Arranged Delirium

Happy New Year…and Extended Maintenance

2012-01-02T15:46:14Z

So with Facebook no longer publishing RSS feeds, I’ve been prompted to move to a different publishing platform for Arranged Delirium. I’ve been using ExpressionEngine (previously pMachine) for years; but the newer version is simply overkill for a single blog, and unnecessarily complex. So, I’ll be moving to Wordpress over the next month and simply starting up all over again. This will take a bit of time, so activity will be little here for a while…

But it the meanwhile, I’ll leave you with a few things to read:

1) Are you using the latest version of Firefox? It’s a winner. You can read about it at this WebMonkey article, but go download it immediately - it’s the best new browser I’ve worked with for a while. Very quick and now nicely streamlined while maintaining extensive customization abilities. It’s my current browser of choice.

2) Since Steve Jobs’ passing, there have been a good number of items written about him. Some of these, as is the case with history recent or ancient, revisions take place. I think its important to remember the humanity of Steve Jobs - he was, like all of us, a great and terrible person. Here’s an article from Forbes reflecting on the Think Different ad campaign.

3) And finally, thanks to AW for this Slate article which does a very good job of bemoaning the increasing complexity between our competing tech platforms. It’s the 80’s/90’s all over again!

See you in about a month!

How to Rip your DVD’s into iTunes on your Mac

2011-12-20T16:00:35Z

I’m continually infuriated with the large media companies and their efforts to control my consumption. If I’ve bought a DVD, I think I should be able to watch it - on any device. I also think I should be able to put it on my computer and watch it in my living room. My thanks to the studios that get this, is truncated by my furry at the more numerous conglomerates which want me to buy multiple copies of the same thing. This effort to protect content really only hurts the honest consumer - the folks stealing content will just continue to do that. It’‘s not an ease-of-use issue (or lack thereof) that inhibits piracy.

Anyway, I think it should be easy to take your DVD’s and put them on your mac. But it seems a bit complicated and if you do some reading through a Google search on this, you can be led down a number of paths that make the process more difficult than it needs to be. Here’s how you do it:

1) Download RipIt and go ahead and pay the Little App Factory for it. You’ll never regret it. If you are pressed for cash, RipIt will run you $25. But you can get all their software as a bundle for $60, and you might be surprised at how much you use it.

2) Download VLC - an open source, cross platform, media player. You can get it here.

3) Start RipIt and put a disc in your machine. Click Rip, and save the files somewhere you’ll remember to look. Then point VLC to the files, and save them to the appropriate format (I’ve been using AppleTV2, but depending on your needs you might want something else.

I see my DVD collection going the way of my CD collection…

Facebook Removes it’s Last Valuable Feature

2011-11-22T20:01:27Z

Thank you Facebook, for removing the last useful feature (for me at least). Today, FB removed it’s feature for posting RSS feeds via Notes, which was a convenient way for me to post once to my blog and have it posted to FB:

I’m saddened in some sense, because it really does remove that last reason for sticking with Facebook for me. But at the same time, it makes it easier to leave FB forever now. With the absence of the functionality combined with the never-ending privacy concerns, it’s just not worth it. BTW, there’s a recent article at ReadWriteWeb that does a good job of articulating Why Facebook’s Seamless Sharing is Wrong. And, am I really the only one that finds the streaming update feature creepy? It seems excruciatingly easy for that content to be taken out of context (since, in essence, it has none).

Anyway, I’m done with Facebook. I hope you’ll consider joining me on Google+. It’s quiet over there, but perhaps it’ll pick up as others become more active. At least it provides a way to share limited information in ways that I want to. I’ll admit Google+ is still going through its growing pains, but I don’t feel that I need to be constantly on guard to protect the information. I’ll leave a pointer page up on Facebook over the break, but won’t be reading or posting anymore.

Tech Leaders

2011-11-19T19:54:19Z

A couple of unrelated notes that I’m stuffing together into this one post:

1) I’ve been amazed this term by how few of my students know Jeff Bezos. Here’s a Wired article for the uninitiated. Of course, like most tech leaders, you’ll find both lovers and haters; but if you actually do a little research, you’ll be able to develop an informed opinion…

B) We’ll be talking about CMS software soon, and I was struck by a recent quote from Matt Mullenweg, referring to users of enterprise software: ‘How come the [content management system] that my company spent $4 million for is crappier than the thing I use for my blog, that I pay $12 a year for?’ Good question. You can read more here.

More Resources for Web Development

2011-11-18T05:31:13Z

As students in ITL 275 (Web Design and Development) manage to develop more skills, here are a few resources that might prove useful:

1) A list of fonts that play nicely on various platforms. It’s a bit dated, but the screenshots will give you an idea of how different fonts render in different browsers on different platforms.

2) A very nice posting on some of the newer features implemented in CSS3. Keep in mind the Box Model that we discussed in class, and this will all make a bit more sense. PS: He’s wrong about black/white creating eye strain. Well, it does - but it also creates great contrast.

3) Don’t forget your custom favicon. If you want to create a custom image for this, then you can find complete instructions here. For a truly simple experience though, you can’t beat faviconist.com for generating easy text-based favicons.

4) Several folks want to implement button rollover effects. Naturally. One way of doing this(rather old-fashioned) is with javascript. But I think you’re better off using CSS. Here’s a link to a tutorial that you might find useful. If you are willing to implement your photoshop skills, you might try this one instead.

Education Doesn’t Need Technology

2011-11-17T13:29:56Z

Education doesn’t need technology. It’s not a popular position, but not thinking about the topic leaves us open to a rather ignorant acceptance of the Modern ideology that progress is necessary and all technology is “good.” In any event, it’s interesting to see what’s going on in California where many tech leaders chose to send their children to decidedly non-tech schools. Why might that be? Here’s a recent article that describes the phenomenon, but it’s nothing new - tech leaders have been doing this for years. True, it’s anecdotal evidence, but isn’t it possible that they know something because of their experiences in the field?

Don’t Broadcast my Email!

2011-11-16T15:50:33Z

Students in web design are creating (possibly) a new web site for the ITL department. But one thing that is always important to me is making sure that everyone know how to publish email links without just putting them out there for spam-bots to harvest. There are all sorts of complicated ways to prevent this; but there are also some very simple ways that can limit the nefarious spam industry. Here are the simple ones in order of complexity:

1) You simply use the [amp#64;] character instead of the @ sign in your code. This is quite easy; but there are numerous email harvesting spiders that can reconstruct this, so the amount of protection is very minimal.

2) You could also use characters or even type the address differently to obfuscate the address: name (at) washjeff _dot_ edu. This works a bit better, but depending on the formulae, most of these have been cracked; and from a user-interface perspective it can create effort on the part of the sender. This is a less than ideal solution if you actually want people to contact you. Plus, its pretty easy to de-munge.

3) In your code you could replace the actual text with hex values for the characters. This provides a bit more protection that the steps above, but there are still bots that can crack it. That being said, unless you are attracting spammers, it’s probably enough protection. Most certainly, it’s better than nothing! You can find tools online that will generate this for you. This is probably the course of action that you want to take if you are avoiding javascript.

4) You can use javascript to obfuscate the email address. As long as users have javascript enabled, they will see a clickable email address, but the bots will encounter javascript. It’s only a matter of time until this process becomes less effective; but thus far it still works well for me and the organizations I’ve done development for. I use the online tool Enkoder to generate the javascript for me. Supper-easy.

Of course there are better ways to do this - you could create a form, use captchas (annoying), or use a php script to protect email addresses. But truthfully, the javascript method works well enough unless you are being targeted and it is much better than just posting the email address out there where anyone can see it. Publicly broadcasting email addresses is a sure indicator of novice development - you don’t want to do it.

Flash is Dead

2011-11-14T13:48:12Z

Adobe appears to have thrown in the towel recently regarding flash development - at least for mobile devices. Reuters has an good article on the topic here. This clears most of the remaining barrier for the broad-based acceptance of HTML 5 as the development platform of choice for web development and web-based mobile apps.

This really shouldn’t be too surprising. Adobe has updated Dreamweaver in version 5.5 to be a viable mobile app development platform, and it’s bought out other text editors that might have fulfilled a significant competitive role. This does however make the forthcoming Adobe Edge product more appealing as well. In combination with the PhoneGap API libraries that you can access through Dreamweaver, this tool could enable app creators to include a significant amount of interactivity.

Batch Processing in Photoshop

2011-11-11T14:38:22Z

I had a student yesterday that needed to resize a good number of images. I told him to go look for some online tutorials (and there is 1 good one) but many of them were, well, more difficult than they needed to be. So, for student of new media, here’s how you resize multiple files at once:

Step 1) File menu -> Scripts -> Image Processor…
Step 2) Identify the source directory
Step 3) Identify the destination directory
Step 4) Make your desired changes
Step 5) Click the Run button

Thats it. There are a number of other options you can select if you know what you are doing, and as usual - you’re mileage many vary if you are using earlier versions. (For instance, I think the sub-folders option only came around in CS4, so if you are using the machines downstairs with CS3 you are out of luck.) Another tip: If you are at all confused about file locations and directory structures, do yourself a favor and just make two folders on the desktop: one with all the images you want to modify, and another one for where you want the new images to appear.

College Web Sites

2011-11-09T16:15:10Z

In Web Design we’ve been deconstructing College web sites all term. Now its time to start some comparisons - particularly since we now have the language (theoretically) to speak intelligently about it. There are a couple of web resources that can help us.

1) Smashing Magazine has a Showcase of Academic and Higher Education Websites that you can access. This is at least somewhat curated, but questionable in places. In any event it is at least a culled collection rather than a simple listing of edu sites. It’s over a year old so it’s getting dated, but it’s still a fine place to find items for discussion.

2) eduStyle is a site designed for professionals working on college sites (web content folks, graphic designers, etc.). Any site can be listed on here, but anyone can rate it as well - so there’s little if any editorial process. They do however have an awards program that is judged, so you might want to focus on the winners for examples and ideas.

I’m afraid the W&J site does not score well at eduStyle, although there haven’t been many votes. The info there is from the old site too, so the new redesign would need to be listed; but given the functionality issues, I don’t think we’d do well.