Published on
August 31, 2006 in
Web2.0.
PDF Documents
Playing around with embedded Google calendars and reading “Google Apps and the power of embedded functionality“, I got to thinking: what would be other good candidates for a 1-click-embedding provider of other types of documents. I wondered e.g. whether there was something like Youtube for audio (yes, there is. GoEar.com is one example). But then I thought of a document type we all have learned to love and hate: Adobe’s Portable Document Format or PDF.
The idea behind the PDF file format is valuable: create a cross-platform standard for exchanging and printing documents that includes the text, images, fonts and their layout. The Acrobat Reader is a free application, and while Adobe’s PDF Writer is a commercial product (from $299), there are enough free alternatives to counter that. The thing is: PDF is great for printing, but not for browsing.
When you click on a PDF link, one of multiple things might happen:
- If the web server does not send a header “
Content-Type: application/pdf“, your browser has no clue what to do with the file: it will let you download the file and that’s all
- if Acrobat is not installed, you can also only download the file, because your browser will not know what to do with files of type
application/pdf
- if Acrobat is installed, but you work with a browser that is not tightly linked to the OS (e.g. Firefox on Windows), it still might not open in Acrobat.
- if your browser has configured Acrobat as a helper application, the file will download and will then be opened with the reader. So you will have 2 applications open: your browser and Acrobat Reader. This is actually the best method.
- With Internet Explorer on Windows, Acrobat will open inside your browser, and your menu bar will become an interesting mix of IE and Acrobat options. (Where is the print button? Ah-ha!!) When you close the browser, a copy of Acrobat will continue to run in an invisible way, taking up some 32MB of memory
- If you had no indication how big the PDF file was, you might be fiddling your thumbs for the next 5 minutes while the document is being downloaded.
- If the document uses fonts that you don’t have, you might be looking at a very weird layout
So you are screwed if you don’t have Acrobat, if it is a really big document or if you access through a misconfigured browser. This is the equivalent of clicking on a .AVI movie file without a clue of how big the movie is, whether you have the necessary audio and video codecs to see it, and whether it’s worth it. If that was largely solved by a service provider like Youtube, what would a similar service for .PDF files look like?
Continue reading ‘Youtube for PDF: embedding documents’
Published on
August 29, 2006 in
Google.
Russell Jones, CTO of SEO firm Virante, has found an original way of showing off his SEO skills: he created a top 5 of SEO excuses, and made sure they listed #1 to #5 for the Google query “five seo excuses“.
So, here it goes, my top 5 reasons that you should avoid SEO. Or, if you want to do it the long way, just search google for “five SEO excuses”, without the quotes!
from thegooglecache.com via netlash.com
The top five SEO excuses are:
- There’s no money in it
- It’s too competitive
- It’s unethical, right
- It’s too expensive
- It just doesn’t work
Obviously, by now the top #5 has completely changed.
The #1 spot for “five SEO excuses” is now taken by digitalpoint.com, a very popular forum for SEO experts. The second is taken by seroundtable.com, an SEO blog. Only on the third spot, one of the ajaxle.com domains has kept its ground. Once the big guys start playing along …
UPDATE: I became #1 Google result with this post. I apparently should be careful about what I say here.
Published on
August 28, 2006 in
Belgium.
I am already counting down to January 1st 2007 (125 days to go). From that day onwards, it will be forbidden to smoke in Belgian restaurants. Hallelujah!
Some of you smokers out there are offended I should rejoice in such an event? Just remember that for us, non-smokers, cigarette smoke at the dinner table is as enjoyable as a (smelly) fart in the face. We’ve had to put up with that for way too long.
The announcements: Restaurants rookvrij vanaf 2007 (NL) or Restaurants sans fumeurs en 2007 (FR)
Countdown
If you too are eagerly awaiting the beginning of smokefree dining, you can add this countdown clock to your blog. The cigarette becomes shorter and shorter until it will be burnt up on Jan 1st 2007. Instructions on smoking.visualizor.com
Published on
August 26, 2006 in
hardware.
I’ve gotten quite some response on my Netgear SC101 post (in short: they don’t always work). There’s some catharsis in bashing inferior products, but at the end of the day, how DOES on store lots of data securely? Let’s make this more specific: how would you store 1 terabyte (1000 GB) of data on your desktop?
Let take these as requirements:
- raw storage: 1TB or more (if used with RAID-0 striping or JBOD config)
- redundant storage: RAID-1: leaves 500GB, RAID-5: leaves 660GB to 800GB
- affordable: anything higher that €2000 (2$/GB) is not an option
- accessible via either Firewire/USB or Ethernet (Gigabit)
- accessible by Mac, PC and Linux
- preferably not rack-mounted (who has a 19″ rack at home)
- hot-swappable disks are a big advantage
What have you tried and what are you happy with?
Some possible theoretical options:
- Direct attached drive
- e.g. Lacie Biggest F800 1GB, 4-disk S-ATA: €1299
- meets requirements? YES. Only Firewire + USB
- Network attached storage
- e.g. Maxtor Shared Storage II 1GB, 2-disk: €899
- meets requirements? YES. Only Ethernet
- Lacie Ethernet disk would not work: it’s rackmounted and has no RAID
- Build your own server
- e.g. Dell PowerEdge SC430 with 2 x SATA 500GB drives and Linux: around €1000
- meets requirements? YES. Only Ethernet
For me, the only solution I have experienced to be 100% reliable is building a dedicated PC with a hardware RAID card. What is your experience?
Published on
August 25, 2006 in
spam.
In the last three days I have received 3 mails from Colorbar, a “lively private club for colorful people”. The first one didn’t trigger my suspicion, since I am subscribed to some music-related mailing lists. The two next mails came for 2 @forret.com aliases of which I am certain they never subscribed to any list. So I took a closer look at the email. No contact details are given, no indication of where the email addresses came from, no possibility to unsubscribe, i.e. it’s a spam mail. To be even more specific: a belgian spam message.
Continue reading ‘Colorbar: belgian spam’
Printing in larger sizes
I have a Canon 350D digital camera. At 8 megapixels, it’s in the semi-pro league, and allows me to make 293mm x 192mm (11.5″ x 7.7″) hi-quality prints. That’s slightly smaller than an A4 (or Letter) sheet. Imagine now I would want to print on an A0 format or 1189mm x 841mm (46.8″ x 33.1″). That’s 16 times as big (height x 4 and width x 4). I could take a ‘normal’ image and rescale it to that size, but what would that look like? For every 16 pixels of the new picture, 1 would be an original one, and the other 15 would have been guessed from that and the surrounding pixels. This process is called image interpolation and there are different algorithms to do this. Let me show what that looks like.
Interpolation algorithms
Continue reading ‘How to upsize an image’
Published on
August 22, 2006 in
news.
One of the more popular pages on this blog is the post about Richard and Katie: if his site reached 5.000.000 hits, she would allow him to have a threesome (pleasemakethiswork.com). It’s been three months now, so one wonders: did it work? Well … kind of.
Richard and Katie
The old URL now consists of a redirect page to www.richardandkatie.co.uk (NSFW). On this new site, we learn that the three-way action did take place, it took a full 45 minutes and they’re still editing it into a 20-minute video that will be available soon. The reinforcement they invited goes by the name of Holly, a dark-haired girl with an above-average cup-size.
The video will be put up on the site a.s.a.p its taking a few days due to editing – because believe me there are a couple of things that should be left to the imagination – for one my inability to perform during the first half hour… but more on that another day!!!
Continue reading ‘Please make this work again’
Published on
August 22, 2006 in
Tango.
I have been looking for a way to write down tango steps since I began dancing. I experimented with drawing arrows, writing full text, abbreviations, inventing signs, … I’m not alone in this quest:
or 
And that is only when you take into account the feet. The Labanotation system (developed by professional dancers) has a graphical element for each movement of the legs and arms.
While this is probably one of the best systems around, it’s too complicated for us laymen dancers. So I decided to distill a base vocabulary for writing down tango steps: Tangotation.
Continue reading ‘Tangotation: writing tango steps’
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