In repsonse to the Engadget article:
http://www.engadget.com/2008/12/16/apple-announces-final-macworld-steve-jobs-wont-deliver-keynote/5#c16152216
I am personally disappointed to see it go. Apple has been ramping up their own special events for a while now and everyone gets excited about those, but for years MacWorld was the one big event other than WWDC that we expect big things. I can't help but think it has to be hard for Apple to knock one out of the park every year in January, but lets not underestimate the power of this event.
While its value as a trade show may be limited and the explanations of the online and retail stores trumping the need for a trade show make logical sense, I can't help but think that the nostalgia and nearly un-rivaled coverage they receive from this one event is something that is hard to value. How many companies other than Apple can systematically pull this off every year and get the attention that they do? I don't know the cost involved for attending MacWorld, but it would have to be awfully high for this to be dropped. This makes me question why they chose to do this. Special event coverage doesn't occur on a pre-defined schedule, so I would think they would at-least want to replace MacWorld with their own event every year. I guess we'll see.
To follow up my previous post about the Griffin RoadTrip with SmartScan I bought on Amazon.... I did receive a replacement last Thursday. This time I used it in our TrailBlazer. It worked fine out of the box when I plugged it in, but it does seem very snug and I am a little worried this might not be the device to transport back and forth between vehicles for fear of what happened with the first one.
After a weekend of use I have a few issues to complain about. I was hopeful that the SmartScan feature would work better. Unfortunately, it seems to pick stations that are far worse than the ones I find manually (usually in the 88.3-88.9 range). Also, while it works fine to charge and play the iPhone 3G, the adapters in the box do not include one for the iPhone or iPod touch, so I am using the 80GB adapter. It seems to fit snugly (maybe too snugly) and the home button on the iPhone is slightly covered. I also found myself fiddling with the controls. While the play / next buttons might be more useful with a regular iPod, I find the iPhone interface easier to control my music. Not that I would mind the functionality, but the existence of these nicely lit up buttons on the Griffin do obscure the function of switching stations while driving. You actually have to change the function to manually adjust the stations.
In designing the Griffin I imagine the idea was you would be switching music tracks often while leaving the station setting alone. I, however, have the opposite need. I listen to podcasts primarily. I have never found any of these FM transmitters good enough to listen to music with. A single podcast (TWIT, Security Now, MacBreak Weekly) may be an hour and 20 minutes or so. During this time, I don't need to do anything but occasionally pause the podcast. I do, however need to change station about 5 times between Springfield, IL and Bloomington, IL due to static.
In my original article I mentioned that the older Griffin I had a lot of trouble staying upright under the weight of the iPhone. The new flexible one did solve that problem and it is definately more aesthetically pleasing. However, I wish there was a way to shorten the flexible neck. While it is fine for our TrailBlazer, It has a much bigger footprint than I expected it to have in my car. For this reason alone, I will probably be leaving this device only in the TrailBlazer.
Overall, I am a little disappointed. I do think that the Griffin RoadTrip SmartScan is a decent solution for podcast / audiobook listners, or non-picky music lister with plenty of room in their vehicle and for someone who plans to leave it in one spot. I do also want to mention the audio out for users with a Line-In in the car. That solves the mediocre audio, however, if you are going this route you might as well save some money and buy the Tune2Aux device. I have not decided if I will keep this unit or not, but I am continuing to look.
I just bought the GriffinRoadTrip SmartScan on Amazon for around $60 to use with my iPhone 3G, since this is one of the few that works with it (although not officially). I was replacing my older Griffin RoadTrip (without flexible neck).
When the unit arrived, I took it out to the car to give it a try. My car is a Cadillac CTS and has an ashtray that you must flip down to access the cigarette lighter. This was a big reason I wanted the flexible neck, as the older RoadTrip never was ideally aligned and always slipped down under the weight of the 1st iPhone I used it with. When I bought the 3G, it wouldn’t charge it, so another reason I bought the RoadTrip with SmartScan.
As soon as I plugged it in, it seemed really snug. It lit up and starting scanning for stations immediately. I then adjusted the neck to get a good position to hold the iPhone. It seemed a little more akward and cumbersome than I hoped. I pushed it a little closer to the dash since it was sticking farther out than I thought it would and the unit immediately shut off. Thinking that I must have knocked the plug loose I went to pull the plug out and quickly realized I could smell burning electronics. I grabbed the plug (luckly the iPhone was not connected) and started examining it. It appears the end metal connector came loose and was pushed inside the end of the adapter.
Long story short, I have a replacement on its way from Amazon, but I am a little bummed about the whole situation now. I will be extra careful with the new one, but I do have concerns about taking it in and out of the car on a regular basis as to this happening again. Hopefully it was just a fluke, but I will report back in when I get the new one if I have any problems.
I just finished reading Jason Hiner's article on ZDNet titled "The top 5 reasons why Windows Vista failed." While I have plenty of criticism for Microsoft, I couldn't help but think what an incredibly biased article this was.
You can read the article here: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=10303
Either Jason Hiner fell off his rocker or he is cleverly trying to create the perception that Windows Vista is this horrible thing.
5. Apple successfully demonized Vista
Sure Apple has done a great job with their ads, but why are you comparing Apple ads to the demise of Vista? You only show the Enterprise adoption rates which are ALWAYS slow and I am quite certain were impacted very little by Apple. I think if you compare the consumer markets you might have a more accurate idea of what is really happening.
4. Windows XP is too entrenched. I agree, but is this a surprise for an OS that has been around since 2001? Microsoft screwed up in my opinion by waiting sooooo long between XP and Vista. Also, what research do you have that says all netbooks will be running XP and that somehow netbooks are going to take over sales of normal laptops / desktops? And how did you predict that netbooks will never have the power to run Vista?
3. Vista is too slow - Really? What year is this? I noticed your benchmark link was from 2007. Sure you may need more resources to run it, but wouldn't Windows 98 fly on a P4 or Windows 95 fly on a P3 (Assuming it would operate). Vista is quite fast on my machine. I would understand if you were trying to upgrade your old machine to Vista, but isn't this really the start of a new platform, really meant to run on new computers? If you are going to say XP is faster than Vista, why don't you elaborate? Don't you think you need to consider that most drivers at release time may not have been tuned as well as they are now and that future performance will only increase on Vista, most likely far surpassing XP in gaming and other intensive areas? Isn't Leo Laporte's Ultimate Gaming Machine running Vista 64 because that was the consensus of many people in the know (like NVida and ATI) as being just as fast?
2. Windows Vista failed because there wasn't supposed to be a Vista?
Is this like Letterman saying "no number 2, writer stuck on Jet Blue?" Microsoft has been talking about a subscription based model for a long time. Will they get there? I don't know, but I expected to hear something about Windows Live Mesh. That seems to be some coherent concept moving in that direction. I wouldn't say they dropped it, they are just slow at getting there. I'm not neccesarily defending them here, but I say again, how is this a reason Vista failed (your words, not mine).
1. It broke too much stuff
You mean it broke some stuff. And some of that was due to wating on vendors to upgrade drivers. Since you are focusing on enterprise again for this point, isn't it always the case that enterprises don't adopt right away because they know it takes time? How is this any different than any other release of Windows with enterprise wide adoption?
Bottom Line:
You said "Microsoft needs to abandon the strategy of releasing a new OS every 3-5 years and simply stick with a single version of Windows and release updates, patches, and new features on a regular basis." So maybe we could all be running Windows 95 with 13 years of patches from Windows Update? Cool. Sign me up.
A very common dilemma I come across as a PHP developer is how I want to handle creating thumbnails for lots of images. Sure, I could use some software and make thumbnails, but I'm talking about bigger projects that need to handle it for thousands of photos. I have been down the path many times of using PHP GDI+ and writing a function to do resizing. A couple of years ago I got fancier and made some proportiate resizing functions so that those pesky pictures people take holding their cameras vertically don't have to be squished into a pre-determined width of 100px. However, each and every time I do a project like this I always think how messy it is. If you have 50 thousand photos, you will have 100 thousand files once you pre-make all those thumnails. And what if the client comes back next year and wants a different size, or you decide to do something in-between sizes for another use? Heck, what if you update a photo, you have to remember to do the thumbnail. Don't forget to remove them too, or you are just creating a new project for yourself 5 years later when you are running low on disk space and backups take forever because of the 10 gazillion thumbnails left rotting on your system that link to nothing.
My new approach to doing thumbnails is to not do them at all. That's not quite what I mean, but I have really been sold on the idea of dynamically generated thumbnails. There is very little performance hit if it is done correctly and I have been extremely happy with the results so far. My development time has been reduced and I never worry about wanting to add more sizes later, changing / updating existing thumbs. Even better, I can remotely host images and pull them in doing the thumbnail version on the fly.
This was very useful to me in revamping a real estate web site design project my company, Vermilion Design Group, built many years ago, www.conniedavis.info. I actually removed nearly 60 thousands photos from the site and off-loaded only the good ones to a single site that can be shared for all of my real estate web site customers.
My new method involves two items. First, I use phpThumb(), an open source thumbnail generator from http://phpthumb.sourceforge.net/. I really like this solution because it uses the most efficient method available to generate thumbnails. It determines the available memory when creating images, so massive bulk conversions won't crash and burn. It also chooses the best option depending on if you have ImageMagic installed on your server or GDI+, etc... Finally, I am really impressed that it can do all of this work on remote images, just as if they were local.
Implementing phpThumb was very easy. I put it in a folder and then call it just like using a normal img tag. The trick is you can add all kinds of parameters to the end of it:
<img src="phpThumb.php?src=images/myphoto.jpg&w=400">
The above will show myphoto.jpg from the images folder and on the fly proportionally resize it to 400px wide.
In addition to incorporating phpThumb for image manipulation, I needed a quick solution for determing if an image existed before showing it. The fast way of course is if the image is stored on the same site, you could do:
if (file_exists("images/myphoto.jpg")) {
<img src="phpThumb.php?src=images/myphoto.jpg&w=400">
}
However, the really cool part is using it with remote images. You can do this many ways, but I chose to remain in PHP and test to see if I get a header back from the image. In the next example, I am calling a remote image to be 400px wide, but only if it exists, that way I could show a friendly photo if it wasn't there. In my case, these photos were of real estate houses, so I didn't know for any 1 listing whethere there would be 1 or 15 photos.
function url_exists($url) {
$hdrs = @get_headers($url);
return is_array($hdrs) ? preg_match('/^HTTP\\/\\d+\\.\\d+\\s+2\\d\\d\\s+.*$/',$hdrs[0]) : false;
}
if (url_exists("http://www.othersite.com/myphoto.jpg")) {
<img src="phpThumb.php?src=http://www.othersite.com/myphoto.jpg&w=400">
}
While there are many options for handling thumbnails and a variety of tools, I think this combination is a very fast, comprehensive solution to the problem. If you find this helpful, I encourage you to post any additional solutions or any corrections to the comments.
As always, if you would like to hire me for a web development project, please visit www.vermiliondesign.com
