Rob Fahrni

Goodbye old friend

2010-03-06T18:23:00.001-08:00

This is it, my final post.

I've been using this weblog, and Blogger, for the past nine years, but some recent changes to Blogger got me thinking, maybe it's time for me to make a change.

New site, new weblog, new publishing system.

If you follow this weblog in an RSS reader it's time to point it at my new home. That new home is being published using WordPress, and I'm loving it.

So, point your browser to iam.fahrni.ws if you're looking for my new home. This site will remain unchanged, an archive of my weblogging life.

Web Home - fahrni.ws
Weblog - iam.fahrni.ws
Twitter - @fahrni

See you on the internets.

Blogger FTP, The End Is Near

2010-03-05T20:34:00.001-08:00

May 1, 2010, FTP Publishing will cease to work, and by extension, so will this weblog. Well, at least it'll stop updating.

Movie line of the week answer

2010-03-05T20:11:00.001-08:00

Good evening movie liners, it's been a long day, so let's just get this wrapped up shall we?

Our big winner is Mr. Steven Vore, congratulations Steven.

The correct answer was...

Real Genius

Growing your brand

2010-03-04T14:50:00.001-08:00

AppCubby: "How do I grow App Cubby in a way that increases value AND income? That's a question I've been asking myself since the day the company was founded. These past few months, I've been working on a solution I think makes a lot of sense. I've signed an exclusive sponsorship deal with Honeywell to advertise its consumer auto brands - FRAM, Prestone, and Autolite - in a rebranded version of Gas Cubby called Gas Cubby by FRAM." - Very interesting, very, very, interesting, and smart to boot.

Movie line of the week

2010-03-04T07:47:00.001-08:00

Good morning folks, how about a movie line from 1985?

This? This is ice. This is what happens to water when it gets too cold. This? This is Kent. This is what happens to people when they get too sexually frustrated.

Ok, quick, what movie! Send your guesses here.

Boo Orange County

2010-03-04T07:44:00.001-08:00

Los Angeles Times: "Some Southern California cities fine residents for watering their lawns too much during droughts.

But in Orange, officials are locked in a legal battle with a couple accused of violating city ordinances for removing their lawn in an attempt to save water." - The city should be encouraging more folks to do what the Ha's have done. Drought tolerant plants, no lawn, and wood chip's are all great ways to beautify your yard and conserve water. If you've never lived in an area prone to drought you may not understand, and that's ok, but here it's nice to see folks doing their part to save water for more important things, like drinking.

Boo on you Orange County.

The problem with company blogs

2010-03-03T17:13:00.001-08:00

Inc: "The big-hit technology companies from the past 10 years tend to have pathetic blogs. Twitter's blog, like Facebook's and Google's, is full of utterly boring press releases rewritten to sound a little bit less stuffy. Apple's employees produce virtually no blogs, even though the company has introduced several game-changing new products in the past decade. Meanwhile, hundreds of Microsoft's employees have amazing blogs, but these have done nothing to stave off that company's slide into stodginess." - He's right. The best weblogs tend to be run by the little guys. The indies making a living using the technology they're talking about. Company weblogs often have to walk a fine line, they have to be careful about what they're saying and how they say it. Just look at Joel, he's killing off his weblog because he can't really be himself any longer for fear of offending someone. I think there are still some exceptional BigCo weblogs to read, John Nack for instance. I think he does a great job of representing Adobe and talking to his audience, without sounding like a marketing wank (yeah, yeah, I know, he's not a marketing wank, but you get the picture.)

I guess what I'm trying to say is this. If you're going to have a company weblog, or company weblogs, don't come across too stodgy or corporate, it's a turnoff.

Shipley to Jobs: "Don't be evil Steve."

2010-03-03T08:08:00.001-08:00

Will Shipley: "But when you sue someone for doing something you do yourself, you become one of the bad guys. Can you name a company you admire that spends its time enforcing patents, instead of innovating? Remember the pirate flag you flew over Apple's headquarters when you were building the Mac? Is Apple part of the Navy now?"

Cool NY Job!

2010-03-02T16:51:00.001-08:00

jobs.stackoverflow.com: "We need an Android developer to help us develop the best eReader for Android devices. If you dream of electric sheep we want to hear from you!" - Gee you think that's a job working on the Nook? What a sweet gig, if you're a Java boy.

What's a Pixel Qi?

2010-03-02T08:57:00.001-08:00

Jerry Fahrni: "The Pixel Qi screen offers the quick refresh of an LCD screen with the low power consumption and direct sunlight readability of e-ink. I'm excited about the Pixel Qi technology and have been waiting for their screens to appear in consumer devices for quite some time. In fact, I'm holding off my purchase of a Kindle DX until I see a Pixel Qi screen for myself. I'm just not a fan of reading PDF files on a backlit LCD display, and reading them on a Nook or Kindle isn't a great experience either." - Pharmacist by day, super geek by night, my brother ladies and gentlemen. Jay is the ultimate gadget man and does a lot of research into mobile devices because he absolutely loves them. This particular technology has been on his radar for the better part of a year and it's finally hitting the streets.

Time to bring out Seamus

2010-03-01T07:50:00.001-08:00

Say hello to Seamus Coremally, our local Irish Apple Core. He'll be hanging with us through the month of March.

This will most likely be the final month for this weblog, and my apple core friends, kind of sad really.

Omni, designing for the iPad

2010-03-01T07:35:00.001-08:00

The Omni Mouth: "I want to say that's sort of crazy, except our own CEO Ken Case created a terrifyingly accurate faux iPad using a 3D printer. It-well, it even has a little Omni logo on it. And a 30-pin dock connector. And... look, it's just very, very realistic and I'm a little worried about how much sleep everyone is getting, okay?" - I think I need a 3D printer. This is a great way to put together a UI, just move a bunch of paper around. I remember our UX team doing this at Visio. They'd do usability with pieces of paper. Great stuff.

Movie line of the week answer

2010-02-26T15:03:00.001-08:00

Good afternoon movie liners, we have a winner!

Congratulations to Mr. Steven Vore!

The correct answer was...

Up

Indiana Jones meets Computer Scientist

2010-02-25T13:18:00.001-08:00

jobs.joelonsoftware.com: "Digital Antiquity, a national initiative funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, seeks a Technology Director/Lead Software Engineer to lead the technical development of a "start-up" national digital repository for archaeological documents and data. This exciting cyberinfrastructure initiative provides an excellent career opportunity in informatics and software development in the stimulating environment of a major research university." - What a cool opportunity. If I had all the lovely requirements they're looking for I'd apply today. I'd love to be the Indiana Jones of the Computing World.

60+ Free WordPress Templates

2010-02-25T11:47:00.001-08:00

Instant Shift: "In this showcase below, you'll find a Excellent Collection of Fresh High-Quality Free WordPress Themes Around because We all know that we're going to use our blog as a tool to promote our business, so we need to have a clean, professional, corporate look." - I've been struggling to get my new weblog up and running. I keep finding themes that are near my idea of perfect, but I can't find the one. Out of this collection of 60 I should be able to find a good starting point, if I can't get my current template straightened out that is.

HTML5 and Flash

2010-02-25T09:57:00.001-08:00

Cringely: "Flash always picked up where the browser left off, but it can't talk to your webcam, store local files, or draw pixels directly to your screen. Now, for the first time, a cluster of technologies known as HTML5 allow a standards-based pathway to busting those barriers with canvas graphics, drawing video onscreen, smarter forms, and local storage for private data. So who needs Flash?" - It'll be interesting to see how having video support in the browser changes what we do at Pelco. I still doubt it'll be good enough for daily monitoring for a few reasons; can it support up to 16 simultaneous live video feeds with low latency (by low I mean less than 200ms from camera to display), will we be able to PTZ our cameras, what about overlays on top of the video? Those are just a few minor, minor things, but stuff we need to be able to do on the client. Even if we can't do that it'll be great for configuration and casual monitoring of live and/or playback video.

Interesting times.

Tweets and copyrights

2010-02-25T08:38:00.001-08:00

Jeffrey Zeldman: "As messages sent via Twitter cannot be longer than 140 characters, they cannot be copyrighted. However original, witty, or profound they may be, nothing more than good manners protects your original expression of authorship. If you wish to let other people quote or use your Tweets, you need not "license" them; indeed, technically, you cannot license them, since they are in the public domain the instant you publish them." - The more you know.

Movie line of the week

2010-02-25T08:20:00.001-08:00

Good morning movie liners, I hope you're awake and ready to play?

Here's the line, good luck!

My master made me this collar. He is a good and smart master and he made me this collar so that I may speak. Squirrel!

Ok, quick, what movie! Send your guesses here.

Yelp, extortion scheme?

2010-02-25T07:45:00.001-08:00

Techcrunch [hat tip Robert Schultz]: "The plaintiff in the suit, a veterinary hospital in Long Beach, CA, is said to have requested that Yelp remove a negative review from the website, which was allegedly refused by the San Francisco startup, after which its sales representatives repeatedly contacted the hospital demanding payments of roughly $300 per month in exchange for hiding or deleting the review." - This should be interesting to monitor. I can't imagine an up-and-comer like Yelp doing something so stupid. Could it have been an opportunistic employee? Guess we'll find out.

Hey, money talks

2010-02-24T08:09:00.001-08:00

Tumbledore: "I've run pitchfork.tumblr.com for almost a year now. I had several posts up and I followed 28 people with the account. All my posts are now gone and my address has been changed to pitchfork1.tumblr.com. Where my blog once stood now stands the official Tumblr for Pitchfork Media Inc. Watch out, Soup, I hear Campbell's is gunning for you next." - Here's another reason I like having my own domain. I'm sure the Tumblr license agreement spells this out somewhere. I do feel sorry for this guy/gal, but know what you're getting into.

Movie line of the week answer

2010-02-19T00:29:00.001-08:00

Good morning movie liners, we have a winner.

Mr. Brady Hiscox correctly guessed...

The Ladykillers

See you next Thursday.

A sad day for Fresnans

2010-02-18T07:35:00.001-08:00

Fresno Bee: "More than 600 lots containing items such as office furniture, science exhibits and lighting fixtures were sold in a sometimes dramatic auction held beneath a large tent on the former museum's grounds. The museum's art collection will be sold later."

Movie line of the week

2010-02-18T01:01:00.001-08:00

Good morning movie liners.

Saw this movie for the first time last night, very funny stuff. Good luck.

Who only just remortgaged his home in order to raise the money for a surgical procedure that will correct the wandering eye of his common-law wife, Mountain Water, who suffers from astigmia, strabismus and a general curdling of the vitreous jelly.

Ok, quick, what movie! Send your guesses here.

Switching to WordPress

2010-02-13T23:24:00.001-08:00

Well, after all the talk about Movable Type and Tumblr, I've decided to switch to WordPress even though I don't like that it publishes pages dynamically. Yep, I caved, as my brother said "Welcome to the darkside."

Let me explain, it won't take long

When I convinced Jay, known as Jerry to ya'll, to start weblogging he purchased his domain, and we set him up with WordPress because it was easy to configure on DreamHost. It's what they call a "one-click" install. It was brain-dead simple. Jay has been weblogging for just under a year and things have gone quite well for him and his site. Install to successful weblog in under one hour. Three easy steps: buy domain, point domain to host, install WordPress, WHAMMO!

Fast Forward

I've been on Blogger for nine years and I've thought of switching many times, but I was never satisfied with anything I'd considered for various strange reasons; dynamic publishing or archiving was strange, etc. When Blogger made the announcement they were going to jettison FTP publishing I was a bit bummed, but I completely understand the reason they did it, they need to move the platform forward. But I digress. As I've explained in some recent posts since the announcement the new structure doesn't really work for me. This domain has sub-directories under it and I'm not sure how to map them to a Blogger hosted site. Sure rob.crabapples.net would work just fine with the new Blogger scheme, but what about rob.crabapples.net/source? I won't have access to the server at Blogger. So I decided I was going to evaluate different platforms.

I looked at Tumblr, Movable Type, and WordPress. I quickly eliminated WordPress because of my desire to have static pages. I still believe hitting the database to produce the page when it's visited isn't the right thing to do, so it was gone. Tumblr does the same thing as Blogger is proposing. They'll host your domain on their servers. Haileigh, our oldest daughter, and Kim, my wife, have Tumblr based weblogs on Tumblr's servers and they work great for them. I on the other hand don't like their archiving scheme, again, Rob strangeness. Their archives have random numbers attached to them, like this, http://fahrni.tumblr.com/post/377656270/random-shot-of-me What's with the 377656270? I'd like to have Y-M-D in my post, like 2010/02/13 followed by the post name. I still think Tumblr is in a very sweet position and would probably chose them over Blogger if they were my only two choices. My final candidate was Movable Type. It is a very powerful weblog publishing system. With Movable Type 5 you get the concept of a website that can have multiple weblogs. Pretty sweet. I installed it, gave it a whirl, and had decided it was going to be my platform of choice. Then I talked with Jay about it.

"What, WordPress is good enough for my weblog but not yours?"

Yep, that's what my brother said to me in response to a tweet about Movable Type. It got me thinking about WordPress again. I'd started bahookey.crabapples.net a couple of years back to play with WordPress so I had grown pretty familiar with it. I spent a couple of days warring with myself over which publishing system to choose, and I finally decided WordPress would do just fine and it gives me all the publishing power and customization I'd like to have, even if it publishes pages dynamically.

At some point in the near future this weblog will go into mothballs, yet another tough decision I made along the way. It'll remain as it is, unchanged, and serve as an archive to my new site, which I hope to unveil at some point in the near future, not like it's going to be a huge deal, a couple of folks will have to point their feed readers at a new RSS feed. This site will still have contain my source code projects, so rob.crabapples.net/source will not change, at least not for now, and maybe not ever.

NO, NO, NO POTTER IN 3D!

2010-02-12T20:42:00.001-08:00

HPANA: "Last week rumors started to circle the news rounds that "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" would be released in 3D, we can now confirm these reports to be true." - I CANNOT believe this stinking 3D trend. Could we please focus on telling the story? Yeah, it makes more money, great. So what about the folks it makes sick to watch their lovely 3D creation? What do they do? Thanks for nothing.