Categories
Design Development

Mini Giants

Hundred10: “We were excited to work with the Grizzlies on their iPhone app because of their position as marketing innovators in within MiLB. We threw some crazy ideas at them (some of which will have to wait for version 2.0) during the design phase and not once did they tell us to leave the room, which was a nice bonus. And all the app goodness is served up in delicious Retina Display high-res glory.”

My favorite feature is Card Me. It’s easy to use and you can publish your pictures to Facebook. Neat.

Here’s to many, many, more Hundred10 mobile applications.

Categories
Sports

Giants

NY Times: “It was their first championship in 56 years, and their first as a San Francisco team. And team they were — not a consortium of superstars, but a smooth blend of rising stars and nonstars, of rejects and never-beens, modestly compensated by Yankees and Red Sox standards, but hard-working and well-anchored by a staff of awesome starting pitchers, all in their 20s.”

The Giants are proof you don’t need the NY Yankees roster of super stars to win a World Series. A bunch of work-a-day guys. I love that, and wish we had more of that in today’s professional sports.

Categories
Apple iOS Mac

Setting yourself apart

Daring Fireball: “The whole point of Apple’s success with iOS has been the opposite of “write once, run anywhere”. It’s more like “write a version that is specifically optimized for this particular device”.”

This is one of the things I love about Apple. A lot of companies would be fine with slapping some simple mouse based helpers into their emulator, change it ever so slightly so it works on the desktop, and ship it. Apple doesn’t do that. They tune their software for the hardware platform. As it should be.

Categories
fun Holiday Life

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman.The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving:“The next morning the old horse was found without his saddle, and with the bridle under his feet, soberly cropping the grass at his master’s gate. Ichabod did not make his appearance at breakfast—dinner-hour came, but no Ichabod. The boys assembled at the schoolhouse, and strolled idly about the banks of the brook; but no school-master. Hans Van Ripper now began to feel some uneasiness about the fate of poor Ichabod, and his saddle. An inquiry was set on foot, and after diligent investigation they came upon his traces. In one part of the road leading to the church was found the saddle trampled in the dirt; the tracks of horses’ hoofs deeply dented in the road, and evidently at furious speed, were traced to the bridge, beyond which, on the bank of a broad part of the brook, where the water ran deep and black, was found the hat of the unfortunate Ichabod, and close beside it a shattered pumpkin.”

Like I said, be careful tonight trick or treaters.

Categories
fun Holiday Life

Happy Halloween!

Trick or treaters, be careful out there. Watch out for ghouls and ghosts as well as dogs and cars.

Come on by for some candy, if you dare.

Categories
MLOTW

Movie line of the week answer

Good morning movie liners! Hey, I actually posted the answer on Friday!

No takers this week. Our line comes from a classic Halloween Horror Film…

Halloween II

See you next Thursday.

Categories
MLOTW

Movie line of the week

Hollywood!Good morning movie liners! I’ve been pretty bad about this lately, and haven’t been keep up as I should. I’m trying.

Here we go, good luck!

It’s Time, Michael.

Ok, quick, what movie! Send your guesses here.

Categories
Life

Fixing Shorten2Ping for WordPress

I’ve been using WordPress for my weblog for quite a while now and I find the ability to extend the basic functionality to be one of its greatest strengths. The developer community is amazing to say the least. I rely on a number of plugins to publish this weblog, but none more than Shorten2Ping by Samuel Aguilera.

Shorten2Ping allows me to use the excellent ping.fm, which allows me to post updates to all of my social networks, so when I publish a new weblog post Twitter, Facebook, and a couple of other spots are automagically updated for me. No fuss, no muss… until recently.

To get Shorten2Ping to work I have to provide an API key assigned by ping.fm. This is basically a handshake that allows Shorten2Ping to communicate with ping.fm on my behalf and publish my updates. (Yes, that’s an oversimplification, but you get what I mean.) About a week, or so, ago Shorten2Ping started receiving “Your API key has been suspended. Please contact us regarding this matter.” messages from ping.fm when I’d publish a post. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, turns out I wasn’t the only person with this problem. The author of Shorten2Ping got to the bottom of it. Ping.fm had a spam problem and disabled his developer key.

“The problem is that seesmic suspended it because they say that Shorten2Ping is used by spammers users.”

What to do?

All is not lost. Samuel patched up his plugin, and with any luck it’s going to work when I publish this page. If it doesn’t I’ll publish an update to this post, but hopefully it’ll work first time out.

There are a couple of things you’ll need to do after updating Shorten2Ping, it should show up in your WordPress Updates, so go install it.

First thing you’ll need to do is visit ping.fm and copy your posting e-mail address. Once you have that you’ll need to go to Plugins, locate Shorten2Ping and click on Settings link.

Next you’ll want to select Ping.fm email from the Send Notificaiton To combo-box.

Finally click on the Notification link and paste the e-mail address you copied from ping.fm and paste it into Posting email

Once you’ve done that you should be able to post using WordPress and once again update all your favorite social networks.

UPDATE: This fix requires more than the above steps to work. Apparently you’ll need support from your web host. The new Shorten2Ping “fix” requires the php mail() function. Apparently I don’t have that support enabled, and many folks probably don’t. I’d imagine it’s a security risk. Maybe we can convince Samuel to create Shorten2DlvrIt? Dlvr.it will also publish to your social networks just like ping.fm.

Categories
fun Life

Extreme Pumpkin Carving

Frankie.Villafane Studios: “If you have yet to try and carve a pumpkin in a 3-D manner you need to. Its fun and everybody enjoys a cool pumpkin. Unfortunately they begin to rot less than a week after carving so be sure to take plenty of pictures. You can experiment with ways of preserving them but I find nothing works better than a nice photo. Some chefs that I have carved for put lemon juice on the faces to help slow down the natural molding process that will occur.”

You gotta love “Extreme” Pumpkin carving. Wish I had the skill to do this sort of stuff. I’ll bet there are some folks at LEVEL that could do this.

Categories
Movies

Bucking the trend

Why so serious?Hero Complex (LA Times): “Nolan was most eager to talk about the fact that Warner Bros. had agreed with his argument that the film should resist the current 3-D craze and instead use high-definition approaches and IMAX cameras to strike out on a different cinematic path than the stereoscopic technology that, for better or worse, has become the dominant conversation in the blockbuster sector.”

Thank goodness someone has sense enough to move away from this horrible 3-D trend. Just make great movies, you don’t need 3-D.