All things tech

I was revising the tutorial on Mark The Dark and decided I needed some graphics.  Seeing that I’m cheap, I looked for free stock photo sites.  I compiled a list of the best sites I found.  These photos are great for using on websites when you want to fill up an empty space or even if you’re printing something.  Make sure you read the terms of use–their licenses differ depending on the site and the photographer.  Here’s the list (in rough order of usefulness):

Stock Exchange
Free Photos Bank
photocase
OpenPhoto
Morguefile
BigFoto
Pixel Perfect Digital
FreeImages
FreeFoto
Aarin Free Photo
NASA
NOAA
National Park Service
gimp savvy (Index of other free stock photo sites)

Two things about RyanAir, an Irish airline, came out on the news this week that are particularly appalling.  Both their rude response to a blogger and a potential new pay to pee policy tell me that RyanAir hates their customers.

RyanAir’s and the blogger

Jason Roe wrote in his blog about what he thinks is a bug in RyanAir’s website.  Some RyanAir employees saw it and left some pretty rude (IMHO) comments.  Among them are:

• “…you are so stupid you dont even know how you did it!…what self respecting developer uses a crappy CMS such as word press anyway ND puts they’re mobile ph number online, i suppose even a prank call is better than nothing on a lonely sat evening!!”
• “If you would work in your pathetic life on a such big project in a such busy environment with so little resources, you would know that the most important is to have usual user behavior scenarios working rather than spending time on improbable and harmless things…”

The response of RyanAir PR is equally rude.  I would have expected them to refute (if necessary) and apologize for the event.  Here’s what they said:

“Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion.

“It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again.

“Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel”.

Pay to pee

I saw on the news that RyanAir CEO Michael O’Leary announced “One thing we have looked at in the past and are looking at again is the possibility of maybe putting a coin slot on the toilet door so that people might actually have to spend a pound (about $1.43) to spend a penny in future.”

There’s a weird, undescriptive error you might come across if you use the CMS editor in PrestaShop.  It will say “an error occurred while updating object cms ()”.  That isn’t very helpful.  It turns out that there are some “taboo” words that aren’t allowed to be used.  It looks like it’s there to prevent sql hacking.  If you get this error, check your content for the following words and replace them with something different: union, load_file, outfile, dumpfile, escaped, terminated, cascade, infile, x509, trigger, revoke

For the 1234567890 countdown, I celebrated by watching coolepochcountdown.  It was pretty exciting.  When it was time, the screen flashed and fireworks were shot and music was played!  Here’s a screenshot.

This past weekend, I went to Seattle Startup Weekend 2 and talked about it at jongela.  In this post, I’ll talk about the more technical parts of the experience.  When we first got there, several people (over 50 of them!) gave quick idea pitches.  They ranged from cooking websites to crowdsourcing to iPhone apps.  A comprehensive list can be found here and here.  After eliminating the less popular ideas, we got to choose between the finalist ideas.

Here are some of the ideas that I thought were cool.  The purpose of Onevite (later called 1nvite) is to send one invite that will add a person’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social network accounts all at once.  Wishing Well (later named FavorWish) was a website where people can list their wishes and have their wishes fulfilled (described as a “pay it forward for the web”).

I chose to join the eco-friendly commuting competition project.  We named it TripChamp.  This project utilizes a competition setup to encourage people to reduce their carbon footprint.  We’ll be marketing to businesses that want to help their employees be more eco-friendly.  Watch the TripChamp Screencast.

The people on our team were Dave Albano, Kevin Leneway, Nina Strasser, Elizabeth Grigg, Angela Chin, and me.  Our team worked out really well.  Dave was our leader and provided the vision.  Nina, Elizabeth, and Angela worked on designing the UI and the page content.  I worked with Kevin on doing the actual programming.  I did most of the database interface and functionality while Kevin did the styling and screencast.  It all worked out well.

We developed the website using CodeIgniter.  This helped A LOT in getting the website live as quick as possible.  Using DX Auth and CodeIgniter sessions cut a lot of the programming work involved.

I learned a lot from this weekend.  I networked with lots of really bright people and I’m already looking forward to the next one!

I came across this problem when looking to install Google Apps on a domain.  It gives me this problem on both of my computers as well as some VMs I have.  I don’t know why I’m having this problem–I don’t know a single thing in Chinese and have never selected that for a language.

I wanted information on what they would provide for a non-profit, but this affects the links to pages for schools and ISPs also.  A Google search took me to the landing page at http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html .  When I scroll down to the bottom and click on “schools,” “non-profits,” or “ISPs,” I get taken to a Chinese page.  When I click on the language drop-down and select “English,” I get taken back to the Google Apps landing page, not the pages with information for schools, non-profits, or ISPs.  I got around this by just doing a Google search instead and avoiding the Google Apps landing page.  This isn’t a mission-critical problem, but definitely an annoyance.  Here are some screenshots:

On January 15, 2008 a US Airways plane (flight 1549) made a crash landing in the Hudson River.  Luckily, there was not a single fatality.  Before they leave to pick up their loved ones, many people check the flight status to make sure it’s on time.  So I wondered: does it tell them that the flight crashed (certainly, that would cause panic)?  or does it tell them the flight arrived or is delayed (that would likely cause confusion)?

When flight 1549 crashed, I decided to observe how they handled it.  I found that various websites handled it differently.  Several websites listed that it had already arrived at the destination.  Flightstats.com showed that the flight had landed, but was 19 minutes late (screenshot shown to the right).  True, they had landed…but not at the destination. When I went to USAirways.com, their site was bogged down for a couple hours because of all the traffic.

I finally managed to reach their flight status page after several tries.  Rather than display a status, the website instructed the user to call the airline (screenshot shown below).  Which is smart, when you think about it.  It’s a more service-oriented and accurate way of handling the situation.  And then they can give those concerned more information as it comes out.  Well executed!

Over the holidays, we took a trip through Idaho, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and California.  When we were booking our Los Angeles-Seattle flight, we found that Virgin America was the cheapest flight at $80 per seat.  The next cheapest was about $110 on Southwest.  For almost all the cases that I’ve checked, Virgin has cheaper rates than any other airline.  I hadn’t really heard anything about them other than that they were fairly new, so I was pretty eager to see how they fared.

Parts of the flight impressed me while other parts disappointed.  When we first got to the LAX airport, we found that there were three agents checking people in.  Luckily, nobody was in line when we checked in.  Checkin wasn’t particularly painful other than the less-than-eager attitude of the agents.  I felt like the process took a lot longer than it should.  A few minutes after we checked in, the line had developed to about 30 people and the throughput seemed to be really slow.

The plane felt a bit newer and cleaner than others I’ve been on.  I know that doesn’t really matter to most people, but it’s something I notice.  Legroom felt like it was an inch more than normal.  This isn’t to say that it’s spacious–just that it was less uncomfortable than normal.

I was impressed that all the seats have a touchscreen display built into them and the armrests have a builtin remote control.  The screen was pretty intuitive, but the large number of options might confuse people.  Among others, there are options to watch TV, watch movies, and play games.  The games are free but some of the shows cost money.  BTW I didn’t buy headphones because they charge $2 for them and I’m cheap.  I think that if you brought your own, they’d work.  There were many features that you could click on, but it would just tell you that that feature hasn’t been developed.  One of these was the ability to instant message other people on the plane.  That would be the coolest (IMHO) feature of all!  I don’t know when or how they’ll implement that, but I look forward to seeing it.

I recognized the games as ones made for Linux, so I assume that their systems are powered by Linux.  The remote control pops out of the armrest so you can use it as a game controller or type.  My guess is that in the future, they’ll let you browse the internet on those displays.

The flight attendants came around midflight as most do and offerred the standard drinks.  However, they didn’t offer us anything to eat with the drinks.  I don’t like drinking without eating.  I wanted my 10 cent peanuts at least.  When Southwest Airlines gives me two or three packages of peanuts, that makes my entire flight a good experience.

After the novelty of the touchscreen displays wore off, I tried to get some sleep.  The plane was lit up with some really annoying blue lights.  I think it was supposed to make the plane feel trendy and space age, which it was effective at.  However, those lights were the same brightness when we were in the air as they were when we were on the ground.  It made it really hard for sleeping.  They should really just turn those off.  I don’t need to feel cool while we’re flying.

Would I fly them again?  Definitely.  The low fares and cool entertainment is really attractive.  Just remember to bring your headphones.

I came across an interesting article on Data Center Knowledge.  It compiled a few statistics about Facebook usage.  Here’s a quick overview:

Total users: 140 million
New users: over 600,000 per day
Users outside the US: 70%
User profiles updated: 13 million per day
Average friends: 100 per user
Photos hosted: 10 billion
Photos added: 700 million per month
Videos added: 4 million per month
Active user groups: 19 million

I showed these stats to my wife, who said “wow, that’s a lot of time wasted.” The Facebook statistics page says that 2.6 billion minutes are spent on Facebook every day. Calculated out, this amounts to a collective 4,947 human years being wasted every day on Facebook. If we assume it takes one minute to update your Facebook status, that amounts to almost 25 human years being wasted each day just to announce that you’re “watching tv” or “staying inside tonight” (those are the statuses displayed at the top of my Facebook news feed right now).

I decided to make a website (markthedark.com) to be a light graffiti community.  If you don’t know what light graffiti is, it’s a fun technique where you take LED (and other) lights and “draw” while the camera is taking the picture (you have to adjust your camera settings to do this).  Light graffiti is pretty fun and almost everybody that I’ve talked to has enjoyed it.

Although there are several blogs and flickr galleries on the internet where people post their art, there wasn’t any site that really serves as a community–share and see others’ artwork, talk and learn about techniques, get ideas, etc.  Right now it’s just a gallery–sort of a Digg for light graffiti.  But I’m working on adding a forum and more “best practices” info.  If you have any advice, requests, or bug reports, please email me!