Page 1 of 512 3 4 5

Windows Live Writer BETA 2 Released !

Posted on May 31, 2007 by cogmios

Wow! I must be psychic. 5 days after I posted “Whats up with Windows Live Writer?” (WLW)Windows Live Writer BETA 2 is HERE !

I downloaded the installation via a proxy since I’m based in the Netherlands, meaning I will get forwarded to a general live.com website without the downloads. (Although I could have gotten it from here).

I de-installed the old version and deleted my my documents live writer directory” and then installed the new BETA 2 release. So… what’s in here? First of all. I’m using this application almost every day so when I saw the feature list, the actual new goodies and the superb new look and feel I was filled with excitement!

Here is a little list of the new features I found most handy for me personally:

1. Table Support

Tables Suppport!	Isnt this Cool?
Now I can make all kinds of	smart tables without typing tr td a million times

2. Link to previous postings – When you add a link you can choose via a pulldownmenu to link it to an earlier post (or evento a glossary entry), furthermore it’s in the rightclick menu which is very thoughtful. Linking to earlier posts is quite handy from a pulldown menu so that I don’t have to copy and paste older permalinks into my postings. The glossary entry might be very handy if you have a set of urls you link to regularly e.g. the weblogs you visit most often.

3. Support for Pages (WordPress) – Allowing us to not only manage our blogpostings but also manage WP pages. And yes it supports the templates for pages! wow this is really good. Amazing… I can now edit my “about” page from Windows Live Writer, this empowers me to do much more with WordPress pages. Stay tuned.

4. Support for excerpts and extended entries – which is very handy although most of the time I’m too lazy to make these things. And yes, it can split your post also just like inside WordPress.

5. It syncs between WordPress content and your local blogpostings – the previous version had a kind-of workaround where you had to delete WLW postings physically on your disk to get them aligned, this version solves all of this.

6. Many new options! E.g. you can choose to save your blog every N minutes; You can now choose to open a new window when pressing NEW or just open the blog in the same window (which was discussed here); etc…

7. The button manage weblog jumps straight to my WordPress admin page which is a nice goodie.

8. You can now …. Add new categories! So not only add existing categories to your blog but also add new categories. How sweet is this, wonderful. Joe writes: You can even do it while you’re writing a draft offline, since we don’t actually “commit

Internal error 500 errors on cogmios.nl

Posted on May 31, 2007 by cogmios

Thank you, I had seen 1 before just recently and it was already in my mind to investigate, to be honest: I don’t have a clue yet. However… I have some reports which relate “dreamhost”, my hosting company, with the 505 errors which seem to occur with WordPress and/or MySQL. I will investigate this and hope to resolve it soon.
Thank you,
Edward de Leau / Cogmios

On 5/30/07, MT wrote:

Name = MT
Email = *********
Subject = 505 errors
Message =
Hello,
I found you by following your link to my WLW post (thanks, btw) But
as I wandered around your site, I got a number of 505 errors
Specifically, if I click the “comments” link on an article on the
homepage, or the permalink on any article that has comments.
Just wanted to let you know!
MT

UPDATE 1: when I disable WP-CACHE everything works and the 505 errors are gone, I have read about this lately and in my mind is that it is not really wp-cache related. further investigation…(because now nothings is cached).

UPDATE 2: whenever there is at least 1 comment even when WP-CACHE is disabled it is not shown, the page “breaks” the script.

I have now tried different templates which all behave the same, so it’s nothing in the client html or javascript. I really don’t get it.
UPDATE 3: RESOLVED!! Phew!!! I migrated back to php4, did some other stuff and it seems to be ok again

Links for 2007-05-30

Posted on May 30, 2007 by cogmios

authorSTREAM Present and Share PowerPoint

Microsoft Surface
Hey…I know this one…and now its called Microsoft Surface, pretty cool, in some years everyone will have one.

Links for 2007-05-29

Posted on May 29, 2007 by cogmios

High Yield Investment Program – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The google indication of "common knowledge": use it in your weblog!

Posted on May 28, 2007 by cogmios

I was writing a paper for my IT Architect Profession studies. I was doubting when to include some more words to explain certain terms and words and when not. If you are a writer (yes, Bloggers are writers too), you probably know this feeling: “is this word understandable for all my readers?”, should I explain it / should I make a link to wikipedia behind the word?

E.g. I was doubting if I would have to write some footnotes to explain the “use case driven method” (by Ivar Jacobsen).

However, I then thought to apply the “Google check for common knowledge” and discovered there were more than 1.000.000 hits on “use case”. Above that it also has a large wikipedia entry.

So it made up the new theory, please comment on this if you disagree, that if a term has more than 1.000.000 hits in Google AND appears with a large article in Wikipedia that it is considered common knowledge for a certain targeted audience. Ofcourse the following should be noted:

- if you are writing about “use cases” for an audience consisting of readers who are totally not within your field of knowledge you should raise the Google indication to 25.000.000 (e.g. “MSN Messenger“)

To test my hypothesis of common knowledge and when to explain terms:

1. Hotmail has +200.000.000 entries and should be considered common knowledge
2. CSS has +200.000.000 entries and should be considred common knowledge
3. RUP has 7.000.000 entries and should be explained to a novice audience
4. CRM has 70.000.000 entries and should be considered common knowledge HOWEVER…this is tricky since the letters “CRM” also mean lots of other things, so … “Customer Relationship Management” still has 30.000.000 hits….and well…should be considered common knowledge
5. Unified Change Management has only 140.000 hits and should be explained in larger terms.

It still feels like the Google check is not really all there is too it, since I don’t believe my non-technical friends would know the term “CSS”, so hmmm…. could we improve this common knowledge idea by using automated tools?

Probably the answer is somewhere in Google. Maybe by taking the distribution of the words related to the sites on the world where they appear. E.g. if the word appears in every country and in common magazines its common, if the word appears only in specific forums and places full of technical words its less common. I don’t know but it sounds like an interesting idea.

I think it will have to be calculated by using multiple feature sets all giving values and then calculating a value out of the feature sets. This will present the “commonness” for a word. Then again… what is common? A chinese term might sound normal for a quarter of the world but not for and english person. So we have to define what we mean by common first. Uh… I give up!

The Atheist Book shop!

Posted on May 28, 2007 by cogmios

Links for 2007-05-28

Posted on May 28, 2007 by cogmios

Weblog Tools Collection » Blog Archive » Web 2.0 Free Button Maker

YouTube – Roger Wilco Dies a Lot in Space Quest 1
i can remember my deaths actually…did i say my..

Download Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego (VGA) game – Abandonware online
memories

The Official Abandonware Ring

Sim Abandonware.. Resurrection!
Welcome to Sim Abandonware.. Resurrection! This is a place where we offer the classic Maxis-made Sim games such as SimAnt and SimFarm available for download

Welcome to The Ultimate Meme Database
I learned some interesting new (actually old) memes here

Wonderful new dutch trading website: ruilen.nl

Posted on May 28, 2007 by cogmios

On ruilen.nl (new site) users do not need money anymore to trade goods or services with each other. There have been hundreds of these sites in the past but somehow this one seems to catch on. Maybe it’s the web2.0 look-and-feel that finally does it.

Ofcourse I wanted to try it and proposed to use my just-learned-trick for amongst others: beer!

Leeeeeeeeroy Jeeeeeeenkins

Posted on May 28, 2007 by cogmios

The video takes place in the Upper Blackrock Spire dungeon in World of Warcraft, inside the Rookery room, one of the most notoriously difficult sections for newcomers to the game. It opens with the guild members discussing an impending raid via audio teleconferencing, complete with regimented battle plan and statistical breakdown of their survival. The fastidiousness of their preparations is ruined by the sudden and unexpected actions of Leeroy; who, being AFK(Away From Keyboard) and missing the entire conversation, runs into the area without pause, yelling “all right chums, I’m back, let’s do this! LEEEERRROOOOY JEEEEEENKINS!” There is a second or so of stunned silence from his companions, followed by the carnage that ensues when they mount a rescue attempt. The attempted raid (and video) ends disastrously, with all the guild members laying dead on the floor, screaming at Leeroy for his brash decision. Leeroy responds to the abuse -and explains what he was doing AFK during the raid preparations – with the retort “At least I have chicken.”

Leeroy Jenkins on Wikipedia

The quest for an affordable Pilot Briefcase / Wheeled Laptop Case Part 2

Posted on May 28, 2007 by cogmios

Since my last quest posting I have decided I want the “U.S. Luggage Business Cases Nappa Leather Rolling Catalog-Computer Case D978-4 Black”. It seems to be exactly what I want. It’s in my mind so I want it!

However: 1) Amazon does not ship to Europe (via Luggage Guru) 2) Ebags does not ship to Europe 3) the briefcase superstore does not ship to Europe 4)Luggage.com cannot accept international orderss 5) 6pm does not ship to Europe 6) Irvs Luggage Warehouse “Unfortunately, Irv’s Luggage no longer ships internationally. ” 7) csnstores idem DiscountLuggage.com does not currently ship orders outside of the United States

9) LuggageOnline however… does seem to ship overseas, so I put my bag in the shopping card, try to checkout via PayPal and then get this screen: uh… sigh… Crazy isn’t when you are a quest and then there all these little things popping up trying to prevent you from finishing your quest. I try to reload, enter my paypal data and then get “Deze ontvanger accepteert geen betalingen van niet-Amerikaanse PayPal-rekeningen.” …. (this shop does not accept non-American payments) *ARGH* So I go the normal slow checkout and…the new customer registration only allows US postal codes. Ok… thank your for wasting my time, bye forever.

10) On with the quest, Mercantila only ships to 48 states 11) …

Maybe it’s intesting to put a little background on U.S Luggage/SOLO while we are searching (intermezzo):

For almost 90 years, U.S. Luggage has developed and marketed innovative, high-quality products that respond to the changing needs of the American consumer.
No surprise that it was U.S. Luggage that literally revolutionized the luggage industry when, in 1972, it introduced the very first wheeled luggage. Not resting on its luggage laurels, U.S. Luggage also developed into one of the largest leather case companies in the country, known for quality, excellent value, patented design features, and trend-setting approaches to product marketing.

Ok…there we go 11) yfsstudio only ships to US 12) Staples only delivers in the US 13) 1-800 Luggage hmm… I read that I should call them for International shipping. Let’s do that tomorrow.

On a parallel path… On the SOLO website I can’t find the D978…which is strange, let’s try to e-mail customerservice@solocases.com to find out if they have a distributer in Europe…the link on the website for “international online retailers” is dead: http://www.shoppeezee.co.uk/.

How to create a flip-over flash booklet in a hurry!

Posted on May 27, 2007 by cogmios

My sister asked me to create a flash booklet for her website. The problem is that a) I don’t have that much flash knowledge and b) I don’t have the time right now to dive into it.

So I took the workaround approach: I downloaded an existing SWF photo applet and tried to see how far I could get. It took me about 30 minutes to create this demo with some of our marriage pictures .

Basically it’s just a matter of replacing the existing images and background. I used Xara Xtreme and Irfanview for all the imaging work.

For the background picture I took an existing picture and cropped it to 800×600.

The “pages” each are 300×400 images, so that’s also just a matter of cropping.

I made the transparant boxes in the background image with Xara, and found out where it should be placed, by placing 2 rectangles of 300×400 in the middle, and then just made a transparant box around it.

The “most difficult” is to create a widespread image. The seperate JPG’s pages are 300×400 so you have to crop a large image to 600×400 and then “split” the JPG directly in the middle. With Xara this was easy by just creating 2 300×400 boxes and then use the intersect function, this will give you the split JPG. It would be nice if I would have made the “middle” somewhat darker/fuzzier so it would seem that it’s actually a page bending in the middle of the book, maybe I’ll do this to improve the look and feel. It’s simple though: just darken the left or right side of the picture.

Then I placed the little red forward and backward buttons to the bottom right or left of the pages by just placing 3 red triangles next to each other. I don’t know why 3 and I don’t why red, I just wanted to this one quickly. Maybe there should be another indicator I don’t know. I could have left them off but I thought it would be clearer that there is a “flip-thingie” in the corner of the image in this way. So I place them in each and every picture since everything is a picture (hmmm.. maybe I could have added page numbers instead).

For the demo I just “did” 6 images but obviously I could have created a zillion. The images themselves are defined in a file called “config.xml”. It’s just a list of the names of the JPG’s you would like to add.

I just posted this so that if you ever have a need to quickly make a flip-over album without that much technical knowledge well… this is the way to do it I used the SWF page-flip download from uh… www.page-flip.com (their demo’s)because it was the top one in Google. They offer 2 different ones: the simple SWF one which I used and the complete fullblown thing you can use inside Adobe Flash, etc… If I have any extended time left in the future I might try the advanced one for now I downloaded the simple SWF option (for $25 but there are countless free page-flip SWF’s on the Internet, just Google on it. I just used this one because I wanted to do it quick, there was documentation along with it and it looked like a professional one which wouldn’t would cost me too much time).