Archive for the ‘General Nonsense’ Category
Adobe Community Moderator
Posted by Jay Charles | Filed under General Nonsense
Last week, I was invited to become an Adobe Community Moderator… an invitation I’ve gladly accepted. I spend a lot of time contributing to support forums [the Adobe FMS forum in particular], and while I don’t do it for recognition, it’s really nice to know that my contributions are valued.
As a Community Moderator, I’ll help with managing comments posted to the Adobe LiveDocs, and contribute notes, comments, etc. where I can.
Spam City
Posted by Jay Charles | Filed under General Nonsense
Sometimes, something can be so stupid that I have to just laugh at the situation. During my last migration, I took down the spam filter on the old server (the one where my old domain lives) to transfer the license to the new server. It’s been a couple of weeks since I checked the email on the old domain (the screen shot below has not been Photoshopped)…
Google Chrome: First impressions
Posted by Jay Charles | Filed under General Nonsense
I’ve been itching to give Google Chrome a try since I read about it a few weeks ago. Everything I’ve read has given me that warm, fuzzy feeling I get any time a new application comes out that makes interweb applications more useful. The browser (as it exists in Firefox and Internet Explorer) has always been the biggest monkey wrench in the works, as when first conceived, the browser was never meant to be a client for robust web apps. I just installed the Chrome Beta, and I’m taking my first test drive around some of the web apps I like (and some that I’ve developed).
The first thing that’s striking me is how fast Chrome loads pages and javascripts. My first test of the new browser was using Twiddla, which is one of my favorite javascript based rich internet apps. Chrome seems to load up the application a bit faster than firefox, but, wait a minute… unfortunately, the overall experience isn’t as good. Using the drawing tools and moving objects around the stage is far smoother on Firefox… the dragging in Chrome is quite jerky and jumpy. I’m also finding that the more objects I put on the Twiddla stage, the slower the drag and drop in Chrome. Oh well… back to Firefox for using this application.
Next up, Pageflakes. Again, Chrome seems to stutter and sputter any time there is something being dragged around the page, particularly when there are other objects being rendered (like video playing or Iframes reloading). Aside from the bad drag rendering, the performance of Chrome on this app seems no better or worse than in Firefox.
Hmm… that warm fuzzy feeling is giving way to a “it looks good on paper, but is it really any better?” feeling.
Flash apps. Well… no need to list them one by one, as the results are the same as they are in Firefox and IE. As expected, Flash runs exactly as it does in other browsers (well… other Windows browsers that is… Flash on Mac is no fun in any browser, but that’s for another article). No faster, no slower, no better or worse, just the same reliable Flash experience.
Okay… now that I’ve played with a bunch of apps I’ll just jump back to the blog page I loaded into chrome a while ago… but… um… where’s the drop down that shows me my browsing history? Hmm… no little downward facing arrow button I’m so familiar with. After some hunting, I found that clicking and holding the history buttons gives you a context menu (assuming you have a history in the direction of the button) with an option to show your full history. This “show history” button is duplicated in the “Customize and control” menu, but really, I think I prefer the one-click dropdown in the address bar from browsers past. The history opens in a separate tab, which I don’t really get. I’m also finding that in the history, all you see is the page titles (and not the addresses)… which leaves me at the mercy of people using very descriptive page titles, or the same title for every one of their site’s pages (unlike “untitled”, or “Somesite.com” which we see so often).
Some things I really do like about Chrome are the view-source screen and element inspector. Nice to see the browser include things like that… should prove to be very helpful. And, of course, with each tab running as it’s own process, it means things like one goofy, buggy page running in a tab won’t bring the whole browser down (although, I don’t often run a bunch of tabs, but I suspect lots of people do. Maybe I’ll be one of those people when I’m using Chrome)
From the standpoint of forward facing user experience, I can’t say I’m as impressed with Chrome as I expected hoped to be. Of course I’ll be testing all of my applications against it from here on, and I’m sure I’ll use it for specific purposes (like poking around in page code) but based on this first experience (and yes, I know it’s still in beta), I don’t think it will be replacing Firefox at the top of my start bar just yet.
Test Posting: SWFObject vs. Wordpress Editor
Posted by Jay Charles | Filed under General Nonsense
Just a little test post to see how difficult it is to get SWFObject working in my Wordpress posts without building a plugin for it. If this post looks goofy, now you know why. If you see a Citrix logo below (which is totally out of place for this site), then it’s working without a fight.
I see the logo… do you? If you don’t, please post a comment to let me know.
Back from the dead.
Posted by Jay Charles | Filed under General Nonsense
I’m back from my trip into dead server land. For those that don’t know, I had a catastrophic hardware failure on one of my boxes (the box I keep this blog in) about a month ago. Fortunately, I was able to recover just about everything… just missing a few images here and there and a couple of really old pet projects I haven’t worked on in ages.
It’s funny… when it comes to my client’s projects I’m absolutely anal about keeping multiple backups. You’d think I’d have put the same effort into backing up my personal stuff. Lesson learned.
Moving day!
Posted by Jay Charles | Filed under General Nonsense
It’s funny how time flies. Some time ago, I set up a new development server for testing Flash Media Server applications, and told myslef I’d move my site there in a few days. Here we are, day 536 later… and I’ve managed to find time to install wordpress. Not an amazing feat, but given my workload recently, I’m quite proud of myself today.
More to come before too long… maybe another 536 days?
BTW.. if you bounced in here looking for my old site, you can still find it here you’re out of luck, it’s not on my server anymore. I’m not maintaining it anymore (as though I’ve done anything to it in the past 4 years anyway…), but it’s still there in all its outdated glory.