Category Archives: Tech

Some small tips and tidbits on bytes.

JOSSA 2010

Posted on by
Reply

Well only a few months late.  I could list many excuses, including a last minute ski trip to Whistler, but I won’t bore you with that (future post on that ski trip coming soon!).

So a little late but here are the 10 projects that received my JOSSA (Jamas Open Source Software Award) for 2010.

Firefox/Thunderbird – Mozilla – I have been a long time user of both Firefox and Thunderbird, both at home and the office. Looking forward to seeing what the next major revision will bring.

Lightning – Mozilla – OK another one to Mozilla but this project deserved its own special mention.  It has allowed me at work to continue to fight our IT department in moving to Outlook.  It still has some issues but with the ability to talk to exchange servers and Google calendars it is easy to overlook these.  Looking forward to the future of this project.

Tab Mix Plus – onemen and Gary Reyes – On a typical day I have 15+ tabs open in FireFox.  Managing these can get a little bit frustrating.  Thankfully the Tab Mix Plus has some helpful options to keep me sane.  For example, you can choose where a new tab will open, my favorite is beside the current tab I am working on, saves me having to go to the last tab and pull it back to where I wanted it.

WP-Stats-Dashboard – Dave Lighthart – Keep track of all your social media accounts tied to your website can be a lot of work.  Dave has created this great WordPress plugin to provide you with a list of quick stats for a very wide range of social media and other community sites (some I only found out about through the plugin).  It has been great to see the progress this plugin has made over the past year.

NextGEN Gallery – Alex Rabe – Most plugins for WordPress are fairly small, which tweak or add a small piece of functionality.  Then there are the plugins in the category that NextGEN Gallery are in, which are massive.  This plugin turns WordPress into a CMS for photos.  Uploading in batches, organizing into galleries and albums, slide shows, thumbnails and watermarking.  I have yet to think of a feature it is missing.

Google Analyticator – Ronald Heft – Google Analytics is a great tool for gathering information about visitors to your website. This plugin for WordPress makes adding the tracking code a snap.  Extra features include the ability to exclude logged in users, based on permission levels.  Also adds access to stats right in your admin dashboard.

Google XML Sitemaps – Arne Brachhold – Don’t let the name fool you, this plugin does XML sitemap submission for a wide range of search engines, all with a few clicks.  Submitting sitemaps is an important part of SEO for any site.  The fact this tool does it with so little effort is a great time saver.

All in One SEO Pack – Michael Torbert – SEO takes work, there is no silver bullet that will just do it for you.  This plugin however makes it very easy to correct some SEO issues on any WordPress website.  It can be used to change the home page title, description and key words.  It can also automatically rewrite page and post titles for you.  A great tool when getting people started on a new WordPress site.

Contact Form 7 – Takayuki Miyoshi – I tried many contact forms for WordPress until I found this one.  Clean simple interface, with no extra fluff features (like Ajax pop ups) that would randomly break.  You want your contact form to make it easy for visitors to your website to reach you, look no further then this plugin.

Notepad++ – Don Ho and Team – I do most of my programming in a cygwin or linux environment.  But every so often I have to do things on a Windows machine, which Notepad++ has made less painful. Quick and feature rich it makes a great C, C++, HTML and PHP editor.  Wish I could same the same thing for most other Windows programs.

Well that is it for this year.  I hope 2011 JOSSAs won’t be so late, but last minute ski trips can happen any time.  I encourage you to start your own JOSSA style award.  It isn’t a lot of money but it will hopefully make a developers day, which will make your year better.

 

HTML5 + Java = WOW!

Posted on by
1

A co-worker showed me this very cool site, 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and The Web. The content is good, worth checking out if you curios about the topic. The amazing part is the delivery method.  The book and everything you see on the page is done using HTML5, with some Java scripting. The outcome is pretty unbelievable. This was the sort of thing that used to require flash, which has a lot of detractors on the web (resources, Apple vs Adobe battle, lack of SEO).  I look forward to seeing what other great content will be created using this new standard, if this site is any indication the future of the web is looking good.

Coverage of the 2010 Winter Olympics

Posted on by
Reply

Living in Canada we are very lucky with the quality of the Olympics coverage on television. CBC in the past and now CTV have done a great job of covering a lot of the events live. Our southern neighbours have not been so lucky, with NBC showing most coverage off tape and only during prime time. This means that alternatives for those Olympic fanatics has become very important.

Both CTV and NBC have introduced special websites for the Olympics, that have been streaming lots of events live. Both sites have news, photo galleries, videos and lots of background information on events and athletes. CTV’s Olympics site has a handy schedule on the right hand side showing which TV channels are showing events live. The quality of the online live video streaming has been good from the CTV website.

Kudos to VANOC for the quality of the main Vancouver 2010 Olympics website. Featuring a nice design with lots of useful features, my favourite being the schedule and results page. This page provides a quick snapshot of what events are coming up next and results from finished events. The site features live converge of results which works OK. This is not video but shows graphics of what is happening and detailed results of times (split and final). I think this idea is great, good for people at work who want to follow along but don’t want to be caught watching a live video feed. It seems to have a few glitches, but so far updates seem close to real time. It would be great to see this idea improved upon, I think adding some indication between races to indicate what is going on next would help.

On the TV side the HD quality has been great. The sound of the crowd with the surround sound really creates a live feel. The slow motion replays really give you a detailed look at the forces applied to the competitors’ bodies. The video overlay showing the difference between competitors is really cool, this idea may have come from car racing computer games, it is crazy to see how just a small difference around one ski gate can cause a huge difference in speed.

On Bell TV they have again done the single channel that shows 6 channels at one time. Great if you are trying to watch more then one event at a time. You can select which channels audio is being played by moving the selector box. Also on Bell there are now 5 Olympic HD channels that are showing the live raw feed from up to 5 venues at the same time. No commentary, no annoying commercials, just pure sports coverage. This has been great for watching events that aren’t being picked up by the main channels.

Mobile coverage of the Olympics has certainly improved. Both NBC and CTV have apps for the iPhone/iPod touch which a very good for keeping track of results and medal accounts. Also VANOC has put out an amazing app, mostly for those people at the games, schedule, results and maps. Two features it has that are well thought out is using your location it adjust event start times to your local time and the same live results that the main VANOC site supports.

If anyone else has found something worth checking out leave a description and link in the comments.