Posts from — November 2005

Many sites now provide feeds of their content which you can subscribe to. This simple technology allows you to use software called a ‘feed reader’ or ‘aggregator’ to read content from sites instead of visiting the site itself. Don’t be put off by the acronyms like XML or RSS – this is genuinely easy to do.

Why would I want to do it?

If you like to keep up to date with a number of sites, you can now do so more easily with a feed reader. You no longer have to go from site to site checking for new content. This technology allows you to keep up to date with the content from a large number of sites. Using a feed reader you can subscribe to a sites feed. You can now read the sites content in your feed reader and the site’s feed will automatically update. The feed reader will usually have a way to visually let you know when there is fresh content from a site you are subscribed to, so you can see at a glance which feeds you need to catch up on.

OK, so how do I do all this?

First, you’ll need a feed reader, or ‘aggregator’. You can install a feed reader on your computer so that you have access to it on your desktop, or if you prefer you can use an online feed reader. If you are not comfortable installing software on your computer then an online feed reader might suit you best.

The following three feed readers are popular:

• FeedDemon for Windows
• NetNewsWire for Mac OS X
• Bloglines which is Web based

Wikipedia has a list of news aggregators if you would like to explore some more options.

Bloglines, which is listed above as a popular online choice is very easy to use. Sign up with them and when you log in you will see a subscribe button prominently placed on the screen. You will then be brought to a screen where you can enter the url (web address) of a site or feed. If you enter a website address, the feed reader will attempt to discover where that site’s feed is and subscribe you to it. If the feed reader cannot find the feed you will have to enter the feed manually.

How do I know where a site’s feed is?

A lot of sites include a text link or button which leads to their feed. The trouble is there are many different names and acronyms in use to alert you to a site’s feed. This is partly to do with the different technologies being used to offer feeds, but we won’t worry about that now. The fact is you have probably seen these links or buttons but you may not have known what they were. A common button is a small orange button with white writing on it which might say one of the following:

• RSS
• XML
• Webfeed
• Feed
• Subscribe

(Click on any of the terms to read the wikipedia entry for them)

These buttons are usually links to the url (web address) of the feed for that site or blog. That is the url you need to give to your ‘feed reader’ or ‘aggregator’ in order to subscribe.

That’s it?

Well, in a nutshell, yes:

1. Choose a feed reader
2. Tell your feed reader where the feeds you like are
3. Read all your favourite sites in one fell swoop

There must be more!

These are the basics, if you don’t feel comfortable with the concepts yet, have a look at these:

• Using RSS and Atom, from a non-technical standpoint.
• What Does Syndicate This Site Mean?
• an introduction to weblogs, part two: syndication
• About.com’s Top 10 Windows RSS Feed Readers / News Aggregator

So where are the feeds for this site?

The feeds for this site are as follows:

• http://blog.miloco.com/atom
• http://blog.miloco.com/rss
• http://blog.miloco.com/rss2
• http://blog.miloco.com/rdf

Props Where Props are Due

Thanks very much to Frankp of 9mmfilm.com for most of the text of this page. You can check out his site here. You can also check out his original post giving guidelines for how to set up your own feed in a user friendly manner.

Watched The Pacifier with Vin Diesel last night, and it was an enjoyable film – not GREAT, but still enjoyable.

It’s a Disney film, and it shows. The beginning action scenes that kick off the plot and are used to establish that Diesel is a “tough dude”, are almost laughable. But, you get the impression that they’re supposed to be laughable – again, it’s a Disney film! If you put yourself in the mindset of a 7 yr old (which, is very easy for me to do! ) you’d probably enjoy them too.

The story is good, a bit predictable, but good, and you know you can count on a happy ending.

Plot is straight forward, with a few of what were meant to be “twists” being pretty obvious if you were thinking about it. But, most kids wouldn’t, and they would probably be appropriately surprised.

Diesel does a good job of being tough but likeable, and his growing attachment to the kids is believable. A lot of times in movies like this, they don’t show enough character interaction or allow enough time for you to actually believe that the tough guy has gone from drill sergeant to softie. But, not so here – well done Vin.

Lauren Graham, Diesel’s love interest, is well cast. It’s Lorelai Gilmore as a Principal – same character different job. But, it works well nonetheless.

Brad Garrett plays comedic relief in his role as VP Murney, and he IS funny. But, sometimes its pretty painful to watch. As my wife said during the film – “Gosh, I hope they paid him a lot of money to do this…” Again, not surprisingly, its Robert Barone as a VP. Same goofy character, but somehow it works.

Overall, an enjoyable film that yer kids will probably love. I bought it (before I saw it), but you can probably get away with Netflixing it.

Favorite quote – “This is going to be done MY WAY! No highway option!”

I’ve spent most of my sleeping hours skinning my blog to look just like my website! I am now a Master Blogger Skinner. HA! Yeah, right… More like I’m just starting to understand how these things are actually put together.

Honestly, it is rather simple if you understand CSS, but I’m just getting used to the power of CSS. I’ve been using it for years on the fringes of my web designs – I’ve mostly used ASP variables, etc. to do what CSS does. What can I say, I’m old school…

But, now I’m getting into CSS, and this blog skin is a first foray into more complicated item decoration. I’m still waiting to dive even deeper in, doing a complete layout in CSS. To see the real power of CSS in layout, check out css Zen Garden. As an example, this page and this page share the same HTML – only their Style Sheets are different!! Now, that’s amazing!

*SIGH* I am but a Padawan… :^)

I’ve also added an XML feed (Blogger’s built in ATOM feed), and also put in a quick-link to subscribe to my blog on Bloglines. I’ve noticed that there are lots of neat things to do with Feeds, ATOM and RSS..

Some nifty sites to check out:

• FeedBurner – Takes your Blogger ATOM feed and makes it RSS. But, its an old RSS standard. From the website – “FeedBurner helps bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers get more value from the content they create.”
• Bloglet - Makes it simple to allow people to get email updates when you post to your blog.
• FeedBlitz - Ditto on Bloglet
• RSSWorkshop - A tutorial with a bunch of info.
• RSSTutorial - Another set of info with links to tools, etc.

Its super easy to set this stuff up, and best of all, its all free!

So, sucked in by a 3 fer $25 previously viewed deal at BB or Hollywood, I dont remember which, I bought Kingdom of Heaven.

I must say, I really loved this movie… Great story, great acting, great action and a “hot” topic as well. Being a devout Christian, I was a bit wary of how it would portray those of my faith, but I think it was very fair.

To quote Hospitaler in the movie – “I’ve seen fanatics of all faiths do horrendous things, calling it God’s Will…”

Anyway, I think it was very well done, and showed that people will sometimes use religion as a mask to cover their own ambition or greed. But, one who has true faith in God, cannot help but have his actions reflect it.

“It is a Kingdom of Conscience or it is Nothing”.

Bloom was great, Niesen, though brief, was as good as ever.

The extras were good too – there’s like a 1.5-2 hour “Making Of” from all points and perspectives, pre-during-post production from the POV of Director, Producers, Actors, etc. The sets, etc. were amazing too – again, watch the extras to point out JUST how cool they were…

This is among my Fav’s. Great movie!

So, I just hooked up a second 20 inch monitor to my rig, and I must say I don’t know how I ever lived without it!

Using Photoshop is SO much easier when you can actually SEE what you are doing. All my palettes go on the second monitor, and I get a full view of the doc.

Seeing web pages in different resolutions is also easy – just set up the second monitor for whatever target resolution you want, and with the flick of a mouse you know exactly what your page looks like. No more jumping back and forth with your own monitor to 1024×768 or GASP 800×600. In fact, if you REALLY want to get crazy, you can set your main monitor to the target res, and then use the extra real estate from monitor 2 to make up for the lack of space. This way, you are designing with the proper constraints from the get go…

Also, web surfing is great this way – ever looking up 2 things at once and want to compare information? BAM – one page on one monitor, one page on another!

Set up photo slide show for monitor 2 when you are using it – neat way to see all your memories while you work!

I did have some challenges getting it up and running though, which frankly surprised me. I’m using a GEFORCE 6800 with 128 MB of RAM, so had plenty of buffer to run both at 1280×1024. But when I booted Windows with both connected, and “activated” monitor 2, I would get a hang, and then a hard crash reset of the machine. NOT GOOD. If I booted without the two monitors, and connected the second after the machine was up and running, I could get a “Horizontal Span” working with ForceWARE from NVIDIA, but DualView mode would crash just like Windows.

I started to suspect a power issue because of the hard boot, but I’ve got a 510W Antec TrueBlue power supply in the puppy. I was hoping it wasn’t that, because the next step up is a 850W power supply from Power PC and Cooling… FOR $400!!! All my drivers were up to date though, so what else could it be? I was even on a completely fresh install of WinXP, so it couldn’t have been a moldy OS that was the problem.

Anyway, I decided to jump off the deep end, and ring up customer support for eVGA, the MFG of my Video card. I immediately put through to someone who took my name and number and said that I would be called back in 30 minutes or less.

Well, having no choice, I very skeptically gave him my info, and then waited for the call. I was pleasantly surprised when I actually got the call back, and a helpful person was on the other end of the phone.

He immediately asked me about the power supply – SEE, I wasn’t nuts – but then dismissed it given the size of the supply. Next he asked about the drivers – par for the course, so far – and I told him that I was up to date with the latest ForceWare stuff from NVIDIA. He surprised me again by recommending that I rollback to the 77.77 version of the drivers, which I could get from their site.

He said boot into safe mode and uninstall the current drivers with the Add / Remove Programs control panel, and then use a utility called Driver Cleaner, from www.drivercleaner.net to really clean it all out. Then, boot normally and install the 77.77 drivers.

I really didn’t think all this was going to work, but in fact it worked great.

My only concern now is the length of time that I can continue to use these drivers that are 3 revs old. Eventually there will be a game that won’t work well with them, and I’ll need an update.

If they don’t release and update soon that will work for me, I’m going to be facing a major dilemma: Dual Monitor Goodness or New Game Nirvana?

Time will tell…

So, I’ve been working on a lot of web projects lately – just put up a new web page for MILOCO.

You can see it at www.miloco.com – its my first time using the Adobe design flow. From Photoshop to ImageReady, etc. I haven’t jumped into GoLive yet, but I probably will sometime in the future. Right now I’m still a Dreamweaver fan – and Visual Studio.NET for programming.

I wish that either Dreamweaver had better integration with .NET technologies, or that VS.NET had a better page DESIGNER. Designing in one, and programming in the other is really a PITA, as they both add their own little craplets to pages.

That’s one of the reasons I’ve jumped to Adobe – I’m hoping that they help not only the overall design, but the workflow as well.

So far, its all still a PITA. :^)

Here’s my 2 cents (well, judging by the size of this, maybe my 20 cents!) on the potential of a new Star Trek movie, and on the franchise in general:

The hardcore Star Trek fans are waaaayy harder on the standards than Paramount will be, or should be.

I think that a good WIDE appeal movie is what is necessary to breathe life back into the franchise. To do that, I agree with many who have written on the subject, that a prequel is a bad idea. There is too much history to line up with and get right without it sucking. AND, it is only interesting to those who already care and know about the existing body of work. That’s the crux with the prequel – it is of interest to less people, and the people that it is of interest to will be the harshest of critics.

I say fast forward to the future. Show us some advanced weaponry – show us massive political upheaval. Show us a trilogy that has the death and resurrection of Starfleet, or the death and evolution of Starfleet. Heck, show us the Starfleet that kept fuxing with the Enterprise crew by jumping back in time (but PLEASE, leave the time travel out of it – to easy to step on your own foot). Well, OK – you can jump back in time to get T’Pol so she can be in whatever movie they do next, but THAT’S IT on the time travel. Maybe she’ll finally figure out that the Vulcan Science Directorate doesn’t have it all figured out…

The fact is that a Trek movie or show is expensive to make, so it has to be widely appealing to make it to general distribution. If the franchise becomes widely popular again, maybe some of the stuff that we as fans want to see will come out direct to DVD for those of us that care, but that is a long shot.

People get old, and new people have to replace them to keep it interesting. I don’t want to see Sisko looking fat, old and droopy – like they did with Frakes and Sirtis in the final episode of Enterprise which was entitled These Are the Voyages… We ALL get that way, but its depressing and people don’t want to see it. It’s the Bond phenomenon, but in space…

I think that today’s movie culture is more about EPIC than it is about straight character. Star Trek was always more “focused” in its scope – two ships off in some sector battling with wits and phasers. I think that is a major contributing factor to why something like Enterprise or even Nemesis did so poorly, yet the new Star Wars films, being equally flawed, are in the top tier in earnings. They were epic!

Lord OT Rings was epic too, but they were very well done, so that you still cared about the individual characters (even after just the first film…) so it is certainly doable. Also, to be widely appealing, it has to appeal to kids. Kids loved Starwars (crap, there was – count them – TWELVE Darth Vaders at our Halloween party this year – out of 20 kids!!!). They also loved LOTR…

I say take the Trek universe and make it epic, give us some heartfelt characters, add in a few characters that the kids will dig, and mix it up with some wild imagination on technology. You’ll have a surefire winner that would breathe life into the franchise. THEN maybe Paramount will have open ears to another movie like Wrath of Kahn.