AdamStout^.com

For those of you who haven't heard, the Snowpocalypse is upon us, we are supposed to get 20" to 30" of snow tonight.  And on top of that there is supposed to be lighting. 
This picture is from the Shopper Stopper we had last month but it should give you an idea of what is to come.  Being from San Diego originally, this is all a bit to absorb but it was nice to get kicked out of the office at 2 and told to go home.  I never got a snow day from school, so I'll take what I can get and enjoy it.

One plus side of this weekend is that I learned the term "snowtarded".  UrbanDictionary.com lists the definition as, "Those who have no clue how to drive/function in the snow" and there is no better way to describe the people out here in D.C.  This storm is bad, but it will be clear in a few days.  There is no need to buy up a month of supplies from the store like people seem to be doing.  These are the same idiots who don't realize you need to drive slower on snow regardless of teh speed limit.

I'm just going to try to stay home this weekend.

I've spent the last few evenings trying to update the layout of my site to handle resizing better.  Before it was hard-coded to be 972 pixels wide.  This looked fine on my laptop (and I'm hoping on most other people's computer's) but since I bought I 24" wide screen monitor I realized there was lots of unused space that could really be used by my photo gallery.  On the left, you can see what the gallery looked like before my changes.  There was only a fixed number of pictures per row which once again was fine on my laptop but left a lot of unused space on larger monitors.

To my point, I tried to allow the CSS template to flow with the center expanding but I just couldn't get it to work right.  I need to have three variable height columns to work but that just doesn't seem possible.  This is the closest I found to what I wanted but it couldn't use a background image for the side columns (other than that, it would have been fine).

I ended up using the old borderless table technique.  I wanted to stick to CSS only, but like I said, I don't think it is possible (I though you could use the new table emulation in CSS but that isn't support everywhere and is basically just using a table anyway).

Moral of the story, sometimes you should just use the simplest approach instead of wasting time trying to fancy.  On the plus side, you see on the right the same photo gallery as on the left but now it is stretched out and can take up more of the screen space which is a good thing for the galleries that have hundreds of pictures as well as when viewing all the photos with a certain tag (which is a recent feature added to the gallery).

I'm not going to go into detail about ho much spare time I have, but yesterday I was reading a dictionary and came across an explanation of why we use the word "love" in tennis to describe zero points.

Although after a little more research this seems in doubt, what I read was that love is an Americanization of the French word "L'euf" meaning egg (which is what a 0 kin of looks like right?). 

Even if it didn't come from the French, people seem to agree it is from Americans mispronouncing the original (which is also perhaps Dutch).

In April of last year, I migrated my Picasa based photo gallery to use Flickr instead.  I like the Flickr's API much better than the crap Google offers for Picasa.  In addition to the API Flickr offers unlimited storage of pictures for about the same price as a few GB of storage with Google (at the time at least).  I believe they have since lowered their prices so you can get unlimited storage with Flickr or 80 GB with Google.  If Google makes some enhancements to the API, I may end up switching back.

To the point, with nearly 70 photo albums, the Flickr API was a little too robust to use real time.  To get around this, wrote a small MySQL database to cache all the data I need locally (still hosting the pictures on Flickr).  This has greatly improved the load time of all the pages.  For instance, the main gallery page now loads in .4 seconds instead of the 20+ seconds it was taking before.  While the API had everything I want, not everything was in the right call, so I had to make several calls per page instead of just one large call to the API.  This really slowed things down.  Now I just call a single MySQL query (that still needs to be optimized).

If you have traveled through any airports lately you may have noticed that several airports have free WiFi (through January 15th) thanks to Google (via what appears to be a partnership with Boingo).  It is interesting to me that included on the list of airports Google is providing WiFi for is San Diego and Pittsburgh both of which already had free WiFi.  I've only traveled through a few of the airports on the list where I've tried to use the internet, and although I know Dulles (Washington, D.C.) and Austin do not normally have free WiFi, my sampling shows 50% of the airports already had free WiFi.  It is also interesting that while Google is getting a lot of press for this "benevolent" action, there are others (like E-Bay) that are sponsoring free internet in other places but not getting much press.

A few weeks ago, I was traveling through Austin and when I connected to Google's sponsored connection and got a clue as to why they are really doing this.  Here is a screen shot of what I saw:

While at first this looks like a normal Terms of Service agreement that you have to click on to get onto a public network, it really is a way to grab some more market share for Chrome.  While people are just trying to get on-line in a hurry, they are going to download Chrome because they think they need it to continue onto the internet.  I almost clicked on it and I'm a pretty technical person, I would love to see how many people Google tricked into downloading Chrome and having it automatically become the default browser.

If GMail didn't make Google Evil, Chrome certainly did.

On a side note, while trying to find the list of airports that Google is providing the WiFi for, I searched for "google free internet" and came across Google's free at home internet, TiSP.  If you search either Google or Bing you'll see this comes up first.  So while Google is Evil, at least they have a sense of humor.

Yesterday I pointed out that Reuters needs to get a new editor who can proof read their articles, it looks like CNN needs one as well.  I was reading an article about Palin's new deal with Fox when I learned that the GOP had presidential primaries in 2009.  I must be behind the times, I thought all the primaries were in 2008 when we had the general election for president.

A couple of months ago I bought an Iomega ix2 Network Attached Storage device.  While Iomega's name isn't what it was back in the day of the zip drive, since they are now owned by EMC, I figured the quality must be ok.  Overall, I think I got what I paid for, but the drives are a little slow when serving pictures and music.  It works fine for my back ups, but I think I'll buy something a little faster next time to at as a home media server.

The major thing I wanted to accomplish with my new shared storage was to get all the pictures and MP3s that I had on my laptop, desktop, a my wife's desktop into a central location that was backed up and accessible to all the systems.  The Iomega NAS worked great but once I got everything in one location, I realized that I had a lot of duplicate pictures between the three systems I merged together.  I started looking into writing an application to help de-duplicate the files but before I got too far, I took a look at what freeware was out there. 

I tried a few of the applications out there, but quickly settled on Duplicate Cleaner.  It is a nice little app that quickly searches your directories for duplicates based on different (and configurable) criteria.  While there were some other apps the specialized in images and others in music, this handles music, pictures, videos, and documents.

The guys at DigitalVolcano really saved me some time compared to writing something and I appreciate they didn't try to charge me $50 for something I only need to use every once in a while.  Some of their other apps on the site seem a little odd, but what ever floats their boat.  This one is a nice light weight app.