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 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’
Published on
August 20, 2006 in
music.
Pukkelpop festival
Pukkelpop is the last of the big summer festivals, and for me, the best. It might be the Limburg influence, something in the water, or the relaxed guidance of its founder, Chokri Mahassine, but everyone working at the festival seems to be so happy and aiming to please.
I spent most of my time there at the press lounge, in the pleasant company of Clo, Zabine, Bart, Ben, Gunther, Sylvie, Lien, Vanessa and so many others. I also received a much-too-short massage from Tamara at the Coca-Cola booth. Clo has pictures, so they’re bound to show up at some moment.
Continue reading ‘Pukkelpop 2006′
Published on
August 15, 2006 in
Apple.
I had an interesting discussion some days ago: will the iPods move to more storage (e.g. the Terabyte iPod) or more bandwidth (Bluetooth, EDGE, Wifi). Let me sketch what those two scenarios for the future iPod look like:
2009 iPod as personal media storage
That new iPod ‘3D’ might not be much bigger than the current 60GB iPod video, but it has a better 16:9 screen, and way more storage. It ships with a 500GB Flash card that is replaceable. You typically buy more storage cards: 1 for all your music, 1 for essential movies (with that Hitchcock and Tarantino collection), 1 for TV series (one season is around 15GB) and fill them up from your 50TB home media set-up.
The sleek white player has wireless USB and uses wireless battery reload (with magnetic holder) so you don’t need a cable for anything. Your 5.1 headphones: wireless. Copying from that 50TB iTunes/Tivo media station: wireless. Hooking it up to an HD-TV: wireless. Sure, it has Gigabit Wifi too (which is really only around 250Mbps, but we’re used to that from the 802.11 guys), but not everyone uses that yet, certainly not in that Ardennes village where you booked that small hotel for your “24″ marathon (12 seasons, who would have thought? Thank god for the 2x hi-speed viewing mode).
It can obviously play the new “3HD” (3-dimensions) standard, which is really neat if you have one of those new holographic projectors. If you have subscribed to the (rather expensive) iTunes ‘Premium Hollywood’ service, you get all new movies on your iPod at the same moment when they are released in the cinemas. You only get them at consumer-grade HD resolution (2048×1080 – looks OK on that 50″ screen), not at the new DCI 8K standard for movie theatres (8192×4320 with HDR) but who’s complaining.
2009 iPod as personal media receiver
Continue reading ‘iPod in 2009: more storage or bandwidth?’
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