Recently in Review Category

I have used Movable Type installed on my own webhost for 5 years or so. After several false starts on Wordpress I decided to make the switch. Maybe.

For several years I really liked Movable Type. I could manage the design of my web site using html and css. Movable Type took my html and css as templates to produce the final product with all of my blog entries incorporated automagically. Movable Type even permitted text files to be linked so that one could avoid the Movable Type editor altogether. The system was relatively clean and straight forward to use.

Then came Movable Type 4.2. Six Apart made some fairly radical changes to the template structure which broke existing templates during upgrade. The new template structure fragments the html into blocks - header, body, footer, sidebar, etc. It might be possible to work with the new structure in order to implement the old. I have not yet taken the time to sort it all out. 4.2 came just as I was about to head out on a military deployment to Iraq. I didn't have time to figure it all out then. By the time I returned, I'd lost interest.

I've been watching Wordpress for several years. Twice I made attempts to move my blog to Wordpress and then changed my mind. After I returned from deployment, I started looking into what I wanted to do about my blog. For several years I've been watching all kinds of cool widgets and themes coming out for Wordpress. The bit the really got my attention was the iPhone Wordpress client. I figured Six Apart would surely make one as well. Not so far. That finally motivated me to move my blog over to Wordpress and see what it is really like.

Movable Type is definitely an industrial strength weblog content manager. From a single install of MT it is relatively painless and instantaneous to set up multiple blogs with multiple users of varying access privileges. That part did indeed work very well. Up until 4.2, managing the look and feel of the various web sites on which the multiple blogs existed was also fairly simple. There was one html template for each view (main index, archive index, comment input, etc.) associated with the blog. Movable Type included some advanced features that made it really simple to reuse common elements across multiple templates. The style of the entire weblog could be managed from a single style sheet. Multiple style sheets could also be used from within the constructs of CSS. 4.2 made some radical changes to the template structure which complicated the construction and management of the html significantly, at least in my opinion. I'm sure that the folks at Six Apart are convinced that the new architecture is a vast improvement.

What then of Wordpress. Facebook integration is available through a widget. Digg integration into one's blog is available via a widget. Mobile device specific layouts that are triggered automatically are available through a widget. Flickr integration in a manner more meaningful and elegant than the gawd awful Flickr badges is available in the form of a widget. Having watched with envy as my buddies running Wordpress blogs kept getting all the cool gadgets and toys I decided it was time to get it a try.

Wordpress sets up more quickly and easily than Movable Type. The SQL setup is pretty much the same for both but installation of the Wordpress software is easier. Customizing Wordpress is both easier and significantly harder. Simpler because so many things can be customized simply by installing a widget. If the customization you want is available in a widget, adding that customization to your weblog can be done in minutes. Likewise if the customization you want is available as a theme. Most things that can be handled in modifying a style sheet are also fairly easy provided that you have a working knowledge of CSS.

Anything that does not fit into the categories mentioned above falls into the significantly harder class. Customizing the header of you blog, which is a fairly simple html and css task in Movable Type, is more complicated in Wordpress. It requires mucking around with the Wordpress php code. When I'm wearing my web designer hat, I'd really prefer to only have to work with html and css. JavaScript, php, perl and all the other languages of the web are great but it should not be necessary to fiddle with php in order to insert or change a graphic in the page layout. That's crazy. But that is what is required to peak, tweak and/or modify in any significant and meaningful way the page layout of a Wordpress weblog.

I know that there are a lot of business and corporate blogs that run on Wordpress. However, in my mind, Wordpress is excellent weblog software for non-technical to moderately technical non-professionals who want to run their own blog. I honestly believe that most of these people would be a lot happier on Squarespace or similar. But, if you really want to install and maintain your own blog software, Wordpress is a decent choice.

For web world professionals who maintain blog sites for clients I think there are better solutions available. Movable Type is an industrial strength blog engine. Once you get your head around the template architecture that they use the page layout that Movable Type can support is limited more by the skill of the designer than Movable Type.

I'm not yet ready to go back to Movable Type. I like some of the things I've been able to do with Wordpress but I do not like the hurdles involved in customizing a Wordpress layout. So, I'm exploring other weblog management systems looking for something lightweight, easily incorporated into an html CSS web site. MODx maybe. Any suggestions?

In my review of the Remington Shortcut, I mentioned that there's a reason why they won't ship it outside the United States. Well, it is because the power supple is 120 volt and does not work in most of the rest of the world which uses 220 volt electricity. In the room where I stay, we have a converter that drops the 220 to 110. So, I figured I would just make sure I always plugged it in there. Yeah. The second time I went to recharge the Shortcut, I plugged the power supply into the wrong outlet and couldn't figure out why it wasn't charging.

Amazon to the soldier's rescue once again. I found a universal power supply that is very handy for deploying solders and travelers in general. The Velleman Compact Universal AC Adapter Power Supply can be used in place of most power supplies. It can be plugged into 110 volt or 220 volt which is what I needed. It comes with a number of tips that attach to the cord. And, the output voltage is switchable to match the device you are trying to connect it to. It is important to get Velleman part number PSSMV1 and not PSSMV1USA if the 110/220 capability is important to you. PSSMV1USA only does 110.

It sounds confusing, right. It's really not. Use the selector switch on the side to select the output voltage. Check the device you plan to plug it into which should have the input voltage clearly labeled. The Remington Shortcut requires 4.5 volts of DC.

Select the tip that fits into the device. This is pretty straightforward, it either fits or it doesn't. Match the polarity. Check the device you plan to plug in, in the same location where you found the voltage there should be an illustration; a dot, a circle and two lines. This illustration tells you whether the center pin in the plug should carry positive or negative electricity. Each of the tips that comes with the power supply has CEN marked on one side. The output plug on the power supply has a '+' symbol on one side, a '-' symbol on the other. Make sure the CEN is on the side indicated by illustration on your device and you should be good to go.

I currently use the Velleman to charge my phone and the Remington Shortcut. It works great. I think it is important to note that if the device you want to plug into the Velleman power supply requires any kind of special plug, most electric razors and modern cell phones for example, the Velleman will not work. I'm very happy with it at this point. Does exactly what I need it to.

For a long time out here on FOB Hunter, we had no barber. That did not preclude us from adhering to military grooming standards. There are a number of barracks barbers on the FOB with varying degrees of skill. The most common approach is to simply get a “butch” haircut, one in which the hair is a sixteenth of an inch all over. I really hate the way that looks on me but not as much as I hate really bad haircuts. I decided to look at the options out there that would allow me cut my own hair in some reasonable fashion. Amazon to the soldier's rescue.

A search on Amazon turned up a few possibilities but the only one that got decent reviews was the Remington Shortcut. When I tried to purchase it through Amazon and have it shipped to my APO address, Amazon would not allow me to order it using that ship to address. Turns out, there was a reason for that. I had it shipped to the house and asked my wife to forward it to me out here. That made it take a while longer but it did finally arrive.

The Shortcut comes with two comb attachments. One is apparently for doing butch haircuts. The other used in conjunction with the dial on the Shortcut lets you adjust the length to which the hair is cut. This was the feature that I wanted. I like my hair cut nearly skin tight on the sides but I like to have about quarter inch or so on top. Having read the reviews on Amazon which made it very clear that reading the instructions was important, I read the instructions before I used the Shortcut for the first time. Sounded pretty straightforward.

I started on the sides with a setting of 1. The Shortcut does require that you go over an area several times in order to get all the hair cut. It's a lot like brushing your hair. After the sides were done, I set it to 1 1/4 and went over the curve from the side of the head to the top to give a reasonable transition to the longer hair on top. Last, I set the Remington Shortcut to 2 and trimmed the top. Once I was done, I got into the shower to get all the hair clippings off.

I now do this once a week. Friday morning is my haircut, right before I jump in the shower. It works great. My hair always looks decent. It's not the flat top that I where at home but my hair meets Army standards and I don't cringe every time I catch a glance of myself in a mirror. I have to say I'm quite happy with the Remington Shortcut. At less than $40 if it lasts the entire deployment I will have gotten my money's worth out of it. I'll put it in the deployment box when I get home and probably not use it again until my next deployment.

For the complete details of what comes in the box and the specifics on how to use it go to the Remington web site. My only intent here is to let people know how I use it and that it does a great job for what I need.

[Update: 24 Apr]
The Shortcut is a great idea. The implementation, not so much. The device requires approximately 20 hours to charge and then lasts for about 3 to 5 minutes of run time. Long enough to cut my hair but only just. Very disappointing. I am now looking for a similar device from a maker other than Remington.

Technorati Tags: military life, review

We're house hunting. If you've been watching the financial news you know this might be the worst possible time to sell a house. However, it is also a great time to be buying. So, we're house hunting.

The ready accessibility to the MLS for the counties around us makes it a lot easier. We can see what is for sale, how much it is listed for, square footage and all that. So, we've been using mlslistings.com to make a list of houses that we think we're interested in and then, on the weekend, we drive out and do drive-bys of the places on our list. At the same time we drive around the various neighborhoods to get a feel for the community. When we got home, I was had a hard time associating the fliers we picked up with the location from which we got them. I figured this was an excellent justification to learn about geocoding.

I already have a Canon PowerShot Pro 1 camera, which will have to do until I pick up my Canon 5D. I needed a way to embed the latitude and longitude into the EXIF of the image. I was hoping my Garmin StreetPilot i3 would provide the lat/long information I needed but it can not. So, I purchased a Magellan eXplorist 210. I chose this particular device because it was the cheapest handheld GPS device with a display and a USB connection. For those wondering, the eXplorist 210 connects to Mac OS X and appears as a volume and is completely usable with Mac. So, now I have a way to track where I've been.

The trick then, is to use a track file from the GPS device to determine the exact lat/long where the photograph was taken by using the time of the photograph. The EXIF data in the photograph will have the time it was taken. The GPS log file will have a lat/long associated with that same time provided that it is on, logging and with the camera. There are a number of applications that might help us out. I only tried as many as was necessary to accomplish my intended goal. There might be others out there. Here are the applications that I tried.

HoudahGPS

This one did not work for me. No idea why. Might have been me, maybe it's the software. It simply did not work.

LoadMyTracks

This works great for my purposes. Using LoadMyTrack's Translate File from the File menu I translate the Magellan track.log file which is in a proprietary format to GPX which is an XML interchange format. I've never been able to get any of these applications to talk directly to the 210. Not sure why.

Next, I connect my camera to the PowerBook G4 and let iPhoto import them. While iPhoto is importing I'm wondering why iPhoto does not already support geocoding. Because iPhoto does not support geocoding, I have to export the images. So, I now have the pictures I want to geocode and the GPX file from which to get the geocode in a single directory on my desktop.

HoudahGeo

While HoudahGPS did not work for me, HoudahGeo works great. I used it twice and then paid the shareware fee. HoudahGeo first loads the photo images, then the GPX file. It then matches times to determine the lat/long of the photos. HoudahGeo then gives you the option of writing the data to the image files, importing the data and the photos to Google Earth, or exporting the photos to Flickr. I do all three. You can take a look at our house hunt here.

It is a lot of fun to associate the photos you take with the location they were taken. I think all of us have sorted through the family photos and wondered, where was this taken. Additionally, we wonder, who is that person. I'd like as much information as possible embedded in the image file itself so that, when you have the image file, you have the whole story. This is a fundamental reason that I think iPhoto sucks. iPhoto provides things like keywords and description fields but the information is not attached to the image file. It is put into a separate database. Lose that database file, you've lost whatever information was in there. IPTC Core picks up where EXIF leaves off providing metadata fields for keywords, descriptions, photographer, copyright, etc. All of this information is embedded into the image file so that any application that supports this metadata can, at a minimum, diplay it. iPhoto ought to be leading the way. It ought to already support geocoding, IPTC, and it should be using the image file as the storage medium for the information.

aloha

[posted with ecto]

Technorati Tags: commentary, computers, mac os x, review

"Babel" (Alejandro González Iñárritu)

My wife and I watched Babel on DVD last night. Both of us thought it was pretty slow, not very good.

Babel tells four stories that are, in varying degrees, interrelated. In my opinion, none of the four stories are very engaging. Much of the camera work was the handheld camcorder shots that are in vogue. I'll be happy when that particular fad falls from grace. They don't look any better when Hollywood does them.

The movie leads off with the Cate Blanchett's character, Susan, asking her husband played by Brad Pitt, "what are we doing here?" They are presumably vacationing in Morocco. The more rural areas of Morocco, from the look of it. I spent the rest of the movie wondering at the answer to Susan's question. Good actors did a reasonable job in delivering a mediocre script. Editing was on par with the writing.

Babel is, in my opinion, very similar to another movie, Mystery Train. Mystery Train is far more interesting. Not quite the star-studded cast but a much better story, told in a very interesting and surprising way.

Technorati Tags: movie, review

"World Trade Center (Widescreen Edition)" (Oliver Stone)

The character I most identified with in the movie was a fairly minor, supporting role in the movie. However, the man was absolutely critical to the story. Without him, the two police officers would be listed among the dead instead of being survivors 18 and 19.

Dave Karnes, upon seeing the collapse of the World Trade Center, walked out of his accounting office, got a haircut, put on his uniform and drove to Ground Zero. He walked into the pile of rubble that other rescue workers were being restricted from and started looking for survivors. In the course of his search, he met up with another Marine, Jason Thomas, and they searched together. They found the two police officers. And then they refused to leave until they saw them pulled from the ground. Lastly, they walked away. No glory, no praise. Mission complete, move on. Staff Sergeant Dave Karnes, having already served 23 years in the Corps, re-enlisted and served two tours in Iraq.

I enjoyed the movie a lot. I can't imagine what it must have felt like to be trapped for so long. The DVD Extras tells the rest of the story. The surgeries and recovery of the two officers. As is often the case, the two got worse before they got better. Both survived.

Great movie. I recommend it. I think it is good to remember that day. We don't want to believe it but that enemy is still out there. Given an opportunity, that enemy will do September 11 again and worse. "You may not realize it but this country is at war."

aloha

Technorati Tags: military, movie, review

Every once in a while, a direct mail campaign works on me. Which is, I suppose, why we have junk mail in all it's nastiness. 1% of the direct mail actually works.

yourmusic.com is pretty cool. There are probably other similar services out there but this is the first one I've become aware of. The deal works like this. You pay a 'membership fee' of $5.99. Each month they will send you the first available CD from your queue. Everyone knows what the queue is, right? We've all been trained by NetFlix. But, just in case. The queue is your wishlist of CDs. You go to yourmusic.com and add CDs that you want to your queue, your WishList. Every month yourmusic.com sends you one. You can buy additional CDs at the same price, $5.99 per, multi-disc sets are priced at $5.99 per disc. Better than iTunes Store and I get the physical CD, which I really like.

Up to now, iTunes Store has been successful in trapping my impulse buying. Once or twice a month I'll click the button and buy one to three CDs, songs, and music videos -- and now even the occasional TV show and movie -- from iTunes Store. Not no more! I'll undoubtedly still do a lot of discovery through iTunes but now I'll jump over to yourmusic.com to make the purchase.

aloha

Technorati Tags: music

"The Company" (Robert Littell)

One of the books I got was The Company: A Novel of the CIA by Robert Littell. My audible.com account says I originally purchased the audio book on 17 October 2003. Today, almost exactly three years later to the day, I finished the book. There were two false starts over the course of that three years. I have the unabridged edition which means that I have listened to 40 hours of audio book. For all of that, it is a great book.

Littell tells the history of the CIA from it's formation, out of the ashes of the OSS, to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Most of the more significant events are told accurately. One of the things I enjoy about historical fiction is that it drives me to find out what actually happened. Some times only in a lightweight fashion (look it up on Wikipedia). A few events are handled with more drama than accuracy. The character of James Angleton being the most evident.

In the course of the story we meet three presidents; John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. Kennedy is presented as an overbearing, egotistical man. Ronald Reagan is presented as almost senile and bumbling. Bush is presented in a rather flat light. All of which I found interesting.

It was interesting to look up each character's name to find out if they were real or fictional. James Angleton, a major character in the book, was a real person. William J. Donovan makes an appearance. Allen Dulles is there, of course. Kim Philby has a major part in the book while the rest of the Cambridge Five make only cameo appearances. Harvey Torriti, one of the main characters through whom much of the story is told, appears to be a fictional character.

All in all, a good book. I enjoyed it though I must admit I was glad to finally reach the end today.

aloha

[posted with ecto]

Technorati Tags: book, review

I always check out the new albums on iTunes 25 New Releases. I am often introduced to artists or albums this way. So, today I was cruising through the list of 25 new releases. An album piqued my curiosity because it was a group called The 5 Browns. The album cover looked like a release by some pop group but the category said classical. Hum?

I clicked on the album, popped over into iTunes, and looked at the album. Yep, still the same pop looking group. I listened to the 10 second sample iTunes offers. Yep, they really are a classical group. Now I was really curious. Google 'The 5 Browns'. There's their web site.

I'll let you head over to The 5 Browns and check them out. Very worth looking into even if you think you don't like classical music. These guys are hella cool. This video is an absolute must see. Check 'em out.

Aloha

[posted with ecto]

Technorati Tags: music, review

This book and the subsequent movie reminds me of "Rising Sun" (Michael Crichton). I had lived in Japan and was an Asian Studies major at Cal State Long Beach at the time the book was published.

Crichton sought to capitalize on the popular notion that Japan was bent on 'conquering' the United States by buying it. There was a lot of talk about how Crichton had done huge amounts of research. The book included a several pages long bibliography of scholarly works on Japan. Sharon Sievers, my Japanese History professor at the time, told me that Japan Scholars all over the country were searching the book to see if they had been quoted or listed in the bibliography. Those who had not were heaving sighs of relief.

There was plenty of allusion to the notion that Rising Sun was in fact prophesying the future if America did not do something about the new Yellow Peril. Probably most comical of all was the fact that Japan's economic bubble had burst in 1989 and by 1992 when Crichton's book was published Japan's economy was entering a recession from which it has yet to recover.

"The Da Vinci Code" (Dan Brown) strikes me a very similar. Dan Brown plays on popular notions in a time when it is popular to poke holes in and fun at Christianity. Dan Brown grabs a handful of sexy alternative theories about Christ and Christianity and weaves them together in a fictional story that covers two thousand years. The Da Vinci Code was never intended as an academic work. It was intended to entertain and, given its success in the marketplace, I would venture a sizable bet that it is a very entertaining story.

I read Rising Sun when it came out. I thought it was a good story. The Japan in Crichton's Rising Sun bore about as much resemblance to the real Japan as Crichton's America did to real America. They were fictional places in a work of fiction. The point of both books is to entertain. I haven't read The Da Vinci Code but I can say that Rising Sun was/is very entertaining. Best not to take either book too seriously. Neither the movies.

aloha

[posted with ecto]

Technorati Tags: book, christianity, commentary, movie, religion, review