
If you have never given much thought to the performance of your site, YSlow makes it easy to dive right in.
What are some of your favorite Firefox extensions geared towards web development?
A couple of weeks ago I needed to fix a friends computer that suffered from an incurable case of BSoD syndrome. He had all of his data backed up to an external hard drive so the coast was clear to reformat and reinstall Windows. Piece of cake. The problem was how was I going to find all the right drivers to make his laptop useable again? He lost the drivers & utilities CD that came with his laptop. Enter DriverMax.
DriverMax is a free program that scans your system and provides links to the latest version of drivers for the particular hardware you have. The process is straightforward as DriverMax handles downloading and installing the files for you. It can even generate reports of all the hardware devices in your computer as well as what driver version is being used. This handy tool saved me loads of time by not having to scour the Internet for the right driver or figuring out which one is compatible with my system. You can leave it running in the system tray and it will notify you when a driver update is available but for my purposes, once the computer is up and humming along normally, I simply uninstall DriverMax.
The only downside I could think of is you have to sign-up for a free account to their forums in order to download drivers. It worked well for my friends laptop so if you need to do a clean sweep of a PC and you lost the driver disc that came with it, give DriverMax a whirl.
I just read over on Techcrunch that Picasa for the Mac is finally ready. You can get it at http://picasa.google.com/mac/. I wrote about the rumors of Picasa on the Mac 10 days short of a year ago. The Mac version is nearly identical to it’s PC counterpart, interface and all. Check out the overview video embedded below.
One of the main reasons I like Picasa over iPhoto, the free photo program that comes with every new Mac, is Picasa keeps your folders in tact not forcing you to keep your library in a specific hierarchy. Plus, I find Picasa more intuitive and easy to use.
Now I just need to figure out how to sync my photo library and information between my Mac and PC instances of Picasa.
If you haven’t tried Picasa yet, give it a whirl .It really is a great way to organize and edit photos.
Who needs fancy graphics and snazzy physics known in modern gaming? I prefer the creative, classic DOS games of yore to today’s hyper-real slaughter fests. Up until this weekend I had know idea how to play old DOS games on my Mac,and then I found Boxer.
Boxer is a DOS game emulator for OS X and is based on the open source project DOSBox. It packs a few little tricks to help you load and launch your games with ease. The problem is these tricks aren’t very obvious so I’ll give you a little walkthrough.
After downloading and installing Boxer, the first time you run it it will ask you to choose a designated game folder. Which ever folder you choose will auto-mount as your C: drive every time you start Boxer. From here you can navigate to the folder with your game in it and launch the .exe file. Wait, you don’t remember how to navigate around that black screen with a white blinking cursor? Yea neither did I.
Luckily Boxer makes it a snap to run your games straight from the Finder. Just go to the game folder and add ‘.boxer’ to the end of it’s name. Now you can double click the folder and it will automagically launch in Boxer. Some games require you to have a CD-ROM loaded but Boxer can handle that too! Just make a copy of the game folder inside the game folder and add a ‘.cdrom’ to the end of it’s name. Boxer will automatically detect it and mount it as a virtual CD for you. Can’t get much easier than that!
Other niceties include Mac friendly keyboard shortcuts like cmd+F for fullscreen view and cmd + up/cmd + down to increase/decrease the CPU speed. Other ones are listed on the Boxer site.
Now you can relive the gaming classics. If you need some ideas to get started take a look at the adventure game Sam and Max: Hit the Road or the first person that took the world by storm, Doom. Try your hand at the original Warcraft or one of my favorite turn-based strategy games Heroes of Might and Magic 2. Remember those old education games from the Learning Company like Treasure Mountain? There are a ton more games up for grabs at Abandonia, which is dedicated to abandoned DOS games and Squakenet.
Even thought these games might be old, they are still just as addictive. Be sure to give yourself some time to get sucked in.
