Nontrivial Exercises

“Tagclouding” Your Blog (Or Any RSS Feed)

For the last couple of months, as I’ve really started using del.icio.us (now that it’s so easy to do with Flock), Technorati, and as I’ve been thinking about tags on Flickr, I have wondered why I can’t have a tagcloud for my blog. Typepad, and many other blogging services, offer categories, which is a start at organizing your data. However, tag clouds contain much more information in a much cleaner view.

I decided that I want one for this blog, and set out on a search. Here is what I have found, and it’s pretty cool:

<!–
.zoomclouds  {
   text-align: left;
   border:1px solid #006699;
   padding:2px;
   position:relative;
   background-color:#FFFFFF;
   width:300px;
}
.zoomclouds span a, .zoomclouds a {
   margin: 0 2px;
   text-decoration:none;
   font-family: Helvetica, arial, sans-serif;
}
.zoomclouds span.tag1 a {color:#6588c7}
.zoomclouds span.tag2 a {color:#254887}
.zoomclouds span.tag3 a {color:#355897}
.zoomclouds span.tag4 a {color:#4568a7}
.zoomclouds span a:hover, .zoomclouds a:hover {
   color:#FFFFFF;
   background-color:#8ca5b5;
   text-decoration:none;
}
.zoomcloudswg {
   font-size:10px;
   color: #bbb;
}
.zoomcloudssp {
   font-size:10px;
   color: #444;
}
–>

The cloud is from Zoomclouds, but let me talk about some other alternatives and why I like this service the best.

Continue reading ‘“Tagclouding” Your Blog (Or Any RSS Feed)’

Using a Bluetooth Headset on my Toshiba M200 - Final Update

In my two previous posts about this topic, I described my efforts to use a Bluetooth headset (a Motorola HS850 in my case) with my Toshiba M200 Tablet PC. I have resolved the issues I noted previously and this is now fully working. Here’s a summary of what you need to do, since it is a bit confusing if you use the US Toshiba support website:

1. Use the latest Toshiba Bluetooth driver that supports the headset service. You cannot find this driver on the US Toshiba support website, so go to the European site. At the time of writing this, the latest version is 4.00.30.
2. Install the driver, but DO NOT set-up or discover any Bluetooth devices (i.e. your headset) until you reboot. This was my problem – my impatience got the best of me and I configured and discovered my headset before I rebooted, which messed up the configuration such that I had to uninstall the driver and reinstall it to get it to work.
3. After rebooting, open the Bluetooth utility (double click on the Bluetooth icon in the system tray) and configure your headset. You’ll then get a shortcut on your desktop for your headset – just open the shortcut whenever you want to connect to your headset.

I called Toshiba technical support to ask them about the Bluetooth driver. They confirmed that the Bluetooth drivers will work with any Toshiba laptop – i.e. there is no difference between the Bluetooth hardware on their laptops. This is despite what the US support site suggests, since they have different downloads of the V2 drivers for each different laptop model.

Then, when I asked them why you have to go to the European support site to obtain the latest Bluetooth driver, the support rep told me that they were “not allowed” to put the driver on the US site, though he didn’t know why.

Perhaps Toshiba wants to deliberately confuse US customers who want to use Bluetooth headsets – it sure feels that way. At least you can get it to work, though you have to dig a little bit to find the right driver.

Again, here is the link to download the latest Bluetooth driver that will support the headset profile on any Toshiba laptop:

http://aps.toshiba-tro.de/bluetooth/directlink.php?snr=2

Technorati Tags: bluetooth, m200, laptop, toshiba, hs850, support

2 Parents, 3 Kids, 4 Pets

We are moving ever-closer to being fully integrated in American Suburbia, having now acquired our first dog. We actually were putting this off as long as we could – not because we do not like dogs, but rather because we do, but we had the following concerns:

• We do not want our house to smell like a dog
• We do not want dog hair all around our house
• We like big dogs (like labs), and have what is a relatively big back yard (for American Suburbia), but it is still not big enough for a decent sized dog to truly run around in and get enough exercise
• We do not want a little yippie, high-strung dog

For these reasons, we didn’t really want an inside dog (smell and hair) and we didn’t have enough real room for a decent sized dog. However, we also have 2 boys, one of whom is 4, and it’s therefore very hard not to have a dog.

We kept the Yorkie of a friend of ours at our house for a few days and kind of fell in love with her. She was small, but not high-strung. She didn’t smell bad, and Yorkies don’t shed – their hair continually grows. She was cute and cuddly even as a three-year-old, and we really liked her.

So, after looking around a while, on Saturday we found Diego, a four-month-old Yorkie puppy pictured above that we are now proud to call our own. This brings our family Suburbia metrics to the following:

• 3 kids
• 4 pets – 1 tortoise, 2 fish, 1 dog
• 1 minivan
• 1 child playing soccer
• 4 collapsible canvas chairs
• 3 scooters

Gobby - Collaborative Cross-Platform Text Editor

At the recent CocoaDevHouseDallas event, several of us got together to collaborate on the design and development of a new note-taking app for the Mac. After a lot of whiteboarding and discussions, we wanted to capture some of the requirements and use cases that we had come up with for this app. The problem was, all of this info was distributed across the minds of 4 or 5 people who had commented and discussed the design of the app.

Since this was a group focused on developing in Cocoa, the Mac object-oriented development framework, everyone had Macs … except me. I was along for the ride with my Tablet PC in hand (which, by the way, caught a few people’s interest). There is a Mac app called SubEthaEdit, created by The Coding Monkeys in Germany, which is a collaborative real-time text editor for Macs.

At one point in the evening, then, at CocoaDevHouse, several people fired up SubEthaEdit on their Macs and began listing the requirements and use cases that they remembered from our discussions. After several people added their ideas to the list, we had a fairly long list of items, created and modified in real-time, that we could then save.

Pretty cool. Well, SubEthaEdit is a Mac-only app, and the developers apparently don’t plan any port to other OS’s like Windows or Linux. However, thanks to Tyler from CDH, I’ve found a close equivalent that will work on Mac OSX, Windows and Linux.

Gobby is a free open-source app that allows for real-time collaborative editing of text documents. Although it is easiest to install on Windows – there is a pre-built Windows installer, but you have to compile from source on OSX and Linux – you can share and collaborate on a doc with multiple users on multiple platforms.

I’ve tried it out on 2 Windows machines and it works great. You can check out some screenshots on the Gobby homepage, and I’ve added a few of mine here as well.

User list of all users currently connected:

Editing screen with changes shown in each user’s specific color.

One disadvantage of Gobby compared to SubEthaEdit is that you have to manually enter the host name or IP address to connect to a shared session, whereas SubEthaEdit will find a list of people to connect to if you’re on a local network using Bonjour (an Apple networking utility). However, with Gobby you can manually specify a specific port to use, and you can specify passwords with each session / document on which you collaborate.

Technorati Tags: gobby, subethaedit, cocoadevhouse, editor, collaboration

Roboform Support Flock - It’s Here

I mentioned that Roboform, was going to add support for Flock. Well, after releasing an adapter over the weekend that supported Flock 0.5.11 but not 0.5.12, the current version, today they released the adapter to support 0.5.12. I have installed it and it works!

Now, I’m going to try using Flock for a more extended period of time and write blog posts from it, use the shelf for collecting items that I want to write about, etc.

Now, should I….

You can get the Roboform adapter for Flock on their supported browsers page.

Technorati Tags: flock, roboform

Beta Testers Wanted for MindManager Mac Edition

I have written about mind mapping in a few previous posts covering some of the basics. In some forthcoming posts I will mention different mind mapping applications and how to use mind maps as a clever and information-rich form of project management.

Arguably the most feature-rich and extensible mind mapping application available today is MindJet’s MindManager. One of the biggest complaints from Mac users, however, has been MindJet’s lack of a Mac edition of MindManager.

If you are a Mac user and are interested in mind mapping, take notice. MindJet is now developing a Mac edition of MindManager, and are looking for beta testers. You have to apply on their website, but this is a great opportunity to be involved in the development of this wonderful application on the Mac.

As I have personally considered whether I could switch from a PC to a Mac, one of the most significant barriers was the lack of a Mac version of MindManager. Now, this barrier will apparently come down soon! Another barrier for me is the Tablet PC platform itself, but the rumors are rampant about how we may see more from Apple on this in the not-too-distant future.

Technorati Tags: mindjet, mindmanager, mac, beta

Roboform Support of Flock

I have mentioned my intrigue with the Flock browser before, and how a big barrier for me to use Flock was the fact that you could not use Roboform, a very nice password management utility that I use, with Flock. I actually opened a support ticket with Roboform regarding their support for Flock, and just heard back from them today with some interesting news.

Roboform plans to add support for Flock in their next Roboform adapter release, which they mentioned as being “less than a week” away. I am very excited, and others should be as well, because I know many people use Roboform to manage their passwords and help protect their privacy on-line. Without the ability to easily port your password management between browsers, you are definitely hindered in what you can do with a browser.

With Flock being at such an early stage of development, why would Roboform want to spend their resources to support it, when so much is potentially subject to change with the app? I think there are 3 very good reasons, and whether these were actually their motivations or not, I can’t say, but I think the implications suggested by them will be true regardless:

Continue reading ‘Roboform Support of Flock’

Being Purposeful About Your Privacy - Part 2

In my previous post with this title, I mentioned how I had thought through the way I had setup my interactions on the Internet in 4 distinct ways, with varying degrees of privacy. How much you share of yourself when on-line is something you must consciously and purposefully decide, or risk letting someone else decide it for you, e.g. via default settings in various applications you use.

I want to explain the 4 different profiles, or faces, that I have on the Internet and suggest that these are reasonable ways to organize the different ways of sharing yourself on-line. As I consider my on-line interactions in the past, I see that I have blurred the lines between these four profiles without even considering it, and I think it was overall to the detriment of my privacy. I have come to believe that the more you can choose the specific manner in which you want to interact or share yourself for each on-line experience, the smarter you will be about your privacy, and the more secure you will be.

Continue reading ‘Being Purposeful About Your Privacy - Part 2′