TwoSpy

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.

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.

Today is my last day to work for ORIX.  I am taking off to join a startup as employee #1 (hopefully there are more to come).  Until now, I have enjoyed the company of an entire IT team around me to bounce ideas off of and learn from.  Although I’ll continue to do so via IM and email with some of the developers I was working with, I doubt it will be nearly the same not working from the same location.  So you may notice this blog start to turn more technical as I begin to use it to bounce ideas off you – my new virtual IT team.

Random poll for anybody reading this:
On your last day, did you have 4 meetings on your calendar?  What the heck!

Although the alarmist media loves Al Gore, those that know me know I don’t buy into his propaganda.  I drive a fuel-efficient diesel Jetta for the economics of it, not for the environment.  But if you are one of those Al Gore lovers, why aren’t you driving one too?  Todays diesels are …

… quieter, more powerful and fuel efficient. With no throttle restriction, higher energy content in the fuel and extreme combustion pressures, diesels typically garner 30 percent greater fuel economy than comparable gasoline engines. And less fuel burned means less greenhouse gas CO₂. After a century with a dirty reputation, diesel is suddenly looking green.

Read the full article here.

If you are leaning toward buying a hybrid for your next car, I would strongly consider a diesel engine.  Compared to a similar gasoline car, diesels have only about a $1000 premium, versus a $5000 premium or more for a hybrid.  Additionally, you can get 300,000+ miles out of a diesel versus 100,000 if you are lucky with a hybrid.  Your thoughts?

Mint.com launched at TechCrunch40 on Tuesday. The site claims that it:

… connects nightly to the credit card providers, banks, and/or credit unions you choose to keep your transactions and account balances automatically up-to-date. Mint even auto-balances your checkbook and auto-categorizes your transactions.

I have been looking forward to seeing what the site offers, and though it has launched, I am still looking forward to see what it offers. I signed up immediately after the launch, and I guess I wasn’t the only one. The site got hammered. It was down in a matter of hours. Just today I was finally able to get my Chase checking account linked, but I still have had no luck with my Chase credit card account or my Wells Fargo account.

Has anybody else had any luck? I’ll keep you posted on any further progress I have.

On another note, does anyone know of any security risks that I should worry about by using this site? From the surface, everything is using SSL, but I sure hope my account info is being gaurded safely on their backend. I tend to be overly trustworthy, so please stop me if I am making a mistake here.