Gotkicked.net Blog

iPhone goodness

2007-09-08T13:16:00.000-04:00

Well since Apple lowered the price of the iPhone I went and grabed one. Its pretty nice. Still no vcards =( but I got an IM client for it so that makes me happy. Now I need to find a twitter app...

Oh yea this was sent via my iPhone.

Google = Bad Deal

2007-09-07T14:38:00.000-04:00

My last post was about how the iPhone doesn't allow you to download vcards from the internet. Within a day I was #1 in Google for the search "iphone vcard". It was also picked up by Jaiku. The listing in Google however has since vanished. Censorship? From Apple perhaps? But wait Google shouldn't be doing that... Come now Google. I like you I really do. But why have you removed a post from your index simply stating that a function for the iPhone isn't there?

Sad sad...

I fully suspect that my blogger account will get disabled after this and my entire site to get black listed. *sigh*

iPhone + vCard = Bad Deal

2007-09-03T20:03:00.000-04:00

Let me preface this with: I'm not a Mac hater or lover. If something is good I'll use it and thats it, nothing else.

So I've been thinking about getting a fancy new iPhone for a while now. Its really because all the cool kids are doing it. One of the things holding me back is this simple question: can the iPhone use vCards downloaded from email and websites?

Sadly after about 30 mins talking with one of Apple's live help person, I finally got an answer. No dice... Now I don't doubt that the iPhone actually uses vCards to manage the transfer between the the phone and the programs like Outlook and Entourage since thats how the iPods do it. So it seems that it would use them but in a VERY restricted fashion...

So now since Apple in their infinite wisdom has decided to exclude this seemingly basic functionality, they have lost a customer. For now that is...

Microformats for like yer mum

2007-08-21T22:16:00.000-04:00

Ahh yes. Microformats. Great little snip-its of mark-up. If you know what they are and how to use them. This one of the things I've been struggling with at work. I want to include them but I also need to make sure that the general public can also utilize them (this is assuming that they also know how to use vCards and iCal). As Francine puts it: “I have to 1)run Firefox as my browser and 2)download a plug-in”. I would suspect that most people don't want to change their browsers nor download a plug-in for something they don't understand.

So whats the solution? I don't think there is an easy one. For things like vCards and the like they could use x2v and the Technorati feeds. But what about hAtom, hResume and hReview?

W3C has a sense of humor after all

2007-08-21T12:35:00.000-04:00

I was reading Eric Mayer's blog about the :empty pseudoclass and I had to go see what the W3C had to say about it. I came across the CSS3 Working draft on Selectors. I got to the end of 6.6.5 and noticed something odd: Section 6.6.6 was intentionally left blank. The source of the section is thus:


<h4><a name="content-selectors">6.6.6. Blank</a>
<!-- It's the Return of Appendix H!!! Run away! -->
<p>This section intentionally left blank.</p>
<!-- (used to be :contains()) -->

I don't know what Appendix H is but with a number like 6.6.6. and a comment to run away I'm not sure I want to find out.

Oh yea and I still don't know a good use of :empty is...

(mt) Mediatemple

2007-08-02T23:27:00.000-04:00

Last weekend I broke down and got a Media Temple Grid Server. I was going to wait a few months but the night that I went to look at it (for the 5th time) they had a 20% off promo. Who can pass that up? In the end I spent $160 for a year of fanciness. I'm still in the process of moving websites over to it, so don't expect a lot of posts. I'm also considering moving this blog over to WordPress this weekend. We shall see...

WSUUG

2007-07-27T08:23:00.001-04:00

The Web Standards and Usability User Group had its first meeting last night. It went well we've settled on the 1st Monday at 7pm to meet but we haven't quite found a place to meet yet. Our first thought as a local bar that is fairly quiet however it turns out that they aren't open on Mondays. So we will continue the search...

Rel-tag and issues with Blogger

2007-07-25T10:16:00.000-04:00

I use Blogger. Sad but true. Well maybe not all that sad. But it has some issues. I was playing around with the 0.8b Operator tool bar by Mike Kaply and I had a problem. Apparently Mike has made the good decision not to allow broken implementations of the rel-tag Microformat to work in the operator tool bar. Fortunately Mike Creuzer has come up with a solution by using php and mod_rewrite.

Now this question is do I convert to WP (or another blog app) or do I stick it out with blogger and follow Mike Creuzer?

Safari 3 and Acid2, Part 2

2007-07-24T21:12:00.000-04:00

Another friend of mine has also done some testing with Safari 3 on Windows. Other people have had mixed results. And some have had the same passing results.

Lets home that Apple gets on the ball and fixes all the bugs before we are required to support Safari on Windows.

Fun stuff.

Safari 3 and Acid2

2007-07-18T10:02:00.000-04:00

We all know that Safari 3 for Windows has lots of bugs. There are also other questions about Apple's move to put Safari on the Windows platform. I'm not going to get into all that because at this point it doesn't matter much. Safari is here (in Beta but still here) and my managers will want at some point to support it.

Acid2. We all know it and we all hate browsers who can't render it correctly. We also know that Safari for Mac was one of the first major browsers to pass Acid2. So heres where it gets interesting, the version of Safari 3 (3.0.2 (522.13.1) I have installed my Windows XP box passes only when certain conditions are met. The version of Safari 3 (3.0.2 (522.13.1) my friend Zach has installed on his Windows XP box doesn't pass. His results include an orange bandanna. Odd.

Safari 3 at about 800px wide all nice and pretty:

Safari 3 at about 550px wide and Mr. Smiley is losing his top:

Safari 3 at about 350px wide and Mr. Smiley has lost his brains:

Microformats

2007-07-15T22:05:00.000-04:00

If you haven't heard about microformats you've been missing out. Simply put Microformats are simple markup that you can use to identify specific kinds of data. I gave a short presentation at work about them last week. It went rather well, though I don't think they will get used much if at all.

I've been working on creating a JavaScript to allow IE users to download an hCard without having to have a toolbar or link to another site. Don't get me wrong I think X2V is great.

Anyways I ran into a few snags. First, since I am trying to use execCommand to save the vCard, Internet Explorer 6 won't encode the file correctly. I'm not sure if this a limitation of IE or the method I'm using it in.

Secondly, Internet Explorer 7 doesn't like execCommand being used with SaveAs. This is an issue cause I can't count on users installing the patch.

So in the end it looks execCommand isn't a feasible solution.

Happy 4th

2007-07-04T16:55:00.000-04:00

Happy 4th of July! Whooo!

Val is moving away to Colorado soon so we've been do a lot of stuff together lately. Last night we went to a Norfolk Tides game.

In other news I am working on some javascript to embed into a page to download a vCard from an hCard (go check out Microformats to see what I'm talking about).

Blog Moving

2007-07-01T16:20:00.000-04:00

So I moved my blog over to my site. I thought it would be better for SEO and just things in general to have it host it off my server. So ajaswa.blogspot.com will redirect over to here.

I'll be posting more tomorrow at work.

Check out my Technorati Profile because then I can claim my blog.

Google Image Thursday - #19 "Numa Numa" - Internet Fads

2007-05-17T13:17:00.000-04:00

So things come and go and thats what this one is about: going. This will be the last internet fads, mostly because I've gotten board with fads.

Here we go: "Numa Numa" Who would have thought some kid lip syncing to a song would become such an internet fad. He even got press in main stream media:

Thats from Wikipedia

The other image today is from Marine Operations in the Northern Solomons: its a map of Piva Action in 1943. There is a trail called the Numa Numa Trial.

Google Image Thursday - #18 "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" - Internet Fad

2007-05-14T14:39:00.000-04:00

Yes I forgot to post for Google Image Thursday. Its hard to remember sometimes... I did plan on doing it at home after work but alas I got tied up with packing for a trip.

So on to this weeks images (or last weeks)... All Your Base Are Belong to Us has been around for a while.

The first one found here, reminds me of a project I once did about Dummies for dummies.

The second Is a Calvin and Hobbes parody. I especially like the "move zig" panel.

Sitemaps oh Joy!

2007-05-09T16:11:00.000-04:00

I've been reading up on this new fangled sitemaps thing. Because its all the rage now for some reason... even though Google has been doing it since '05. (Well now that Yahoo! has jumped on board and MSN says they will support it (later sometime... who knows.))

Here are some useful links for those who need some info on it:

General info:
Sitemaps.org
Google's Sitemaps

Submission (users are required):
Yahoo!'s Site Explorer
Google's Sitemaps

Alot of people say you can add a line in your robots.txt file to submit your site. I don't really like this approach for a few reasons. The original intent of robots.txt was to let spiders know where they could poke your website. You really can't stay with that intent by adding lines to let spiders know where there are xml files. The other reason is because there is no RFC or standards body that owns robots.txt. So it really isn't a standard at all.

Just my $0.02.

Google Image Thursday - #17 "Pirates" Internet Fads

2007-05-03T14:02:00.000-04:00

This week I'm going with "Pirates", seems like the next best thing to do. =)

The fist image is from globalsecurity.org. Its a map of Piracy, I think, its in another language.

I found this one very amusing over at teesmybody.com:

Are you a ninja that loves pirates?

AVAST!!!

Google Image Thursday - #16 "Ninja" - Internet Fads

2007-04-25T14:53:00.000-04:00

This week I'm starting a "Internet Fads" series. I'll be posting at least 2 images I find.

Starting with Ninjas cause they are cool like that. What I didn't find a lot of were images of motorcycles, Ninja Gaiden and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That makes me sad because I grew up on TMNT. I did find one of my favorite videoblog/podcasts AskANinja.com.

The other picutre I found yesterday but couldn't find today. =( I makes me sad. So I can't give credit to the author for it. What I do remember is that it had board ninjas about it. They look more confused then anything to me. Definitively not ready to kill many people. Though looking like this might just be a ploy because ninjas never caught off guard.

Iframe goodness

2007-04-24T18:08:00.000-04:00

Crazyness at work. I get to work yesterday and have a pretty normal day until around 4:30 when my General Manager sends me an email forward. The forward was from some "big wigs" some place to all the GMs, VPs and high level managers. These aformentioned "big wigs" think the best way to get updated legal documents (ie. copyright, visitor agreement, etc...) to all of the Big Compay's websites would be to have all the websites create pages with Iframes on them and have the iframes link to www.bigcompany.com/copyright.html. So after talking to one of the managers in my group we came up with a plan to end the sillyness. Simply to not do it and send our reasons to the "big wig".

Let explain something about this method of updating the websites like this. It solves so many problems its not even funny! They don't need to send out updates to these documents! It is the perfect solution! [end sarcasm] The reality is that this way of implementing document changes creates more problems then it "fixes".

Big Company's main website was created from word documents. If you haven't seen html that has been created with the built in webpage maker thingy Microsoft has included; its not for the faint of heart. Lets just say it won't validate at all. The copyright html page had over 100 errors on it and had about 270 lines of nearly useless css. Here is a code snippet or two:

@font-face
 {font-family:Helvetica;
 panose-1:2 11 6 4 2 2 2 2 2 4;
 mso-font-charset:0;
 mso-generic-font-family:swiss;
 mso-font-pitch:variable;
 mso-font-signature:536902279 -2147483648 8 0 511 0;}

And:

<o:p></o:p>

So that was good. I'll update about the competence of the "big wig" when I know more.

Google Image Thursday - #15 "Computers"

2007-04-19T13:24:00.000-04:00

This week at work I got a Mac Mini so my team can do cross platform testing. In honor of this sexy little box I searched for computers.

Good old Tech Republic has a set of photos on dirty computers. This photo looks like an old Dell or Micron. I've had to clean computers like this at one point in time. Thank god I haven't had to do that in a while.

Google Image Thursday - #14 "Lindy Hop"

2007-04-16T09:15:00.000-04:00

I put off posting last week because I was getting ready for DCLX.

So with all the dancing I did this past weekend I thought I'd search for lindy hop. And Lo! what did I find? Why this photo from Jammin' on the James.

Its Frida Segerdahl and Skye Humphries in 2005.

Google Image Thursday - #13 "Googlebot"

2007-04-05T18:30:00.000-04:00

I thought that since all this is made possible though googlebot I should search for that. So here it is:

Google Image Thursday - #12 "Decisions"

2007-03-29T13:57:00.000-04:00

For this week I decided to go with "decisions", it seemed like the right thing to do.

I could have used the I'm feeling lucky button on Google it seems, as ExplodingDog came up first. I did take a look around to see if anything else came up but nothing really worthy of Google Image Thursday. For those who don't know Exploding Dog is a great site run by Sam Brown. It has mostly silly cartoons drawn from fan's ideas. It is fun.

The image today is decisions. Just take a look: YES! NO! YES? YES! NO!!! NOOOOO?.

Google Image Thursday - #11 "Spam"

2007-03-23T09:29:00.000-04:00

Yes I know its a day late. I had a quite of bit of work yesterday and I didn't get around to posting.

So I get a lot of email spam at work, even though we have computers designed to catch it. I got a few this morning about how anti-spam people are lame. Which was amusing for a while. I deciced to see what I could find on Google about spam. And this is what I found:

Its a Spam energy drink. Its on a non-english site so I can't really comment on that. I do wonder how this thing tastes though. Is it like the processed meat product spam? Or is it more like email spam: bland and tasteless? I do plan on finding out. I just have to figure out if they ship to the US.

After a quick search I found the Official Spam Energy Drink site. Their store is coming soon though. =(

Google Image Thursday - #10 "Generic"

2007-03-15T16:17:00.000-04:00

I'm not sure why I picked generic for this week. I've been working on a generic markup project at work. I guess thats it...

Generic Beer found at 40 Ounce Beer. What can I say? Its been a long week and I'm ready for Friday and happy hour to come along and a very happy St Patrick's day.