Lyle Troxell

Playing with Flock

Lyle Troxell — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 15:44:21 -0700

A while ago I mentioned Flock at the time it did not become my default browser, but now it has. I am making the switch today. I like the additonal features of clean integration with my blog, flickr and with del.icio.us. Let's see if it's stable enough for me to stick with it.

Building GeekSpeak.org, Part II

Lyle Troxell — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 01:07:00 -0700

Editing XML is Hard… mText

In part one of Building GeekSpeak.org I explained that we have a content management system that uses a layer of XML. But hand editing XML is a pain. HTML, generally a form of XML, is also kinda difficult to edit by hand, that’s why the blog world has adopted markup. A comon form of this sort of markup, which I use in this blog, is Textile. Generally this allows a user to use a simple text format that is translated to html. Miles Elam whipped out some Java and made mText, a markup that transforms to our SimpleDoc xml format.

mText Examples

mText uses brackets ([]) and other sudo-standard markup formatting to define elements. Currently there are some bugs in the code, but all of this does work, and translate to our simple doc format.

Images

[myimage.jpg]
[myimage.jpg|Caption text]

Links

[Link Text|http://geekspeak.org/]

Acronyms

[TLA|Three Letter Acronym]

Sections

! Section title
!! Subsection title
! Back to top Level

Orderd List

#! Title
# list item 1
# list item 2
# list item 3

Unordered List

*! Title
* list item 1
* list item 2
* list item 3

Here is an example of the xml generated by the above mText. This example was created using cocoon and mText. All of the sections that are siblings of articleinfo in this example where generated by the above mText and the mText java parser.

Why Not Textile

Textile and all the other markup systems translate the text markup to HTML, but we have a system that requires us to use a more symantic markup, Simple Doc XML. So Miles had to create mText. It’s a fine solution, the only problem is that he is the sole developer and it has become stale. Right now fixing the mText Java component is high on our GeekSpeak Web Davelopment needs.

Coccon and Rails

A few months ago I launched a tool built on Ruby on Rails that allows the Geeks of GeekSpeak to modifiy the GeekSpeak website. Currently it only allows the users to add shows; I made show editing first becuase that’s what I do the most. The long and the short of this beta version being up is that I do not have to edit xml documents all the time.

Here is a general breakdown of our system:

RubyOnRails app edits the content in the database
PostgreSQL database holds our content
Coccon on Tomcat using XSLT and mText renders html from the database contnet to create GeekSpeak.org.

Currently only the show pages (including homepage) is served from the database, but I am working on it.

GeekSpeak Show Flow

Lyle Troxell — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 13:16:00 -0700

For GeekSpeak each show page has a title, an abstract with teaser, and content. The content is optional and we normally use it to add information about the show: guest bio, news links, questions and answers, and other things addressed durring the show. For a while now I have wanted to add comments so that multiple people can add content at the same time. This would mostly take place durring the show.

What we have been doing latley is assigning one Geek to edit the show page and add notes into the content of the show page. This works but is not “community” base enough for me.

So now I am thinking we can have a new element to the page, the idea would be a transcript list. This would be time based entries that would show as a list on the show page and allow a sort of transcript of the show. I would probably like to group these by segments of the show: GeekNews, Interview, and Questions and Answers.

So what is this called? It isn’t a transcript, it’s more like a tumblelog for a GeekSpeak show. Each entry would fall under a segment title… here is a stub:

GeekNews

Dell laptops going up in smoke be sure to check out the pretty pictures by the campfire
More from Cassini-Huygens about Titan, one of Saturn’s moons

Questions and Answers

Bill from San Jose- How do I fix a MPREXE caused an invalid page fault in module Kernel32.dll error? – We answer with that link.

This looks a bit like our show page now see http://geekspeak.org/shows/2006/07/22/, but the way we would build it would be a catagorized list, which would be put in time order. This would allow multiple people to add content at the same time and re-order the content.

I would love feedback on this.

Remote Control Hack for Nikon D70

Lyle Troxell — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 16:05:00 -0700

I have a Nikon D70 and just programmed my “X10 8 in 1” remote to release the shutter. The code I used was for a Sears TV: code 079. (holding SET UP until led stayed lit, hit TV and then entered 079 – then the power button released the shutter.) Make sure your D70 is set for remote mode.

Must Have OS X Apps

Lyle Troxell — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 21:19:00 -0700

A list of the free applications that I must have on Macintosh OS X.

Web Browser

I use Mozilla Firefox. Safari, Apple’s built in browser is great, but I like Firefox better.

If you want to be on the front line of social software and empower yourself to add to the internet you can try the rappidly evolving Flock Browser. I use both of these browsers. I have not made the Flock switch, but I am tempted.

Email Client

On my Mac I use Mail.app wich comes with Mac OS X and is very wonderful. So no need to download anything.

Sound

I deal with a lot of audio on my Mac. I have the radio show and kids that make great sounds. To capture and edit I use the following.

Audacity
I use this great application for audio capture and editing. It supports multiple tracks, has lots of useful filters and is free, what more do you want? Well, a lot actually, but it is a great solution and I produce my GeekSpeak Podcast with it every week.

LineIn
As I said, I have kids and they love to hear them selves. LineIn allows you to hear the source comming into the Line In of the Mac through the speakers… watch out for feed-back. The thing is, if you just want to use your computer as a preamp – this will do the trick, and without it… ahh.

Video

Playing video requires having the right codecs and players that can make sense of all the video out there. On OS X QuickTime is a great player, but you have to pay for full screen and it seems to have more dificulty then it should.

MPlayer OSX
This is the cats meow of Video playing on a Mac. It is very possible this is all you will need to install to play all video formats on your Mac. But I have been using an older copy and therefore also have the following video players.

DivX
I have mixed feelings about these they are kinda sellouts , what ever that means, but DivX is widely used for encoding video and their codec plays nice with QuickTime… so install it. Here is the trick though – install the free trial and unless you like being upsold don’t give them your email. Some of the features will not work after a while but, as they say:

The ability to play and encode DivX videos with the DivX codec does not expire at any time.

VLC
Video Lan Player is a little geeky (tricky interface) but can play a multitude of formats and can go full screen.

Windows Media Player plugin
Chris just clued me into this great QuickTime plugin that allows Windows Media Files to be played inside QuickTime.. finally!

Flash Player
My “pure geek” side finds the persistant existance of Flash slightly evil; it is not an open source solution, which means Macromedia (Adobe) owns it. And I hate that. But every one is using it, so you need to instal it in order to experiance all of this hi-bandwidth goodness called internet video.

Geek Features

You do not need these, but if you like them then you will love them.

QuickSilver
The best enhancement to an OS since the mouse. Which is odd because it makes you use the mouse less.

This application runs in the background and is triggered by hitting ctrl+space bar. When triggered it displays an overlay space for an icon, which, as you type, is populated by matches. The long and the short of it is you can launch any application, system preference, document, etc. by using the keyboard only.

Fugu
This is a great secure copy, sftp and ftp client for Mac OS X. I use it for putting content on my web servers.

ThumbsUp
ThumbsUp is a wonderful little image tool that allows you to create thumbnails of images. You can drop a whole folder of images on this little app and get images siezed the way you want. I use it for web development all the time.

A blogging tool and browser in one.

Lyle Troxell — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 10:20:21 -0800

Flock is a free, open source web browser. ...we’ve started with integrating tools that make it easier to blog, publish your photos and share and discover things that are interesting to you.

Flock

I heard about Flock months ago and my first thought was "forking firefox’s code base is a bad idea", but I just fired it up and it is a wonderful experiance. Flock is a modification of FireFox that extendes the browser to be a fairly robust web editor. Flock uses web APIs to give a user a client application that for multiple web applications: Flickr, Blogging and other "Web 2.0" services.

I think Flock is a wonderful take on giving editing tools to a user.

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technorati tags: blogging, flock, Web 2.0

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Building GeekSpeak.org, Part I

Lyle Troxell — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 22:52:00 -0800

In 1999 Sean Cleveland and I launched a little online magazine called PCExtreimist.com. The same week that it launched I started wworking for a Radio-Station website company, Feed the Monster, where I met Miles Elam. XML was the cats meow then, and Miles and I saw it’s “perfection” esp in the separation of content from layout/design. Feed the Monster was all about good design and shared content about the music industry… great looking, high-profile, radio station websites with shared content. The company tanked. Content Management is hard.

Sean’s personal finances started looking fairly bleek too. Even thought PCExtremist.com was well recived, read and linked too, online advertising was no way to pay the bills. We stopped adding content to the site, but have held onto it… maybe one day.

The three of us settled back in my home town of Santa Cruz, where my father, Peter, was the station manager of KUSP, a non-profit public radio station. It was August of 2000 when my father asked me to stand in as the host of GeekSpeak, a weekly technology talk show. I grabbed my friend and Mac expert John Tracy and with Miles and Sean started doing a fairly fun radio show.

It was not long before we realized that a good website would be a great benifit to the show and to the listeners. Miles started desiging a site that would be all of the good things from Feed the Monster, but open source and designed very cleanly. Fairly quickly he put up an amazing infrustructure using cocoon. The infrustructure uses flat file xml documents. And to modify the site you have to edit xml documents. You see, the publish side is clean and great. Wonderful separation of data and design. But, as with Feed the Monster when I started their, less attention had been put into managing the content.

Due to the desire to separate the content from the design we used a simplified doc book to hold the data… because if you used something like html you would be bowing to that format’s design. Additionally html uses things like Bold, while docbook uses things like Author. It is true that if you view our website you may see an author name bolded, if you viewed the content as a pdf you may instead see it in a different color to denote a person.

Every week I copy last week’s show, change the dates, edit the info.xml file and SCP it up to the GeekSpeak server. It’s a pain in the butt and I hate editing XML more then anyone I know, but, on the good side, the show page apears well formated (thanks to xslt). The show apears home page with a teaser and the abstract. The show apears in the rss/podcast, after I upload the audio for the show, and it even has a text and html render of the description of each show so that iTunes makes it look good. These are not normally trivial to do, but with our system it really is quite simple.

But October of 2002 was the first time I made one of those show xml documents… that is over 3 years ago. I am so done. And I look around and their are blog tools all over the place. Their are web appliction development enviornments that tout the lack of XML configuration.

In December I decided I would grab Ruby on Rails and make an editing system that would tie into our cocoon publishing system and compleate this radio show website content managment system. Allowing Sean Cleveland, John Tracy and the rest of the Geeks to add content to our site with ease. To answer questions publically and to share their wealth of information with the world for more then one hour a week.

Next Part: Edting XML is Hard… mText

Photoshop Elements 3, Organizer... Digital Island

lyle — Sat, 13 Aug 2005 01:15:09 -0700

Like many others I am extreamily frustrated by Adobe Photoshop Elements 3 export features. The Organizer (only in Windows version) alows you to do some great management of collections of photos and of hierorical keywords. It starts out with multiple first level Keyword groups; People, Places and the like. Each of those top level keyword groups gets a unique icon. In each of those groups you can have more keyword groups or individual keywords. And these keywords can have thumbnails assigned to them. For example in my People master folder, which has a person icon, I have my imediate family as individual keywords; Wyatt, Daria, Gwendolyn and Lyle. I also have a hole bunch of sub folders; Geeks, Family – Troxell, Family – Sterlin, Family – Byrd, Wrights, UCSC, and many many more. Each of those folders has sub folders or indevidual keywords with thumbnails. So – now I can drag a person’s keyword icon onto an image (or multiple) and assign the keyword to the photo. It is fantastic. Oh – and if I want to find all of the Photos of my son, I just click on the checkbox next to his keyword thumbnail… presto. And you can do that with any keyword or keyword group/folder. But there is a catch. After you get in the 12,000 photos and above range the application starts taking 30 seconds or more to assign a keyword to a photo. Being the Geek that I am I decided to try and get to the bottom of this.

I found that Photoshop Elements 3 uses an Access database file and ODBC to read and write to it. I don’t think there is an easy way to make the app more efficent, but there might be one: you may be able to determin the ODBC name it is trying to use and hard code that to a better database… MS SQL for example. But this would probably be… well practically not possible. The route I went was “get far away from this app”. But I want my data. So I opened up the Access file and tried to grock the relational structure. Big problem… I can find the groups and keywords and how the keywords are assigned to the groups/folders… all of that has fairly understandable relationships. The problem is that there are no references to the acutual photos. Well there are some, but none that map to any of the keywords. I think the app does something special with this album file that acces does not get… or I don’t know access well enough to pull the data out.

Status: I can get the keyword structure from Access. I just need to do some exports and the throw it into a better database (open source). And I can have Photoshop Elements 3 Organizer write the keywords to any jpegs I have. (it can write exif data to jpgs, psds and tiffs). And then all I have to do is write a perl script, or some such, that will read in the exif and find the keywords in the hierctical keyword structure… I’m thinking a RubyOnRails app for viewing and such. But here is the rub. I have about 10,000 photos in Elements Organizer that are in RAW format, specifically Nicon Raw (NEF). PSE 3 Organizer can not write to NEF and will not even use the new Adobe RAW converter to go to NEG files. So the work around that I am planning: export all of my RAW files at JPEG. And do the grab thing I had planned. So.. that is my goal. I’ll post my progress…. oh and my long time goal is to have all of my photos online as small files (max 800×800) and an easy way to add meta info to them and to get the RAW file. Yeah, that should be a breeze.

-lyle

David Lawrence Show and GeekSpeak

lyle — Mon, 09 May 2005 20:33:51 -0700

A while ago David Lawrence contacted KUSP and said that he wanted to speak with me about the name “GeekSpeak” and how I use it. I looked up his trademark on “GeekSpeak” and started to freekout.

My basic thought was that I would have to change the name of my show, and Geek Speak is a great name. Needles to say, I was bummed. I talk to David on the phone and he says he likes my show and doesn’t want us to stop using the name. Whew.

So then today David asks me to be on his show. I’m on hold right now to go on air. Like many of my own guest I am a little nervus.

My little Sister

lyle — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 10:39:39 -0700

Marina Troxell, my sister, is loosing her kidney, this will be the 4th she has lost in her 29 years. Her husband, Chris, was going to donate one of his to her, but the last test came up positive for rejection. So it’s a no-go. Chis has rejected Marina as well; they just filed for divorce. They have two small children, Ariana, 3 and Arora age 1. Chris says he just doesn’t love Marina, maybe never did. And blam! Just like his father, he is off. And Marina is left alone with two kids and a masters degree in operatic voice, looking for a kidney and a way to support her children.