Phone Number:

<a href="callto://+***********">Link will initiate Skype to call my number!</a>

Skype Username:

<a href="skype:********?call">Link will initiate Skype to call my Skype username!</a>

Steps:

1. Get default gateway of VM machine
2. Use that address the same way you would “localhost” on your Mac

Example:

Get IP address of VM

Local Mac development environment

Dev environment from VM

Twitter in Kynetx Rule Language from Phil Windley on Vimeo.

Twitter uses OAuth to authorize access to individual data. This video screencast shows how to use OAuth and Twitter from within the Kynetx Rule Language (KRL).

For a project that I am starting I wanted to use Rails and MySQL so I decided to install for source that I compile myself for both. It was amazingly easy and satisfying to have both compiled and installed on my machine for development. Hivelogic has some really simple easy to follow blog posts on how to do both. If you are wanting to compile and install either Rails or MySQL on your Mac from source code then I recommend you check them out.

Installing MySQL on Snow Leopard

Installing Ruby, RubyGems, and Rails on Snow Leopard

Bike photo by piston9 / CC BY 2.0

One of my co-workers recently tweeted, “I really want to know how I missed this web comic. Hilarious!! http://bit.ly/7das6F“. That got me thinking about how much people do miss from their favorite comic sites or any site on the web for that matter. Of course you can subscribe to RSS and get all their updates but those who valiantly use and keep up with their feeds know how quickly it can become overwhelming. But what about all of the people who like sites or products but don’t know how to set up an RSS reader or who just don’t want to? How do you get your content to those people all the time without them having to type in your URL?

With Kynetx!!

With Kynetx you can customize the users experience on your website AND ANY OTHER WEBSITE YOU DESIRE!!

Are you getting excited yet? Are you listening or paying attention?! Are you thinking about the possibilities??!!!

In this example, if a user really loves the comic “Geek and Poke” why not make the content available to them anywhere they go on the web in unobtrusive manner? In fact, if you do it well, the users will be giddy with the results and love your product even more! It’s a little known secret that people actually like advertising. THEY DO! People love to buy stuff! What people actually hate is irrelevant and irritating ads that are in their faces. I took 3 sites and customized the users experience based on the context that they really enjoy the comic “Geek and Poke”.

• Google.com
• CNET.com
• CNN.com

Here are the after and before photos of what the user will see as they visit these sites.

Geek and Poke on Google.com

Geek and Poke on CNET.com

Geek and Poke on CNN.com using Kynetx technology

All the user has to do is download an Information Card into their Card Selector on their computer!

Check out this presentation by Kynetx to learn a bit more. (Make sure you watch it full screen. It looks much better!)

If you would like to try it out for yourself, drag this bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar: Geek & Poke or click to download the information card below to your card selector.

Geek and Poke Information Card

Just visit any of the three sites with the card installed or click on the bookmarklet while on that page and you to can see the magic happen. ; )

If you love stackoverflow.com then you know how helpful it can be when you are looking for answers to your programming questions. Why not, if you are a StackOverflow fanatic, have all of your search results  augmented for what you like? Here is a drop dead easy way to tell your browser, “Hey! I really like getting search results for Stack Overflow so bring them to my attention.” Now that is context sensitivity! You can do the same thing for anything you like and it’s easy but the awesomeness doesn’t end there! Search result augmentation is just child’s play compared to what could be done. We are going to be seeing a complete rewrite of the advertising industry as we know it! Now you need to see this in action for yourself. You will need 2 things: 1) a card selector from Azigo 2) the information card for StackOverflow

AzigoLite Card Selector

StackOverflow Info card

Install the card selector, import the info card into the Azigo card seloctor and away you go. Now open up Firefox and do a google search for What’s your most controversial programming opinion?

Instead of the plain Google results you are used to, you now get a stack overflow icon to the right of each result that is from a stackoverflow.com domain!

This was all done with 11 lines of Kynetx code. Like I said before, this is just the beginning. We can write code that can put anything anywhere we want based on what the user wants. I plan on writing a Kynetx app that will place my latest blog posts on the front page of cnn.com for my parents so they can keep up with what I am doing when they go get their news.

From the beginning, billboards, newspapers, radio, and tv advertising has been a shotgun affair. Advertisers and companies broadcasting their ads to anyone and everyone they could. We, the users, have had to suffer through decades of irrelevant and poorly targeted advertising. Kynetx is bringing to the table the technology needed to turn the tables for all of us to rise up and take control of the advertising that we see. I have come to learn that people don’t really hate advertising, we just don’t like irrelevant and obscene advertising. Blasted advertisements are ineffective mostly because they lack the ability to understand the context of the receiver. If you can get people to willingly subscribe to advertising that they want… well, then you have something! I know this has been short and probably all over the place so let me share one more example that happens to be the first Kynetx app that I wrote.

Being able to keep everyone in a company motivated and tuned into the same goals can be a task to say the least. You could blast out emails, bring it up in meetings and blah blah blah but that sucks and it doesn’t work that great. What if every employee’s browser knew that they were an employee and injected a slide-out tray with the company goals and up to date progress for those goals while they were surfing the web? I wrote a Kynetx app for that! It only shows up on a few domains and allows each employee to see our Key Performance indicators. I also threw in there at the bottom a notification of how many tweets mentioning the company and how many questions had been asked on our stackexchange site since the day before. CONTEXT RULES!

This is just the beginning and I have done a terrible job of explaining it to you so I hope you will ask lots of questions and come back for more posts explaining and showcasing the awesome power of the purpose-centric-context-sensitive web.

I just recently started following Preston on Twitter and had him do my business cards but I already feel like we have been friends for a while. I couldn’t have asked for a better design that truly reflects my personality, my goals, is very professional, and everyone loves my card when I give it to them. If you’re still not convince about his skills and commitment to design, just check out his blog and you will find that Preston is well on his way to the top of the design industry. Anything from website design to  business cards, Preston is your man for the job. So, from a friend to a friend, I promise you that you won’t be disappointed!

Contact him now via Twitter @prestondlee

or on his contact page on his blog

Design by Preston

I recently found a site that features well designed sites and I have picked a few that stood out to me.

https://www.redbrickhealth.com/

http://www.studio7designs.com/

http://www.veboolabs.com/

http://www.divvoted.com/

http://thegreatbeardedreef.com/

http://emotionslive.co.uk/

http://www.wpcoder.com/

http://blogfullbliss.com/

http://www.jeromem.net/

http://www.silverbackapp.com/

http://francescomugnai.com/

http://nicolaswill.com/

http://wheeloftea.com/

http://www.christophe-peyras.com/

http://stoodeo.com/

http://www.futurice.com/

http://gotsleeves.appspot.com/

http://beakapp.com/

http://yodaa.com/

http://www.sjlwebdesign.co.uk/

http://codebutton.com/

http://koormann.de/

?? Have you found another amazing Flash / ActionScript resource? What was the best thing you did to learn ActionScript?? Let us know! : D

Akismet
AntiVirus
AskApache Password Protect
CSS Naked Day
Fancybox
Google XML Sitemaps
jQuery lazy load plugin
List Drafts Widget
Page Links To
Really Simple CAPTCHA
Spider Tracker
WordPress Related Posts
wp-cache
WP-IE6update
WP Security Scan
Electrical Outlet Photo http://www.flickr.com/photos/grendelkhan/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

THE PROBLEM

Information is flying all around us like debris from a tornado going through a trailer park. Information overload is a real problem now for the average person and it can wreak havoc on a persons productivity and goals. Never before in the history man has there been soo much information available. Experts, books, seminars, awareness: the availability of these are low if not non-existent. We are like little children who have been handed a gun with incredible power but no one is talking about how to safely handle it, and people are getting hurt!

WHAT TO DO

Fortunately for you, if you “shoot yourself in the foot” its your fault! Probably not what you were expecting, but it’s true. You have control over most of the information you subscribe to.

• RSS Feeds
• Television
• Radio
• Email
• Social Networks
• Magazines
• Newspaper

WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH MY BROWSER?

You can control what your Firefox looks like. I have seen too many people who try to browse the web with so many buttons, bars, and add-ons that much of the space for actually viewing web pages is reduced by about a third or more. Take back your browser real estate and surf the web with freedom again!

WHAT CAN I DO?

Here is an example of two extremes.

If the bloated one looks similar to yours or a friends browser then you are in the right place.

To Do:

• Use the Toolbar collapse button to hide the clutter until you need it

• Remove all add-ons you aren’t using all of the time (Spring Cleaning!)
• Hide toolbars (functionality can often be accessed through the application menu)
• Remove buttons that aren’t needed (most have keyboard shortcuts which are faster)

This is really fun because you get to drag and drop buttons where ever you like.

• Hide status bar if you don’t use it (Bottom gray bar)

• Disable “Always show the tab bar”

The real trick is to balance the functionality of add-ons and buttons with space. After many months of trying different configurations, this has been the most effective layout for me.

I use the keyboard shortcuts for the Firebug add-on and the other basic browser buttons like forward, back, refresh, so I have removed all those buttons and add-on bars. I show the status bar on the bottom so I can see if the HTML pages I am coding are validating as strict without running a validator. I also hide the bookmarks bar because I don’t use them very frequently. Everyone uses the web differently which makes Firefox great for many people because it can be customized for their needs. Play around with your layout, reduce distractions, and find what works best for you.

Storm Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/liebedich/ / CC BY 2.0

There are a few reasons why your installed add-ons might get marked as incompatible. Sometimes the developer has not changed the install requirements to accept your version. Mozilla suggests to developers that they don’t mark it compatible until they KNOW it is compatible. So, many developers don’t mark their add-ons compatible with beta and alpha releases of Firefox. Another reason an add-on might not be marked as compatible is because it really ISN’T compatible. Running an incompatible add-on can corrupt data in your browser profile and other places on your computer so don’t force add-ons to work unless you are willing to deal with the risks.

Precautions:

• Don’t force add-ons unless you are willing to deal with possible browser crashing and data/profile corruption!
• Backup your profile!
• Be an add-on minimalist! The more add-ons you have, the more that can go wrong… very wrong.
• Backup your system regularly. If you don’t do this already your crazy and you should start yesterday!

How:

To force Firefox to accept all installed add-ons we simply need to tell it in it’s configuration file to ignore incompatibility. It will still check for updates and inform you that add-ons are incompatible, but it will let them run.

Steps:

1. Open Firefox
2. Type about:config into browser bar and press enter
3. Click “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button and chuckle at Mozilla’s developer’s humor
4. Right click on any list item in browser window and select “New” -> “Boolean”
5. Paste extensions.checkCompatibility into alert box input window
6. Select “False”
7. Open add-ons window: Select “Tools” -> “Add-ons”
8. Click “Restart” on yellow notification bar
9. Throw your hands up in the air
10. Shout for joy
11. Spin around in your twirly chair and get back to work
12. ; )

Visual Steps:

1. Click on the first image
2. Click on the arrows that show up when you mouse over the image to walk through the steps visually
3. Enjoy the show

Shocked Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/carbonnyc/ / CC BY 2.0

FF 3.7a - aka Minefield

Firefox 3.7 Alpha is available for download for developers to try out but it is still very alpha. I love the humor that the Mozilla developers have as seen through the icon used for Firefox 3.7a. The developers have lovingly named the alpha “Minefield”. Love it! ; ) Still want to try it out? Download Firefox 3.7 Alpha

I think there is immense power and potential in being able to write commands for Ubiquity using JavaScript and HTML. As JavaScript and HTML becomes, pardon the pun but, ubiquitous more people will be able to create commands that extend the functionality of the browser while on the web. I am really impressed with the entire setup and I think Mozilla deserves two thumbs up for pioneering the future of the web.

I have several other commands I have written to use and some just for practice, located on my ubiquity page. I will continue to update the scripts as I write new commands and work on improving the web. Would love it if you subscribed to the commands and gave me feedback on what you think.

If you aren’t already using Firefox I highly encourage you to because there is no other browser like it. When I am writing a blog post, I use the quick search in the top right corner of Firefox to search for photos on Flickr using the Creative Commons license. If you are not using Firefox, (shame! shame!), do your Creative Commons search at http://search.creativecommons.org/ Search results appear in one column with tabs at the top to chose from search sources other than Flickr.
As I scroll through the images I open the ones I find interesting in a new tab. After searching through a good amount of photos, it has gotten easier to find good ones and I’m beginning to find a style that fits my blog. I then download the size that best fits my needs by clicking on “all sizes” right above the image.

I then end up going back to the page with just that image and all of the comments people have made on the photo. It is time to get the attribution links for all the legal stuff. The link to the Creative Commons license is on the right side with a link just under the heading “Additional Information”. The Creative Commons license page explains to what extent the image can be used and how to attribute the image to the owner.

The top section of this particular license agreement allows me to use this image on my blog (share) and to remix the image to use it in other ways. If this license agreement did not have the remix statement, it is my understanding that I could not crop the image and use in some of the ways I have in this post. The next section explains how to attribute the photo to the owner and usually provides a nice HTML snippet to copy and paste into your blog or web page.
Note: You can get to the license page from other pages but the link from the images main page is the one that I have found to have the HTML snippet that I use to attribute the images to their respective owners.

After placing the HTML snippets at the end of my blog post I am nice and make the images link back to their main Flickr page which is not required by the license. I find that this is the best way to connect viewers directly with the source of the image and I would appreciate others doing the same with my images if they ever got used. ; ) I also usually open the photos in Photoshop and compress them a bit more for web viewing.

How I feel after a good Flickr - CC fix

Many artists are happy to let you use their work when you follow the guidelines set in the license. Sometimes if I feel I have done a nice job on a blog post I will leave them a comment on their Flickr photo page letting them know I have used their photo and some have even commented on my blog posts thanking me for using their work! ; )

Photos:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/zanastardust/ / CC BY 2.0
http://www.flickr.com/photos/31878512@N06/ / CC BY 2.0

Gotcha…

jQuery changes CSS inline rather than to an external CSS document meaning that my relative path was invalid. My jQuery CSS image path needed to be $('#background_spot').css('backgroundImage',"url('images/event_background.jpg')");
After making the change for the path of the image to be from the html file we were all smiles.
Photos:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/saranv/ / CC BY 2.0
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dotbenjamin/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

NameGuard

I have used several different sites and services to register domains. NameGuard is hands down the best domain registration site and service I have ever used. After registering several domains with NameGuard I wonder why I ever used all the other sites out there.

Why

• FREE Privacy Protection!!!
  • Many other services charge extra, each year, for this service
  • If you don’t get privacy protection all of your personal information ends up in the whois directory for that domain. Bad!
    
• Industry standard pricing on domains
• accepts paypal or credit card for payment
• Change DNS name servers at time of registration
• Extremely fast registration time

NameGuard Advantages

Even though the girl doesn’t come with every domain name registration, NameGuard provides some of the best services I have seen yet. Click on the girl to read their list of advantages.

This post may seem like I may be making money through some affiliation program but I make nothing from this post other than helping others enjoy the same great benefits of a great domain registration service while protecting their personal contact information

Enjoy

countdown widget

Would work well on blogspot (blogger), WordPress, TypePad, and many more.

Error Message: Unable to create directory … {long directory path} … Is its parent directory writable by the server?

Cause: I recently changed hosting services so when I migrated my blog over to the new server everything worked great except for my WordPress uploads. Most things in WordPress are kept relative and ask the server where things are but the path to the upload files are kept in the database so if you change servers without changing the database string pointing to the correct directory you will get an error and probably frustrated also.

UPDATE 05/25/09

Thanks to a comment from Matt Lindsay I now realize that there is a much easier way to update the wordpress upload string in the database than digging into the actual database. A big thanks goes out to matt for making my blog better. ; )

Quicker and easier fix

1. Login to your WordPress Admin
2. Go to “Settings”
3. Select “Miscellaneous”
4. Put the correct path in the input field labeled “Full URL path to files”
5. Save the changes and you should be done

The advantage I had in digging into the database is that when I switched hosting services only one of the folders in the path changed so I went in and just modified the one folder. This is nice if you don’t know the exact file path from the server root like me. ; )

Older more complicated fix:

1. Login to your database for the WordPress blog.
2. Browse/ view tables in the database created when setting up the blog
3. Browse/ view table named “wp_options”
4. In the “option_name” column look for “upload_path” (was #60 for me)
5. Edit the row values and change to the correct path
6. Save changes

After making that change the problem should be fixed and uploading will now work. If this helped be sure to give me a shout and leave a comment. Best of luck to you. ; )

Sources:
—————–
I figured this out all on my own. ; ) #HappyGeek