In Valid Logic

It has been over a month since I did my last Nick Bits, so figured I was due for another.

• As of today, Nick is now three months old!
• He was really cute when he dressed up like Santa
• Sleeping through the night!  After we got back from the Telligent Christmas Party almost two weeks ago, he started sleeping through the night (or about 10am til 5:30-6am).  He is also starting to have more regular nap times and be up more between them.
• He is smiling up a storm and talking like crazy now.  He doesn’t really talk in words, but loves being talked to and makes all kinds of noise back.
• That said, he does have one "word"  He uses the word "agee", which when he says it, sounds like of like "hungry" and he only makes the sound when he is hungry.
• He has now found his hand and loves sucking on it.  Kind of funny to watch, since he will go to town.
• Nick enjoyed his first Christmas!  While he doesn’t know who Santa is yet, he will definitely have a ton of fun next year.  He made out pretty well this year, finally getting some toys (most toys are like 6mos+, and only a few for 3mo or newborn).  But he now has a playmat and a nice collection of noise makers to entertain him.

A pandemic has been spreading lately around Telligent: buyamacitis.  First it started with Jason, then it infected Rob, spread to Scott, and then quickly spread out to Jose, David, Jayme, and myself.  Ben was already a Mac owner, as well as several other converts in the services department and Telligent’s sister companies.  Now, the majority of the product team are Mac users.  Most of the others have gone the route of getting the MacBook Pro.  However, I primarily use my desktop, so investing in a laptop to make the switch wouldn’t make much sense.  So I decided to get a Mac Pro instead.  The iMac doesn’t really offer much extendability in terms of hardware or adding good

The main enabler for all of this has got to be VMware Fusion.  Its "Unity" feature, which allows you to window Windows applications natively in OS X along side Mac applications.  With this, it provides a much more natural feeling, instead of it looking like a virtual machine.

Overall, I am truly enjoying the Mac so far.  I used to have an old TiBook (Titanium Powerbook G4 400mhz) back like 2000-2003.  It was basically in the OS X 10.0 and 10.1 timeframe.  I believe 10.2 came out while I owned it, but I didn’t upgrade.  So I’m familiar with OS X, just kind of rusty.

Some bits of the Mac are truly an awesome experience:  Quicksilver, iPhoto 08, iMovie 08, Fusion (as previously mentioned).

Some things could use some work.  I had to buy a Quicktime extension to support my digital camcorder.  Also, my camcorder was crashing iMovie because I had deleted a few movies through the filesystem instead of the camcorder’s built in UI (it had old metadata lying around).  Overall, something as simple and also unobvious as this should be handled internally.  Windows did.

Still searching for a few things to complete my Mac experience.  Namely, haven’t found an RSS reader that quite compares to FeedDemon.  NetNewsWire, which is also offered through Newsgator, is close, but not quite the same.  My main gripe is no easy "mark post read, or mark it unread" button, no easy "flag this post" button (can hit the F key).

One nice thing with the community of software around the Mac is there really is a good amount of cheap, high quality software for the Mac.  There are a lot of quality programs for the Mac that are just in the $10-20 range to register.  I could totally get behind that.  It is the perfect price range for ideals like the Codding Horror "Support Your Favorite Software Vendor".  For Windows, there is tons of software, but the crap to quality ratio is far lower, and in general, will cost more than what I’ve seen with the Mac.

While I am enjoying my Mac, I do feel a bit dirty using one.  I despite the "Mac vs PC" holy wars, since in reality, there will never be a winner and it is just a pointless debate.  Perhaps my opinion is summed up best with this YouTube video, entitled "I Hate the Smugness of Apple".

It was over a year ago that I first tried out SmugMug.  At first, I wasn’t pleased, however the CEO, Don MacAskill, had responded that they were experiencing issues.  Couldn’t hold it against them too much, since it was the same day Flickr was having issues.  I had taken a little bit of a further look, and loved that the CEO was proactive with seeking out customer issues, but at the time, I was rather passive about my overall photo gallery needs.  I was already with Flickr, had a Pro account, and it filled my need.  So I let my SmugMug trial expire and continue on as things were.

Recently though, the things I’ve been wanting in a photo gallery were changing.  Namely, my Flickr Pro account expired, and I wasn’t really motivated at all to renew it.  You don’t really gain that much beyond more bandwidth (which I never went over 100mb), being able to have more than 200 photos, and being able to get originals.  So pay to get more than 200 photos and view originals?  Not running to pull out my credit card.

SmugMug fits the bill though.  They provide several options that make them far more attractive for my new needs/wants.  Something other than the boring white layout?  Check, several themes, and also widely customizable.  Better gallery structure?  Check, Flickr’s one-long-list thing called sets is too generic.  Advanced privacy settings for gallery level vs photo level?  Check, now I can have some private galleries for photos to send to family and such.

I had been planning to switch, though finally took the dive when I ran across a video of Scoble interviewing Don, the SmugMug CEO.  I was roam TechCrunch Saturday afternoon and ran across a link to it and started watching.  I actually signed up while watching the video.  It motivated me that much.  One reason: SmugMug is actually innovating, while Flickr is rather boring.  Two features they rolled out recently truly appealed to me.

First, they support videos, and not those crappy YouTube quality videos, actual high definition H.264 video.  I had been looking for a way to easily post videos of Nick for family members and make them both streaming and downloadable, with a nice gallery interface, and have them private.  They fit the bill 100%.

Second, in the video, they were showing off their new feature called SmugMungous and it totally appealed to the geek in me.  They dynamically adjust the content of the page to maximize your browser.  Take photos of my vacation last year.  Try resizing your browser window (need to release it for the event to trigger).  It will automatically change the size of the picture on the right side of the photo that you are viewing, it will add and remove thumbnails on the right side, and the number of pages will dynamically update.  How sweet is that?  They make use of your whole browser window instead of some slim center area like Flickr!  Take a gallery with another theme like my photos of Nick.  It doesn’t scale as much (since it is theme dependent), but note how the header image of the toy train will add and remove portions as you adjust the size.

Another thing that impressed me, I was trying out their "Create a Card" feature and was having a problem with it, so I emailed their support on a Saturday afternoon, and got a response from them that fixed it in under an hour.  I was surprised, I was expecting to hear back Monday morning, or maybe the next day, but I got a prompt response on a Saturday afternoon.  And I believe the response was from the CEO’s sister who works in support.

SmugMug definitely costs more than Flickr, since I even went for SmugMug Pro.  I guess it can be summed up in three points.  First, they are for people who are passionate about their photos.  Flickr doesn’t have the same passion.  Second, I like companies that seek out discussions about them.  Ever post about Flickr and have their CEO respond to you?  Third, they are a strong family business.  It is a father and son business, and 7 of the 24 employees are family.  You don’t see that much these days, especially in the tech field.

Had someone ask me over Twitter the other day how to make a contact form like mine in Graffiti.  Here are some quick steps to get it accomplished for you.

1. Create a post and set its post name to "contact", or something similar and just make a note of it.
2. In your theme’s folder, create a file named "contact.view", or if you created the post with another name, use "post-name.view" (replaces spaces with -).
3. Fill the contents of the file with the following (key pieces in bold, rest will depend on your theme… the markup below is specific to my site’s layout):

            <div id="content">
                 <div class="post">
                    <h1 class="title">$post.Title</h1>
                    <div class="entry">
                        $post.Body
       
                        <p>$macros.ContactForm</p>
                  </div>
                </div>
            </div>

4. In the Graffiti Control Panel, go to Presentation, Navigation, and add a reference to your Contact post onto your navigation bar.

And there you have it!  With this, your post’s title and body will be shown on the page, allowing you to easily manage the content of the page through the control panel, and the macro adds in all the necessary form elements to handle the contact page.

A while ago, my father-in-law had told me that he’d submitted one of the photos I’d taken of my nephews last year in a photography contest for the local newspaper.  I found out yesterday that my photo took 2nd place in the Family category.  Overall, it is kind of cool, though looking through the photos, it wasn’t really a professional photography contest, just a holiday photo contest.  Either way, the photo was printed in the newspaper, with credit for it going to me.

Rich had asked what I won.  Myself (and my father-in-law) didn’t win anything except maybe some street cred.

Today, the release of Graffiti Beta1 was announced, and overall it looks pretty solid.  It has been interesting watching Graffiti progress over the past couple of months.  Overall, it is incredibly powerful.  The ease at which you can develop event modules, widgets, or add Chalk objects for use in themes is awesome.  Want a new theme?  Can just upload a theme as XML and it sets up all of the files.  Wouldn’t be surprised to find a lot of the simplicity ideas work their way back into Community Server.

For more information on Graffiti, be sure to check out graffiticms.com (the live site coming soon), and the documentation site at docs.graffiticms.com.  Solid documentation from the start has been a goal of the project since early on, and there is already a wealth of information on the docs site, and it is really easy to find what you’re looking for.

So why did I make the switch to Graffiti?  More and more, Community Server is focusing on communities.  Although CS can be configured to run as just a single personal blog, it carries a whole ton of weight that makes it really big for just a personal blog.  Graffiti is a much smaller application, geared specifically for a site and managing its content.  It fits in perfectly as a platform for a personal blog.  CS does what it does well, but for this site, Graffiti does it better.

I’ve imported all of my old posts with a currently early alpha migrator by our Jayme Davis.  I’ve also used Rich Mercer’s module to handle redirects from Community Server URLs.  All my old posts, I’ve put into an "Archive" category.  I’ve also decided to drop tags.  I found tags too laborious and mostly irrelevant.  Simple categories are usually more effective, as I never used to be good about tagging posts, and sometimes it just leads to bloated tag clouds.  Instead, future posts will just be grouped into a small collection of categories.

Thus far, I've been avoiding installing Visual Studio 2008 on my desktop for one reason… I am dreading going back to the dual Visual Studio version days.  I hated back when Visual Studio 2005 came out and used to constantly be switching between 2003 and 2005.  There were 3 main annoyances:

• Accidentally open a source controlled 2003 project in 2005 and have to upgrade, then get nagged with checking it in, or having to close 2005 and re-open 2003.
• In CS 2.x, we actually had separate projects for 2003 and 2005… it was a pain when someone added a file to one and not the other.
• VS 2005 was a big improvement over 2003, however for a lot of projects at the time, I was stuck still using 2003 for a while when I would have liked to been using 2005.

Really, you would think the Visual Studio Team could address this.  2008 allows compiling to previous versions of the framework, so why can't it open and re-save older project files?  At the very least, allow it to use 2005 project files without upgrading.  Comparing them, there isn't a whole lot of difference.  However if you upgrade it to 2008, 2005 won't open it.

What alarms me most is the following:

• Developers like being cutting edge, so they know we're going to want to upgrade.
• Company policy often won't let products jump to the latest and greatest right away.  IE, CS 2008 is committed to .NET 2.0 already, and we'll want our project files for the SDK to work in VS 2005.  We'll likely go to .NET 3.5/VS 2008 by CS 2009.
• Developers use (or should use) source control.  One can't upgrade unless all the developers upgrade.
• No backwards compatibility hinders adoption.

Office does this flawlessly.  Office 2007 introduced new document formats, but it still work seamlessly with older versions.  A Office 2003 user can send me a Word document, I can open it, make changes, save it, and send it back to them with no problems.  It doesn't force me to update the document.

So why can't Visual Studio offer the same thing?