Adding Understanding

Catching up on some blog reading today I picked up on a thread Dave Winer's been writing about. He's using ImageMagick to resize images and produce thumbnails. Throughout the thread I kept thinking this sounds a lot like a standalone version of the Drupal imagecache module. Perhaps, I thought, the answer could be setting up a Drupal site to do the conversion. Nah that's too much I said to myself.

However, the more I thought about it the more sense it made. Then I got to today's post where Winer mentions a small web server for doing the work. "I'm still bugged that: 1. It seems slower than it should be. 2. A window flashes every time it creates a thumbnail," Winer says in the post. OK this is the prefect situation for building a one-off clone of imagecache. The next paragraph says, however, that he doesn't want to build it in PHP as it's another language to pick up.

While heating up some naan for my lunch the plan came together. Build a small website using Acquia Drupal and have imagecache do the work for you. The beauty of the solution is that it doesn't take learning PHP. It is a PHP-based solution of course, but one with no coding necessary. So why use Acquia Drupal specifically? It has a couple of advantages in having the necessary modules already bundled with it. The modules are all available on Drupal.org but for somebody who hasn't setup a Drupal site before having them all together is handy. There's also a good Getting Started guide that makes it easy for users to get a site setup.

One of the in my spare time activities of life as a techie is providing network administration support to the family. Lately the in-laws have had some challenges getting online. When I asked them to visit http://whatismyip.com they would get different results each time. Their TiVo folks had said they had a problem with their IP address and that was why the TiVo wasn't working. Things got more interesting when I started looking up the ip addresses. The IP addresses reported belonged to companies on the other side of the globe. From Cambodia to Poland the information didn't make sense.

Interestingly although Remote Desktop wouldn't provide access (because of the bad IP address) screen sharing in iChat did work. Upon logging in and firing up AirPort Utility I expected to see that the AirPort knew it had a different address. But alas the AirPort resolutely stated the IP address in Poland.

Autumn is one of my favorite times of year. Actually truth be told I love most of the seasons, each for their own beauty and grandeur. Mornings that start with a deep chill and transform into crisp days filled with color are hard to beat. Beyond the inherent beauty the promise of winter's coming is inescapable. Skiing, ice skating and building snow forts are just around the corner while the days grow short.

Fall Cleanup

Spring cleaning in my mind gets overbilled. Sure spring days are sometimes warmer than their cousins in the fall, but the days of fall just beg for a good cleanup. Getting the house in order and ready for the longer nights of winter where the family will be inside more of the waking day is but one of the advantages. Fall cleanups, with the holidays and gift-giving around the corner also provide a great opportunity to assess what the family's needs are. With these ideas fresh in mind one is much less likely to run out and get a gift for a family member that isn't needed.

Fall is also a beautiful time for morning walks. The pictures accompanying this story are from a morning walk along the trail. The osprey that accompanied us moved from tree to tree and looked followed us along the trail. With the cooler days coffee becomes appealing throughout the day with the cool afternoons.

Somehow I don't know that today's question will bring up as many great responses as yesterday's Komodo vs Coder discussion. The question of the day relates to home alarm systems. The house we're in has an alarm system built-in and now we're faced with wondering whether to have it monitored or not.

What I think I would rather is to have a fire and carbon monoxide alarm that is monitored, perhaps with a panic feature that is monitored as well, and to have the security alarm send me a message.

At the risk of starting the vim vs. emacs sort of flame war I'm curious what folks think about Komodo IDE vs. Coda for general use. I've been using Komodo for about a year and liking it but faced with two pretty equal prices for upgrading vs moving to Coda I'm starting to look at how I really use Komodo.

A redesign of the site has been on my to-do list for some time now. It is a bit of a cobblers children have no shoes problem. Between the book chapters to be edited, the site work to be done and the need to solve customer problems there aren't enough hours in the day. Today was a great day to get out and do some non-computer work so it left even less time. However tonight I finally decided to just jump in and do it.

At the Reno airport catching up on some news reader backlog I came across the Uncletterer headline Google can now OCR all PDFs. Jumping out of the newsreader and to their site it was exciting news. Well it turns out the headline is misleading. Google can, and will, OCR public PDFs. It won't, however, do any OCR on the documents in private spaces including Google Docs.

I wrote some time ago about the plan for scanning documents and getting rid of our filing cabinets. Well with all that's been keeping us busy since then it hasn't happened. The scanner part of the workflow is great and I have some ideas on what I want to do with the documents once they are OCR'd but haven't taken the time to work out the workflow.

On a completely unrelated note why is it that TSA spends so much time looking at my bag of clothes and completely passes on the bag I forgot to take my ziplock of fluids out of?