Trillions from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo.

This is a short film (a fast paced preview of a larger effort) by MAYA Design created to put some perspective on the invisible but fast approaching challenges and opportunities in the pervasive computing age. For more information

More information at Maya.com

Unless I’m missing something, this turns out to be a fantastically difficult problem. Consider:

1. You have to take into account both style sheets and in page markup.
2. Because the solution needs to work across multiple sites, you can’t “cheat” and pull specific CSS selectors.
3. Raw HTML is still mostly soup and a bizarre mix of broken tags, bad markup and coded craziness. 
4. Style is inherited from items further up the DOM, so you can’t even pull just the CSS for a specific tag.

You’re really stuck trying to reverse engineer how a browser renders an entire page of elements and when you think that oftentimes, it is a struggle even to get two well tested and supported browsers to render markup the same, it is that much more daunting of a task.

So after some thought, my proposed solution was to not even try to reverse engineer a browser and instead just embed
gecko into an app with RubyGnome’s Gtk::MozEmbed functionality.

As the spider would browse pages, it would pass them to the embedded instance of gecko where getComputedStyle would sort out what color a H1 (or whatever) happened to be. 

I’m not sure this is the best solution, but it was really interesting to consider and research.

Luckily, the bug he was informing me of was sufficiently bone-headed on my part that I was able to distinguish what was going on, but for future reference I’ve put together the following list of how to best take screenshots from a variety of mobile devices:

iPhone / iPod Touch

Tap the Power button and the Home button simultaneously and a screenshot will be saved to your Pictures.

Blackberry

1. Browse to http://m.thetechmogul.com/
2. Install CaptureIt! for Blackberry
3. Use new menu option of “Capture It” to take a screenshot

[via: digital inspiration]

Windows Mobile

Use the free MyMobileR application to remotely control and take screenshots of your WinMob device.

Nokia S60

Use Antony Pranata’s Screenshot for Symbian OS

Sidekick Devices

Press menu+shift+shutter simultaneously to place a screenshot into your pictures.

The shutter button is (and I quote from Y! Answers) – “button u push on top of ur phone 2 take a pic”. Heck Ya it is!

How to Take Android Screenshots

Browse the Marketplace for “Android Screenshot”, a free utility for taking time based Android Screenshots.

[via: Sizzled Core

Sean Cribbs led a very wide ranging talk on how to manage and contribue to an open source project at last weeks Raleigh Ruby Camp.

Some things really stuck out to me:

1. The move to Github quieted the number of people who thought they were heavy handed as they could just fork whenever they wanted.

2. Plugins as a way to involve people in the project without changing the core.

3. Day job is supporting hacking

4. Building a service business around an open source application seems like a natural type of business.

Links:

• Radiant CMS
• Wordpress.org
• Github
• CodeHaus
• Upstart
• Radiant on Crack
• Redcloth
• Bluecloth
• Rdiscount

Download audio file (sean-cribbs.mp3)

Download

I had a great time last Saturday at Raleigh Ruby Camp and met a host of Ruby on Rails developers working on interesting things.

One of the discussions that occurred was lead by Mark Imbracio of 37 Signals. I’ve posted the audio below and have linked to some of the topics that came up in the discussion. The audio quality and production isn’t great (you may need to really turn your volume up), but I got quite a bit out of the discussion and you might as well.

Links

• Capistrano
• Amazon Web Services
• Logical Volume Manager
• CentOS
• Xen
• HA Proxy
• Puppet
• HowTo: Custom Mongrel Handlers

Download audio file (mark-deployment-talk.mp3)

Download MP3

[update 10/23 - fixed broken link to AWS]

For the time being, I think we’re still going to do more with iPhones than holographically projected images, but videos and other speculative works do seem to have a touch of self fulfilling prophecy about them, and if nothing else the music’s soothing.

Automator is a drag and drop tool that allows you to quickly throw together time saving mini applications.

Something many people need to do is to repeatedly convert photos from one size or format to another, and while it’s easy enough to use Photoshop or another dedicated graphics tool to repeatedly Open > Save As > Close files it’s far from efficient.

Step 1: Find Automator

Automator is the application with the icon that looks like a rejected Wall-E case study (in your /Applications folder). Double click him to get started.

Step 2: Choose What To Modify

You’re going to want to drag and drop actions from the left side of the application onto the right “workflow” side of the application. Like gravity, reading and our current economic system, the actions will proceed from top to bottom.

As we’re going to be working with images, it may be tempting to choose the “Ask for Photos” action from the list. Don’t do it as the action should probably be titled “Ask for iPhoto images” as it’s not possible to just get a folder full of images to deal with.

Instead choose: “Ask for Finder items”, which is used for manipulating any combination of files and folders.

Step 3: Choose your Manipulations

From here you can drop in any type of image manipulation technique that you need: scaling, cropping, and thumbnailing are all options that both sound vaguely dirty and are available in Automator. Additionally, “Change Type of Images” will likely come in handy.

If you’d like to see all the options that are available, type “images” into the search box and read the descriptions.

Step 4: Test your Automation

Click the “Run” button in the upper right corner to begin processing. It’s a good idea to back up your files while you’re tweaking things to be just right as you’ll likely dramatically trash a few sets of images while you’re getting things right.

Step 5: Save your Automation as an Application

While you can save your Automation as either a “Workflow” (which will re-open Automator when run) or as an Application, I’d highly recommend saving as an application as it opens up a further world of possibilities: running jobs periodically with cron, distributing the workflow to non technical users, or even adding a cool icon and attempting to sell the application as your own batch processing tool.

While both are great applications, they each cost around $80 US.

Recently, Sun Microsystems (makers of Solaris, big purple servers and pony tailed CEO’s) have unleashed a new virtualization product on the world: VirtualBox, and while it lacks many of the features of the other two it’s free, easy to use and works reasonably well.

Step 1: Download

Download the latest version of VirtualBox for OS X from the support Wiki.

Step 2: Install VirtualBox

Mount the Downloaded Disk Image and run the VirtualBox.mpkg file. This should place a VirtualBox.app in your /Applications Directory

Step 3: Create a Virtual Machine

Helpful wizards jump up to walk you through creating a new Virtual Machine, but in case you miss them, click the blue “New” button in the upper left of the main VirtualBox window and follow the directions.

You will need to make 2 decisions:

1. How much RAM to allocate. I found that 512 was adequate for a stock Windows XP installation. This will vary greatly with what you are attempting to use the virtual machine for, but for cross browser testing and basic usage was fine.
2. How much HardDrive space to use. The wizard will strongly encourage you to set this “dynamically”, meaning that although you may specify that the virtual machine can use up to 25 GB of space it won’t use that much right away. Instead, it will slowly increase the amount of space taken as you use the virtual machine.

Step 4: Install Windows

At the conclusion of the Virtual Machine creation wizard, you will be prompted to begin the Windows installation process. Push F8, partition the hard drive with NTFS, enter your code, choose your TimeZone and an hour of tediousness later you’ll be dumped at the Windows Desktop.

Step 5: Setup Networking

By default, the VirtualBox networking was set to Network Address Translation (NAT), where the VirtualBox pretends that it’s in its own separate network from the network that your Mac is actually running on. While this can be useful in some specialized cases, to just get up and running it’s not necessary.

1. Shutdown the Windows virtual machine
2. With the Virtual machine selected. Click “Settings” and choose “Network”.
3. Set the Attached value to “Host Interface”
4. Make sure that the correct host interface is set in the bottom of the screen. i.e. if you’re using wireless select AirPort. If you’re plugged in, select Ethernet.
5. Restart the Windows virtual machine and you should be good to go. The machine should pickup an address automatically off of your home network. *

* There is a fairly big assumption here that you’re in a place with a working DHCP server. If this is not the case: you’re in a Starbucks, Don’t have Internet access, etc. you’re going to need to fiddle with the network settings.

[updated 9/30/2008] – I was up too late when I made the original post for this and needed to go back and fix some grammatical and formatting errors.

Tags: quaketaxonomy

Turns out it is because of the differences between guid and link elements in an RSS Feed. You can tell he’s really frustrated with the time and effort this cost him (my most recent RSS pet peeve is people who put dates in that occur several hours into the future), but I think it’s one of those maddening things that has a reasonable explanation. The presence of guid itself is optional, and the developer community as a whole has pretty much deprecated it’s use in favor of using “link”. So, when in doubt leave it out (or If the guid don’t fit, don’t submit … your edits back into SVN).

Andy Baio (who just completed a sweet redesign to Waxy) was having similar problems with the default guid behavior could potentially have used the guid element for his Waxy Links section. It would be within the bounds of the spec to have all the links pointing to the main Waxy.or: Links, but set each of their guid’s differently so as not to confuse RSS readers into thinking they had already consumed a particular page.

While this is certainly arcane knowledge of interest to only those working on a close basis with feeds and feedreaders, it’s interesting from a broader sense in how time, expectations, preset defaults and implicit decisions about how to use something effect actions made later on.