Adam's Blog

I noticed it today. It's uncanny. Could they have been separated at birth?

As my readers will know, I've detailed my isses with Google, or more specifically, Picasa Web in the past. Well, today, I was surprised when Picasa refused to upload new photos for me. I cannot use my iPhoto exporter anymore, since that broke with one of the last two updates to iPhoto, so I tried the web interface and then the "Picasa Web Albums Uploader" application Google provides. The reason it failed? No storage. "That's odd," I thought. I have extended storage and about 5 GB free. But alas, it expired. In fact, my storage SHOULD have expired in August, but just did recently. So I tried to upgrade again. After all, Google's been good to me on the whole. But my order was cancelled by Google. The reason: "Another order modified the user's storage plan before this order was received" What the heck? So I tried again. And once again: cancelled. So my storage has been cancelled for a few days now, no upgrade has been applied, no warning whatsoever from Google (at my account, which is a Gmail account!), and no way to upgrade! Gmail has been a fantastic app for me, but I'm just not sure about...

Google just released their Gmail compilation video to YouTube, and... well... it's cool! It really is. Not only because the video is fun, not only because it's refreshing to see a company that looks like it might be fun and not just a bunch of hair old white men who are only concerned with the bottom line, but also because it fascinates me. It fascinates me that a product can inspire such loyalty that makes its users so fiercely dedicated to it. I am blindly loyal to Mac OS X and Gmail. The both of them are huge inspirations to me; they make me productive, I enjoy using them, they work with me and for me rather than as an abrasive but necessary intermediary (like Citrix) or flat out against me (Microsoft Word!) Gmail is so great and so empowering that random people are willing to take time to make ads for it. I wish I could be that happy with, partnered with, and loyal to all vendors I patronize. Now, that's delivering a product.

As a very young kid, there were four shows I remember watching very frequently that most in my generation will recall: Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, The Electric Company, and 3-2-1 Contact. Of these shows, I recall bits and pieces of skits and songs. Some are a little more familiar with the retro crowd: The Bloodhound Gang, the sillohuettes speaking to each other, Lily Tomlin as Edith Ann sitting in a giant rocking chair, and even Spider-Man shorts tucked into the science bits. But there are two songs that really stood out for whatever reason, and they have been stuck in my head for about 25 years. I spent quite a bit of time searching for them online, but to no avail. I never was able to find them ...until last night. I randomly decide to check them out again. Lo and behold, I foudn them both within minutes. God bless YouTube. So here are two songs that made enough of an impression when I was about 5 to stick in my head for 26 years. Enjoy. Here is "Punctuation" And here is "T-I-O-N tion tion tion tion"

I really did not expect to ever post something like this, but it's true: I switched to Safari 3. I love Camino, really I do. But recently, its limitations have been bothering me. I prefer my tabs in a very specific order and often I have several tabs open. If ever I close a tab by mistake, I cannot get that same order without doing tons of work or re-launching. Safari 3 draggable tabs. One of the things that used to bother me about Safari was that there was no "New Tab" button available for the toolbar. There is now. It's also got great keychain integration, private browing, the original embedded RSS, true Aqua widgets, resizable text boxes, easy PDF integration, and it's super-fast. Camino doesn't support Ad-Block, but rather, stylesheet-based filtering. Safari does that too, by default, and it's even easier to use than it is in Camino. Safari doesn't have any Flash problems and once you add "Safari Stand" and enable the debug menu, you have a perfect drop in replacement. My biggest complaint about Camino was the lack of development tools. It doesn't have a Javascript debugger (ChimericalConsole never worked me for), doesn't have a decent source...

Dear Google, WTF? Love, Adam

I am very excited about how portable Small Axe, the engine that powers sethadam1.com, has become. I am going to be upgrading the site in the next few weeks. You won't see a ton of new stuff, but it will be much more powerful and configurable for me. One place I have made some changes is in the RSS and Atom feeds. Although I advertise my feeds at feeburner, our source feeds are at sethadam1.com/feed and sethadam1.com/feed/atom. They have received some stylesheet love and are much more readable by the human eye.

I was recently issued a challenge: backup a blogsome blog and the content of a Slashdot journal and merge them into a single database. I foolishly accepted this challenge, knowing that Blogsome is based on Wordpress. Come to find out that Blogsome doesn't allow you to backup or export their Wordpress content. Also, Slashdot doesn't provide you a way to export or backup your journal. The prize was sweet: a brand new, fairly expensive, unlocked mobile phone. If you want to make a mirror of your blogsome blog, you can use a single very powerful command to generate a snapshot of it from any Linux machine or Windows with Cygwin installed: wget -k -m -r http://url But this will only create a static HTML mirror of your website. It won't allow you manipulate content or put it into another database. That leaves only one way to do it - request the entire site page by page, and parse each page individually. RSS is not reliable here, as most people have it set to only 15 or so items and parsing an enormous page make make PHP or your server run out of memory or alloted script execution time. It's a...

I integration the "Link Blog" into the RSS feed a few weeks ago, and now I've integrated it into the front page. Hope you enjoy.

Yesterday, being a loyal Mac user, I rushed out and got iLife '08. iLife '08 was billed as a huge update. I was very excited. I got a chance to play with some of the apps, and here is my first impression. iPhoto: Features Galore iPhoto and iTunes have always been the two core apps for me on the Mac, since I use both loyally. iTunes is no longer billed as part of iLife, but iPhoto received a huge makeover for version 7, so I was especially excited for this application. Lo and behold, iPhoto '08 is worth the price of admission. This version includes some really neat features, some advanced photo editing I was pleased to use. The addition of "events" was a very welcome feature. iPhoto attempts to "autosplit" events when it first loads and the auto-split mostly sucks. So my advice is add your entire library into one "misc" event (which can take several seconds) and then pull out the ones you want elsewhere. Moving from one event to another is painful. You can join and split very easily, but moving a nonsequential photo into a previous event is still a multi-step process (split, split, "all", merge)....