Fairweather Zealot

Okay, after a few days of using Microsoft’s new IE7 Beta, I’ve gotten a handle on the changes, as well as what I like and don’t like about it. Continue reading

Recently, I got into a discussion about what the best noise reduction software for photography was. Aside from the larger debate about whether you should post-process your picture or not (which could be a post in and of itself), I was wondering if there was a clear leader in programs to reduce noise in the shots that I took at higher ISOs with the Nikon D70. The D70 has a well-deserved reputation for adding quite a bit of noise at ISOs greater than 400, which is pretty unacceptable really.

But since it’s there, I have to compensate for it. My wife introduced me to Noise Ninja, and I found Noiseware myself. Both work very well, but were they the best choices? I created a test to compare them, and found that they were comparable, although I preferred Noiseware. Continue reading

Back in year’s past, Microsoft enjoyed a nearly complete monopoly on the web browser, and nobody really knew what standards were. Those who did were portrayed as geeks, crazies or perfectionists. And the folks from Redmond said “Enjoy what you have – we won’t be giving you anything else until Longhorn in 2005 2006 2007.

Then came a spate of new browsers that did know what standards were, and actually began following them. For MAC users, that meant Safari and Camino; for Windows users, Opera started pushing but it was Firefox that really caught Microsoft’s attention. Suddenly, their domination of browsers plateaued and actually started to drop. At first, it was just those silly designers trying to force their ‘standards’ mantra. Then the numbers started to grow – companies started adopting Firefox, as did the government. In fact, millions of people were downloading it and the press started to make a big deal. Suddenly, IE’s ‘quirks’ were seen as fallibility, as bugs, as negatives that other browsers didn’t have. IE became the evil browser, and designers took the lead to shout the praises of these lesser-known but more compliant browsers. And IE’s market continued to wane.

So, Microsoft realized that something had to be done. And IE7 was announced (no, not that IE7), as Microsoft scrambled to hold off the upstarts who were threatening its dominance. Now, they’ve finally released it in beta form so that the world can see that they really do care. Continue reading

When my wife got her Nikon D200, I was looking forward to using it. One glitch that I hadn’t thought about initially, though: since the D200 uses a different algorithm to encode its RAW files, my version of Photoshop CS2 couldn’t open them. There was a supposed Adobe Camera Raw update, but it was just a beta and didn’t work. Not a big deal – I could wait.

When the final version of ACR 3.3 was released I went out and grabbed it to be able to play with the pictures I took using the D200 – and it didn’t work. I used the directions that Adobe provided to the letter, but no dice. I deleted the plug-in, and tried it again. Still, no luck. I redownloaded the file, unzipped it again – and again could not open the files. Continue reading

I’m looking for full-time work again – my contract position has run out of design and usability work, and while I have a couple of projects to finish up, I’m looking for larger scale (and preferably permanent) work that includes benefits, an office, ample free time to be creative, an in-house racquetball court and lender Nikon D200′s. Anyone know of places hiring like that?

Speaking of the D200, I’m just a little jealous of my wife. She’s getting one – at least, she is once Nikon finally starts shipping them reliably. Unfortunately, it’s because of a major mishap we had on her birthday. While out taking some pictures, she slipped on some rocks and *BAM* – cracked her LCD, messed up the four-way controller and who knows what else on her Nikon D70. She was devastated, and after making sure she was okay (she’s banged up, but was more concerned about the camera), I felt horrible for her. We went home to find out that:

1. the expensive warranty I bought from Best Buy was useless (if there’s visible damage, they won’t cover it)
2. Repairs will run $250 – 500 and will take 4-6 weeks
3. That my camera alone won’t cover two avid photographers

So, off we went to Calumet Camera in Philly to see what they had available. She just wanted the body, but they had no idea when those were going to come in. So, we went with the kit – a Nikon D200 plus the highly regarded Nikon VR 18-200mm lens. It will set us back a pretty penny, but at least we have it (for now… ugh).

But back to me — expect some actual updates on my site and on the Blueline Concepts pages. It’s due for a true overhaul, so I’m going to put some real time into it. In the meantime, send me offers!

Other amusements »

• WordPress 2.0 – Do I want to risk another upgrade fiasco?
• Fightening set of crashes – cars, bikes and more.
• Simply amazing flash animation
• Top Ad Music of 2005
• Flags: Meet the World – a great set of work
• Fantastic homemade music video

I’m in the middle of a contract where we will creating a site that incorporates several departments presentation needs to a varied number of customers. In short, Department A needs to be able to present information to Customer Type A and Customer Type B, while Department B needs to be able to present information to Customer Type C, as well as some information which is share by all Customer types. The data varies between global information without any account specificity, and user-specific transactional data.

The navigation consists of a global ‘frame’ from the parent company (header, footer and left-nav style). Between them is our content (<div id="container">), which in turn has two divs, leftcol and rightcol (I know, so original). We are basing the left navigation – the main navigational element – on the parent site, although we are tweaking the style slightly, customizing the menu items to our site specifics, and most of all making it compliant by removing tables and image-based ‘text’ links. The main content of the page would fit in the right column div, often being fed from another part of the company’s database.

The main navigation isn’t a problem. I’m using nested lists to create a primary and secondary navigation to mimic the table-based rollovers that the parent site has. The problem is that when we reach certain portions of the site, I would need to go to a tertiary level of navigation. Not necessarily a problem in and of itself, although it does pose space problems within the width of the left column div.

Still, it was my recommendation as the most advisable method to go, following this general pattern:


<ul>
<li>HEADER 1</li>
<li>HEADER 2</li>
<ul><li>page 1</li>
<li>page 2</li>
<li>CURRENT PAGE</li>
<ul><li>Option 1</li>
<li>Option 2</li>
<li>Option 3</li></ul>
<li>page 4</li></ul>
<li>HEADER 3</li>
<li>HEADER 4</li>
<li>HEADER 5</li>
</ul>


Simple, aside from spacing problems (32-character option names don’t fit very well). However, the client team wanted to use a set of navigation for that particular page, all within the right column DIV. So, suddenly, we’re left with left navigation, and not-quite-as-far-left navigation. I tried to explain the fact that having to left-justified navigations would most likely be confusing to the user, and that incorporating the navigation into overall navigation would perhaps be more advisable. They weren’t so sure, because they wanted to make sure that the topic navigation was in the face of the user.

After some discussions, it was then suggested that perhaps top navigation within the right DIV (the ‘frame’, if you will) would make more sense. At first, I wasn’t so sure because having two navigational areas – one top and one left – isn’t always the best idea. However, most situations also use this with TOP = primary/global nav, while LEFT = secondary/subject nav – not the other way around. In the end, I created three comps:

1. Integrated Left Navigation
2. Dual Left Navigation
3. Left and Top Navigation.

So, the result? Strangely enough, to me at least, the last choice seems to be the consensus winner. While I had my concerns about offering two separate navigation elements (well, four if you include the header and footer links – but don’t get me started there), it seems to work pretty well. Creating the ‘Inner Nav’ using a top tab-based navigation, if offers a way for the user to focus on the navigation inherent to that particular user-specific system (in this case “Orders”) as opposed to the more global (and generic) navigation on the left side. All of the items that the customer might need to use from within that Order space would be within that inner navigational space – and when they are done, they simply use the global navigation to the left to visit other portions of the site.

From what I know about usability, it seems to fly in the face of good design, but in this case it seems to make the most sense, and actually appears to work fairly well. I’m sure the usability folks will have plenty of words on the subject, but at this point, I’m having trouble finding it.

Daily Links »

• George Clooney interview – I actually gained a lot of respect for this guy, despite Batman and Robin.
• Record Bluefin Tuna
• CableYoYo – cool invention for ‘cordless’ items

Once again I have upgraded. And once again, I followed the instructions given. AND ONCE AGAIN, MY DATABASE WON’T IMPORT CORRECTLY. I can’t believe that I am going to have to recreate everything… Or maybe I don’t, say screw it and start over. Sucks that my entire history would be gone … but maybe I just put it on an archive page and try to add it a little at a time.

Frickin’ WordPress.

I’m not sure who’s worse, but both my wife and I have an addiction to Flickr. We’ve both been getting into photography more – me with my Nikon N80, and her with the Nikon D70 that I bought for her for Christmas, and Flickr has provided us a chance to put our stuff out there.

It’s great meeting the others on the site, checking out the pictures and getting feedback on your own stuff. Now, we take pictures and can’t wait to see if there is anything worth posting.

Plus, I’ve been getting into some of the adjuncts of the site, such as geotagging and some of the search functionality programs/hacks. One new one that I found was the Flickr Related Tag Browser (horrible name, cool program), which gives a cool search function and viewer. I also still like Flickr Graph for a relationship API. There’s a ton of great stuff out there and I’ve only just scratched the surface.

I found this baby cardinal in our front yard, although its nest was in the back yard, so I carried it back (yes, this time I thought it was warranted, unlike the last time, when I might have been too gung ho).

Unfortunately, we think that this little guy may have met an untimely fate at the hands (paws) of our neighbors cats. I’m going over later to ask them to put a bell on – this wouldn’t be the first bird/small furry animal they’ve killed in our yard, but this is the one that really saddens me since we’ve been watching it since it first left the nest.

Other Recent Pictures

It’s been an interesting week, to say the least. To start it all off, on Monday, I lost my backup hard drive. Yes, the original works still, but the back-up (damn Maxtor) sputtered and died. Unfortunately, in an effort to make space, I had moved some files over to the backup – and when it went, they went. Fortunately, I was able to recover those files using a $50 software package I found – but not without less than 6 hours of work, reinstalling PhotoShop (it was trying to access a file off of the failed drive and locked up with every attempt to start it), and several tufts of hair being removed.

At the same time, I got to go to the Philadelphia zoo for the first time in years yesterday, after a good meal with my wife, parents and grandmother for a delayed mother’s day. It was cool to see the animals and take some pictures, but more and more I get sad when I go to zoos. It seems that the animals really aren’t happy – they are biding their time until death rather stoicly in most cases – kind of like many people at their jobs, I guess. It seems a cruel way to educate people, but I understand the conservation that goes on there. Still, it’s hard to watch three elephants walk about a small enclosure instead of a 1,000-acre preserve.

Still no new job, although my job prospects are getting better … and I’ve been doing the freelance thing and getting some cool projects out of it. Still waiting on the checks, but there is only one particular asshat who I did a form for that I have a particular amount of venom for. I thought 30 days was reasonable, but he’s acting like I’m being a jerk. Screw him, the horse he rode in on and the hairpiece he covets.

Well, in my case, about 2.5 months – and I’m not even partway through my CD collection. It seems that I hit the limit last night, although I’m not sure why. I was adding the last of the MP3 from my system and hit the 20.1GB level on iTunes. Hmmm, that might be a problem with a 20.0GB iPod. So, I started looking at what I had. After removing a few duplicates, bad tracks or stuff that I really didn’t want, I was still at 19.9GB. So, I removed entire sections of music that I’ll keep on MP3 but not necessarily store on the iPod – I’ll never really listen to it there.

So, I got my iTunes list down to 18.8GB – cool, now let’s synchronize. And behold, I get a message that I can’t upload all of the songs because the iPod is full. What? How does 18.8GB on iTunes = <20GB on the iPod? I’m not sure, but until I deleted the 1.1GB of Depeche Mode tunes (Depeche Mode Singles Box set is a biggun’), it wouldn’t load.

Strange thing is, now my iPod is showing 8.8GB of free space (and 3715 songs). What gives? Obviously, I’m missing something that is on iTunes, but I’m not sure what yet. But the bigger problem is this:

what the heck is on the iPod that requires 1.1GB of space? Obviously since my ceiling of transfer was less than 18.8GB, there is something going on. Okay, I could maybe understand a quarter-gig of space for programs (although I think that’s still excessive), but 1.1GB? What gives?

Also, if anyone knows the answer to this, I’d appreciate it – when I have my iTunes set to auto-sync, does it remove songs from the iPod that I removed from iTunes? I thought that it did, but it was my one thought of what might be happening – that I might have a couple extra songs on the iPod that weren’t showing up on iTunes. Also, how does one clear the iPod completely to start fresh with what you have on iTunes currently?

Now, I just have to figure out just how I have 8.8GB of free space on the iPod after syncing it last night…

in other news…

I just discovered a cool new tool for Flickr – the Flickr Zeitgeist. It’s a small JavaScript that allows you to put a zeitgeist of your pictures (or those of your contacts, the newest on Flickr or a combination) on your site in a compact little box. Check out the upper right-hand corner for mine.

Funny Fact of the Day
“When he was the prinicpal owner of the Texas Rangers, George W. Bush briefly flirted with the idea of changing the team’s name to The Texas Alamos, until an assistant told him that Texas lost the Battle of the Alamo.” – from Gullible.info