Too few hours in the day //Jafoca.com

So what happens when Internet services are combined with a search engine and a command prompt?  Mash up goodness.

Ubiquity is a new FireFox mashup engine of sorts that allows users to on the fly generate mashups of Internet services that operate with XML RPC calls.  Basically it allows data to be pulled together from different sources to create what is called a mash up.  My favorite mashup example is Whrr.  Whrrl is a mashup of google maps and a database of points of interest, allowing for the bookmarking and logging of reviews for places such as restaurants and businesses.  Once combined with an iphone client application, you can also track your current location and make that info free to your friends to use.  So mashups are pretty cool.

But how does Ubiquity play into this?  Ubiquity is a firefox plugin that allows on the fly generation of mashups from a command line like utility.  Now, mashups are not specifically easy to generate even for a somewhat skilled programmer.  They require knowledge of the API interfaces of the services you would like to mash up, which can be a challenge.  Ubiquity eliminates some of these challenges by doing the mashing up part for you.  The demos of Ubiquity that I have seen can take a snippet from a website and email it to a contact in gmail with the simple command “mail to ‘contact’”.  Essentially it is supposed to know what you want to do, which is the remarkable part.

It supposedly can do just about anything from posting to a blog to inserting maps and restaurant reviews into email.  But the versatility of mashups come at a price – usability is still nowhere even close to what the common Internet user can handle.  It is a good step, but in time it will need to be better.

People like to hate on Microsoft.  People REALLY like to hate on Vista.  I feel that is mostly because (unfortunately for Obama) people are resistant to change.

Regardless of those feelings, anybody who has bothered to give Vista’s sister product, Office 2007, a proper try have nothing but praise for the latest offering of the office suite.  It is more user friendly, and quicker to work with at the same time.

Microsoft is making an incredible offer to students again this year, $59.95 for the entire office 2007 Ultimate (the big one) suite.  Very nice.  I took advantage last year, and am going to try to get another copy so that I can run Groove on more than one of my systems.  =P

I have really enjoyed watching the Olympics this summer.  The opening ceremony was spectacular, world records are being

via Editrix on Flickr

broken almost every day, and Michael Phelps has just been a phenom in the pool – which is great.

However, I can’t help but feeling that there is something of a taint over the games this time around.  Amid accusations of doping it is hard enough to enjoy sports that have lost some levels of legitimacy (at least I am confident that Phelps is not doping…), yet China has been cheating the Olympics in another way – repeatedly.

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So yesterday we discovered a bug in the Blue Sky Sessions website.  I think that I probably introduced it when I was fiddling with getting our contact form looking pretty last week, although I have no idea how as the contact form is not presented with the portfolio where the bug occurred.  The bug consisted of the entire layout being shifted to the left hand side of the screen from its normal centered position, quite embarrassing.  It only happened in IE, and was only on one of our pages.

Anyhow – I took to looking at the code and found that structurally the template was exactly the same as the other pages, so it should have been centered.  I really could not find this bug!  Getting frustrated, I asked Barry (my boss / coworker) to have a look at it.  After deleting most of the page he noticed that I was missing an HTML DOCTYPE declaration.  Yuck.

He put this in and of course (silly me, I should have thought of that…) it worked.  The doctype tells the browser how to parse the HTML code, I did not realize that it had actual importance to interpretation so I was not too attentive to it in the past.

An example doctype declaration is:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>

So anyway, if you are having goofy HTML bugs then be sure to check out your doctype.  An excellent reference for anything HTML is w3schools.

Testing the stuff and the things. This is a test of the iPhone wordpress program.

Oops- photos don’t work with my configuration…

matt Scott is gone

Woohoo! Photo blogging from my phone now works!