I’m posting this entry from my iPhone today, using a new app called BlogWriter. It works, kind of, though it’s abundantly clear to me that to be great, such an app really needs an improved way to enter URLs, and needs to not cover up the text of your post with the keyboard. It’s impossible to see what you’re typing past one or two sentences. I had to edit this in my normal control panel after submitting with the iPhone, because after the words "such an app", my typing was all taking place behind the iPhone keyboard, completely obscured, with no way to scroll or move things out of the way.
On top of that, it’s a poor implementation of the MetaWeblog API, as it only supports one field. For a $10 app, this really isn’t acceptable. Or a free app for that matter - a distributed app should do what it advertises, regardless of the price. Oh well. :\
Update: I was reminded that the default MetaWeblog API does in fact only have one field. I’ve just never used it in a context outside of the Moveable Type API which extends the MetaWeblog API to allow four fields. My apologies to the application author, as on that particular point, it does in fact do what it says, though it would be infinitely more useful to support the additional fields that the aforementioned extension to the API affords.
The new search engine, Cuil, from some ex-Google peeps, is horrid. I see a lot of bloggers fauning because, well, it’s the hip thing to do, Cuil’s new, and because Cuil is challenging The Establishment, i.e. Google and Microsoft. Well fine, praise their boldness and their politics, but don’t let that color your view of how the service actually works, because it works horribly.
First, the 2 and 3 column layouts not only look horrible in a respectably sized browser window, but it’s incredibly difficult to scan to find what you’re looking for, especially when page titles end up on multiple lines. The attempt to associate an image with each result is even worse. Sometimes it will pick a random icon or image from the actual site, and sometimes it will slap down a maybe relevant image from some other random site, giving the impression to the end user that the image is relevant to that search result, when it’s not. Example: my picture is associated with the ExpressionEngine wiki...wha?
Next we have a wrong image associated with the EllisLab blog, and an example of the often funky text handling of the page titles. The ampersands you see below are all in the markup.
Lastly, this stranger is yet again associated with the wrong site, this one. Odd since Cuil obviously figured out my association to ExpressionEngine, but it can’t make that association for my own site? Also notice the URL. For about a month when I was changing domains, that would go to an Apache generated 404. Now it is a permanent redirect to derekderekderek.com. I don’t know when the index was made, but either behavior is incorrect for a search engine, whether Cuil spidered my site when it was a 404 or a 301 code. Definitely not friendly for site owners, and will lead to loads of incorrect content in their index.
I didn’t have too look hard for these examples either; it’s par for the course. Do a few searches on content that you know will bring up sites that you are familiar with, and you’ll readily see the resource matching issues and the page title malformation. And sadly there’s no way to customize the output beyond their classified ad multi-column approach. That might be forgivable if they were liquid and filled your browser based on its width.
The goal of a search engine is to get me from the idea in my head to relevant content as quickly and accurately as possible. Cuil does not fit that bill in any size, shape, or form. At least they don’t have a big "Beta!" badge on the front page, though in this case, perhaps that would be entirely appropriate. I hope they get their act together on the presentation of material, because their goal I must admit, on paper, is noble. Relevance is supposed to be determined solely on content, and they do index more pages than any other engine. Of course, if they’re counting things like associating my content from derekderekderek.com with koruproductions.com as additional pages or sites despite the fact that that domain has always used proper HTTP status codes, their number is wildly inflated.
My observation for today: If you have to keep reminding people, you probably aren’t.
iPhone Field Test Diagnostics - Secret menu on your iPhone to give you information about your current network, signal to noise ratio, etc. Just dial *3001#12345#*
The technical and security limitations are certainly well understood here, so Apple can’t be blamed, but it is annoying to have a household with two iPhones, an iMac, and a MacBook, coupled with a desire for separate user accounts for family members, but with a single iTunes library.
Sharing the music between Macs works great with zero config. Sharing the library between two user accounts on a single machine works fine if you select a shared location for the library. Using two iPhones syncing different material on a single machine works great with zero config. But any combination of the above, and things get hairy, very quickly. If I come up with some clever solution, I’ll be sure to share it. Surely my situation is not so unique. There must be many such Apple Households where each family member has no desire to share each others’ desktop, documents, contacts, calendars, and email, but wants to share music and iPhone Apps.
Derek Allard Comments on PHP 4 Support in CodeIgniter - "its gone from interesting, to funny, to boring, and now its back to funny again"
In case you didn’t know, iTunes has an equalizer, and it’s extremely helpful. You can turn it on and change its settings by opening the Equalizer palette window from your iTunes Window menu, or by pressing opt+cmd+2 (alt+ctrl+2 for Windows). If you’re on a laptop, you can use it to get the most out of your tiny tinny speakers by using the "Small Speakers" EQ setting, or the Vocal Booster if you’re watching a tv show or movie. I use "Spoken Word" quite often both on the laptop and on my nicer external speakers attached to my iMac when I listen to podcasts. Following that, "Rock" and "Electronic" get the most usage, and to my ears it shapes the sound in a noticeably pleasant way.
And I don’t know how I always forget about this, but you can set Equalizer Presets on a per-song basis. Just Get Info, cmd+I (ctrl+I for Windows, or right click > Get Info on either platform), go to the Options tab and select the EQ preset. No more fiddling with it in between songs. Even better, select an entire group of songs or album, Get Info, and set them all at once. The EQ will then automatically shift to that setting whenever iTunes plays that track.
SmugShot - I <3 SmugMug
There’s an opening on our development team for a new Technology Architect:
The Technology Architect will have responsibilities covering many aspects of software development, from maintaining the current code base for ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter to developing new tools and applications under the direction of the CTO. The Technology Architect will also be required to help keep documentation for products up to date.
The Technology Architect is a full-time position (part-time is also available).
I’ve not used www in my sites’ URLs for at least two years, as it’s a subdomain that isn’t needed, and is downright goofy to say, type, and use. And don’t even get me started on what a retarded acronym it is. World Wide Web? Sure perhaps in the late 80’s early 90’s when a network administrator wanted to make it clear that their servers ran a web server in addition to FTP or other services, but now? ggg: Goofy goofy goofy. I think I prefer the Chinese direct translation: Ten-thousand Dimensional Net.
So when I stumbled across no-www.org today, I felt compelled to validate and register my site with them, and since accessing my site with www. still works, you just get redirected to my domain sans the goofiness, I am at a Class B compliance level, and is now reflected in my side bar. If you want to join in and aren’t yet compliant, here’s the .htaccess I’ve been using.
# forcably remove www
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.derekderekderek\.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://derekderekderek.com/$1 [L,R=Permanent]
Magical Scanning Software - VueScan - I've had problems getting a working scanner driver since updating to Leopard and Photoshop CS3. Canon doesn't keep their driver for my scanner up to date. Zero config, VueScan automagically worked. Awesome.
