TwoSpy

I attended the Clarence Thomas luncheon today in Dallas. I admit I knew very little of the Supreme Court Justice before today, but it was comforting to learn that we have a moral, God-fearing individual serving us. I am looking forward to reading his auto-biography, My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir.

An interesting quote from a DMN columnist:

If Clarence Thomas were a liberal, he’d be widely regarded as an American hero.

You can read his article here.

Just returned from a weekend of relaxing while preparing defenses …

For the numerous high schoolers reading my blog, go get a computer science degree.  From Chronicle.com:

Employers face a shrinking labor pool, since the number of computer science graduates has dropped significantly since the turn of this century. Laws of supply and demand apply, so companies compete harder and pay more for a smaller supply of qualified graduates.

I have been realizing these claims myself.  The job posting to replace my existing position hasn’t received a single hit.  If you are an IT profession (specifically a developer of some sort) and are reading this, please make yourself known.  I need to know I am not the only one.

From FOXNews.com:

An Inconvenient Truth won plaudits from the environmental lobby and an Oscar from the film industry but was found wanting when it was scrutinized in the High Court in London.

Justice Burton identified nine significant errors within the former presidential candidate’s documentary as he assessed whether it should be shown to school children. He agreed that Gore’s film was “broadly accurate” in its presentation of the causes and likely effects of climate change but said that some of the claims were wrong and had arisen in “the context of alarmism and exaggeration.”

In what is a rare judicial ruling on what children can see in the class-room, Justice Barton was at pains to point out that the “apocalyptic vision” presented in the film was politically partisan and not an impartial analysis of the science of climate change.

Just to keep things balanced, I will point out that the Judge did agree …

… with the main thrust of Gore’s arguments: “That climate change is mainly attributable to man-made emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide (‘greenhouse gases’).”

So to learn what you can do to help out, read my earlier blog post about fuel efficient vehicles.

This post is credited to the fact that the iPhone does not support Flash. Until tonight, my photo album was implemented in Flash. I wanted to be able to view my pics on my friends iPhones, so here it goes. I love the way the iWeb photo gallaries look and operate (using prototype and scriptaculous behind the scenes), so I set out to see if I could make it work for me. This turned out to be a bittersweet experience.

Starting with a “My Albums” page template, I dragged a few iPhoto events into the album widget. This was exciting until I published a site. I do not have a .Mac account, so I am publishing to a folder on my web server. To begin, publishing is no quick process. Once completed, the actual album index page renders blank, and the image links appear 15 - 20 seconds later. This just isn’t going to cut it.

On take 2, I did away with using the “My Albums” template, and created a separate “Photos” page for each album. This left me with having to build the index page from scratch. Now here is where things started looking better. The alignment guides in iWeb are killer, just like designing Windows Forms in Visual Studio. This made designing the page a breeze … copy paste works like a charm.

Another great feature I discovered was masking. I could create a frame that bounds an image, and then scale and position the image within the fixed size frame. Now that was really neat.

My last task was to create some sort of navigation between the pages. I turned off the auto-generated navigation since I couldn’t figure out any way to customize the styles on it. I then created the links to go back to index page. My only real issue here was with the color chooser. There is nowhere that I can specify a hex value. Instead, I had to use the eyedropper tool to choose the exact color I was wanting. I guess Apple didn’t think any web-literate users would ever be tinkering with their products. Fair enough.

All-in-all, I put in a good amount of work hacking up the album to look and work to my satisfaction. But it still beat writing one from scratch. The final album is now live on my site here.  Let me know what performance is like from wherever you are located.

I would love to hear about other album generators available that can produce something similar without a lot of effort. Basically, something to which I can supply a simple html template, has a nice filmstrip and slide show, and performs well.