Owner: franzone.com - thoughts of a web geek URL:http://www.franzone.com Join Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 20:56:48 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: I'm a work from home web geek, a father of three, a husband, a world of warcraft nerd, a martial arts practitioner, a musician and many other things. Product reviews, technical articles, April Fools posts, live stories, oh... and we have comics! Site statistics:Click here
New Macs To Be Released? 2007-08-05 20:03:36 According to some witnesses (sounds like a real news story, huh) Apple Stores and Best Buy stores are no longer accepting shipments of the old or current Mac keyboards. What does it all mean? Should we be expecting new Macs to hit the stores? Read the story here:
Old Mac Keyboards No Longer Shipping, New iMacs Probably Coming
Manualist Plays Guns N Roses - Sweet Child Of Mine (On His Hands) 2007-08-03 21:09:10 The YouTube famed Gunecologist playing Sweet
Child Of Mine by Guns N Roses
… with fart sounds on his hands! This guy is really amazing. The first couple of minutes are a little boring, but at around three and a half minutes in it really picks up and makes it worth the wait. Check it out (click through to the site if reading via RSS or email and you cannot see the embedded video).
Read more:Plays
, Hands
I Wish I Could Wrap Myself In… Thee? 2007-08-08 13:42:37 I was just listening to my U2 Edition iPod and Blue Oyster Cult’s In Thee came on. I love classic music of the 70’s era so I have a lot of this type of stuff. This time round though I was listening to the lyrics… which is quite odd for me. Especially if I’m working. At the end of the first Chorus they sing, “But I wish I could wrap myself
In thee.” What? Who talks like that? In thee!? Yeah, yeah… I know it’s the title of the song, but I just thought it was funny that band’s actually sang like this. I guess it’s artifact of the Jesus movement. Now for your lyric viewing pleasure:
Maybe I’ll see you again baby
And maybe I won’t
Maybe you’ve bought your ticket
Gone back to Detroit
Airplanes make strangers of us all
Give us distance
Much too easily.
Jim says some destinies
Should not be delivered
But you and I seen now baby
That still they are
Winning it makes losers of us all
‘Cause the dice roll
So indi
Halloween! A Film By Rob Zombie? 2007-08-08 06:45:52 Fall is fast approaching and of course we have the scary movie marathons to look for both on the screen and on television. The latest reincarnation of the Halloween
the movie franchise was written and directed by none other than Rob Zombie. Don’t know who that is? He is a rock… maybe goth rock musician who’s music has been featured in many movies including The Matrix. It is not really a new thing for song artists to branch out into other arenas these days, but this one actually surprised me a little. Obviously he has the right name for job. Other than that though, I’m not that familiar with song artists directing films… let alone writing them! It will be interesting to see what Rob brings to the film genre that is actually quite close to his own music. I also wonder if he will be featuring his own music in the film?
As for my own tastes in scary movies, I’ve always been more of a space thriller kind of guy. That has changed a lot in recent years,
WordPress Posting Via Java - Part 2 2007-08-07 22:43:25 In the first part of this series titled “Would You Like To Post To WordPress From Java?” I introduced you (hopefully) to the XML-RPC mechanism that WordPress implements. I also showed how it is quite simple to post to a WordPress blog using Java and the Redstone XML-RPC API. In this installation I’d like to expand the example a bit further.
First, however I’d like to apologize for posting non-working code. I posted the example without actually compiling and/or testing it. If you downloaded and fixed the errors to get it to compile you also probably noticed that the method would not successfully login to your blog. Doh! I’ll be fixing those errors in the next version of the file, so hopefully you will walk away with something you can actually modify to your liking… and use.
Now, how about that last example? Did you notice anything lacking in the data that we posted. If you recall the method signature looks like this: blogger.newPost(blog_ID, user_lo Read more:Posting
Broken CGI Directory 2007-08-07 12:51:10 Through the course of some research for a project I ran across a CGI directory site. Basically it lists various CGI scripts and also a handful of tutorials and tips. The site is http://www.cgi-bin.com. What is so special about this directory? Well, nothing actually. I just thought I’d mention it for the following funny reason. Browsing through the directory I found an interesting script that I wanted to take a look at. I clicked through to the details screen, which had a description of various properties of the script (platform, cost, author, etc). My next logical step was to click through to the site owner so that I could download the script. No such luck!
The site uses a “jump” CGI script to redirect you to the destination of the script. Unfortunately clicking on the link gives you an Error 404 - File Not Found. Not the script you are looking for… the redirect script. Anyway, I just thought it somewhat ironic that a “CGI” directory had a broken CG Read more:Broken
, Directory
HIGH SPEED DOWNLOADS: 60+ Download Managers 2007-08-06 10:00:35 Another fine list from Mashable.com, comin at ya!
You know the story: although your ISP claims that your connection is lightning fast, those huge video files you just grabbed off Google Video and YouTube are taking forever to download. Most people figure that slow download speeds are normal. If you use the built-in download manager in your browser, it is normal. Fortunately, you can change that by simply getting a new download manager.
Here are a few to get you started; some are ugly, some are decidedly 1.0, and some even cost money (gasp!), but they all do the job.
HIGH SPEED DOWNLOADS: 60+ DownloadManagers
Song Of The Week - Weekend 2007-08-10 15:26:47 Where I live the local Classic Rock radio station has a Friday / weekend tradition. At 5:00PM (quitin’ time) they play the song Weekend
by Wet Willie. This of course signifies that the weekend is starting! I used to work for a company where I commuted with one of my best friends. So on the way home we’d crank up the radio and both sing Weekend at the top of our lungs. What’s that? No, neither one of us can sing. We sure had fun though.
Do you have any traditional weekend songs that you play?
People Watching And Bluetooth Headsets, You Look Ridiculous! 2007-08-14 13:11:03 When cell phones initially came out they changed the world. People were no longer bound to their land-lines when it came to conversing with the people in their lives. I was actually a cell phone and pager salesman back in the day. I can remember selling those huge bricks of a phone. People would actually carry those around, tethered to their belt and chat with their friends. You know what? They looked completely ridiculous!
Fast forward to today. Cell phones are so tiny, slim and fancy that you can hardly notice someone carrying one (if they don’t want you to). The problem with these phones though is that you have to lift the darn thing to your ear to talk. That’s just craziness. Of course another technological breakthrough left us with the bluetooth headset. Great! Problem solved. Another problem, depending on your perspective, has been introduced.
People wear these things on their ear… ALL THE TIME. And you know what? Yep, you saw it coming. They look ridiculous! I Read more:Watching
, Bluetooth
, Headsets
Two Days Running… It’s A Miracle! 2007-08-14 09:47:17 Well, folks I’ve done it. I ran this morning for the second day in a row. Wow! Yeah, I know… big deal. It’s encouraging to me though to be getting back into exercise. One thing I noticed this morning was that it was HOT and HUMID. I pass a sign on my run that has the temperature and it was 80 degrees (Fahrenheit) this morning at 6:00AM. The humidity of course is always like one million percent because I live in Florida. It felt like running in a sauna. Oh well, cooler weather will be here sometime in January (sarcasm).
Anyway, here is the Nike+ graph from my run this morning. Click on it to view a larger version. BTW - How do you like the cool Lightbox effect? Compliments of the WP-LyteBox plugin.
Read more:Two Days
Running Without Drugs 2007-08-13 12:46:21 Since being on the wonderful slew of medications that are supposed to possibly help my migraine medications I have not been able to keep up with my running. My last attempt was downright pathetic and so I have not returned to running since. That is until today! Being without a job caused me to eventually be without health insurance and incidentally without migraine medication. I’ve actually been doing extremely well without them so far. In fact I’m having a hard time deciding whether or not to get back on them. I really hate being on medications all the time. Plus some of the medications caused me to be dizzy and very short of breath most of the time. Thus my lack of exercise.
Anyway, I got back into the saddle again this morning. I climbed out of bed at the butt-crack of dawn, about 5:00AM and got my running gear on. Amazingly this round went much better. I had to work pretty hard to get up that hill on the first half mile, but I was able to recover and catch my breath&hel Read more:Drugs
Free Magazine Subscription! Internet Retailer 2007-08-12 22:53:53 I just received a sign-up offer for a FREE 1 year subscription to InternetRetailer
magazine. I don’t do much internet retailing, but for a cost of FREE I couldn’t really pass it up. The sales pitch states that it includes:
…comprehensive coverage of the practices, strategies and technologies that are shaping web retailing… latest trends in marketing retail web sites, the newest technologies in mobile commerce, the most effective web site designs, the expansion of the web in stores, the future of web TV, the latest techniques in search engine marketing, and proprietary data on America’s 500 largest e-retailers.
You can click through the link above to go to their main page and follow the FREE SUBSCRIPTION link on that page. You can also go strait to the sign-up form for your FREE SUBSCRIPTION here. The free deal is only available to U.S. residents, sorry You can still subscribe internationally but you will have to pay the regular subscription price, $102 Read more:Magazine
, Subscription
How Can I Be More Productive? The Not-To-Do List 2007-08-17 12:41:47 Tim Ferriss, author of the The 4-Hour Work Week, has published a great list of 9 Not-To-Do’s in an article titled The Not-To-Do List: 9 Habits to Stop Now. I thought this was a really great read for anyone trying to increase the productivity in their life. I’ve listed a few of my favorites below:
1. Do not answer calls from unrecognized phone numbers
Feel free to surprise others, but don’t be surprised. It just results in unwanted interruption and poor negotiating position. Let it go to voicemail, and consider using a service like GrandCentral (you can listen to people leaving voicemail) or Simulscribe (receive voicemails as e-mail).
I’m a bit of a phone hater anyway, so this one rang (pun intended) especially true for me. One of my best friends was known for looking at the phone and seeing a number that he didn’t recognize and not answering. He’d then say, “Sorry, you did not authenticate.” I like that. Of course I actually take this one ste
Friday Song Of The Day - Almost Cut My Hair 2007-08-16 22:38:46 I heard this song on the classic rock station the other day and had to look it up. I thought it was kind of funny talking about “cutting my hair”. I guess back then it was kind of a big deal for guys to have long hair around corporate or conservative type folks. I like it also because it talks about being down “in that sunny southern weather”. I live in Florida and it has been MISERABLE lately. Temperatures in the 100 degree range and humidity that could suffocate a cow!
Almost
cut my hair
It happened just the other day
It’s gettin’ kind of long
I could’ve said it was in my way
But I didn’t and I wonder why
I feel like letting my freak flag fly
And I feel like I owe it, yeah … to someone
Must be because I had the flu for Christmas
And I’m not feeling up to par
It increases my paranoia
Like looking in my mirror and seeing a police car
Well I’m not giving in an inch to fear
You know I’ve promised myself this year
We Read more:Friday
Are You Superbad!? 2007-08-16 22:19:33 What a great time to be a geek! It seems that every time I turn around there is yet another reason the media gives us for being a geek. Napolean Dynamite took the world by storm. Now we have… Superbad, a coming-of-age cautionary tale about two socially inept teenage boys about to graduate high school. From what I could tell by the website and the trailer it’s about their fight to not be nerds and/or geeks anymore. They are about to leave for college and are bound and determined to leave on a superbad note! Watch the trailer below (click through to the site if you cannot see it).
You can also get your Superbad T-Shirts now! Be the first.
LyricWiki Search Widget Now Hosted On WordPress 2007-08-16 21:10:39 LyricWiki is a free site which is a source where anyone can go to get reliable lyrics for any song from any artist without being hammered by invasive ads.
The LyricWiki Search
Widget is a WordPress plugin that provides a widget to place a search box right on the sidebar of your WordPress site so that your readers can utilize the LyricWiki site and find their favorite lyrics from your blog!
This is not news… I’ve had this plugin posted up for a while. True! However now my widget is finally hosted on the WordPress Plugins Page. Hopefully this will give the plugin (and my blog) a little more exposure to the internet masses. You can download it from the WordPress plugin site below:
Download LyricWiki Search Widget (24 kb)
Read more:Hosted
30+ Firefox Tools for Bookmarking & Searching 2007-08-16 10:15:47 Mashable.com just posted this list of FirefoxTools
and had to give it some cred. I have to say, the folks at Mashable create some killer lists. Here are just a few to wet your appetite.
2 Pane Bookmark - Splits your bookmarks in to two panes, the top one showing the folders, the bottom one showing the folder’s contents.
Annotea Ubimarks - Adds the Annotea social bookmarks and topics to your Firefox browser. Can update locally and then publish.
Bookmark Duplicate Detector - Detects duplicates in your bookmark as you add one, and can also search out existing duplicates and get rid of them.
Bookmark Sync and Sort - Lets you sync your bookmarks with an XML file to keep them backed up and download elsewhere.
Bookmark Tags - Store your bookmarks by tags instead of folders making it easier to find what you’re looking for.
Boox - Gives you styled bookmarks, view live feeds as a web page, enhanced search and more.
To see even more, go to the original article on Mashable.com!
Read more:Bookmarking
Do You Work For Sun Microsystems? Not For Long. 2007-08-16 09:42:18 Sun Microsystems
To Let More People Go
— Goldman Sachs predicted another restructuring at Sun last week amid the euphoria that a first look at Sun’s June numbers engendered with investors and, lo and behold, Sun Tuesday confided to the SEC that it’s anticipating throwing a unquantified number of its staff from ‘various geographies’ out on their collective keister the next few months and taking a $100 million to $150 million charge.
List Of Funny Road Signs 2007-08-16 09:19:06 I just ran across a blog that posts funny and weird commercials, ads, road signs and anything else that the author, Kiwi, finds amusing. I really enjoyed this listing of Crazy Road Signs. Go see for yourself!
Read more:Funny
Is Alexa Completely Useless? Michael Arrington Says Yes! 2007-08-15 22:49:01 I’m sure the head honchos over at Alexa
are scrambling like ants and beating their technical staff over the head with a ball-peen hammer to get this fixed. Apparently they are reporting that YouTube.com gets more hits than Google.com. Hmmm. I’m sure that TechCrunch, one of the most read blogs on the internet, doing an article on this has stirred the pot a bit. Check out the original article:
Alexa Says YouTube Is Now Bigger Than Google. Alexa Is Useless
Read more:Michael
Can I Scrobble The Tunes From My iPod? 2007-08-15 20:52:57 What is a scrobble? Actually it’s not a what. “Scrobble” is the term used when you transfer details about a song that you are listening / have listened to into a back-end database using the Audioscrobbler recommendation system used by Last.fm. Ok, that’s the short explanation and if you want more then you can go search for it.
The Problem
The problem with the initial pass of this system is that you could only scrobble files as you listened to them. This meant you had to be connected to the last.fm site while you were jamming out. So what if I listen to most of my music on the road via my iPod
? There were a couple of plugins that promised this functionality, but I never bothered while I was working from home because it generally didn’t matter if I missed scrobbling a few tunes while I jogged with my iPod Nano. However, now I’m commuting to a job that is an hour’s drive away. Different story.
Not Quite There
The Last.fm client actually implemen
Hilarious Spam Message 2007-08-22 14:51:20 I just had this spam comment come across and it breezed by the Akismet filter. Thankfully I have the moderation (human element) filter engaged as well, but this was a funny one so I thought I’d post it.
Hey Everybody!
I’ve been lurking for awhile but this is a really cool forum so I decided to jump in and get my feet wet. I’m new at this so I don’t have much to say but it’s been real educational reading here and I look forward to participating.
The URL that they left was some blogspot address that just redirected to a loan site. First of all… this is a BLOG, not a forum. If you are going to throw this kind of spam out there on blogs at least get that part right. Secondly… well there is no second. So whoever you are, whether human or robot, stop spamming my blog!
Read more:Message
Picking Up The Pace 2007-08-22 08:58:57 I had a really good run today; it felt like I was actually working and pushing myself a little. Of course to start out the run my iPod froze up on me. I noticed that after a few seconds following the “Workout beginnning” announcement there was no music. So of course I had to stop and reset the thing… I can’t run without my tunes! I’ve been running in the 11:00 minute mile range, but today I actually picked it up a bit. The final average pace was 10′45″ per mile and that includes a pretty decent slowdown towards the end because of a side cramp. Well, click the graph below to see a larger version… if you want.
Read more:Picking
Developer API: Can Your Cell Phone Understand You? 2007-08-21 09:21:19 An article over at TechCrunch reviews a new company called vlingo who is developing a mobile API that developers can use to put speech recognition on mobile devices.
Their system starts with a basic statistical language model to make the best guess about what you say. It then improves upon that by taking into account context, and positive and negative user feedback down to the individual. Context helps the system by narrowing the number of possible words you said. For instance, if the context is an address, the number of possible street names is limited to the ones in the city. User feedback correcting the system’s output or leaving it be helps the system learn how you speak (e.g correcting Austin to Boston).
This seems like a pretty daunting task as voice/speech recognition usually takes quite a bit of a) computing power and b) dictionaries of pattern matching for comparison. Of course it appears that the two co-founders heading up the project are up to the task.
The two co-founder Read more:Developer
, Understand
, Cell Phone
EverybodyGoTo Giveaway Action Shots! 2007-08-20 22:43:26 The Everybody Go To blog hosted a giveaway of a signed USB Drink Cooler and a cool USB Desk Lamp back at the end of July. The winner was announced on July 29th… and it was me! I got the goods in and have finally gotten around to getting a few snapshots of them. Sorry for the quality, I’m not exactly a photographer.
Read more:Action
Daily WTF: So How Long Should This Thread Wait? 2007-08-20 09:04:26 If you haven’t checked out the site Worse Than Failure (yeah, we all know what WTF stands for), then you should go right now. Bookmark it or subscribe to their feed. Some of the stuff they post is absolutely hilarious… if you are a programmer / technical type. Anyway today’s post is about someone being confused about how long to wait in a thread. Quite funny… go check it out.
Patiently Waiting Forever
Read more:Daily
, Thread
Another Week, Another Run 2007-08-20 08:48:53 Well, I only got two runs in last week, but it was the first week in a while (for exercise that is). I got my aging keister out of bed this morning at 5:15 AM CST and got out the ole running shoes and iPod. It was actually a decent run and felt really good. I’m keeping about an eleven minute mile average over the 2.5 miles that I run. Not exactly stellar performance, but at least I’m moving. Before my long hiatus I was at about a ten minute mile over 4 miles. Hopefully I can regain that in the next couple of months and get back on track for the Pensacola Double Bridge Run. Anyway, here is the latest graph from today’s run.
Sun Microsystems Changing Stock Ticker To JAVA 2007-08-26 09:25:07 Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems
(Nasdaq: SUNW) has just announced that they will be changing their stock symbol to JAVA. I don’t normally bother with any news of the financial sort on this blog, but this change is a bit interesting and is stirring a lot of speculation.
If, like me, you’re wondering if the ticker change somehow presages an exit from the bare-knuckles server business…
As a software company, Sun would have different but more profitable battles to fight, which means more resources for improving Solaris and working with Google, among other things. In short: there’s opportunity here, even if seizing the opportunity would require an extreme makeover of the company.
You can read the original article, Sun Seeks A Java Jolt, written by Tim Beyers on the Motley Fool Advisor site.
Read more:Changing
, Stock
, Sun Microsystems
15 Tools To Screen Capture Websites 2007-08-25 09:35:17 Another great list over at Mashable lists different ways to get screen-shots of websites. Here are just few to wet your appetite. These are in the form of Firefox plugins, but they also list some standalone programs and some web based tools to get the job done.
Save as image - an aptly named Firefox plugin that lets you save a page, frame, or part of either as an image directly from Firefox.
Pearl Crescent Page Saver - Save images of web pages in jpg or png format; save the entire page or just a portion of it, with the ability to automatically scale the image to a smaller size.
Picnik for Firefox - if you use online image editor Picnik this Firefox plugin enables you to easily import a screenshot of the currently opened webpage into it.
Head over to the original article 15 Ways To Create Website Screenshots to get the full list.
Read more:Tools
, Websites
Conditional Statements And Comparison Order 2007-08-25 07:17:41 Most programming languages that I know and can think of use conditional tests and comparison operators. This is one of the most basic concepts in programming. A conditional test at it’s most basic form is testing whether a variable’s value is less than, equal to or greater than a constant or known value. You then make a decision to do or not to do something based on the results of that comparison. For instance take the following example:
if( MoneyInMyWallet > $100 )
{
GoShopping();
}
Listing 1
In this example, MoneyInMyWallet is a variable that should hold the value of the amount of money in my wallet at any given time. The condition says that if that amount is greater than $100, then I can go shopping. If the amount is less than or equal to $100 then I cannot go shopping. Pretty simple, right?
What’s Your Point?
No, this actually is not a tutorial on conditional statements and programming. My point is I’ve noticed that some developers will actually place Read more:Order
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