Ryan Morlok’s Blog

If only I had this in High School English….my pronounciation would have rivalled Toskey…

Ran across this video on digg.  A guy created a stop motion video of himself interacting with the real world.  Pretty cool, and I can only imagine the time and effort this must have taken him.

Finally another Colbert BKAD.  The 31st installment is New Jersey’s 3rd.  As usual, the master list has been updated.

I’ve been trying to track down what’s been causing problems with uploads to the new version of gallery (gallery2).  It will freak out and abort uploads when it reaches certain pictures.  I thought it was weird that it would consistently not be able to upload particular pictures, and do fine with all the rest.  At first I thought it was an issue with the new version of gallery and my iPhotoToGallery plugin that I use to upload, but today I tried to upload some of the errant pictures through the web interface, and it still freaked out.

What I realized was that the pictures that are giving gallery2 problems are those that have been rotated locally on my new computer.  The new mac has a more current version of the iLife suite, and it seems that something strange is happening when I rotate pictures.  Either the jpeg manipulation libraries on gallery2 have a bug in them, or the new version of iPhoto is doing something nonstandard with the jpeg files.  I still need to investigate it further, but at least now I know where to look at the problem.

It’s back to just Katy and me here in Illinois.  Brogan was in town for a little over two weeks while we worked on the startup related stuff.  Things went well and we had a party.  Mike stopped in Chicago on his way home to visit his grandmother, and then will soon make the drive to Phoenix to take his other Grandparents there for the winter.  He’s quite the traveling man.

I upgraded gallery this afternoon to gallery2 and things are pretty much finished.  I had to mod one of the themes slightly, and I’m still not completely happy with it, but things are fairly usable now.  I’m not going to alias http://www.morlok.net/gallery to the new site (http://www.morlok.net/gallery2) just yet, until I check to see how this is going to affect the pictures on my photo tributes.  The interface, with the current theme, is nice, but I’m sure I’ll be tweaking it more in the future.

Be aware, it may be a little slow to show the thumbnails at first.  Not all of the thumbnails were re-generated after my import from the old gallery.  After they’ve been viewed by someone once, things will be much faster.

Also, there were a few problems when importing pictures from my old gallery.  Currently, the only pictures that I’m aware of that aren’t there now is the full collection of pictures from Dusty and Laura’s wedding.  I’ll work to get that on there in the next few days.

Mike and I were trying to create a network throttling device, and we stumbled upon Dummynet. Everything seemed cheeky until we realized that they only offered a download as a bootable floppy disk image. I don’t know about everyone else, but I haven’t kept floppies in years. We couldn’t find one in the entire house. As an alternative, Mike downloaded a floppy image to cd image tool so we could create a bootable CD instead (the floppy image provides a mini-BSD distro with the tools installed). bin2iso is available here, or if you’re interested in the dummynet cd iso, that can be found here. No guarantees if it will work, as we haven’t tested it yet.

There’s been a comment drought around here lately. Except for the spammers, most people haven’t been commenting on my blog. It’s been even worse over in Broganville, where he’s only gotten 2 comments lifetime total, and they’re both from me!

I found a bunch o spam comments on my blog again today.  Looks like the math plugin was only successful in keeping Steve off the comments.  Maybe I’ll switch to a different captcha plugin, or maybe I’ll just modify the current math one so that it will be nonstandard.

I spent a few minutes looking around for a timecard application for OS X, and didn’t find a lot.  I was kind of surprised because this is the type of application that would work extremely well as a dashboard widget.  It’s a strange world.  You can find a widget to give you the price of gold, or the Ferengi rules of acquisition, but not something useful like keeping track of your project time.

I just want something simple.  Something that lets you clock in, clock out and exports to Excel.  I found an applicaiton that does most of those thing (sans Excel export) here.  If I feel really ambitios, this might be a simple application that would warrent me making a forray into Mac programming.  I’d like to get experience doing that, but I’m not sure if now is the time to be teaching myself a new programming environment.