Daniel Hardy

Turn any RSS feed into a slide show

Today I was educating myself on a new format for creating slide shows called “S5“.  It is an open format that can create slide shows using XHTML/CSS and Javascript.  These shows can intern be run in any modern browser making them truly platform independent.  For the most part the standard is extremely well thought out and holds a great deal of promise.

In my research I found a great tool that will convert a RSS feed into a S5 presentation.   Give it a shot and see how flexible this format really is.

How did I miss this gem!

In writing my last article about the various search engines I came across a fun site called Ubuntu Popularity Content.    This site shows the number of downloads and installs for every package in the Ubuntu repository.  It is certainly an interesting look at what people are using and if you are an Ubuntu users I suggest you take a look, maybe you will find a great new package.

A different view…

I just discovered a great way to watch the election results come in while hearing what other techies are thinking.  If you are reading this after Super Tuesday I suggest you book mark the link and take a look at it in November.

See what I am talking about over at Google Maps

Blacklisted by Microsoft

When I started this blog I paid careful attention to my search rankings at the big three search engines (google, yahoo, and live.com) for the term “Daniel Hardy”. Shortly after its inception I was able to snag the #1 slot at Live.com, #3 slot at yahoo.com and #4 slot at google.com. Today the picture has changed a bit with the most interesting jump coming from Live.com.

It appears that I am no longer listed at Live.com. I am not sure how this works as my rankings on the other two have increased to #1 at yahoo and #2 at google. The conspiracy theorist in me (while small) thinks that perhaps all the discussions of Ubuntu are at the root of this decline. More likely this is a great demonstration of what a difference there is between these search providers.

Personally I find this difference to be extremely valuable. It is like a second opinion or another perspective on a given topic. Unfortunately one of these companies may soon be broken apart and melted into one of the other two. Hopefully this will not be the case but it is a tough world and Google is a monster of a competitor.

Dynamic Comment System

Yesterday a friend of mine showed me a great dynamic comment system being used over at deadspin.com . After seeing it in action I decided it would be fun to implement something similar on my site (even if I rarely get any comments). I have whipped up a bit of Javascript and tweaked my template a bit to support it. Please leave a comment and let me know what you think. If it gets decent reviews I can great a tutorial on how to easily implement it on a typical WordPress theme.

Making friends with HAL

As of late I have been having some trouble with HAL(Hardware Abstraction Layer). I finally found the solution and decided I would post it here in case anyone else my need it. The symptoms of this problem are simple. When Gnome boots up you get an error stating “failed to initialize HAL”. There are many problems that can cause this error but the one that I keep running into was tricky to find but extremely easy to resolve.

It boils down to a boot order issue where dbus and HAL are scheduled to boot at the same time. The problem with this is that often HAL requires dbus to be up and running. To figure out if this is the specific cause you can take a look at the /etc/rc2.d/ folder. You simply want to make sure HAL’s three digit prefix comes after dbus’s. For example “S12dbus” followed by “S13hal”. If it doesn’t simply execute something like the following command in the terminal. Make sure you change it to match your system.

If you have ran into this problem I hope this will help you get it fixed.

The Audi Experience

Today I received an interesting item from Audi. It was basically a ‘welcome to the club’ type package but done on a completely different level then I have seen before. Every aspect of this mailing was Audi through and through. There was all sorts of handy information included like what items are covered under the warranty, a catalog of features that can be added post purchase and my personal favorite, an experience guide book.

Audi certainly has shown again that they care about user experience from start to finish. The real test will be when I take my car in for its first schedule maintenance. I will be sure to post back how it goes.

Screen Shot Update

It has been a while since I have shown my updated desktop… then again it has looked like this for a long while.

Site Change

Well, I said a while back that I would be changing the theme. Over the last several months I have struggled with creating a theme that I felt was good enough and fit my personal style. Today I have finally given up. This theme could be considerable better on multiple fronts and doesn’t fulfill the previous statements but I decided it was finally time to just post something. I am not sure how long it will stick around for but at least I got it up.

HoneyPot Spam Fighting

I have been working on various forum validation techniques lately and came across a simple idea that seems to make a lot of sense. You can read more about it here. The basic idea is that you include a hidden form element. If this element is filled in then it is probably a bot that doesn’t understand CSS or Javascript. When handling this submission you know that you can ignore it.