Just a quick message before I head out of town and away from technology for a few days:  If you’re having trouble playing any type of video file, just install FFDShow.  It basically plays everything.

I have a couple of unrelated topics to discuss today...

I’ve made several little updates to my website lately, most of which I have mentioned on the homepage.  Most recently I’ve given the photos page a new feature, where each directory now has a thumbnail, made up of four photos beneath it.  I’m still not totally pleased with the way it looks, and part of the problem is the dark background.  I got the inspiration from this article, which produces some impressive results.  Only problem with that method is that the height of the thumbnails will depend on the images involved, and I wanted them to be all the same size.  I may just get over that, or write some code to crop the images.  I’ve also encountered a problem where PHP crashes if I try to generate too many images at once.  I think I know what the problem is, and in C++ I’d just use a pointer and be done with it, but I don’t know that PHP has those.

Firefox has been crashing a lot for me since the last patch, usually when I load several pages with Flash ads.  Penny Arcade and Joystiq in particular would consistently crash Firefox.  Has anyone else had this problem?  It doesn’t seem to happen for me at home, but happens a lot at work.  The only two differences between home and work are: 1) I leave my Firefox session open for about a week at a time, so that it will remain the first icon on my taskbar and so that I won’t have to reenter a bunch of passwords; and 2) I am going through a proxy server at work.  I tried updating my flash player but that didn’t do anything.  I did find an extension called Flashblock, which (you’d never guess this from the name) blocks flash content.  Since I’ve used it I haven’t had any problems.  I’d recommend it even if you’re not having problems.

One last question—does anyone have any recommendations for video editing/DVD making in Windows?  I’d like to be able to create simple menus, just a jpeg in the background and a list of video clips to jump to.  Nothing fancy really.  I have just never gotten around to transferring our videos from the wedding and Hawaii to DVD, since my old PC just didn’t have the power to do it.  I’ve used Adobe Premiere before, but I wasn’t very impressed by it.  Any other suggestions?

Last week I installed Opera for the first time, to make sure my site was usable to Opera users.  Well there is some weird cookie/caching thing that makes it difficult to switch back and forth between text-only and full-graphics versions of my site, but other than that I only saw one thing that didn’t render the same as Firefox (and that turned out to be an ambiguity in my css that is now fixed).  In fact, I haven’t yet found a site that doesn’t work in Opera (of course, I haven’t really been looking very hard).

I was not “won over” by Opera, in the way that I was with Firefox.  Firefox was basically aimed at IE users who wanted a modern piece of software.  I mean, they don’t advertise it like that, but if you look at the keyboard shortcuts and the menu layouts, they’re practically identical.  Opera... not so much.  I mean, I rely on Ctrl+Enter finishing a URL in the address bar-- I can’t remember the last time I had to type “www.” and “.com” in the address bar.  And I rely on URL auto-completion in the address bar.  Opera lists URLs that match what you’ve typed so far, but hitting tab doesn’t select the first item in that list.. meaning, I have to use the mouse too much.  And Ctrl+T doesn’t open a new tab-- another shortcut I use all the time.  Of course these are all ergonomic issues associated with using new software, and it may very well be that Opera has better ways of doing these things.

The good thing I noticed about Opera is that it’s fast.  I mean, really fast.  It was the first thing I noticed.  I had long thought that something was wrong with either my server or my PHP code because Firefox often pauses briefly during a page load.  Not with Opera.  When I looked around the Opera site, I found that this speed is (not surprisingly) one of their selling points.  I’m still not giving up Firefox, but now every time I use it I am painfully aware of just how slow it is, whereas before I was blissfully ignorant and assumed that’s just how the internet worked.  On the plus side, it looks like the latest Gecko engine has undergone some big performance improvements, so maybe Firefox 2.0 won’t suffer from the same slownocity as 1.5.

PS-  The sky looked pretty cool the other day so I took some pictures of it.  I thought they were pretty so I put them on the site.

I bring forth two topics of discussion on this grim mid-January day.  First, I built a new PC last week.  Here is a picture of that process that Stephanie captured.  Notice as Punky eagerly awaits the opportunity to chew on any part I do not need.  This was my first time building a whole PC, which wasn’t very difficult.  I thought I had destroyed my processor though.  All you ever hear is how incredibly sensitive the processor is, but once you get the clasp closed down on it, it is pretty much indestructible.  I learned this while trying to mount the cooling fan on the processor.. which involved applying a sizeable percentage of my full body weight to the “snap-in” mounting screws.  But other than that, and the fact that I forgot to put in the shield around the connectors on the back and had to unmount the motherboard to put it in, everything went pretty well.

Second, I am going to discuss Windows Live Local (found, cryptically enough, at local.live.com).  It’s Microsoft’s latest way to compete with Google (specifically, Google Maps).  So far, it’s got the immediate advantage of making much prettier maps.  It also has satellite data of course.  The photos around Charlotte are older than Google’s, but they also have some black and white photos that cover my hometown in a pretty high resolution (albeit without color), where Google just says “no satellite imagery available at this zoom level.”  I guess I should try to get to a point here.  I don’t normally like to side with the “I hate Microsoft because they’re successful” techno-hippies.  If you want to read blogs about that, you don’t have to look very hard.  I’m going to objectively and open-mindedly suggest to you that perhaps Microsoft sucks.  Proof of this theorem is left as an exercise for the reader.

I guess what I’m addressing specifically is Microsoft’s “throw money at the latest tech trend until we have at least ninety percent market share” strategy.  I’m really amazed at the economics of it.. ya know, that it actually works.  I mean, look at what they did to Netscape seven years ago.  And that was competition for lead market share for a piece of software that they give away for free, without any kind of embedded advertising.

The inspiration for this whole blog post is this comment I read in an interview EGM had with Bill Gates (well, the interview was actually with Peter Moore, the Bill Gates thing was a sidebar):

EGM: Microsoft has lost roughly $1 billion a year on the first Xbox since it launched. Was that worth it?

Bill Gates: We knew going into the original Xbox that we would lose...a lot. Or you can say, invest a lot—that’s the nice way to say that. And we knew the only thing we’d get out of that first generation was the learning and credibility that came with that experience.

Read the whole article here.

Can you imagine if you were owner of a company and you told your shareholders “Our strategy this year is to release a product that loses a billion dollars a year, for the next five years.  Then maybe we’ll start to turn a profit.”  I mean, even if you’re Microsoft, a billion dollars is still a pretty significant sum of money.

So give me all your poison

Some of you are probably aware of PicTML, a Visual Basic program I wrote with back in high school.  Well, now it exists on the web.  Go here to see some examples of what PicTML can do, and feel free to make your own pages and publish them for everyone to see.  There are a number of improvements, namely different optimization options (I find it easier to tweak settings in “small HTML” mode, and then convert to “accurate image” mode before publishing).

I try to make my site accessible to non-geeks, and PicTML could use some help in this area.  The background color field currently accepts the following colors:  red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, violet, purple, magenta, white, grey, black, and pink.  And of course you can use any hex color you want, but if you know how to do that then this paragraph isn’t really directed at you now is it.

I was actually a little disappointed with how easy PHP made it to do a program like this.  I had the working prototype done in a single evening.  I had set out to make this a two-week project, to take me right up until Christmas break.  I mean, when I was learning to code on the TI-83, we had to program uphill, in the snow, barefoot.

Geeky sidenote- once I had finished I realized that I had used an MVC design pattern without even intending to.  The image itself, the $_SESSION vars, and the script to validate the $_POST vars are the model.  Then the control frame is the controller and the preview frame is the view.

I mentioned a while ago that I browse the web with my PDA sometimes.  Well when you search Google from a PDA, it has this nice PDA gateway thing that will translate pages to a form that can be viewed on a PDA easily.  From my experience it works very well.  I made a page to be my PDA’s homepage, where you can enter a URL and have Google make it look right on your PDA for you.  I figured I’d share it with the world.  I also put links to all the sites I visit frequently from the PDA (yep, that’s all of them), so you can get a peek at my browsing habits if you’re curious. :)

Other links:  these two links go to vi cheat sheets.  If you’re not a programmer you probably have no idea what vi is.  If you are, you may still not know. :)  Anyway, if you are familiar with vi--but can’t remember things like “k == up”--you might want to print out one or both of these cheat sheets and hang them near your monitor.

vi cheat sheet 1 (PNG file)
vi cheat sheet 2 (WARNING:  PDF file... in case you hate them as much as I do)

I’m writing this post from my PDA, because I can.  Unfortunately, I cannot write very fast with a stylus.  And the version of IE that comes on Pocket PC doesn’t support iframes for some reason.  Okay. enough stylus writing for one night.