Motorcycle Racing and Riding

I loaded-up Picasa 3.5, and it automatically began sorting photos by face.  It was able to recognize my face in extremely dark pictures.  It also recognized my daughter, regardless of age.  Baby faces don’t look like third-grader faces, but Picasa was able to choose the correct ones in most cases.

My daughter is adopted, so her early-days photos are extra-special; those are the times that I missed. Now I can easily create a photo album that contains all of her images.  Easily, being the important part here. Most newer images are stamped with a creation-date. This is not the same as the file creation date, which will change when you copy the file to a different storage medium.  Picassa will organize the photos by face, and sort by creation-date, making it easier to produce a photo album of all of her images. Excellent.

How do you get this feature?  It’s a standard part of the image scan in Picasa 3.5-and-up.  Just get the new version of Picasa, and get organizing those photos by face!  This video contains Google’s demonstration of the Picasa facial recognition feature:

I like the new-site (dangerismymiddlename.com’s) URLs.  The Web site was previously hosted by WordPress.com.  WordPress.com embeds the publish date in the URL’s. If you change the date?  Incoming links to your URLs won’t work anymore.  There is no way out of that madness.

WordPress.com also won’t allow URL rewriting or redirects (either of these would allow me to kludge my way out of the above limitation). On the new site we can revisit a subject, and replace guesses and rumors with the actual Press Releases, and re-publish it.  Links to the old article would automatically be pointing to the new one. On the old site we could do nothing of the sort, because of those dates getting embedded into the URL.  We would need to have multiple copies of the article-in-question, or broken links from the outside.

Last month was by-far our largest month on the old-site (dangerismymiddlename.wordpress.com), and this month?  In the first five days of this month the old-site (dangerismymiddlename.wordpress.com) did about half-the-volume of last-month’s record indicating, that readership expansion was accelerating in-spite of the fact that the old Web site is basically dismantled.  Can we get to the point where we explode again on the new site (dangerismymiddlename.com)?  I sure hope so. At this point we are worried about losing all those readers.  Simply putting links on the old-site directing folks here isn’t doing-the-trick.

Why do we care?  We never made a cent doing this.  I just love motorcycles, and writing about them is more satisfying when I know that people are reading what I wrote.

Most Beautiful Buell image #1 by Paul Danger Kile (c) 2009 dangerismymiddlename.com; Free for use on the Web with two conditions. (1) You link the photo to http://dangerismymiddlename.com and (2) you put this caption on the photo.

Here is how to add WordPress posts or comments to facebook notes.  It works with WordPress.com, and WordPress.org installs, and yes, it really is this easy:

1. Go to: http://www.facebook.com/editnotes.php?import
2. Enter the following: http://[the URI for your Wordpress blog goes here]/feed/ in order to import your posts into facebook notes.  Replace [the URI for your Wordpress blog goes here] with the correct URI (URL).
   
3. Enter the following: http://[the name of your Wordpress blog goes here]/comments/feed/ in order to import your post’s comments into facebook notes.  Replace [the URI for your Wordpress blog goes here] with the correct URI (URL).

That’s it!

Mike Benkovich— my favorite Microsoft Evangelist— (yes, I actually have a favorite Microsoft Evangelist), pointed-out that Microsoft is offering Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade Edition to eligible college students for only $29.  How do you get it?  The instructions are on more than one Web page, so I will put them here for you.

1. Go to http://windows7.digitalriver.com/.
2. Enter your “.edu” college email address. The Web site will let you know that you are eligible.  Don’t depend on the list of colleges there.  If you are a student, and want the software, then give it a try.   Interestingly-enough Digital River’s Web-based-ordering-system appears to be built on Sun Java technologies
3. You will receive an email from Digital River.  Follow the directions in this email.
4. You will receive another email with a download link on October 22, 2009.  Use this email to download your software.

Go here to see which features come with Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade Edition.

http://drh1.img.digitalriver.com/DRHM/Storefront/Company/msshus/images/product/detail/win7_hp_upg.png

We have used a few Java UI frameworks in the past (Google GWT, Click, Stripes, and the like) with varying amounts of satisfaction. I believe that one of the holy grails of Java Web business application development is a drop-dead simple Editable-DataGrid-and-DetailsView-CRUD-thing, like we used to have back in the 1980’s with dBIII+, FoxPro, etc. Some of the Adobe Flex samples seem to indicate that Flex makes it easy to do that.

This is an area where Microsoft excels-at with every UI API that they produce (WPF, Windows Forms, Silverlight, ASP.Net, etc.) and we really need the same focus for Java. Part of the problem might be that too many folks are competing with each other instead of working with each other, and that’s just a natural part of an open source world. Part of the problem might be that many programmers haven’t been exposed to good DataGrids in order to miss them. Part of the problem might be that building a good one is a difficult thing to do.

Could Flash (Flex uses Flash) really be a good Java front-end? What about downloading all those big Flash movies? Well, actually the Flash movies don’t get downloaded each time that the UI updates. The MXML and ActionScript that is embedded in the movies updates the UI on the client-side. This is extremely efficient.

I did some coding and support for the Miller Lite Virtual Racing League (a now defunct racing simulator that had over 80,000 simultaneous users). We listed each team’s standings in a DataGrid; it used Flash on the front end, and Struts on the back end. Adobe Flex, which is a free and open source API, now makes that power available to all programmers. You won’t need to purchase expensive software to get there.

I actually built a scanner program with dynamic UI once by embedding a spreadsheet into a VB program (FarPoint Spread). It would automatically display the correct editable fields for various types within Documentum, even if those types didn’t even exist at the time that the program was written. It was really easy to code, and extremely powerful, and not something easy to do with JEE as far as I know. I was successful, because the tools were powerful, and easy, and I had the wacky idea of using a spreadsheet in place of text fields (it looked much like text fields when I was through with it). Non-Web Java programmers could probably build a CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) List-details-thing with SWT/JFace (the GUI API that was used to build Eclipse).

Education professionals and students can go here in order to get Adobe’s Flex Builder and Cold Fusion 8 for free.

Adobe Flex is free for all, and available here.

User Access Control is more intrusive by-default in the Windows 7 Release Candidate Build 7100 than it was in the Windows 7 Beta Build 7000, but it is still easier to live with than the original Vista implementation. Here is how to adjust the settings:

1. Go to “Control Panel”
2. If you cannot see the “Action Center” control panel icon, then choose “View by: Small icons”. The small icons settings turns on all control panel icons.
3. Click on the “Action Center” control panel icon.
4. Click on the “Change User Account Control settings” link.
5. Adjust your settings.

I once said that if Microsoft added symbolic links to Windows, then I would use it forever. Well… We currently use mostly-UNIX where I work, but I am still psyched that Microsoft officially includes symbolic links in Vista and Windows 7.

Please go here to learn how to use the mklink command to create symbolic links in Microsoft Operating Systems.

Please go here to learn about symbolic links in various operating systems, including alternatives to mklink in Microsoft operating systems.

The name (Windows Services for UNIX) makes it sound as if the application puts Windows services on UNIX. In actuality these are UNIX commands that run on Windows.

I realized how much I needed to install this $0.00, cygwin-like, program when I typed “ls” in front of a coworker for the third-time this morning.

Cons? Windows Services for UNIX does not include bash. For the love of all that is good Microsoft, please merge the features of bash (best… shell… ever…) and PowerShell (best… Microsoft… shell… ever…).

Cygwin is an well-known, older alternative to Windows Services for UNIX. Cygwin does include bash. It’s what I am using today.

Go here to download Windows Services for UNIX 3.5.

Here is information about Windows Services for UNIX 3.5 from Microsoft TechNet’s Interoperability TechCenter.

Here is more information about Windows Services for UNIX 3.5 from Microsoft TechNet’s Interoperability TechCenter.

Thank you, and have fun out there.