RobiNZ CAD Blog

Dean Kamen at TED 2007

Seeing Dean Kamen’s presentation, from a Segway but not about them, was a highlight of Autodesk University 2004. This clip gives a glimpse of what he’s about; being remarkable…

Dean Kamen previews an extraordinary new prosthetic arm, on TED.com

 

Inventor Dean Kamen gives a 5-minute talk about the extraordinary prosthetic arm he’s developing at the request of the US Department of Defence, to help the 1,600 "kids" who've come back from Iraq without an arm (and the two dozen who’ve lost both arms). Kamen's commitment to using technology to solve problems, and his respect for the human spirit, have never been more clear than in this deeply moving clip. (Recorded March 2007 in Monterey, California. Duration: 05:41.)

Tags: Dean+Kamen, TED+2007

SnagIt to Blog

This is brilliant, from SnagIt to TypePad in a click!
Versions for WordPress, Live Journal, Movable Type and TypePad at:
http://www.techsmith.com/snagit/accessories/blogging.asp

via blognation

Tags: TypePad

Jimmy Bergmark interviewed by NOVEDGE blog

In the latest post on NOVEDGE Franco Folini interviews Jimmy Bergmark of JTB World.

Like many I first “met” Jimmy via the Autodesk Discussion Groups, his website and blog. He’s a keen contributor and has a wealth of knowledge in CAD related programming and customisation. In 2005 it was a real pleasure to meet him in person which given I’m in New Zealand and he’s in Sweden was no simple task. We met in Orlando, about halfway, as both attended Autodesk University 2005.

NOVEDGE blog: An Interview with Jimmy Bergmark, AutoCAD Guru
Jimmy Bergmark is the owner and principal of JTB World, a Swedish consulting company specializing in AutoCAD programming and customization. Jimmy is well known in the AutoCAD community because of his constant presence and highly qualified advice in several discussion forums and also because of his popular technical blog…

Tags: JTB+World, NOVEDGE

Total Lunar Eclipse - Wow!

This has nothing to do with CAD but thought you might enjoy. The total Lunar Eclipse tonight was an amazing sight. These photos aren’t the greatest resolution but capture the colours. My little Canon iXus on a tripod needed 15 second + exposures to get anything during the darkest part. I missed having a DSLR tonight….

Just as it started. Not sure if the halo was part of the eclipse or from cloud that cleared at just the right time.

Going, with just a wisp of cloud.

Going, lovely purple & hint of red…

Gone! There was so little light at this stage nothing showed on the camera screen at all. The moon looked red, but not quite as red as the camera sensor captured it.

Tags: Lunar+Eclipse, Auckland, New+Zealand

SnagIt + MindManager 7.0 = Happiness!

One of the best accessories for SnagIt is the “MindManager Output”. Sadly this was broken when I upgraded to MindManager 7. Yesterday I attended the Revit Tech Conference and today I was transcribing my hand notes, OK scrawl, to MindManager. As there were many application based tips I also had Revit running to grab relevant screen captures, annotate them, then add to my notes.

Missing the MindManager output, I visited the SnagIt site and found it’s been updated and now works fine with MindManager 7. If you are already using SnagIt & MindManager it’s free so go and grab it! 

If not, both MindManager and SnagIt have free trial versions*. They make the best documentation authoring combination I’ve found.

Note: This capture shows MindManager 6 and SnagIt

SnagIt Accessories
MindManager Output (Version is 1.0.2  is MindManager 7 compatible )
This output accessory places a MindManager output button on the Preview Window toolbar. Then, with one click, you can send captures to your MindManager document. *MindManager 6.0 and above only

* Health Warning; You will get hooked

Click for post related Disclosure Statement

Yahoo!Xtra Bubble: XtraMail thought it was spam!

I was a little mystified why I missed the Yahoo!Xtra Bubble announcements apart from the mail disruption notice seen in this earlier post. A visit to a relations place in the weekend had me setting up her Bubble and I saw this in the in-box:

Her XtraMail was set to mark all spam with [SPAM] rather than delete it. It appears Xtra’s old spam filter picked it’s Yahoo!Xtra Bubble announcement up as Spam. Probably quite true but perhaps it explains why many didn’t know about the impending changes.

Sure enough, a look at my MailWasher history showed the Yahoo!Xtra Bubble announcement was deleted, tagged as spam, on 18/07/2007…

Tags: Yahoo!Xtra+Bubble, Yahoo!, Xtra

See you at the Auckland Revit Technology Conference 2007?

The Revit Technology Conference is coming to Auckland on Monday (27/08). If any readers are attending say hello to the fellow in the Warehouse (blue store development) shirt!

Revit Technology Conference 2007
The Revit Technology Conference is an annual event designed to cater to the needs of the Revit-based CAD community. Founded and run by users of the software, RTC is the pre-eminent educational and networking event for users throughout the region.

This year the team is coming to you!

We are embarking on a series of one day seminars designed to entice, enrich, and enliven your worklife (FDA approval pending...)

XtraBubble Mail Trouble...

Last week several hundred thousand subscribers, including me, got an email from the ISP Xtra which said:

From: Xtra
Sent: Wednesday, 15 August 2007 16:36
To: Xtra Customers
Subject: Service Announcement: Xtra Webmail will be unavailable for 24 hours
Dear Customer
We are making a significant upgrade to email this weekend, and as a result webmail will be unavailable for up to 24 hours over the weekend. However you can still send and receive emails using email software like Outlook. To find out how to set up Outlook please visit www.xtra.co.nz/help .
For more information over the weekend about the changes and the status of the upgrade please visit www.xtra.co.nz/updates
Kind Regards
The Team @ Telecom Xtra

Based on my experiences this week it should have said:

Dear Customer
We are changing our email service from Xtra New Zealand to Yahoo! Australia servers in this weekend and as a result;

1. Webmail will be unavailable more than 24 hours over the weekend, forever unless you agree to new terms and conditions. You will be required to agree to Yahoo!, not just Xtra, Terms & Conditions to continue using Webmail even though this service was heavily promoted as a benefit of your Xtra contract.
2. Email access using software like Outlook will also have random disruption that will last a week or so and will never retrieve some messages at all.
3. Yahoo! SpamGuard will replace the XtraMail Spam Filter
1. It will not offer the current Xtra “Tag spam but don’t delete” option.
2. It will also false tag approximately five times more valid mail as spam.
3. It will be defaulted to “on” and you will have no indication it’s diverting spam, including “valid spam” messages, to a folder you can not access without using webmail (which requires agreeing to Yahoo! terms).
4. If you have an existing Yahoo! account;
1.  The Xtra Webmail URL and Yahoo!Xtra Bubble link on the Yahoo!Xtra home page will take you to a Yahoo! Sign-in that has nothing to do with Xtra, Xtramail, or Yahoo!Xtra Bubble
2. There will be no indication on this page of how to access Xtra webmail or sign up for Yahoo!Xtra Bubble. In fact you will be required to use Google to find the http://www.yourbubble.co.nz/ page where you can sign-in to access webmail.
5. We will not be updating Xtra FAQ accessed from the Xtra home page.

I had a huge reduction of email volume since the “mail upgrade” and wondered what had happened. It wasn’t until tonight that I found this missing mail. It required accepting the Yahoo! terms and logging into Yahoo!Xtra Bubble webmail. Over six hundred messages were being held in a “Bulk” spam folder and were not seen by Outlook or other software using pop3 access.

I had used XtraMail’s spam feature to tag, but not delete, spam messages as it had a fairly constant 2% error. If I’d used the “delete spam” option I’d never have seen those messages. MailWasher allows me to preview and accept this valid “spam” before deleting the real spam and retrieving my messages.

The weekend upgrade meant Yahoo! SpamGuard Plus took over spam filtering. It had moved 653 messages to the “bulk” spam folder, of which 68 were valid. I had missed messages from friends, readers, event ticketing, sports newsletters and service updates from TypePad who host my blog. Xtra’s 2% spam error had leapt to over 10%. What’s annoying is I’d never have known those messages existed at all without logging into Yahoo!Xtra Bubble Webmail.

Doing that required quite a detailed sign-up and care to avoid install of Yahoo! Toolbar and Messenger, neither of which I want. Once in I had to disable SpamGuard and manually move the messages, 12 at a time, to the webmail in-box folder. Even this was hindered by the default “new Yahoo! mail UI as found I had to go back to the older mail UI for the message moves to stick. Once that was done MailWasher could see & process these messages. It’s filter mechanisms correctly identified most of my valid mail, allowed me to pick the others I did want and then got rid of all the real spam.

Note the big dip in volume when the bubble arrived...

If you’ve sent me a message that got stuck in the Bubble sorry for the delay in responding. I’ll catch up with them over the weekend. Then I’ll figure out how to bill Xtra for the time I’ve spent sorting out their troublesome Bubble.

Tags: Yahoo!Xtra+Bubble, Xtra, bubble, Yahoo!

Robert Green on NOVEDGE blog

Franco has a great interview with CAD Management guru Robert Green. If you are heading to AU 2007 be sure to check out Robert’s CAD Management sessions. I did them in 2005/6 and found them really valuable.

NOVEDGE blog: An Interview with Robert Green, author of "Expert CAD Management"

Tags: CAD+Management, Robert+Green, NOVEDGE

Blogging LT - Erik and Kate's AutoCAD LT Blog

After AutoSketch, AutoCAD LT was the second CAD package I owned. Although it’s regarded as “the little brother” you can do some pretty cool work with it.

It’s not supposed to do 3D but was fine for the geometry of this dome. It looks like a repetitive geodesic structure but the designer wanted horizontal circular members at fixed heights so every level was different. Using LT to array the nodes then dimension member lengths/angles was easier than calculating them!

This is the first AutoCAD LT blog I’ve seen. It’s great the little brother has got a blog.

The LT Side of Things
Tips & workarounds for the LT side of AutoCAD.
http://ltsideofthings.blogspot.com/

Via BTL

UPDATE 30-08-2007: Shaan found another LT blog. Apologies Kate, you’re RSS feed no 1031!

Kate's CAD Tips
Welcome to Kate's CAD Tips! I've been sending these tips out to my office once a week for about three years now, and decided to start the blog as a way to put them all in one place.
http://katescadtips.blogspot.com/

Tags: AutoCAD+LT

Xtra Bubble bursts...

Xtra, my ISP, broke loads of it’s subscribers email this weekend while implementing a “new enhanced service”. Stuff like that can happen with upgrades, especially when it’s a complex system with several hundred thousand users. It shouldn’t, but we’re getting a wonderful new service so it’s worth the pain, right?

“Yahoo!Xtra Bubble” claims to be to be “Your window to the Web” so I had a look. It just seems to be re-packaged MyYahoo! with all the usual Yahoo! crud. Do I really need Yahoo! Horoscope?

Then, looking closer, it all seemed very odd. I wonder why a service from a New Zealand ISP for a Kiwi customer had defaulted to showing:

• Results from a lottery in Arizona?
• The weather from Sunnyvale, California?
• Sports news from “The Roanoke Times” (Roanoke, Virginia?)
• Local news from the Denver Post. (I’m in Auckland and Xtra know it, their bill gets here OK)
• The “Lubbock News”. (Fascinating for the good folks of Lubbock but not much interest to me)
• Shopping from US merchants. (Again, not much use as our dollar plunges)

“Yahoo!Xtra Bubble” sure isn’t my window on the web, whose is it?

Yes, I could spend time customising all this for local content but you still get the Yahoo! crud. Forget the Bubble, a blank home-page looks like a good option right now. Thank goodness this rubbish is provided at “no extra cost”!

Xtra emailers' weekend of misery - NZ Herald
The company says it is enhancing the overall service to more than 500,000 Xtra customers and had tried to notify people of a 24-hour webmail outage.

“The result of a partnership between Yahoo! and Telecom, Bubble is touted as providing "an exciting range of new services that will change the way you use the internet" for no extra cost”

Bubble bursts for Telecom service - Stuff.co.nz
Telecom's website announced the arrival of a new internet service with the words "The wait is over!" but for many customers that's all they did over the weekend - wait.

Tags: Xtra+Bubble, my+yahoo, yahoo!xtra+bubble

25 years of AutoCAD?

AutoCAD is turning 25! Crikey, I must be getting old as remember most of it!

We first used AutoCAD R2.something at Tech. I say “we” as there were few CAD PC’s so several of students used one together. My first CAD drawing was a group effort, a side elevation of a motor scooter project which took us several weeks! There was limited access to slow, if top spec for their day, machines. The desire to draw curves (this was just 2D not 3D) and fill them with hatch patterns plus the “first encounter with AutoCAD factor” meant it was a long process.

I still remember “Beth”, can’t remember her surname, who came to New Zealand from Autodesk to spread the AutoCAD word. She was amused, or maybe bewildered, by design students trying to do things real draftsmen wouldn’t attempt. I think it resulted in a few calls back to the US for updates or test code. Thinking back, I wonder where Beth is now & regret not having that .dwg other than as a print…

Then there was a gap until R9 before I encountered AutoCAD again. For most of those computer free years it was literally back to the drawing board but since then it’s been all digital. My own first CAD PC is a metre away as I type this and still runs fine. Not that there’s much use for a 436 dx33 with 8mb ram which cost $5150.25 (in 1993).

It’s a coincidence The Warehouse, my employer, is also 25 later this year. They didn’t use AutoCAD internally until sometime in early/mid ‘90’s. I’ve been using it, or AutoCAD based software, there since 1997! Now I do feel old…

Celebrating 25 years of AutoCAD - www.autodesk.com/autocad25

Via BTL

Some more BIM & Revit Resources

Here’s a couple of BIM & Revit resources I’ve found recently:

Revit 3D.com
Gregory’s “Revit Encyclopedia” of information

URL: http://www.revit3d.com/
Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Revit3dcomJoinTheRevitlution

and

BIM Manager Blog
David Kingham (who shares my hand writing problem) has a blog on BIM.

URL: http://bimmanager.blogspot.com/
Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/BimManager

Mind Mapping Meeting Notes - Lifehacker

Lifehacker have a great, short, introduction to Mind Mapping as technique to for making meeting notes. It’s something I’ve found useful but seen few doing. Sometimes I use MindManager in the meeting but often it’s just a pen and paper, still using the map format.

The advantage of a map is, with few words, it can capture relationships between ideas that linear format notes can’t show. It’s also far more flexible allowing topics to grow as the conversation flows. Additional info relating to an earlier topic can be linked with a line irrespective of it’s location on the page.

While this isn’t “pure mind mapping” my hand maps tend to be very unstructured and often break the “rules”. While the purists may disagree I think you should concentrate on capturing the information rather than worrying too much about structure. I find they are still meaningful, and readable, in spite of my appalling handwriting 

Note Taking: A Beginner's Guide to Mind Mapping Meetings - Lifehacker
Do you have trouble keeping up with meetings because you can't take notes as fast as the speaker talks?

If you do jot down some thoughts and ideas, by the time you re-read your notes they make no sense? If this sounds like you, a meeting mind map may be just what you need…

See how Mind Mapping helps me cope with information overload in this post from last year:

Taking Note of Autodesk University - Mind Maps to the rescue?

Tags: mind+mapping

Want to know more about CAD/BIM and Google Earth?

Looking at the statistics for this blog there is one thing thats remarkable.

Judging by visits to the post “DWG to [Google] Earth, do you read me?” lots of people are interested in Google Earth and CAD.

It’s responsible for about one third of the visits coming from search which makes me wonder:

• Is there a huge untapped demand for information more posts on CAD/BIM and Google Earth?
• If so what are you all trying to achieve?

Leave a comment or email me using the “email me” link in the r/h column.

Tags: Google+Earth

The lost art of handwriting...

This post by Blog Maverick made me laugh:

Quotes from "I Forgot How to Write!" - Blog Maverick
“I was sitting in a meeting the other day and decided I needed to take some notes .“

“This particular meeting for some reason I couldn't go the digital route so I can had to go 1900s and actually handwrite my notes.”

“What a disaster. I couldn't write.”

Ever since I had to PRINT UPPERCASE at Tech (three years when nearly all work was handwritten) it's all I have done. Now if I write, which is rare, it's all u/c block scrawl as I have forgotten how to write cursive. At school I got good grades for “Technical Drawing” but always with a comment about my poor printing. I even remember one teacher saying I couldn’t consider being a draftsman without improving it. I still remember Mr Price as I enter text into design software!

Technology sorted out the drafting printing but hasn’t helped my handwriting...

If I ever get a Tablet PC it will have to be a convertible with keyboard! Now I just have to learn how to type faster…

HOK Blog!

HOK have a couple of new(ish) blogs looking at buildingSMART (Building Information Model) and Green design. It’s great to see companies sharing their experience & knowledge!

HOK CAD Solutions - Welcome to this HOK CAD Support blog
“This is the idea: let’s use this blog as a communication track to gather knowledge and share; we hope that you will be willing to author posts and share opinions to make this work. Postings will be by HOK and invited guests, viewing is by anybody inside and outside HOK….”

http://hokcadsolutions.blogspot.com/

HOK GREEN BIM - Welcome to my new Green Blog - Miles Walker
I plan to capture my path into green design in architecture…

http://greenbim.blogspot.com/

Also check out Miles' other website on BIM:

4BIM – A web site exclusively for Building Information Modelling

http://www.4bim.com/

Via autodesk-revit.blogspot.com

Tags: HOK, buildingSMART, BIM

Qantas get WiFi'ed (from Feb 2008)

Not sure if Air New Zealand will match this but it’s a great reason to consider the flying Kangaroo.  Qantas new Airbus A380s – regardless of class - will have laptop power sockets and onboard WiFi from August 2008. Retrofitted 747-400s will also go into service from February next year… 

RobiNZ Personal Blog: Qantas adds inflight WiFi to all flights
This is great news for someone who’s a long-haul flight from everywhere!

Slightly less hassle than getting a virus...

It started with this message:
“Your AntiVirus subscription is about to expire…”. Then there was the stupid decision not to just renew the subscription but also, since the cost was almost the same, “upgrade” to the latest version.

The Upgrade:
It started OK, the download took a while but then the update began installing, slowly. About four hours(!) later the otherwise idle machine finally finished the install and requested to re-boot.

The First Run:
No problem, well it took about ten minutes to restart, and then ran Auto-update demanding some patches were installed. Not just virus definitions, which I could understand, but also multiple application and update application components. What’s that about when I’d just downloaded the “latest version”? I let it install the patches.

After the Patches:
After another re-boot it demanded a full scan, to complete the install, but about halfway through Auto-Protect failed. It required an auto-update which installed some components then demanded a re-boot. You might be able to guess what happened about halfway through the scan…

Help, there’s a fix!
After repeating that process half a dozen times and I gave up and resorted to the support site. It was nicely set up and after requesting me to enter the error code it suggested yet another fix-up patch.

I had forgotten the error code but by this time Auto-Protect failed again so didn’t take long to get it. If you build a support site around cryptic error codes why can’t the software log them for the Support Site to retrieve?

But the fix didn’t…
After another re-boot it demanded a full scan, to complete the install, but about halfway through Auto-Protect failed. (OK that sentence was a copy/paste from an earlier paragraph but that’s what happened again!). It was back to the Support site. The advice “If the fix hasn’t fixed things” is to download an un-install tool, completely remove the software and start again. So I decide to do that, the next evening…

The re-install:
So I install the software again which seemed to go OK. After another re-boot it demanded a full scan, to complete the install, but about halfway through Auto-Protect failed. (Yeah, it’s another copy/paste sentence). Back to the support site again and decide it’s time for some live interaction. You can phone, for a price, or chat via IM for free so that’s what I do. After establishing the problem, that the fix doesn’t work and that a re-install didn’t work the technician advises a simple mix of disabling Auto-Protect, rebooting, then re-enabling Auto-Protect and it’s all sorted.

Finally Fixed!
The endless initial scan runs yet again this time completing with a little I’d hoped to see twenty four hours before, when I ticked upgrade on a fully functional trouble free installation. Finally shiny new AntiVirus protecting my machine and all was well with the world.

Until…
Four days later I get “Your trial has ended purchase a permanent license here…”.

Back to Support and find the entry for “You purchased a license but now get trial ended message” which gives another “fix” to download. It demands a re-boot and the trial is magically transformed into the permanent license it always was. That was about a week ago and so far, hopefully forever, I’ve seen that lovely or a dialog I thought I’d never see ever again...

The Outcome:
I can report Norton’s AntiVirus Support site is well organised and their IM Support Technician was great. The sad thing is I had so many opportunities to experience it.

If Anti-virus is this much hassle I hope it works and I never get a virus!

UPDATE 08–09–2007 : It still doesn’t work!

The “working” Norton AV never managed to retrieve a Virus Definition update. It tried, failed then launched into a process which required a 18mb manual patch download, every time. After two of those the support site led me back to the total re-install process. At about that time a promo offer from ZoneAlarm offered the addition of AV for 1/4 of the upgrade cost from Norton. I have uninstalled the Norton Product and requested a refund. ZoneAlarm is working fine.

Tags: Norton+AntiVirus

Autodesk buy Kiwi made!

Must admit I’d never heard of Skymatter or Mudbox, their “3D brush-based modelling software”, until I read this: 

Autodesk to buy New Zealand software company: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance
Autodesk Inc. agreed to buy Skymatter Ltd., a New Zealand company that makes modelling software…

Perhaps Autodesk have been reading this: http://www.buykiwimade.govt.nz/

Tags: Skymatter, Mudbox

A Tablet PC for CAD/BIM?

As it’s an evolution from “the drawing board” combining CAD/BIM software and Tablet PC seems natural. I wonder why it hasn’t been done by the major market players? In the early days hardware was a real limitation but newer tablets like the Lenovo X61 or Toshiba M400 have reasonable performance for portable use. I don’t see them as workstation replacements, rather an ideal way to take your design on-site or to a meeting where using a mouse isn’t practical.

I’ve tried mark-up with Autodesk Design Review (ADR) on a Tablet and liked it in-spite of the application’s User Interface (UI) not being very Tablet friendly. That was with ADR 2007 but, sadly, the newer free ADR 2008 makes more use of fly-out tools for mark-up formatting which are harder to use on a tablet. Even with the current UI the speed & ease of pen input for non-precision sketch/mark-up leaves a mouse/keyboard combo for dead, especially in the field where you can’t use them at all.

I’ve also played with AutoCAD, AutoCAD Architecture and Revit on a Tablet PC and all were usable, if not really viable full-time. There’s no perfect UI but for many environments & tasks the pen/tablet is far more natural, dare I say fluent, than the mouse & keyboard. I was surprised to find AutoCAD’s UI and command “logic” (selection/command sequence) worked better than the smarter object based applications.

Revit’s dialog heavy UI was the least accommodating which is a pity given the power of it’s engine to assist design. I’d love to see that Building Information Model manipulated with a Tablet friendly UI as a conceptual design tool. You wouldn’t want to do detail design work – lots of text or precision dimension entry – but for knocking around a concept the tablet & pen is the most natural human interface, at least until those surface displays with direct manipulation become affordable.

Thanks to “GottabeMobile” I found an application from Evodia which shows what “concept sketches” become with some smart software and a tablet. It’s software for Electrical Schematic design and looks brilliant. I can only say “looks” because the website is in French (my ignorance prevents me reading that) and I don’t have a machine to try it on as the Tablet PC’s I’ve used were loan machines. Donations to the “Tablet for Robin” fund accepted in the tip-jar  

I’ve seen all sorts of software used for this – Excel, Visio, AutoCAD/Revit MEP – but none an Electrical Engineer, who can drive a pen faster than a mouse, could use so fluently. You get the speed of a scribble with the power of software assisted design & layout. Imagine that with a conceptual Building Information Model. The pen may not be the ultimate design tool but it’s mightier than the… mouse.

Via GottaBeMobile.com - Using a Tablet PC for Electrical Sketching
“When you see how quickly someone can sketch out the schematics for a house, you have to wonder why electricians would ever choose to go back to paper.”

Tags: Evodia, GottabeMobile

Real world tales of Revit BIM’plementation

These articles share tips from the front line where BIM theory meets production reality: 

BIM Do's and Don'ts – Cadalyst
Beau Turner* & Joe Eichenseer (Avatech Solutions) offer some real-world insights for success implementing BIM…

As I’ve recently been investigating Revit Architecture/MEP collaboration this AECBytes article was brilliantly timed. Thanks Lachmi & Bill!

Multi-Disciplinary Collaboration in Revit - AECbytes "Tips and Tricks"
Bill Knittle’ s (Synergis Design) tutorial on “Collaborating in an all-Revit environment” has recommendations & techniques for sharing Architectural, Structural & MEP models using Revit’s linking, collaboration & monitor tools.

* Just this week I was reminded of Beau zooming around on a Segway at Autodesk University 2004 as I had another “CAD + Segway” close encounter. More on that in a future post…

Camtasia for YouTube

If you want to output Camtasia movies for YouTube this clip from www.dougstech.com has some great tips on output profile settings for video, audio, compression…

Here is a demo of Visual Thesaurus re-processed with Doug’s settings. It’s the tiny 861kb .mov file, less than half the .wmv and a fraction of the shockwave file size which are the same quality once uploaded to YouTube. 

Websites as graphs

 This is a graphical map of my blogs structure generated by: 

Websites as graphs - an HTML DOM Visualizer Applet

See this image grow at Websites as graphs

See this image growing captured with Jing.

What do the colours mean?
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

 

Tags: Jing

Life in Eight Easy Steps

Click for the answer to life, the universe and everything…  

Savage Chickens: Eight Steps Cartoon

Tags: Savage+Chickens

xkcd on LISP

;-)

Lisp Cycles - xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language

Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).

Tags: xkcd