Weblog of a “Switcher”

It's been pretty difficult for me to post here recently. I have had a confluence of things happen in my life that is making very difficult to post.

For those who don't know, I recently nabbed a new job after being out of work for just over 7 months. Also, my in-laws are here in St. Louis visiting. So I have had very little time to do much of anything other than work and visit.

Hopefully, next week will be different. My in-laws are returning to Texas on Monday and I'll have more time after work to find something to post about or write a review of. Actually, as far as reviews go, I have a program in mind right now. I'll have to leave myself a reminder to actually write the review up.

The job is with a company called Mobile Armor. We create software that helps protect laptop computers and smart phones so that if they are lost they can be destroyed remotely so that none of the data on the device will be seen by anyone who is not supposed to see. I came in at the beginning of a huge contract that if we succeed in winning it, will be an incredible boon for the company and be pretty much a first for the group that we are trying to woo. So I am pretty tired when I get home. This and the fact that I haven't been in a "work" mode for over 7 months, it's pretty draining right now. Hopefully, as time goes on, the company will hire some more folks to make our jobs a little easier.

written by Dave M. \\ tags: new job, post, quiet, Site Info

I have been asked by a few people now how I get the screen shots I use in these posts. There is nothing really magical here, I just use a program to capture the images and let WordPress take care of changing their size to fit within the width of my blog. I use a small JavaScript program I found to display the full size images when someone clicks on the thumbnails. That's pretty much it.

For the screen shots I put on the site, I use a program called Snapz Pro X by Ambrosia Software. It may not be the very best program out there, but it's one I purchased a long time ago and have enjoyed it use for quite some time.

The screen shot images are stored in PNG format with a DPI of 72 dots per inch. That's done by Snapz Pro X and I don't have any control over the DPI at all.

Once, I get the screen shots I need, I use WordPress' ability to add media to a blog post to take care of creating thumbnails and smaller sizes so that the images will fit inside the content column of the blog. So if an image is 800 pixels wide by 600 pixels tall, WordPress will shrink the image to 500x375. It also creates an image that is 150x150 cropping it if necessary.

I then place the image also using WordPress to get my initial HTML data. I then remove a part of that data since I don't use WordPress' WYSIWYG editor when writing my posts. I style some of the images so that there is a small transparent border on the side of the image where the text will run up to it. This is done with CSS inside the IMG tag.

The images that are not screen shots that I use in the top right corner of my posts and sometimes sprinkled throughout the post are usually pictures I find on either flickr.com or image.google.com. I try flickr.com first and make sure the image is under Creative Commons before I use it. If I get the image from image.google.com, I'm just hoping that the owner is OK with it. I'm not a huge site like Digg.com or C|Net, so I don't present as big a threat as a larger site would. If I get asked to take down an image, I'll be more than happy to.

If the image I find is too big for what I am going to use it for, I will use Preview (an application that comes with OS X on the Mac) to reduce the size of the image to the correct size. I usually don't make these images bigger than 120 pixels wide. So I try to find an image that will scale to that size nicely.

Also, I never hotlink or "inline link" an image from another site. This is not an ethical practice and most importantly I would have no control over the image being displayed. The problem here is that the image comes from a different site and so the bandwidth it takes to display that image is being charged by that different site. It's well within the rights of the site owner of the hotlinked image to do whatever they want with the image. I have heard some interesting stories of hotlinked images being changed to rather rude images due to this practice. So the person hotlinking the image will now be displaying an image of something rather rude on their site instead of what they had originally intended.

Sometimes the smaller images are screen shots of application icons. They also might be edited with a program called Acorn by Flying Meat Inc. so that I can merge more than one icon together or do some other simple editing. I also use Pixelmator to do some of that editing. I'm no artist, so I don't use Photoshop.

That's pretty much it. I hope that answers the questions I have been asked. If not, please feel free to leave a comment with more questions. I have no problem at all answering questions about the site or the Mac and OS X. It's one of the main reasons for the site in fact.

written by Dave M. \\ tags: screen, Screenshot, shot

I've been checking out a plugin for WordPress that send the site admin an email for every 404 error that occurs on the site.

I have been getting a few of these and don't understand why since I'm seeing all the items that are claiming to be "404"'ed.

I would like to ask that if you are reading this and you don't notice anything wrong with the site or if you do, please leave a comment so that I can verify that there is indeed something happening. Otherwise, I'm going to assume that the plugin has bugs and the site is fine.

If you can't leave a comment, please try sending me a message via the Contact Me page.

Thanks for your help with this!

written by Dave M. \\ tags: 404, error, plugin, wordpress

Welcome to the new home of
Weblog of a "Switcher"!

If you don't understand why you are being welcomed, then pop over to the WordPress.com home and read the moving notice post.

As time goes on here, there will probably be new features added to the site as I find plug-ins and other features that will hopefully make the site a pleasure to go to and read.

Since I have no control over search engines like Google and Yahoo!, there will still be folks starting over at the WordPress.com site. Hopefully they will see the sidebar notice that the site has moved and head over hear looking for the post that they want to comment on. I don't plan on closing comments out on the WordPress.com site, so conversations will continue there until they run dry. I suspect new conversations will start up here, at least I hope they will.

I have set the WordPress.com site to not let search engines crawl the site, so I suspect in time, the search engines will loose references to the WordPress.com site.

For those of you that have made the necessary adjustments to keep following me here, thank you very much. I hope I can keep posting interesting enough articles to keep you checking out the site from time to time.

written by Dave M. \\ tags: Closing Comments, Control, Conversations, Google, Google Yahoo, Moving Notice, Necessary Adjustments, New Features, Pleasure, Plug Ins, Pop, Search Engines, Search Google, Search Yahoo, Weblog, Yahoo

OK, I have to admit, not having comments in posts on other sites is just annoying. It's up to the author and I fully support what they want, but it sure doesn't lend itself well to discussions.

So I ahve restored comments here. Posts that didn't have comments on will probably stay that way since it's difficult to change the settings on the posts. It's not impossible, but I would have to find them and change them. Not really worth it.

I do have comments set so that I have to approve them before they are displayed. I just want to make sure that they clean and not spam. Akismet is a great comment spam blocker and it does an excellent job of catching them. I just want to make perfectly sure.

So, enjoy and make yourselves known!

written by Dave M. \\ tags: Akismet, Job

I've been looking for a different look for the site. I still haven't found anything that I really like yet. However, I found out something rather disturbing when I switched to this new theme. The Category links don't work. This theme doesn't have a "404" page so I never knew this fact. Now that I do know, I'm going to send off a note to the WordPress crew to see if they can either fix it or tell me what I need to do myself to fix it.

Since the site is hosted by WordPress.com, I can't imagine that there is a lot I can do myself to fix it. Hopefully they can.

Anyway, that's why the side bars look different now. I lost all custom settings I had with the theme. No major loss though.

Anyway, I'm still looking for something different that will work for what I like to show.

written by Dave M. \\ tags: Custom Settings, Lot, New Theme, Side Bars

Check out my post over at Dave's Chalkboard for an explanation of this post. I don't really feel like cross posting this post.

written by Dave M. \\ tags: Chalkboard