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December 22, 2005

Spell it out

What's wrong with the image below? Note that there's weather info for "Today" and "Tomorrow", both fully spelled out. Yet, why can't "they" spell out the days of the week. I find it particularly funny that on "Sun", we're expecting showers.

Princeton Weather

December 17, 2005

Gym Construction Camera

Watch the construction of the new gymnasium at Princeton Academy of the Sacred Heart.

I installed a wireless network camera that FTP's images to the school's web server every 10 minutes between 7am and 5pm. One of the options for the image filename is a "base name" followed by a string representing the current date and time. I then wrote a PHP script that, when the page is requested by a browser, walks through the files in the image directory and displays the one with the latest timestamp on the file.

What I'm looking forward to is creating the time-lapse movie of all the images once the building is complete. Quicktime has a very simple mechanism for doing this. All you do is choose "Open Image Sequence..." under the File menu and point it to the first image in the sequence. It then imports the files, using the increasing sequence number in each filename, to create a movie. You have complete control over the rate at which the images are presented too.

I'll probably create the first sequence once the outer shell of the building is complete and post it on the school web site (and perhaps here as well).

December 16, 2005

TextMate: The Missing Editor for OS X

TextMate: The Missing Editor for OS X is quite the wonderful editor for Mac OS X. It has very nice support for various languages as well as shell integration and other features too numerous to mention. If you develop on a Mac, this is the editor. That said, I've heard others say that "any editor is better than a new editor". This can be quite true for someone who has been developing for years on end. I know several who swear by emacs, due to the level of knowledge of the tool and the productivity they get from its inherent flexibility and programmability. I'm not in that boat and think I've found the right editor for the kind of work I am now involved in, standards-based web site development in XHTML & CSS.

December 13, 2005

pop.gmail.com - SSL Certificate Expired

Perhaps it's just a single server; perhaps it's all of them, but...the server(s) that respond to pop.gmail.com when using Google Mail via POP appear to have an expired certificate, preventing at least some (Apple Mail included) mail clients to fail when attempting to retrieve their mail.

I have posted a message on the Gmail Help Discussion Google group. Since my posting of a reply to someone else's report of the problem, the number of responses to the original post has hit 29 in about 3 minutes.

Beyond that, I'm not really sure what to do about this, other than to blog. As with most of the big players, it's hard to get a phone number or email address to provide feedback. Hopefully, someone at G is watching or someone AT G is having the same problem as the "rest of us".

Stay tuned...

[UPDATE]: After 50+ messages to the Gmail Help Discussion Group, "we all" seemed to locate the "contact us" link on the Gmail help page. It seems that the Gmail team got enough of these reports to respond to and appear to be working on the problem. After first receiving a canned response from Gmail support asking me to do a lot of canned follow-up and respond with details if those attempts were unsuccessful, I received a very brief email from the Gmail team, stating:

Hello,

Thanks for your report. We are aware of this problem, and our engineers are working diligently to find a solution.

We apologize for any inconvenience this issue may have caused.

Sincerely,

The Gmail Team

More to stay tuned for...

[UPDATE]: The problem appears to be fixed, as of 4:30pm EST. Less than 2 hours of outage. Not too bad.

[FINAL UPDATE]: The Gmail team wrote back once again to say...

Hello,

Thanks for your report. We apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced. The issue you described should now be resolved. If you continue to experience difficulties, please respond to this message, and we'll investigate further.

Sincerely,

The Gmail Team

I'm impressed.

December 10, 2005

Google Earth for Mac beta can be found here...

You can find the beta for Google Earth for Mac here. It's simply amazing!

Google-Earth

December 9, 2005

Dave doesn't want pictures of snow in New Jersey?

Dave Winer says he wants pictures of snow in New York and Boston. Yo, Dave! What's wrong with pictures of snow in New Jersey?

By the way...what's wrong with this picture?


Snowgrill2

December 6, 2005

Handy Mac utilities

Just yesterday, I started using two Mac utilities, both of which were new to me, but have been around for a while.

The first is called Taboo. The search for Taboo was borne of a major frustration with Safari. Having become addicted to tabbed browsing, and the dangerous adjacency of the 'Q' and 'W' keys, I too often wind up quitting Safari completely when all I really wanted to do was close the current tab. Well, Taboo offers the necessary warning, saving much head pain. I was in the middle of writing notes using Instiki as a personal note-taking app and was in the middle of taking notes at An Event Apart (which was a great experience, by the way), when I managed to quit Safari and lose about a half-hour of unsaved notes. Now, with Taboo, that will not happen again; unless, of course, I manage to click right on through the warning dialogue.

The second, and way cool app, is called Mousepose, prounouced mouse-poh-zay, like Apple's expose, but with a mouse instead. What Mousepose does is give you a hot key combination (of your choosing) that puts a "spotlight" on the mouse position. It then can either time out or the same key combination removes the spotlight. Eric Meyer was using this during his presentation yesterday and it was very useful for highlighting portions of the screen. Working at home on a laptop with a second monitor to add display space, it is incredibly useful in simply locating the cursor.

Mousepose

I recommend both of these to any Mac user who has such needs.