Jeffrey A. Miller: Personal Software Integration

Blog Audio: Odiogo, FeedForAll, and TextAloud

Tue, 08 Aug 2006 16:34:15 GMT

iTunes decreases my blog consumption

After all this time, I'm finally blogging again. I think the issue has been the lack of time (other things are more important?) and the lack of motivation (i.e., burning desire). Oddly enough, I think podcasts have taken me away from blogging. Since I no longer use NewsGator and FeedStation to download podcasts (I use iTunes instead), I spend less time in my news aggregator. Oh, I still consume blogs, and I think that they're still a great innovation, but I'm not using them like I used to.

A twist on blog consumption: Text-to-Speech conversion

One new product that puts a twist on consuming blogs is Odiogo. It's software that will "audify" RSS content to create MP3 audio consumable by your media player or portable audio device. This is similar in concept to a combination of products I saw a while back: mixing FeedForAll, an RSS publisher, with TextAloud from NextUp.com. This combo allows you to create a "podcast" version of your blog. TextAloud also has other uses for text-to-speech conversion as a stand-alone product. Odiogo, on the other hand, combines an RSS aggregator with a text-to-speech converter in one product. The price is fairly accessible at $29.99. I may try it. There are some sample audio clips of Odiogo available. One thing I noticed is that Odiogo seems to offer only one voice (male). TextAloud, on the other hand, offers multiple voice options with a range of sampling rates from vendors including AT&T (Natural Voices), NeoSpeech, Cepstral, and ScanSoft (RealSpeak). TextAloud comes only in a Windows version and costs $29.95. FeedForAll costs $39.95 and is available for Windows and Mac. They have an interesting set of partners offering complimentary products related to RSS feed consumption, RSS-friendly web hosting, and podcast creation.

Conclusion

I may try the audio blog content option. Unfortunately, most of my podcast solutions involve a lot of manual labor to put it onto my player (my Palm Zire 72 with an SD card). The other downside is that the text-to-speech output can sound somewhat bland, causing me to zone out instead of actively listening. I'll put it on my Someday/Maybe list (GTD).

Palm Zire 72 camera review

Mon, 22 Aug 2005 19:57:02 GMT

Here's a picture from the camera on my new Palm Zire 72. What I like about the camera:

I can capture pictures when I need to (sort of).

I can moblog (sort of).

I can take short videos (sort of).

I say "sort of" on the above items because the quality is not so great. What I don't like about the camera:

Taking pictures is slow. You have to be very steady with the camera and wait several seconds for a shot to "take." If your hand isn't totally steady, your pictures blur easily

Low light situations cause poor picture quality. The camera doesn't have a light or a flash, so taking a picture inside can be difficult.

Sunlight washes out pictures taken outside. Yeah, that cuts down on your optimal picture taking conditions, doesn't it?

It's a feature I was convinced I had to have. It was either the Palm Zire 72 with a camera and no WiFi or a HP RX3115 Mobile Media Companion with WiFi and no camera. Now, I think I might have opted for the WiFi instead with all other things being equal (which they never are). With WiFi, you can sync wirelessly over the network, surf the Web, and check email. The Palm Zire 72 only has Bluetooth. You can sync over Bluetooth, but I haven't tried it yet because my desktop doesn't have it. The problem that I see is the physical range that is required with Bluetooth. I don't have the specs, but Bluetooth is definitely more localized than 802.11b. My computer is in the basement, and I like the idea of charging and syncing without ever going down there. Oh well, that's opportunity cost, right?

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 19:26:45 GMT

Google Releases Maps API for External Use. bahree writes "Google now has officially released their API's for Google Maps; till now there were a few hacks in place such as my where I work, but now its all supported. You would need to get a key, which is associated with a specific url, you can get that here and also read up on all the fun details here." [Slashdot:]

Podcasting Peeves

Wed, 29 Jun 2005 18:50:30 GMT

Michael Lehman's BuzzCast kept the music loop for the running for an entire ten minutes while talking to Jeremy Mazner about Microsoft's PDC 2005! Dude, kill the music! It's sooo distracting! Even worse than that, MSMobiles.com released an hour-and-a-half podcast rambling about cellphone news, with opera-style music playing in the background almost the whole time! Dude, the music has to go, and I'm not going to listen for an hour and a half. Sorry.

Free TUX Magazine electronic subscription

Thu, 09 Jun 2005 17:01:13 GMT

Nobody is paying me to do this, so don't think I'm biased. TUX Magazine is a sister publication to Linux Journal. I like what I have seen so far.

(pasted from email)

TUX Issue No. 3 Now Available: http://www.tuxmagazine.com/node/1000135 -- This issue is packed with how-to articles.

Articles in this issue include:

Does Linux Play Well with Others

Linux Does Windows

Letters to the Editor

Q&A with Mango Parfait

Tux Paint for Kids

iPod and Linux

TUX Explains

How to Install MEPIS 3.3 Simply

K3b and Feel the Burn

GIMP Chrome and Metal Effects

Review: Quasar Accounting

Gadget Guy - CES 2005 Edition

Review: In Praise of MEPIS Linux
Review: Autopackage to the Software Installation Rescue

If you've not yet subscribed to TUX make sure to do so today.

Remember, subscriptions are absolutely free: http://www.tuxmagazine.com/subscribe.

Michael Lehman and NewsGator podcast filtering

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 20:01:44 GMT

I searched for Michael Lehman today, after listening to the first Buzz Cast on MSDN's Channel 9. I found his Radio weblog. After browsing his list of podcasts I came across this one and left a comment about a typo. As I was typing, I decided to throw in this tip (reposted here for the benefit of readers):

I filter podcasts through NewsGator Online Edition. I subscribe to podcast feeds via NG online and review them occasionally. I pick the ones I like and save them to a My Clippings feed for podcasts. I am subscribed to that feed on my home PC via Radio Userland's news aggregator. Radio Userland downloads enclosures in the background at a configurable number of hours after midnight. The next day, the podcasts I selected are cached on my PC. This allows me to selectively download podcasts instead of wholesale downloading anything that comes across in the feed. Of course this technique means that the downloads are a little time-delayed, but I like the control.

Michael Lehman has a pretty cool radio voice. He can read fast too. Just listen to him give the contest information for the PDC event in the Buzz Cast! Michael's podcast, the Manic Minute is available on his Radio weblog via this feed.

Make Magazine Podcasts

Sun, 05 Jun 2005 01:46:25 GMT

After my rants about podcast content, I thought it might be good to point to O'Reilly's Make magazine's online blog, complete with an audio show podcast feed and del.icio.us links. I'm not that much of a geek (electronic construction is beyond me), but Make seems to have a lot of coverage on trends in electronics and technology. You can sneak a peek at how to run Linux on an iPod or a Greasemonkey script that reminds you to "get back to work you surfmonkey!" Here's another post about running Linux on an iPod. And here's a Make post on running DOS games under Windows XP. Thanks to Grady Booch for the Make link. Be sure to read the bit (and watch the video) of the Morse code vs. SMS text messaging contest on the Tonight Show. L-O-L.

Item Hider Bookmarklet

Thu, 26 May 2005 21:20:34 GMT

Tahdah! (sp?) It's my first published bookmarklet, the Item Hider (see the next link).

jm - Item Hider *By the way, this bookmarklet opens up a new window with a dynamic web interface, so you will need to hold the <Ctrl> key while clicking the link in IE. In other browsers, you will need to allow popups for the current page or site that you are visiting (this is a pain :-( ).

It was originally just an experiment in writing a bookmarklet, but it turned into something very handy: a way to create your own printer-friendly page, no matter whether the publisher provides one or not! I was trying to print some content on Eric Sink's weblog about source control and configuration management. Unfortunately, his site uses tables and is not designed well for printing. The net result was that, when I printed, I ended up with all of the left-side navigation menu and only part of the right-side content. I was left guessing which two or three words were missing at the end of each line. I made an interesting discovery during all of this: when printing, Internet Explorer preserves the results of DHTML changes to the current document, even if they are the result of bookmarklet-appended code! In other words, my bookmarklet gave me the ability to hide Eric's navigation cell in the site layout. When I printed, the navigation was not included, and the output looked like it was designed to be printer-friendly from the start. Just out of curiosity, I also tested the bookmarklet and print preview preservation on Mozilla for Linux (Mandrake 10.1). The bookmarklet code worked there too! Very cool! The Item Hider bookmarklet is also good for hiding advertisements that you don't want to print. Save the ink and the paper! In some cases advertisements are included in <IFRAME> tags; in others, they are tables with embedded images. While I was on the track of hiding images, I realized that my code was searching for elements, not attributes. This means that any document element that supports the background attribute would not be affected by my image hiding. To some extent, this didn't matter, because most browsers don't print background images for tables or cells anyway--but I was determined to find a way to hide those as well. To address the issue, I constructed a way to "swap" attribute values, specifically the background attribute. When I swap the value of the attribute with an alternative value, I use the getAttribute and setAttribute methods of the element to write the previous value to a custom attribute. In this way, I was able to swap the background attribute's value with an empty string, thus blanking out the background as well. I'm so proud of my bookmarklet, I'm going to link to Jon Udell's weblog article about the library lookup bookmarklet so he might find it. Then again, maybe I should just link to Jon Udell's weblog in general. It's not very fancy, mind you. But I'm proud of it all the same, especially because it has a practical application.

Seeking information on Thunderbird delete message behavior

Thu, 19 May 2005 17:33:23 GMT

I'm trying to prevent the behavior in Thunderbird in which the next message automatically opens in the same window when I delete the current message. Outlook has this preference setting, and Thunderbird allows much customization via the user.js file in the Profiles folder, but so far I have not found any setting that will affect the default behavior. I don't want to blindly move to another message. I want to individually review messages and open them in a controlled fashion. If I want the next message to appear while I am reading my email message, there is always the "Next Message" option. Does anyone have some information about this? Here's an excellent page on the user.js file and Mozilla/Thunderbird customization.

Mon, 16 May 2005 19:09:30 GMT

RSSOwl 1.1.1 (Default branch). RSSOwl is a wise SWT-based news aggregator. Its search feature lets you hunt down the best RSS/RDF/Atom feeds on the Web, and then organize and share your feeds with agility. Other features include an integrated browser; AmphetaRate, for acquiring news tailored to your tastes; full-text searching through headlines and descriptions; export feed summaries to PDF, RTF, and HTML; the ability to import or export OPML; the ability to exchange collections with others by importing or exporting subscriptions; the ability to import or export user data to and from other machines; automatic newsfeed upating; and much more.

License: Common Public License

Changes:
This release fixes a lot of bugs. It brings back the useful ToolBar in the Favorites Tree to perform some global actions like "Reload All Favorites" or "Mark all Favorites Read". The overall performance was improved, and Thai language support added. The Solaris release uses GTK 2 instead of Motif. [freshmeat.net announcements (Global)]

Mon, 16 May 2005 19:07:22 GMT

Spike PHPCoverage 0.6.2 (Default branch). Spike PHPCoverage is a tool for measuring and reporting code coverage provided by the test suite of a PHP application. It can instrument and record the line coverage information for any PHP script at runtime. It also provides an extensible reporting mechanism with a standard HTML report implemented out of the box. The default report displays the summary information about the code coverage for an application and also shows the detailed information about a file including which lines were actually executed and with what frequency. It is possible to specify the directories and files that should be included and/or excluded from a coverage measurement.

License: Open Software License

Changes:
This release has Windows support. The restriction on which files to instrument has been removed. Now, all files in an application can (and should) be instrumented. Simple local and remote samples for setup verification after installation have been added.

[freshmeat.net announcements (Global)]

Mon, 16 May 2005 19:06:08 GMT

ganttproject 1.11.1 (1.x branch). Ganttproject is a pure Java application thats lets you plan project using Gantt charts. It lets you easily breaks down a project into tasks, show dependencies, and manage resources. It uses a file format based on XML and can export into HTML and PDF documents using XSL transformations. The software is translated into 20 languages.

License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

Changes:
This is a maintenance release that fixes 8 relatively important bugs found in 1.11. Perhaps the most noteworthy is that task color on weekends is no longer ugly dark grey. Alpha rendering is used instead. [freshmeat.net announcements (Global)]

Mon, 16 May 2005 18:52:35 GMT

RMail - Receive the Feed for This Blog Via Email.

I'm such a big fan of RSS and newsreaders (I use FeedDemon) that I sometimes forget that not all of the readers of DennisKennedy.Blog use a newsreader or consume the RSS feed rather than visiting the blog on a regular basis.

RMail from KBCafe is a new service that allows you to enter the URL for the feed for this blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/index.xml) and your email address, and you will automatically receive my new posts by email. I still recommend using a newsreader, but this will give you an email option for subscribing to my RSS feeds and blog posts.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

[DennisKennedy.blog]

SQL Server Command-Line Utilities

Fri, 04 Mar 2005 14:36:10 GMT

I found an article that describes several command-line utilities that can automate SQL Server tasks. These commands include:

isql

osql

bcp - bulk data copy

dtsrun

dtswiz

itwiz - Index Tuning Wizard

We use a couple of these commands at my current client as part of our build/migration process.

Sweet! RSS Calendar

Thu, 24 Feb 2005 20:27:25 GMT

Check it out: www.rsscalendar.com Set up your calendar as an RSS feed.

Cool Upcoming.org features

Mon, 17 Jan 2005 01:54:44 GMT

Upcoming.org has some interesting features:

US "Metros"--cities with events

Upcoming.org's limiting policy

Mon, 17 Jan 2005 01:38:04 GMT

Upcoming.org has some interesting features, but by its own words, its use is limited:

Upcoming.org is not for self-promotion, either by a single organization (e.g. a political candidate, artist, or band) or a single venue.

Also, Upcoming.org is not for personal events (e.g. birthday parties, weddings, Little League games). If your event isn't of interest to the public, please don't add it.

I would love to use functionality like that of Upcoming.org for syndication of themed events, but its policy prohibits that. And, as far as I know, its functionality is not available in other forms. Well, its feature set is compelling and worth imitating for a calendar syndication application.

Response to OpenEvents

Mon, 17 Jan 2005 01:19:52 GMT

I know I'm following an old, cold trail, but here are some comments I found on the OpenEvents [standard?]

I have never heard of it, seen it in action, or seen any kind of spec on what it is or what you think it should be.

[Christopher Schmidt]

Anything to solve the current calendaring hell. I'm all for the "conversations" that blogs are enabling, but at the end of the day, sometimes I just want to meet people face-to-face. It's a higher bandwidth form of communication, plain and simple. We definitely need something akin to web RSS syndication for events (whatever happened to RDF calendaring?) - assembling centralized event sites make no sense.

[Brendon J. Wilson] Hmmm...centralized event sites? Well, they have their place, as long as they are well-themed and focused. But I think Brendan would agree that we should have lots of them--select the ones we want. My goal is to have a centralized event site that offers a standardized client or clients. I want Outlook integration, web accessibility, and extensibility. Is this possible?

ESF - the Nonexistent Format?

Tue, 11 Jan 2005 02:06:06 GMT

ESF seems to have fallen off the radar. Or has it? The real question is, has it been adopted? And the next question is, what ESF clients/tools exist? There was some discussion by Jeff Julian and John Bristowe of a NewsGator extension, but it seems to be MIA. Then there is another XML format of unknown weight--the RDF Schedule format. My goal is to integrate syndicated event information into Microsoft Outlook. Is there an existing way to do this? There is the vCal format for sharing appointments, and its cousin, iCal. But these solutions all involve a multi-step pull operation via email. This is where RSS excels. You don't have to sign up on an email list. No spam! ESF gets a few hits on Google (around 67,000 as of today). I still need to research more to find tools for ESF. But if ESF is as obscure as some reports, maybe ESF is not right for the job. Is anybody still working on it? Here are the sponsors of the standard:

We'll see. I left a comment on John's blog with a question about the status of the briefly-celebrated NewsGator extension. I first got excited about it when I saw Jeff Julian present it in Columbus, Ohio at an INETA user group meeting. It had me drueling! Well, maybe not drueling, but certainly excited. Update: Jeff Julian says this is the "Year of the Event." He points to an updated ESF/ESS spec. The other competitor for event syndication is the OpenEvent specification.

Conditional Formatting and the 80/20 rule

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 14:20:38 GMT

Microsoft Excel is a widely used tool in American business. For that matter, the computer spreadsheet category, in all its incarnations, is one of the primary business tools period, next to the word processor. I happen to use Excel frequently for data analysis and general business math (add, subtract, multiply and divide!). Nothing fancy really. However, I do consider myself to be a power user, relatively speaking. Now, I haven't mastered statistical formulas, pivot tables, or every feature of the graphs and charts, but I believe that I have mastered the 20% of functionality that yields the 80% of results, and then some (maybe 35/90). I believe that one of the most overlooked and powerful features of Excel is the conditional formatting feature. This allows things like changing the background color of a cell based on cell values or formulas--simple but very powerful. In fact, with a few simple techniques, you can find data mismatches, unused data, duplicate data, or matching data--all visually so the opportunity for error is greatly diminished. Amazingly, I've found that very few (actually none) of the people to whom I have mentioned this feature have ever heard of it, much less used it. That is why I feel it to be my personal duty to extol the virtues of this feature to the few that read this blog. The conditional formatting dialog can be found under the Format menu. Note that it does not appear when you right-click on a cell. I believe that this is an unfortunate omission on Microsoft's part, not only as a missing convenience, but also as an opportunity to advertise this useful feature. A cell is allowed to have up to three conditional formats. For example, a number value could have three different colors if it was positive, zero, or negative, respectively. Or a cell could be specially colored if its value was the same as the cell preceeding or following it. This can be helpful for spotting duplicates, although there are more effective ways to do this without using conditional formatting. I just used this feature today to compare values that were supposed to match but didn't. Rather than using the error prone technique of manually inspecting and formatting the data, I used conditional formatting and a formula to highlight mismatched values. The result was a professional-looking spreadsheet that I presented to management to visually illustrate a scenario that needed remedied. And of course, since I was the one who did the analysis, I will likely get credit for the proposed remedy. Bonus!--not $$$, just brownie points. And I did it with very little manual work on my part: just a couple of database queries, some conditional formatting, and some headings finish it off--oh, and repeating rows for page headers too. Fun stuff! So, without giving a complete tutorial on conditional formatting, I urge you to check it out in the Excel help documentation. I admit, I'm probably being negligent in my responsibilities by leading you this far only to leave you without detailed instructions, but time is short, and I've at least wet your appetite. But, just to provide some degree of assistance, here are a few links to learn more:

Conditional Formatting

Add, change, or remove conditional formats

How to Use Conditional Formatting to Shade Every Other Row

Microsoft Office Assistance: Highlight operations performance with conditional formatting

How to Create a Conditional Format to Hide Errors

Demo: Use conditional formatting to highlight operations deficiencies and opportunities

Creating conditional formatting formulas

Once you master the conditional formatting technique, you will likely find multiple uses for it that will make your life (if only slightly) easier. Enjoy, and here's to the 80/20 rule!

Using Drupal

Fri, 19 Nov 2004 19:51:19 GMT

Drupal is a versatile open source content management system. I'm trying to install it for my own use, but I need to upgrade my PHP version first. My friend suggested that I rebuild the server with an updated Mandrake or SUSE distribution. I'm currently running Mandrake 8.2, and I can't get patches for it anymore. It just sounds like the task is going to be a major pain. Plus, I don't think I have any way to burn an ISO image from Windows XP. Drat! Maybe I'll have to dual boot to Win2K to use my CD Creator software that no longer works under XP. More work. A friend of mine is considering replacing his entire small business website with Drupal. I think that's a smart move. Right now his website is still developing (partially under construction) and I think now is a good time to make a move like this. It will support his blog as well as a number of other features. Good stuff. Jeff K., if your out there, I hope you don't mind me referring to your site. As they say, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

myTaskOrg - yet another web PIM

Thu, 04 Nov 2004 18:21:01 GMT

myTaskOrg 1.5.2 [freshmeat.net]

myTaskOrg is a Web-based task organizer written in PHP/MySQL.Date-oriented tasks can be submitted with priority and file attachments as well as the ability to search for tasks, generate reports from a range of dates, and browse tasks with the calendar.

Thu, 04 Nov 2004 18:07:34 GMT

Mono Project 1.0.4 (Stable) [freshmeat.net]

Tue, 27 Apr 2004 17:09:47 GMT

PHP and SQL Security. An anonymous reader writes "PHP and SQL Security are being proven more weak every day. Uberhacker.Com is running a PHP and SQL security research project to ... [Slashdot]

Yoohoo, Oh Blogosphere...a Bookmarklet Challenge

Mon, 19 Apr 2004 02:31:20 GMT

Bookmarklet request.
Anyone know if it would be possible to create a bookmarklet that emulates an EyeDropper style application: as you move it around the page it shows you the hex colour code for the pixel directly under the mouse pointer? I'm pretty sure it can't be done but I'd love to be proved wrong.
[Simon Willison's Weblog]

I'm thinking that the document.onmousemove would have to be set to a function handler that interrogated the event object to determine the underlying target. Once the target was acquired, a simple query on the background color and a message to the statusbar and voila! There you have it. Of course, this does not directly answer the question. What's missing here is the code. I've pieced together a bookmarklet that inserts a div and/or form into the current document and allows drag and drop capability. I imagine there would be some similarities however. Oh, and by the way, I'm only making these assumptions on an IE platform. I can't and won't make guarantees for other browsers. Update: After more thought, I agree with Simon on his assessment of the possibility of an EyeDropper style application. That is, I agree that a pixel-based bookmarklet is not doable--only a page element-based bookmarklet. That would exclude any images used in the page, so such a bookmarklet would be of limited use.