I’m off from work for a couple of days and working on this website, meaning things could get a little wonky here. So far I’ve taken care of a number of things, including upgrading from gallery to gallery2. I’ve said it a number of times – gallery is one of the finest open source projects around. While the upgrade process wasn’t quite as smooth as some of my earlier 1.x upgrades, in the end I managed it and it took me less than two hours. This means once again some image gallery links will be a bit of a mess, short term. If you find something amiss, let me know and I’ll fix it.

I’ve also got another potential candidate for kick ass open source project, gregarius. I’ll write more about it and link to my instance once I’ve got it fully configured. So far so great though.

I also got sitebar up and running again, once I’ve finished configuring it I’ll link to my instance of that as well.

I’ll post more info as I continue working on things.

I linked to a desktop version of the superb wiki engine moinmoin for the mac some time ago. I noticed today that this is now also available for the PC. If you’re looking to experiment with wikis after hearing me babble about them endlessly over the past couple of years, this is one of the easiest ways to go about it, and one of the best. Moinmoin ranks up there amongst the best of the available wiki engines – it’s super featureful, well thought out, and relatively easy to use. It doesn’t get any easier to get your own knowledgebase going on your machine.

I’ve written about synergy2 a couple of times here, most recently back in may of this year. It’s a fantastic little utility that allows you to use the same keyboard and mouse across multiple computers. I use it on almost every machine I own, windows mac and linux. It can be a bit of a bear to setup though, especially for long time mac users who faint at the thought of having to edit a text file to configure an application. Today I happened across SynergyOSX, a handy little GUI to help you configure Synergy2 on macs. If you’ve previously taken a look at it but were put off by the command line interface, check this out. Synergy2 is awesome if you’ve got more than one computer sitting on your desk.

Today I learned a lesson that made me feel pretty foolish. I’ve been working towards practicing what I preach, abandoning long-used commercial software packages like photoshop and word for open source alternatives. I’ll get around to writing about that eventually. I figured the same should apply to file formats, so when I redesigned my site I started using .png instead of jpeg files. This is why the header graphics were taking so long to load – some of them were as large as 320k. This was driving me nuts and several of you have commented on it. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how best to optimize PNG files, never bothering to read any actual documentation of course, and never making any significant headway. I tried a variety of tools on mac, win32 and linux (pngout.exe, AdvanceComp, optiPNG, PNGCRUSH, plus several others), all without much luck – at best I was shaving a few k of the files, not the 30-50% reduction I was hoping to see. Finally I headed over to wikipedia and read up on the png file format and discovered I was operating under a misapprehension the entire time. PNG is for replacing GIFs, not jpegs. 10 minutes later I had a collection of header graphics that were literally 1/10th their previous size. So. Apologies for the crappy website performance, it’s fixed now. At least some of you may find the links to the png optimization tools useful, if you’re not already on a CS version of photoshop any of the above will do a superior job optimizing your pngs, and most of them have compiled binaries for multiple operating systems, as well as GUI’s.

I’ve mentioned before how much I dislike MacOSX’s metadata files and how it writes them everywhere by default, including to almost every single directory users touch on servers I manage. It’s my sincere wish Apple would address this themselves, but given that the problem has existed for years it seems unlikely. Meanwhile, enter another solution – BlueHarvest. It’s a control panel for OSX which allows you to disable the creation of DS_Store files on a per location basis, remove existing files, and change the default permission profiles assigned to them. Do the world’s networks a favor, mac users, and install this and turn of creation of metadata files for anything but the volumes you own, it won’t cost you anything and the world’s network admins will thank you.

Today’s example – bookmark tags, a firefox extension that lets you tag all your bookmarks. Who needs rigid hierarchical categories? Not you, after you’ve installed this. If you’re not already a del.icio.us user and care to experiment with tagging, this is a simple way to play around with it.

[via downloadsquad]

I’ve been writing about how appealing I find Ruby and especially Ruby on Rails these days. We’ve struggled at both my current job and my last position in terms of what platform/s we develop on. Bowdoin was largely a perl shop with some flash in the mix; Skidmore is, unbelievably, still trying to tell everyone it’s Cold Fusion or nothing. (fortunately I’m able to bypass all that). Meanwhile though as I imagine other positions I might move to in the future and what toolsets I’d focus on, Ruby is tops on my list. At Bowdoin there were several architecture astronauts who were trying to force us into an all-Java development model. This was largely an effort to take control of the college’s web communications by the technical staff and I argued against this while I was there. I’m not sure where they’re at with it now. Anyway I got to musing on this today after running across an onjava.com interview with James Tate, the author of Beyond Java. There’s a great quote:

There are developers that can’t stomach learning servlets, Spring, XML, Hibernate, Struts and then some UI glue frameworks. They’re going to be unleashed in Rails.

He’s describing me. My first exposure to a java development framework was the cocoon project. I mean no offense to the developers, but man, I developed a life long aversion to the complexity of these frameworks from that project. We had two really smart sys admins working for us during my time with Cocoon and we still struggled with it. It’s not that there’s something wrong with Cocoon specifically, it’s that the amount of grunt work required to implement projects using frameworks of this nature is so onerous as to drive me to anything that enables me to avoid 700 line xml configuration files. I’m hardly an architecture astronaut – my basic philosophy is to focus on results, and my dabblings with rails thus far are showing me that rails is going to get me to the results even faster.