The content on this site is my own and does not necessarily represent my employer’s positions, strategies or opinions.
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Second Life’s virtual money can become real-life cash – washingtonpost.com
“Last year, as the physical economy withered, Second Life’s economy blossomed, with user-to-user transactions topping $567 million in actual U.S. currency, a 65 percent jump over 2008. About 770,000 unique users made repeat visits to Second Life in December, and the users, known as residents, cashed out $55 million of their Second Life earnings last year, transferring that money to PayPal accounts.”
tags: second-life, virtual-world
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What to expect from HTML 5 | Developer World – InfoWorld
“HTML 5 aims to change all that. When it is finalized, the new standard will include tags and APIs for improved interactivity, multimedia, and localization. As experimental support for HTML 5 features has crept into the current crop of Web browsers, some developers have even begun voicing hope that this new, modernized HTML will free them from reliance on proprietary plug-ins such as Flash, QuickTime, and Silverlight.”
tags: HTML
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Major League Baseball to Stream ESPN Events – NYTimes.com
“ESPN had previously used the services of Move Networks, based in American Fork, Utah. But Move’s system required that customers download a special video player that uses Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, said John Kosner, senior vice president of ESPN Digital Media. The network wanted to make its site easier to use by moving to a supplier that used Adobe’s popular Flash software, which operates within the Web browser.”
tags: baseball, espn, silverlight, microsoft
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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The web designer’s guide to WordPress | News | TechRadar UK
“So what can WordPress do for designers? A lot, my friends! First and foremost, WordPress is a CMS.”
tags: wordpress, cms, open-source
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How to run almost any OS on your Mac | News | TechRadar UK
“In fact, as a Mac user, you’re uniquely positioned because an Intel Mac is the only computer in the world that can legally run all three major operating systems, Mac OS, Windows and Linux. Indeed, you can, if you like, load all three on the same computer and pick which one you want to load when you switch your Mac on.”
tags: mac, osx, linux, virtualization
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent my employer’s positions, strategies or opinions, especially if they are about the guitar, fishing, gardening, carpentry, house painting, and musical tastes.
Blog entries before 2010 are in my Archived Blog.
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Is monogamy good for technology? | The Open Road – CNET News
“Apple creates wonderful technology. I’ve long been a customer. But I don’t want it to be my only vendor, any more than I wanted Microsoft to be such. I’m therefore betting on Google to break the choke hold and will happily pay it for its troubles.”
tags: apple, google, microsoft, ubuntu, open-source
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Cassidy: Geek girls make a point at Linux Expo – San Jose Mercury News
“In fact, it’s in their blood, this affinity for open source — software that is often free and typically improved upon by groups of volunteers. Karsten Wade, the Wade sisters’ dad, works for Red Hat, a company that sells open-source products and services to businesses. His job is to nurture the community of Red Hat users who offer ideas and programming code for building on the company’s products.”
tags: red-hat, open-source
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
I’ve recently started using the Google Chrome web browser and have made it the default over Firefox on several of my machines. Though Firefox has thousands of addons, or extensions, I only really use about half a dozen. That means when I move to a different browser I might be missing some functionality, but not a lot.
Here are the first three Google Chrome extensions I’ve started using, the first two of which are direct replacements for their Firefox counterparts.
- The Diigo bookmark extension. Diigo is a “Web Highlighter and Sticky Notes, Online Bookmarking and Annotation, Personal Learning Network.” I use it to produce the Daily Links that are published on this blog. I’ve run hot and cold on Diigo over the last few years, but I’m back to using it as the best thing around to save and share things that I’ve read on the web.
- XMarks Bookmark Synch tool. XMarks can save both bookmarks and passwords across multiple machines and multiple browsers, though I only use it for bookmarks. When I fire up a new machine and install a new Linux image, I know I can have all my bookmarks ready to go in a few minutes. Google Chrome also has synchronization capability, but it is limited to that browser, though on multiple operating systems. XMarks works in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer.
- TooManyTabs. As you open more and more tabbed windows, the tabs get narrower and narrower, so much so that you can’t read the labels. By clicking the TooManyTabs but, a new window opens up that clearly shows all your windows and what’s in them. Thanks to Kelvin Lawrence for his recommendation of this extension.
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UbuntuGlobalJam – Ubuntu Wiki
“The Ubuntu Global Jam is an incredible opportunity for the Ubuntu community to unite together around the weekend of 26th – 28th March 2010 to work together to improve Ubuntu. Everyone is able to contribute to the Jam, and everyone is welcome and encouraged to get involved. Curious about how to make a real difference to Ubuntu? This is a great chance to make that difference. “
tags: ubuntu, linux
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OpenSim deployment gets easier – Hypergrid Business
“University of California at Irvine professor Christa Lopes (”Diva Canto”) has released an opensim distribution already pre-configured with most popular settings, saving a potential grid operator hours of work getting all the settings right.”
tags: OpenSim, virtual-world
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What’s the easiest way to install OpenSim? – Hypergrid Business
Good review of ready made options to run the OpenSim virtual world server.
tags: OpenSim, virtual-world
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IBM Lotus Collaboration Apps to Run on Apple iPad, iPhone – Messaging and Collaboration from eWeek
“IBM said at Macworld that IBM’s Lotus Connections social networking suite, Lotus Sametime instant messaging and Lotus Quickr team collaboration suite will be available for the iPhone, iPod Touch and computers running Apple’s Mac operating system. IBM also made a vague commitment to build Lotus apps for the iPad. That IBM, which enjoys most of its success selling software for Microsoft Windows computers and even Linux machines, would increasingly support Apple platforms should no longer be a surprise. Businesses are acknowledging that employees are more comfortable using Macs instead of PCs because that is the machine they grew up using at home or in school.”
tags: ibm, lotus, mac, linux
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
For all the things I write about in this blog, some phrases come up over and over as the most popular search targets. It’s not my discussions of open standards or open source, or even my occasional ramblings about Dylan or Springsteen. The image below shows the top search phrases in descending order over the last five months.
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How to Become a Certified BBQ Judge – Associated Content – associatedcontent.com
“Have you ever watched a BBQ cook-off on television, or gone to one of these live events and thought that judges at these events had the best job in the world? Well they do. However, to get one of these coveted non-paying positions you have to become a Certified BBQ Judge, and this article will show you just how easy it is to meet this requirement.”
tags: bbq
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BuddyPress 1.2 released | WordPressious
“BuddyPress is a bundled collection of plugins and themes for creating a social network service around an installation of the popular open source blog engine WordPress MU.”
tags: buddypress, wordpress, social-networking
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Open Luna Foundation
“The OpenLuna Foundation seeks to return mankind to the lunar surface, first through robotic missions, followed by manned exploration, culminating in an eight person permanent outpost, and to do all of this in a way that it is accessible to everyone. Our research and technology will be open-source, we are privately funded, and one of our specific goals is to reach out to the community and educational systems to spread interest, enthusiasm, and involvement.”
tags: space, luna
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Late Last Year, Google Overtook Apple In WebKit Code Commits – washingtonpost.com
“Now, the author is quick to point out the caveats of the graph (and does so for four paragraphs), and notes that he was hesitant to even publish it because of how easy it is to misinterpret. The graph, while it shows commits, doesn’t weigh more important ones versus less important ones. Nor does it in any way measure the ways in which companies or individuals contribute to WebKit in other meaningful ways. That said, it does clearly show that in late 2009, Google surpassed Apple as the company that now contributes the most (again, in terms of commits) to the project.”
tags: apple, google, chrome, safari, browser, webkit
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Where are the Linux tablets? | Linux and Open Source | TechRepublic.com
“The Linux and open source community does not want to find itself back where it was in the mid-to-late 90’s, where it was relegated to servers and the desktops of fan-boys and uber-geeks. This is not where Linux wants to be. The last five years has blessed Linux with so much growth. But if Linux can not gain a foothold in the tablet PC market, that growth could wither away.”
tags: linux, tablet
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A fresher Linux desktop
“It’s been a long time in the coming but this year Linux will get a makeover, thanks to the Gnome project. In September the Gnome team, makers of one of the most popular desktop interfaces for Linux, will release version 3.0 of their desktop environment and they are promising “big user-visible changes”.”
tags: linux, gnome
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
I was having a conversation today with a friend and somehow we got onto the topic of support for ODF, the Open Document Format, in WordPress. Drupal has some import support for ODF word processing files and that effort appears to be quite active (in the sense that there was an update to the module yesterday).
Thinking of WordPress as a content management system, importing an ODF file means taking a word processing, presentation, or spreadsheet document and putting into a form that can be saved and displayed by WordPress, either in a blog post or a standalone page. For simple text, this would mean translating to HTML. Doing a bit more work, it could mean using HTML and CSS for formatting. Getting even fancier, it could incorporate extra JavaScript or PHP code to handle spreadsheets in a live manner.
Import is hard because you need to be able to do something with anything that’s in any document. If you can’t handle something, you had better tell the user what you decided to discard. A minimal import for word processing files, as I mentioned above, might respect all words in the text, paragraph structure, bold, italic, colors, headings, and a few other simple things. In this case I would think of the import as “take this file and do something sensible, if not perfect, with it.”
Export is easier to imagine. Given the range of things that can be done in WordPress posts and pages, I would think that only a relatively small subset of ODF would be needed beyond the packaging and some straightforward text markup. Here I would take as my model “what would this WordPress page look like if I printed it, and what ODF file would I have to create to generate equivalent output?”
Given this, I would tackle the export to ODF feature first, but there is a core question that needs to be answered. Why? That is, given a web page generated by WordPress, why do you need to generate ODF form? I must admit I’m somewhat strapped to come up with good reasons, though I could probably make up a couple.
It is more interesting to consider how to take documents created in ODF by something like Lotus Symphony and then import them into WordPress for publishing. That’s the key word: publishing. So though the problem is harder, having various ways of importing documents into WordPress from ODF would likely be much more useful.
Assuming this as the preferred direction of work and looking at how WordPress can be extended, it’s worthwhile to ask what you might do with plugins or themes to make the import even better. While I like the idea of the result being theme independent, having one or two plugins that added some cool support for imported spreadsheets or presentations could potentially be quite nice.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent my employer’s positions, strategies or opinions, especially if they are about the guitar, fishing, gardening, carpentry, house painting, and musical tastes.
Blog entries before 2010 are in my Archived Blog.
After working through a lot of issues with my website over the December holidays, I started to look for a more modern and, frankly, better looking theme. After trying a dozen or so, I finally settled on Atahualpa.
This theme had almost all the features I was looking for:
- Variable number of columns, so I could use two for full pages and three for those with blog entries.
- Customizable logo and header images.
- Built-in CSS support for printing.
- A professional looking design.
It doesn’t have automatic page navigation, but I can live with that for now. The theme has many ways to tweak it and allows you to “tiger stripe” tables (that is, alternate the color of rows). I turned this off, but it clearly represents a tremendous amount of work and refinement.
Incidentally, I generated the photos used in the header from images in my collection of screen wallpapers and backgrounds.
I just installed the Broken Link Checker plugin. It scans your blog entries and pages and gives you an nice report and way to fix any links that end up in the great web void rather than honest web pages.
Though I installed it for this, my current blog, I was mostly curious what it would say for my archived blog, which has over 3000 entries created over 5 1/2 years. I was nervous, in fact, because I was afraid that I would have to spend a lot of time tracking down and fixing links that were no longer valid.
The good news is that there are only 16 broken links. The bad news is that of the few I quickly checked, I can’t find web addresses that are valid and current. That is, the old content is either gone or is now so well hidden that I can’t locate it. This happens, of course, but is rather sad somehow. Some of the online articles were no longer there because they were from now defunct newspapers. A couple of MIA links were from major IT trades and, if I remember correctly, vanished after some company mergers.
Should you be thinking of moving your content, learn about “redirection,” the way to tell your site where to go when it gets a request for a page that has been moved. This can be done at several levels, from the Apache .htaccess file, to some HTML, PHP, or even via a WordPress plugin. There are other ways to do it as well, depending on how your site is built.
Think twice before casting your content, and your links, into the web void.
Effective January 1, 2010, my blog is split into current and archived versions.
Current blog
Please update your bookmarks and feed subscriptions as follows:
The address of the current blog is http://www.sutor.com/c/.
The link to the blog feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/BobSutor.
The blog comments feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/CommentsForBobSutor.
Archived blog
The address of the archived blog is http://www.sutor.com/newsite/blog-open/.
Here are the rolling three month sutor.com site stats from Google Analytics, plus 12 month previous stats. Percentages are calculated with respect to total numbers of hits. Statistics are computed from the first to the last days of the months listed. The up and down arrows compare the latest month listed with the percentages 12 months earlier, not the previous month.
Net Analysis:
Winners: Apple, Linux, Macintosh, Firefox, Chrome
Losers: Microsoft, Internet Explorer, Windows, Opera
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December, 2008 |
October, 2009 |
November, 2009 |
December, 2009 |
| Browser |
| Firefox |
47.24% |
56.45% |
57.25% |
↑ 55.85% |
| Internet Explorer |
36.31% |
21.91% |
22.89% |
↓ 23.35% |
| Safari |
7.72% |
7.86% |
7.78% |
↑ 7.99% |
| Chrome |
3.31% |
6.87% |
6.85% |
↑ 7.74% |
| Mozilla |
1.20% |
2.33% |
1.49% |
↑ 2.69% |
| Opera |
3.31% |
3.74% |
2.84% |
↓ 1.28% |
| Operating System |
| Windows |
74.57% |
61.83% |
61.82% |
↓ 64.68% |
| Linux |
10.81% |
21.17% |
21.95% |
↑ 17.59% |
| Macintosh |
13.83% |
16.14% |
15.44% |
↑ 16.74% |
| iPhone |
0.25% |
0.48% |
0.34% |
↑ 0.51% |
| Android |
0.01% |
0.04% |
0.07% |
↑ 0.11% |
| Browser / OS |
| Firefox / Windows |
31.26% |
30.76% |
30.83% |
↑ 33.98% |
| Internet Explorer / Windows |
36.31% |
21.88% |
22.89% |
↓ 23.34% |
| Firefox / Linux |
9.25% |
17.03% |
18.19% |
↑ 13.00% |
| Firefox / Macintosh |
6.51% |
8.60% |
8.18% |
↑ 8.83% |
| Safari / Macintosh |
6.88% |
7.02% |
6.92% |
↑ 7.02% |
| Chrome / Windows |
3.31% |
5.64% |
5.61% |
↑ 5.55% |
| Mozilla / Linux |
0.95% |
2.18% |
1.35% |
↑ 2.49% |
| Chrome / Linux |
0.00% |
1.07% |
1.07% |
↑ 1.62% |
| Opera / Windows |
2.57% |
2.93% |
1.85% |
↓ 0.97% |
| Chrome / Macintosh |
0.00% |
0.15% |
0.16% |
↑ 0.57% |
| Opera / Linux |
0.51% |
0.56% |
0.92% |
↓ 0.22% |
| Safari / iPhone |
0.24% |
0.39% |
0.24% |
↑0.35% |
Well, I did it. Over the end of December, 2009, holiday break I took about 15 hours to do what I considered a much needed website reorganization.
Here are the highlights:
I’ve talked elsewhere about some of my frustrations with using both WordPress and Drupal on this site. It was a worthy experiment to learn both technologies but, in the end, I was able to make WordPress do everything I wanted, with a few caveats (see below).
Why did I do this? I found …
- … it untenable to have two content management systems with two similar but different themes. Now I can use WordPress and the same theme for both installations, any employ WordPress plugins. I may use different plugins, but at least they have the same technology base.
- … that I was spending more time fiddling with my CMSs (content management systems) and not enough time creating new content, blog or otherwise.
- … the size of the older WordPress installation (over 3000 entries and 3000) comments was making it excruciatingly slow to work with, even with caching.
What else does WordPress need to be useful for page-based content management?
- Built-in support for wide pages for non-blog content in themes.
- Built-in CSS support for printing (and eventually mobile styles) in themes.
- Page hierarchy navigation at least as good as but preferably much better than what Drupal has.
- Anything else that I’ve complained about before. (grin)
Finally some words of advice to the Drupal community: You really need to provide exemplary import of WordPress blogs if you want to move more people to your platform, no matter how many others are adopting it (e.g., the White House). You shouldn’t say it’s non-core, you shouldn’t say “somebody in the community will do it if they want to,” you need to make it easy, complete, and elegant. I know there are some import modules out there, but unless you can handle things like intra-blog links, automatic category and tag taxonomy creation, and generated redirects from the WordPress structure to the new Drupal structure, you won’t get people to move sizable blogs over.
That said, if I were starting from scratch I would certainly consider using Drupal, but WordPress is not only an excellent blogging platform, it is becoming a very capable CMS. It works for me.
The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent my employer’s positions, strategies or opinions, especially if they are about the guitar, fishing, gardening, carpentry, house painting, and musical tastes.
Blog entries before 2010 are in my Archived Blog.
I’ve been extensively reorganizing my website and effective January 1, 2010, my blog will be split into current and archived versions.
Current blog
Please update your bookmarks and feed subscriptions as follows:
The address of the current blog is http://www.sutor.com/c/.
The link to the blog feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/BobSutor.
The blog comments feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/CommentsForBobSutor.
Archived blog
The address of the archived blog is http://www.sutor.com/newsite/blog-open/.
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