and I mean it
Because I needed it and I couldn’t find it: a tool to embed a Lightbox-based photo album viewer that uses an RSS photo feed as its input. It uses SimplePie RSS library, the Lytebox Javascript photo viewer, and RSS ‘photocast’ feeds from e.g. Flickr, Picasaweb and Smugmug.
It can be found here: tools.forret.com/lightbox/
Continue reading ‘Lightbox for photo feeds’
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I want to mention a little tool that helped me out twice in the last week, and that I find very little info about online. It’s a Windows command-line MP3 file tagger and renamer called id3.exe. Since I forgot where I downloaded it from and Google doesn’t give me a clue either: here’s where you can download id3.exe.
ID3.exe can do several things, of which I will just cite the things I actually used:
id3.exe -1 -2 -g [genre] -c "[Copyright notice]" -l "[Album name]" "%OUTPUT%"id3.exe -D %INPUT% -1 -2 "%OUTPUT%"id3.exe -2 -f "%%a - %%l - %%t.rbs" "%OUTPUT%"Continue reading ‘id3.exe - ideal tool for tagging and renaming MP3 files’
Get ready for a lot of acronyms in this post: “How to create a good XML-based API for MRTG sensor data”.
MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher) is a tool to monitor the traffic load on network-links. It is widely used around the world to generate web pages containing images that provide a live visual representation of this traffic. MRTG is mainly a Swiss open-source product written by Tobias Oetiker from ETH Zurich with some help from others.
When used in its basic form (without RRDTOOL), it generates output like the following:
While MRTG was developed with network devices (routers) in mind, it can be used to show the trend of any numeric value over time. For that, it has a very simple input API: it expects 4 lines of text:
Line 1: current state of the first variable, normally 'incoming bytes count'
Line 2: current state of the second variable, normally 'outgoing bytes count'
Line 3: string (in any human readable format), telling the uptime of the target.
Line 4: string, telling the name of the target.
So there’s maximum 2 variables, which should be the same order of magnitude (or the automatic scaling of the Y-axis will make the smaller one undistinguisable of 0). The uptime and name show up in the “at which time ‘rou-rz-gw.ethz.ch’ had been up for 160 days, 8:02:55.” in the header of the HTML page.
In this world of REST, XMLRPC and SOAP interfaces, this seems so limited. Let’s try to make an XML format that allows the following:
This could be a minimal implementation: Continue reading ‘MRTG data in XML format’
I’ve just finished a tool to make web page mockups. The purpose: make a quick draft of what a web page should look like, so you can include a screen shot in an email or a specifications document. When a client describes what page layout he wants in pure text, it is easy to misunderstand what he means. E.g. “two levels of menu should be visible on each page“. Ok, you want those as a bullet list in the side bar or a breadcrumb on top? It’s easier to just show him an overview of: that block goes there, that’s what I mean with two sidebars on the right, the tags are here at the right, under the recent comments.
My web page designer will let you specify headers, footers, sidebars and let you add bogus content with an easy markup syntax. [text becomes a block of text, *text becomes a bullet, _text is a link … The goal is that anyone, without any knowledge of HTML, can make a rudimentary page layout and say: see that’s what I want. I also generate ‘pretty’ URLs in the RubyOnRails syntax (list/edit/new/…).
It’s helped me, it might help you! Any remarks are welcome!
I have never been a big believer in astrology. I am not convinced the location of stars at the moment of your birth is that important to your personality. I’m a Virgo, but I don’t feel that defines me that much. But some years ago I discovered a ‘labeling’ system that was based on the actual behaviour of a person, whose result was much more significant: the (Jung) Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI):
According to Jung’s typology all people can be classified using three criteria. These criteria are: Extraversion/Introversion - Sensing/Intuition - Thinking/Feeling
Isabel Briggs-Myers added a fourth criterion: Judging/Perceiving
from humanmetrics.com
A good explanation of each criterium is:
- 1. Where, primarily, do you prefer to direct your energy?
- If you prefer to direct your energy to deal with people, things, situations, or “the outer world”, then your preference is for Extraversion. This is denoted by the letter “E”.
- If you prefer to direct your energy to deal with ideas, information, explanations or beliefs, or “the inner world”, then your preference is for Introversion. This is denoted by the letter “I”.
- 2. How do you prefer to process information?
- If you prefer to deal with facts, what you know, to have clarity, or to describe what you see, then your preference is for Sensing. This is denoted by the letter “S”.
- If you prefer to deal with ideas, look into the unknown, to generate new possibilities or to anticipate what isn’t obvious, then your preference is for Intuition. This is denoted by the letter “N” (the letter I has already been used for Introversion).
- 3. How do you prefer to make decisions?
- If you prefer to decide on the basis of objective logic, using an analytic and detached approach, then your preference is for Thinking. This is denoted by the letter “T”.
- If you prefer to decide using values and/or personal beliefs, on the basis of what you believe is important or what you or others care about, then your preference is for Feeling. This is denoted by the letter “F”.
- 4. How do you prefer to organise your life?
- If you prefer your life to be planned, stable and organised then your preference is for Judging (not to be confused with ‘Judgemental’, which is quite different). This is denoted by the letter “J”.
- If you prefer to go with the flow, to maintain flexibility and respond to things as they arise, then your preference is for Perception. This is denoted by the letter “P”.
from teamtechnology
I just updated one of my web tools that definitely needed it: the Blogcentral Blog Dashboard.The idea is to give the relevant data for your blog (blog name, blog URL, feed URL, author name) and then get a dashboard page (that you can bookmark) which gives you easy access to all blog search engines, rankings and ping services.
I have been using the old version for quite a time already (mainly for Technorati stats), but now it even includes Alexa ranking, Egosurf, BlogPulse, -Digger, -Lines, -Shares, Google/Blogger, Sphere and Icerocket. Try it out and investigate that blog ego!
I just finished another webpage for my forret.com tools collection: the Adwords Generator tool. Inspired by seeing a colleague losing his time with Excel trying to create a full list of keywords for his Google Adsense campaigns, I created an easy web interface to do just that: give in lists of keywords of key phrases, and let the Adwords tool create all the possible combinations.
You would use it in this way: say you want to promote a podcast client application for Windows (like the new Doppler 3.0).
Combining everything together gives you a list of 90 keyphrases: Adsense keywords for a Windows podcast client. You can even add the “phrase matching” or [exact matching] options (see adwords.google.com for more info).
You can also look up suggestions for new keywords through tools from Google Adsense and Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture). A nice addition to my toolbox!
I have just created a tool to help solve the Sudoku puzzles: the forret.com Sudoku Helper. I’ve added it to my Forret tools directory.
You solve a Sudoku puzzle by filling in numbers (1-9) in a 9×9 square.
- Rule 1: every row should contain ALL 9 numbers, and no number can occur more than once.
- Rule 2: every column should contain ALL 9 numbers, and no number can occur more than once.
- Rule 3: every 3×3 square should contain ALL 9 numbers, and no number can occur more than once.
(see also sudoku.com)
De Morgen (Belgian quality newspaper) has just started printing such puzzles in every issue, and they are an addictive hobby. Here they are: the EASY, MEDIUM and ADVANCED one for Monday June 6, 2005.
My Helper just checks the 3 rules above and will indicate which cells can easily be filled in because there is only 1 option left. Yes, it can be kind of a spoiler, so only use it to get out of a deadlock, or if you’re in a hurry, or to show off.
The more difficult puzzles will require you to cunningly plot your strategy 2 or 3 steps ahead, which my Helper page will not do or help you with. If you want to spoil even these brain gymnastics, check Sudoku Solver by Logic
For those of you who like a client program that can work off-line, check Sudoku Solver (Windows - free).
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