rantoblogcious

Cheers Blogger, it's been swell

2006-09-10T13:23:00.000-07:00

OK, it kinda had to happen. I'm moving to a professional blogging service now. My own. Driven by Wordpress and it's not really a blog even. It's a... well pff, let's call it a BlogZine then. A blend of professional magazine and a blog. By professional magazine I mean magazines from the 90s when editors still cared about what they do. Think game magazines. Where they really sat down hours and did play the game, no matter how bad it was. Since my main scope of work is in the visual effects "industry" and I have a geeky sense of curiosity, that could actually work out by a long shot. Quite happy with the early stages of the design so far. The blog part in BlogZine is that I don't care if a company gives me freebies or not, I write what I think about the product. I don't intend to hold back as readers of this blog have whitnessed in the past. :) I may cut down on the swearing though ;) Cheers guys and thanks for staying this far. Maybe some of you will come over to the new venture. It's called Behind the Frame. Take care, Frank

Good Software in bad Company

2006-05-21T14:43:00.000-07:00

Ok guys I got this really awesome de-graining software from Visual Infinity. Thing is, what I got is a demo and that renders funny rainbow lines into the image. Since I don't develop for the Rainbow Bride or Care Bears series, so that's a problem. I purchased a license from Visual Infinity and got the unhappy meal. What's in it? Nothing but paiiiiin! My Mc Nuthin was an email receipt from Visual Infinity and that was it. Never got the download link, never got the password. Never got a reply on the 20 e-mails I sent them, No reply on the 40+ pages worth of faxes I sent them. In fact I had to send the faxes to their phone number, which alternates between busy and fax mode as their fax number is not registered with a carrier.

Here's the contact page for Visual infinity, please help if you can do so

Visual Infinity Thanks, Frank

Noush Skaugen on Sirius Channel 102 this Tuesday, April 18th!

2006-04-14T22:04:00.000-07:00

Check out Tuesday's show on 6:30pm EST / 3:30pm PST Sirius Satellite Radio channel 102, Sirius Stars!

Grab the banner and slap it on your page!

Microsoft Employees BEWARE!

2006-04-05T21:12:00.000-07:00

Dear Microsoft Employees,

I'm glad to inform you that if you choose to disclose yourself as a Microsoft employee in the next few weeks I'll punch you straight in the face without warning.

Click the link to see why and who to thank.

Beauty and Despair

2006-03-23T19:05:00.000-08:00

Wow. I just watched the trailer to United 93. Brought up all those feelings again. Feelings of helplessness, despair, fear, hate and loss. Was it because the trailer was so well cut, the images so real or that an event like this just can't be forgotten?

I wish I could just turn away and say: Oh well... it was just a movie. - I wish.

Seeking to get these images out of my head I found the movie with probably the most beautiful images in at least the lat 5 years. It's called The Promise and you really should watch it in 1080p. If the story doesn't get through to you, the images will.

peace out...

Stealing is the new making

2006-02-07T18:26:00.000-08:00

With utter disgust I've read on Doug Bowman's feed that an ad agency stole the design of his site. It's so easy to track who was first with the wayback machine so I don't understand why people still do this. People not but for ad agencies stealing ideas and concepts is business as usual.

The offender: High 5 Advertising created: Jan 22, 2005
The original: Stopdesign created: Jun 06, 2004

I wish this was just one agency faking talent, but everyone working in an agency has probably heard from their art-directors:

Take this design make it [color], add [client name]'s logo and create a slide for our pitch at noon.

Who questions art-directors? Right! THEY have titles, that's important.

Apple! What the fuck?

2006-01-24T20:10:00.000-08:00

Can somebody tell me what your web dept. smokes? Any lefties?

What's up with the HTML that iWeb generates? When I eat Mexican I shit better code than that!

Ever heard of paragraphs or headings? What's up with the gazillion of SPAN tags? Arrrgh this maddens everyone that will use this app. Or other people will make fun of their content v.s. code.

You know the old adage: When the markup doesn't make sense, chances are the content doesn't either.

This means if you don't know what parts of your writing are paragraphs or headings, you should take a course in thinking!

Apple! I'm really disappointed of your product. It's immature and produces output that people using it can't stand behind, they'll be ridiculed in public and are in good company with the morons using FrontPage. At least the great interface will soothe their wounds a little. But the damage has been done and will be on the web archives forever.

Metallic Gum Glitter type of thing?

2005-12-28T05:51:00.000-08:00

I'm looking for a screen-printing service that lets me do 3+1 color prints. I want to do a few special edition shirts that have a glitter/metallic effect on top of them.

Any ideas? I won't deal with cumbersome companies, just upload a PDF and get an online preview is enough. The ones with the cumbersome workflows make you pay for their intellectual shortcomings anyway and I don't plan on funding morons.

Please help this Woman out

2005-12-26T21:05:00.000-08:00

She has the RIAA Gestapo on her ass for something she has no clue that it even exists.

Her kid's friend pirated music via Kazaa on her computer. IMHO the parent(s) of the other kid would be responsible for not teaching the id about piracy.

If you think about it, the kid should be punished directly, circumventing the parents. Let it be service hours and lots of preaching about what copyright really is.

There are a lot of artists that can't afford the lawsuits that the big 4 are pulling off (which is basically marketing on the back of others). So if you pirate their music, you're ruining their livelihood. In the age of podcasting, chances are that people will go after you, outside of the court if you pirate their fav artists music. But I digress...

Right now that Woman needs help to fight off the wrongful prosecution of the RIAA.

PDF + Flash vs. Accessible Design?

2005-12-23T14:55:00.000-08:00

Now that Adobe acquired Macromedia that heinous Freehand app might be off market but what they're doing with Flash is just scary.

While Flash is a great tool for interactive displays, mini games and to embed audio and video into a web-site, using it to solely build a website is a strict no-no.

If you want to lock out people with a disability and do some content euthanasia that's never a great marketing scheme. Guess what, blind people buy skin-care products too! But what Adobe has done here with parts of their web-site is beyond embarrassing for any web designer. What can be a valid reason to display text in a Flash where HTML would have been better? Search engines can't find it and the major screen-readers won't see them for their users.

With the emerging of poorly designed websites like adobe.com it's getting incredibly hard for makers of screen reader software. They now are brutally forced into breaking flash content apart and guessing the text that's flattened to paths due to idiotic font licenses issued by elderly morons or trying to get down through the layers that cover the text that is embedded into the .swf file. Guess what, even giants like JAWS need to make money on their software, if you make their job impossible, you will loose sales. Not because they may abandon your format or focus on another business but because YOU where too stupid to produce an accessible document.

Recap:

Flatten type to paths in a PDF = You're an idiot.
Flatten type to paths in a Flash movie = You're an ignorant idiot.
Using a flattened PDF in a Flash movie = Braindead.

Leaving text as text would break some font licenses made by some ignorant numb-nuts. I think they deserve a kick in the very same. Would you believe that in 2005 there were licenses that would not allow a font to be rendered at a height of 200 pixels? The name of that foundry is Hoefler and Frere-Jones. Great designers, but ignorant morons. You also can't embed the fonts in a PDF or a Flash.

Happy Holidays!

MediaTemple GFYS, will ya!

2005-12-21T00:35:00.000-08:00

Media Temple totally sucks monkey balls!

Guess what? Those fuckers left me down again. The whole site just down. 3rd time in one month!

I pay just a little below $20 each month to get insulting idiots as tech support and a totally inferior server framework.

A fine quote from Full Metal Jacket that involves eyeballs comes to mind.

Now I understand why customers are leaving by the busload. MT used to be a good choice, now it's a cage of fools, not more.

The End Of All Things

2005-12-05T19:05:00.000-08:00

Sit down with me here, my friends reflect on things that were, things that may come and those we lost on the way to get there.

Friendships that faded, business relations that will not last. All we see now will change, whole industries will fall prey to the few that learn to glide with the times.

Here, at the end of all things we meet to watch and live the changes breathing new life into friends long gone bringing new hope to the world.

If the above doesn't make any sense to you, here's the English version:

In 2006 everything will change for me and my business as for a lot of other people in different fields of business. Existing relationships will change, even long standing business relationships will need to go in order to do what is most dear to my heart.

I won't go into detail here, but once it's official I'll post it here, probably as my last post to blogger.

Right now I just want to thank everyone subscribed to this feed for your support and comments during the past year. Why almost all of you insisted on taking the 3 extra clicks and e-mail me instead putting your comments here will probably remain shrouded in myth.

Phone Deathwish?

2005-12-01T22:28:00.000-08:00

Ok, here's my plan, a bit of an experiment. I'm selling my phone and canceling my landline contracts.

So the total cost a year for my business account are €599.88. So what I'll do is replacing it with an additional SkypeIn account, a decent headset and maybe a DSL upgrade.

So I pay like 20 bucks a year + the skypeOut fees that are minimal, even on a global level.

Attention Node Managers!

2005-11-25T21:32:00.000-08:00

With plain audio, enhanced and video podcasts it is impossible for the consumer / user to tell what is what. For my node I use the category attribute to describe the content. Unfortunately the OPML Editor places an unnerving / in from of every part that I add, so all I get is a /Audio. While that might be acceptable with deep taxonomies, here it's disturbing.

So here's my rightClickMenu script for that.

In Tools > edit right-click menu Create an item, double-click that and paste the following code in the window that opens.


local (myCat);
op.attributes.getOne ("category", "Audio")
op.attributes.setOne ("category", "Audio")

When you click Run you'll get an error. Not to worry, that's perfectly normal as we want to apply this to an outline not trigger a dialogue.

Save it and close the windows, now you can access it via the contextual menu on Mac and Windows.

Here are the categories that I use

Audio
Audio Enhanced
Video

Feedback more than welcome

MediaTemple strikes again

2005-11-22T01:21:00.000-08:00

Update: Weird, that only lasted 1h today, glad it's over and I can receive mail again. If i don't answer your mail within a day chances are it got burned by the outage.

And once again they fucked up.

Wonder what lame excuse they have this time...

Funny or scary that a free service like Blogger is actually more reliable than a $20 USD / month service at MediaTemple. Wager anyone? I bet that they give me the same shit that they always give me:

We have looked into the issue that you have reported and unfortunately could not find any problems with your service. Furthermore, using a series of diagnostic checks we were not able to reproduce any of the problems that you reported. We have been monitoring your services and all features are operational.

This basically means: Shut the fuck up, will ya... we don't give a shit what you want... our site works, that's important. You're just a customer, what's the point in serving you?

thanks another happy MediaTemple customer.

frankjonen.com OPML'd

2005-11-16T23:22:00.000-08:00

For all those of you that are on the bleeding edge of technology or even just early adopters. Here's the full website, every article, every link, everything available in OPML format!

So if you subscribe to the top outline, you'll see how everything is linked together, how the content flows and extras such as links in separate sub-taxonomies. Each page also has its own OPML file, so you can start drilling from there.

So why all the hassle? Just finger-practice? Punk'd?

I believe it is a great addition in terms of accessibility as it provides another perspective on the content, way beyond the XHTML + CSS way of dealing with markup. Not a replacement for our trio XHTML + CSS + RSS but rather a 4th one that interacts with the XHTML + RSS part of it since the OPML can parse RSS feeds and display them right inside the outline structure.

When coding HTML correctly you already have a hierarchic representation of your content as (x)HTML is very feature-rich as we learned in the past. SO where's the point in doing it in OPML? Think content! The ability to expand and collapse whole context structures is just amazing when you want to skim down content to find something quickly.

Database Search vs. OPML

There's no searching of OPML content yet, you have to do it by hand, this way you remember stuff that you pass on the way and know where to find it faster next time. But there's an even greater thing up here... Subscriptions! Just like you subscribe to RSS feeds already, you can subscribe to ideas now and watch as they form. In the RSS paradigm we have finite items that correspond to articles. With OPML every object is marked with a date and pops-up and expands its children whenever one idea is updated.

Think of a world directory that everybody links to and gets linked back, this creates one file of not too large size (since it just stores links) that contains every aspect of the world in an open fashion. It takes the idea of the web to the next step. Too bad that OMNI Group doesn't want to participate, shoot them an e-mail and grill them some more, might help them to see the light.

I do know that from an XML perspective the OPML format is questionable, but as with everything in tech, there will be a version 2.

Welcome to the Internet Microsoft!

2005-11-09T01:49:00.000-08:00

Kudos to Microsoft!

This looks exciting, probably the first time I say that about an MS product.

Stop banning Safari! Works nice with Firefox. I only need Excel, where's my Beta Account?

MediaTemple = Worst hosting company in the WORLD!

2005-11-07T18:07:00.000-08:00

As some of you have spotted already my site it totally broken. I'm basically loosing money by the minute because MediaTemple decided to finger with the PHP parser. Now 95% of my php scripts are broken.

Currently I'm looking at the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to hold them liable for willingly damaging my content and some references on class action law-suits as they're actively damaging my business.

So after it was great in the beginning and sometimes their service is good, most of the time I have problems with them. Issues like loosing e-mails, not getting e-mails, waiting 4 hours for an e-mail that actually was generated on the server or simply that the server doesn't respond at all and the site wasn't reachable for hours.

But what's the most annoying is their staff! Arrogance is all that pops into my mind right now. Every time I report a bug, they blame it on me, if that doesn't work they try to put me off as a moron. Way to go MT! When I'm talking with closer colleagues and friends about MediaTemple we merely refer to them as the Hosting Mob, Bandwidth Bandits or a Seinfeld reminiscence that I won't publish here.

This is definitely NOT the company that I'm building our network on.

MediaTemple grew to big, too fast.

Birds on a Hippo's Ass

2005-11-01T15:50:00.000-08:00

Ok who was that genius?

Isn't it humble-some and gracious to associate a product with birds sitting on the ass of a large animal that strolls in muddy/watery areas and wiggles its tail while having a landslide?

Way to go Adobe!

(A)Head of the Asylum

2005-10-05T14:24:00.000-07:00

Holey Chow! Long time no post here. It's not totally abandoned but time got the best of me.

It's just that I'm working on a podcast network that will give NBC, CBS, ABC and Time Warner something to think about. Let's hope I can get the record labels to sing with the choir, but first we have to teach them what the internet is and what it is for... man these cats are slow!!! Just try to find the fucking contact page on these sites, what a shoddy concept of not having e-mail addresses or web forms to protect your staff from spam. There's this CSS thing y'know?!

Aaany-ways... All is well, but terribly busy it's not that I have a cast of thousands to peruse as minions. Just a few friends that work as tirelessly as myself to get this running, get the VC cash and hire the people we need, rent the office and studio space, license the software, get the hardware and show the big guys how it's done with a fraction of their costs and higher revenues.

Oh boy... I tell you the next year is gonna be exciting, even more than this year was.

If you want to join the horde shoot me an e-mail by clicking the image underneath the About Me part of this page.

Mwahahahah sorry MS but...

2005-09-14T22:23:00.000-07:00

M Softies you truly are hilarious!

Guys, check out the link to a horrible rip-off of Apple's Spotlight search on a Microsoft research blog.

Worst user experience = ITMS Germany

2005-09-08T13:20:00.000-07:00

iTunes Germany sucks so bad it swallows! If a product kills my library and messes up my whole collection of purchased music AND then the only way to get all the songs back to the purchased music list is to buy them again they should at least let me download MY music again for free!

iTunes 5 kills your music

2005-09-07T11:41:00.000-07:00

I just lost all my podcast subscriptions and miss 200 songs that i purchased from Apple. DO NOT UPGRADE!

US Government preventing Help for Victims

2005-09-04T19:55:00.000-07:00

The scoop

This is as sick as it is sad.

Every American should go to Bush's Ranch and take a dump right then an there so he knows how the victims feel.

Anyone else demanding impeachment? Fuck you very much Mr. Bush!

Could it be faster?

2005-09-02T13:11:00.000-07:00

Just a thing that starts popping up in European news stations. Would help and organization of the relief efforts work better if the victims were all white people?

Could we please stop judging people by their tan?! Damn, zoom back and get a view from space will ya?! Sheesh!