Missing weekend posts

Marty August 10th, 2009

Hmm, Wordpress for iPhone seems to have a little bug – it eats your posts sometimes. Strange. Guess I’ll have to either re-write them or … more likely … shrug it off and keep going.

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to get creative about anything, but we recently had a contest at work to replace the boring “Day of Move” nameplates we had at our desks. I know it isn’t the Mona Lisa, but it was fun to think about how to represent myself. Continue Reading »

Design , Tech , random
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iBird Explorer Plus

Marty March 17th, 2009

Since the iPhone came out I wondered how long it would take for someone to come out with some good birding apps. Longer than I had expected, it turns out. A few small apps with limited usefulness appeared early on but none had the two main rings I was looking for: a mini field guide and a checklist. Then one day I came across something new, and very promising: the iBird Explorer Plus software. Continue Reading »

Birding , Tech
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Internet Insecurity, courtesy of Trend Micro

Marty December 30th, 2008

I had a rather startling – and worrying – surprise waiting for me this morning. When I woke up and came downstairs to check my computer, I found out that the subscription to my internet security software – Trend Micro – had expired. Well, I knew that was coming, actually, but what I hadn’t expected was that when the subscription expired, Trend Micro would completely shut down all of the software and not allow me to use it until I purchased another subscription.. That’s right – for 6 or 7 hours, all of my computer’s protection was GONE because this software decided that end of subscription = end of software. Continue Reading »

Rants , Tech
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The next level of browser?

Marty August 28th, 2008

The other day, I saw something that Mozilla had come up with – Mozilla Ubiquity. In the shortest sense, it’s a way to create quick internet mash-ups from your browser without having to go to a bunch of different webpages to do it. If you’ve ever used the ENSO Launcher interface, it’s a similar method but browser-based.

You can learn more from the video below, but basically if you’re on a web page, you can select text and then use CTRL+Spacebar to activate a command structure to analyze/manipulate the data you selected. Type “map” and it will map the selected address in Google maps. Select a term or phrase and type “wiki” to get a wikipedia entry, or “ask-search“/”google“/”msn-search” to search on that particular engine. Type “flickr” to search the term on Flickr. Even better, it starts to predict what you want to do.

But it does more than that – you can also run commands such as calculator (”calculate“), switch tabs (”tab“), create a TinyURL (”tinyurl“) and more. Check out the video below, and then go download the prototype. Unless you have IE, that is. Then you can just suck it. Continue Reading »

Design , Tech
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iPhone Apps (Review)

Marty August 10th, 2008

Okay – after a few weeks of using my iPhone 1st-gen with the iPhone 2.0 software, I have to say that I like it for the most part. There are still some glitches that annoy me, but overall it was a sound improvement. And the biggest part of that improvement was the ability to download applications to the iPhone. Previously, everything was a ‘web app’ – i.e. requiring access to the web to use it. Since I spend about half of my commute underground, that wasn’t really helpful; essentially, half of my trip I was left to play with Alarm, Calendar or Calc. Yippee!! But with downloadable apps, there are whole new worlds of possibilities. Continue Reading »

Domaination

Marty May 23rd, 2007

If you tuned in yesterday, you may have noticed that this blog (and my site in general) wasn’t quite right. It turns out that my domain – martytdx.com – expired at 9:09 a.m. EST yesterday, and by 12:43 p.m. a placeholder had been established and the domain taken by enom.com. Continue Reading »

Good News, Bad News

Marty February 22nd, 2007

Well, today was one of those “I’ve got good news … and I’ve got bad news” sort of days.Â But in an effort to be more positive about things, I’m going to try to do what they call in all of those silly ‘Better Management” books, the Oreo Cookie method and sandwich the bad items in between good ones, where possible – or at least look at the bright side when I can. Continue Reading »

Rants , Tech
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Why You Don’t Skimp on QA

Marty February 6th, 2007

Wow, Wal-Mart really screwed the pooch on this one. If you visit their new Video Download beta site, you get a somewhat nice experience – not great, but not too bad – provided you are using Internet Explorer:

If, however, you are using a modern browser such as say, Firefox, your experience is somewhat … shall we say, different?

Notice anything wrong? Obviously, no one mentioned that over 10% of the country uses Firefox, including what might be a disproportionate number of the users who might use a download service like this. Of course, we are talking about Wal-Mart customers…

I sure hope that someone loses their job over this – this is sloppy and a REALLY poor example of what happens when you don’t do proper QA (or use qualified designers). I could go to town on the code itself, but could I really do worse than what they already show here?