One Brush to Rule Them All

We're working on a new site for our college ministry which is launching in the fall. Zak's been doing the design for the site and after several years I've finally convinced him that Fireworks is a great tool for web design. He did a template redesign for the Youth section of our site last week and has become a new Fireworks convert.

This week however, neither of us is a big fan. We wanted to use some design elements that can be easily handled by a Photoshop brush. The problem is that the workflow for using those brushes in Fireworks is horrible. We would LOVE to use Photoshop .abr brushes in Fireworks, other apps too.

Here's the current workflow:

1. Start a design for a web page in Fireworks
2. Realize your banner would be better if you used a couple of Photoshop brushes
3. Discover that FW doesn't support add-in brushes
4. Open PS, design a banner graphic in Photoshop using brushes
5. Import the banner into Fireworks
6. Update the page layout for the new banner
   
7. Realize the banner needs an update
8. Go back to PS, update the graphic
   
9. Reimport into FW - basically starting over with the banner in FW
10. Repeat as needed
11. Slice up your design to convert to HTML
12. Go back and make tweaks based on feedback - leaping back to step 8

Here's what I'd like (either of these would work). Easy solution might be for editing capability in a similar fashion to what Illustrator will allow for a linked/embedded image. Ideal solution would be for .ABR brushes to be supported in as many Adobe apps as possible. Who wouldn't love to have PS brushes available in Flash, Fireworks, Illustrator, and maybe even After Effects in addition to Photoshohp?

This ideal solution has prompted this graphic and shirt designs.

College Ministry Sound Gear

Justin & Gear

Unboxing


Basic Setup


M400 Boxes

 

 

Last fall we received a grant to help us fund buying a portable audio setup for our college ministry. We're going to be moving our college worship to the Missouri State campus rather than doing it here at Schweitzer.

As far as our research (and a lot of students) have told us we'll be doing the only full-band worship within walking distance of MSU. I'm incredibly excited about the possibilities.

We finally got around to ordering the equipment and it showed up yesterday. I figured it would be fairly big, but I didn't expect what we received. For some perspective on the size I made my friend Justin stand next to the wrapped pallet. It really isn't all that much stuff, but the packing to ship it is ridiculous. 

Several people have been giving me advice about the system so I thought I'd post a basic list of what ended up in our gym yesterday.

• 2 RCF Mains - 12" drivers, 350w
• 2 RCF Subs - 15" drivers, 800w
• 4 Mackie SRM 150s (for monitors)
• 2 ART headphone amps for wired in-ear
• 4 Shure SM58 mics
• 2 Shure SM57 mics
• 2 Shure ULX wireless mics (one Beta 87 and one Countryman headset)
• Bags, cases, and a pile of cables 

I'd had a couple of people tell me that they really liked the Kaltman Cable Coiler, so I decided to give it a try as well. Quality cables are expensive, and if this can make sure they always get coiled properly and can do it quickly it will be an absolute win. 

You'll notice that what's lacking in this setup is any type of a mix console. I'm really torn about that purchase. We decided that we wanted to go digital for a lot of reasons, but that's a different post. I've got experience (as do a lot of people) with Yamaha consoles and been pleased with them. While I was talking to our rep at Full Compass (we love them by the way) he suggested looking at the Roland M-400 system. 

The M-400 is a new console from Roland which raises some issues with me. It's built around the digital snake (40 channels over cat5) that Roland has had out for  awhile and I know many people who have been using it and are happy. We've got a demo unit for the next week so we can evaluate it before making the purchase. Initial impressions are good. We're doing a more thorough review with a full band this weekend so I'll write more later.

More big announcements related to the college ministry next week. 

Great Ash Wednesday

We had a great Ash Wednesday service last night. We had a short acoustic worship set with Kathy and Stephanie. It was also our first attempt at any type of architectural projection. I love the stuff Cameron Ware is doing at Irving Bible Church and been planning something of our own. Ash Wednesday is a good service to do this type of experiment - it's not Sunday and the crowd is generally pretty flexible. We set up an Optoma EP1691 projector at the back of the sanctuary about 10 feet off the ground pointed at the front wall. We used imagery from Awake Images, a large celtic cross. The throw from the projector to the wall is about 85 feet at the farthest point. I love that this is possible with a $1,000 projector and a laptop. We're going to do a similar set up for Good Friday. I'm hoping that we'll be able to incorporate a more permanent setup to establish this type of atmosphere more often. in the not to distant future.

NB: Something went arwy with the publishing of this, it's actually from last Thursday. 

Hacked Web Server Back Online

If you've been following my Twitter you know that the web server at Schweitzer got hacked. Whoever broke in didn't do a very solid job, and managed to kill the network before doing anything terribly malicious. The site was only down about 12 hours. After looking through the system it looks like the vulnerability was caused by my not patching ssh reliably (it was several versions out of date). The server rebuild was time consuming, but easy. The biggest hurdle was slow mirrors for downloading the most recent linux ISOs. This sort of thing is a known risk of running our servers in house. The good news is that our backup strategy was rock solid and there wasn't any data loss (maybe a couple of hours). As an expansion of our current approach to backups I'm going to set up a duplicate server that mirrors the home tree of the main server hourly. In the event of the main system going offline for whatever reason we'll be able to bring up the mirror just by adjusting the firewall. Hopefully we'll never have to use it, but having a hot spare web system seems like a good idea.

Testing Twitterfeed

I just set up an account at twitterfeed. I figure that I haven't blogged regularly for awhile, so having new posts show up in my twitter feed might be a good idea. Not sure how long I'll leave it set up, but it may help to both prompt more posting and get some traffic back to the blog.

Leopard: First Impressions

I finally got Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5, installed yesterday. So far I've got to say its nice. I started the install yesterday while we were prepping for Saturday night worship, and it was up and running before the service was over.

I really like the UI updates (except for the mirror dock). Stacks are great. I've consolidated a lot of my applications into stacks to clean up the dock - a stack for CS3 Master Collection, Final Cut Studio, iWork, Office. Other nice features, when doing a screen shot of a region the crosshair shows a tooltip of x/y coordinates and then clipping dimensions. 

Last night I hooked up a drive for Time Machine. It took most of the night to do a backup, but the UI is gorgeous. It's not the most functional backup tool I've ever used, but it's easy. Ultimately when it comes to back ups, easy is WAY more important than a powerful interface, because if it's easy people will actually use it. Time Machine is brain-dead simple.

Spotlight is much improved. It's faster, includes dictionary definitions, does math like Google (which lets me take Calculator out of my dock). The speed improvement is much needed, and greatly appreciated.

While the CoverFlow view in the Finder is nice it's a bit silly in my opinion. Quick Look on the other hand is great - it lets you preview documents without opening the main application. This is great for Office documents, PDF files, and other files that might be used for quick reference. I'm already using Quick Look and liking it. The Finder has other UI improvements that make it a joy to use - a better sidebar, a breadcrumb like path view, 

I haven't had a chance to use the iChat screen sharing yet, but I'm very excited about this feature. I think that there will be countless uses for remote desktop collaboration. It will be useful for training, for quick fixes without having to walk across the room. It will dramatically improve collaboration.

My favorite feature of Leopard is Spaces. It's essentially lets you set up multiple desktops on your computer. I intend to have a space for video editing, general web/email, miscellaneous documents, and Parallels. I was really pleased to discover that Parallels will stay in full-screen within a Space. This way I can have a Space dedicated to full-screen Windows (I know it's silly, but I use Windows only apps almost every day). Spaces makes it easy to have a lot of applications running and not have your screen be a jumble of windows. 

I'm sure I'll come across many more features of Leopard that I like, but these are the ones that win out in a few hours of use.

Flash Versions: schweitzerumc.org

I was evaluating some new content for the church web site this morning and I got to wondering what the ubiquity of Flash Player 9 was for the population that accesses our site. Thanks to Google Analytics I was able to quickly look at the information. I was pleasantly shocked by what I found: 

Flash Player 9:  91.20%
Flash Player 8:   5.67%
Flash Player 7:   2.20%
No Flash:          0.93%

If you look at the chart below you'll note that the blue is FP9 and the tiny green sliver is no FP installed. 

That's right, over 90% of our web using population has FP9 installed. This pretty well eliminates any concern I have about using FP9 specific content (that content might even drive the other 7% to upgrade).

So why did this surprise me? Schweitzer is a multigenerational church. In our case the population is pretty evenly spread among retirees, middle-aged, young adults, and children/youth. I know many of the older folks in the church use our web site and assumed there might be a bit of lag in adoption. When we revised the site last winter FP8 was the overwhelming winner. It's even more interesting that there are no really old versions of Flash Player, Player 7 is the oldest  version in our population. What does this mean? Primarily it means that as we build our media player this fall we can target FP9 specific features and know there won't be a huge uproar.

airSIGNS - AIR Digital Signage

So I'm working on my first official AIR application. I'm hoping to get it done prior to the onAIR bus tour landing in St. Louis.  We're going to be installing five, 42" LCD displays throughout the church in August and I didn't want to spend the money on a canned signage solution that only partially met our needs. The solution is to develop one ourselves. It seemed like a great project to do with Adobe AIR.

Here is a rough feature list:

• import of XML from SlideShowPro Director
• import  RSS/ATOM
• import ICS data
• display loop of images parsed from XML data (initially SSP, later RSS/ATOM)
  
• ticker of daily events (initially RSS/ATOM, later ICS)
• ticker of news items (RSS/ATOM)
• swapable layouts for 4x3 or 16x9 presentation
• multiple display windows for output on several video cards
• countdown timer for upcoming worship services

There is a real spec, and UI mockups, but I'm pretty sure that it will be changing over the next week. My goal this week is to flesh out most of the features that are needed in some form of usable code. So far I've gotten SVN setup and running, trained my assistant Zak to use source control and started prototyping components. Zak has done the basic Flex tutorials and is now working on a countdown timer for the signs. It'll be fun to watch him learn Flex and AS3 at the same time on a real project.

Right now I've got a slideshow component that takes the XML, parses it, and displays the images in a loop. I've also got a simple ticker (no RSS feed for it yet though). I'm beating my head against the window API trying to get custom positioning to work on a new window, so far no luck.

Long-term I'm going to make this thing allow user-definable layouts with a variety of mashup style widgets for various services. It should be a fun project.

Social Networking Overload

I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed and underwhelmed by all of the social networking widgets that are available these days. I'm currently on MySpace (though I can't remember when I last logged in to it), Facebook, Twitter, and Pownce. Not to mention the several others I've messed around with and don't remember. Add to that the blog and an IM client on several networks. It's overwhelming. I can answer the "What are you doing?" question in at least five different venues. I used to keep a Facebook browser tab and Twitterific running. To that I've added the Pownce AIR application (my Pownce id is kerner btw). I fear the ever expanding number of status fields to fill in will leave me with a status of "filling my status in on social networking tools" all of the time.

Pownce basically seems like Twitter with extra features like events and file transfers, but fewer people. These features are great, but without more people connected on pownce it's not very effective. If anybody needs an invite I've still got a few left. Just leave a comment.

At what point do we really divide ourselves rather than connect because of all of the different connection tools?  Will any given tool win eventually or will the next tool come out and add another to the stable of required updates. Sooner or later some consolidation has to occur. What are your thoughts?

FCP Studio 2: Color

I just completed the first video with substantial color correction and grading using Apple Color today. It was quite a nice process. In four quadrant image below you can see each of the clips from these interviews. In clips A and B you can see clips that had the exposure properly set prior to the shoot. I didn't adjust the exposure for clip C and in clip C the corrected version of clip C.  

The workflow was relatively smooth and I found the interface for this type of quick correction to be much better than using the integrated FCP color correction tools. Outputting a sequence from Final Cut creates a Color project that has all of the clips in your  sequence and lets you correct each of them independently. Sending back to FCP creates a new sequence. For the final grading I exported the movie and reimported to a new sequence (as a reference movie). I sent that third sequence to Color and applied a slight gamma correction (for our a projectors, a blur masked by a soft-edged vignette, and a flim look to get a bit of graininess on the image. Below you can see the raw footage top and the final color grading on the bottom (click for a larger image).

Adobe Community Summit 2007

I've spent this week in San Jose at the Adobe offices for the annual community summit. This is a great event that Adobe puts on for user group managers and community experts. The event serves two purposes for me. It energizes me creatively to see what everybody else is doing and learn what is on the horizon for Adobe software. It also lets me reconnect with a great group of people. Over the past 10 years as a UGM I've built some outstanding relationships even though we generally only see each other once or twice a year. The format for the event works really well: there was a training day on Monday, presentations by senior management and product groups on Tuesday/Wednesday, and another day of training today (Thursday).

So what am I excited about after this week?

1. Lots of stuff that I can't talk about. A substantial amount of the information presented at the event is under NDA. Respecting the NDA is the only way we're able to get this type of information ahead of the general public. It helps us better plan for our groups and serve as first-line reps for Adobe.
2. MAX 2007. Ted Patrick is in leading the MAX endeavor and promises that it will be a MUCH better event. I've been pretty open about the fact that other than a few sessions, the networking, and the creative energy MAX isn't the best of conferences. This year is going to be different.
   
3. AIR - Adobe Integrated Runtime. Other than the name this is sweet (when you say it is it "air" or is it "error" this will cause problems). What's AIR? It was codenamed Apollo and it is the runtime that lets web app developers build first-tier desktop apps using either html/javascript or Flex/Flash. The beta was released on Labs on Monday along with Flex 3 and a plug-in for Dreamweaver for HTML apps. A bus tour is even planned for the late summer wrapping up at MAX.
   
4. Open Source. Adobe is embracing open source in a way that is going to substantially impact the industry. The biggest example to date is that the Flex framework is being opened under the MPL. Dave McAlister gave a great presentation summing up open souce at Adobe including discussion of licenses, strategy, and the impact it's having at Adobe.

Google Apps

We're in the process of a major internet infrastructure shift at Schweitzer. By the end of June we should have migrated our connectivity from a T1 (part of which is used for voice lines) and a 100mb fiber connection. The resulting shift has a several of important implications. The first is that our day-to-day usage will be incredibly fast - other customers have told us that more often than not remote sites are the bandwidth bottleneck. The second is that we'll no longer need to off-site our bandwidth intensive materials because of the increased speed. Third we'll have to migrate all of our email away from our current provider (the subject of this post).

I've looked at a lot of options for our email infrastructure and ultimately I think we're going to go with the free Google Apps solution. Since we decided to make the connectivity switch I've been looking at a variety of solutions. Here was my basic evaluation path:

1. Look at setting up the same infrastructure we've used very reliably at Educara for years. This is a linux system with postfix, courier imap/pop, dspam spam filtering, clam-av virus scanning.
   
   Pros: Great level of control, storage limited by drive space, in-house administration, low cash start-up cost (can run on our existing internet server)
   
   Cons: Continuous maintenance to keep spam/virus filters current, loss of connectivity impacts email, limits administration to IT staff, high staff-time start-up cost
   
   
2. Look at other in-house solutions with outsourced spam/av filtering.
   
   Pros: Generally the same as #1 with the addition of no spam/av maintenance
   
   Cons: Similar to #1 without spam/av maintenance, monthly cost
   
   
3. Zimbra. This was my initial decision until I got a chance to play with Google Apps. I currently have a zimbra server running in a VM handling mail for one of our domains. Setup was quick, administration is easy.
   
   Pros: Easy set up, all the perks of running it on our own server,
   
   Cons: Same as #1
   
   
4. Hosted solution. I looked at a variety of hosted options from those using Zimbra to those at our domain registrar. Ultimately none of them really had the flexibility I was looking for without a cost that would be prohibitive this year. The main wall I kept hitting was storage space (we regularly hit the 100mb ceiling with our current provider).
    
5. Google Apps. Google Apps basically provides all of the services of Zimbra in a free (or paid) hosted
   solution. Most people have some experience with Gmail so training is minimized as well (there are also great docs online).
   
   Pros: No dependence on IT staff, proven infrastructure, option for paid support, large amount of storage, options for upgrades/support, google powered search, calendaring, etc
   
   Cons: Advertising in free version, no IMAP, dependent on google

Ultimately Google wins out for us. The free version provides fairly unobtrusive advertising, 2gb of storage/account, all the power of gmail, google documents, a branded start-page, it also gives us the ability to upgrade to the pro version when required/budget allows. We currently only need 30 mailboxes which makes the workload and infrastructure for dedicated hardware (or even a VM) seem like overkill.

The two big factors for me are cost and dependence on the IT team. We hadn't budgeted for this upgrade even though it is greatly needed - SpringNet worked with us to keep our monthly expenditure the same until next year's budget starts. Not having additional fees for email is a big plus. Secondly the IT team right now is me, a consultant, and a couple of volunteers. My biggest concern with hosting email ourselves was the IT requirement for support and contingency plans in the event of a server failure. 

A completely unrelated bonus is that we'll be able to migrate our email before all of the IP switching craziness starts. While we're going to overlap connectivity for awhile it will be nice for email to not disappear during that transition. 

Everybody I've talked to has been happy with Google's solution - I've never had any trouble with my mail there. Anybody have a different experience to share before I commit to this path?

Perian & ProPresenter

Perian is a great tool for playing various media types within Quicktime natively, including FLV. For some reason I'd never bothered to try it with ProPresenter. Turns out that you can natively play an FLV file quite well in ProPresenter. It obviously has the same quality as the FLV, but if you need to use videos published for the web in worship this is a perfect solution. This morning just as a test, I pulled an FLV straight from our web site, imported into ProPresenter and it worked flawlessly. Outstanding.

Contribute Blog Editing

Contribute may be responsible for increased blogging. Not sure how I'll feel having it open regularly, but the native editing is VERY slick. This post is really just a test of the functionality. I'll try posting some pictures at some point too.

So far, it's impressive though. I may get Contribute licenses for everybody in the church that is going to blog. It will probably make training and support much easier.

CS3 Goodness

After a week of having serial numbers for our CS3 licenses the media finally showed up yesterday. It's been a long week as I stripped my Powerbook of all the products that would be replaced by CS3 when I got the serials, assuming the media wouldn't be far behind. I'm glad it's the only computer that got the uninstall. For some reason our reseller didn't list ESD as an option for our volume license. In just a few hours of working I'm enjoying the integration that surpasses previous versions. The software I had access to during beta made me anticipate the entire suite. I can't wait to get the Master Collection when it ships - for now I'm making due in the media department with Web Premium (we also got Design Standard for our publication person). The performance on an Intel iMac makes me want to upgrade my Powerbook badly, but I can wait until the next machine update from Apple. The overall installation process makes me happy for two things: 1) Adobe offering non-profit pricing to churches and 2) how the fairly smooth integration of these apps is going to make me more productive. 

NAB Thoughts

I'm sitting in the Vegas airport waiting for my flight back to Springfield and pondering everything I've seen at NAB this past week. Here are my brief thoughts - some may get expanded entries later.

Technologies for Worship Conference - This conference was one of the main reasons I went to NAB this year. I've never been to an official church media event and I wanted to see if we were doing things similarly to other churches. Short answer is that Schweitzer's media is good, but is grossly underutilized (something that's been on my mind a lot before this event). The best part of this event was the hands-on sessions.

Final Cut Studio 2 - WOW! Multiformat timeline rocks, surround sound in Soundtrack looks great. This is going to be a must-have upgrade.

Adobe Media Player - I'm excited to see a desktop FLV player. This app is also an Apollo application which speaks well for that platform.

Red One - Red is going to fundamentally change the digital cinema industry. The short they were showing in the booth (shot by Peter Jackson and the WingNut team) was phenomenal. The quality of imagry from a "print" of Red footage is easily as good as film. The RedDrive/RedCode integration with Final Cut Pro is also sweet. It allows editing of raw 4k footage on the timeline. If you're wondering what that means SD video is 720 pixels wide, full HD is 1920 pixels wide, 2k is 2048 pixels wide and 4k is 4096 pixels wide. 4k footage is roughly what's used as a digital intermediate after laser scanning film. Being able to shoot and natively edit in FCP is killer - shoot, plug in the Red drive via firewire, and import to the timeline, then edit. The best part though is that this camera fully equiped is less than $40,000. Comperable cameras cost hundreds of thousands of dollars more. 

Walter Murch - Wednesday night I went to an event that featured a keynote by Walter Murch, a legendary film editor (Apocalypse Now, GodFather Part III, The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Cold Mountain, Ghost). He walked us through his philosophy as an editor through the scope of his most recent project, Francis Coppola's latest film Youth Without Youth.  This was a very insightful presentation. It's going to prompt me to make some shifts in the way we handle some of our video editing workflow at the church.

Final Thoughts - This was a great event. Lots of gear to review, met some very interesting people, and got a great perspective on the state of video gear for the coming year. I've been feeling a pull to produce a short again (I worked on two in college). I'm not sure how it will work in the scope of all other areas, but I think I'm going to start writing a short to shoot later this year.

Schweitzer Web Update Launched

Earlier this week we launched the updated Schweitzer web site. There are some substantial design updates and major infrastructure changes - switching to the Web Empowered Church platform, which is powered by Typo3. We still have some content to migrate, so this is basically a soft launch (the only announcement is on this blog). We hit some technical snags that delayed the launch by about two weeks and during that time we neglected the previous site - thinking "Oh, we'll be launching the new one tomorrow." The update task list had gotten so long that it made more sense to launch the new site and move content rather than update the old site.

Remaining items for the next week or so:

• Sermon information - I'm struggling with getting a template that looks good with the SMS.
• Staff bios - several people turned these in hand written, and I wasn't in the mood to spend time typing before the site was launched.
• Better blog tools - right now the pastors' blog is powered out of Typo3, but it will be moving to Movable Type and imported via RSS - see the youth section for an example. I'd much rather train our pastors to use MT than Typo3 - our Youth Pastor already has it down.
• Servant Connector - We're right now updating our master opportunity list. Once that is complete the web team will get the core list imported and leave it to staff to add new opportunities.

Long range we're expanding the web ministry to include a software ministry. I'm lucky to have several people on my team that are professional software developers who are into the vision of building/providing tools for WEC. Here are just a few of the ideas we've kicked around: lyric management system for ProPresenter, volunteer scheduling, worship planning tools, etc. The first project I want to work on is a tool to read/render remote calendar data. We use EMS for all of our room scheduling and main calendar functionality. It has an ODBC interface, so I'm hoping it will be possible to get data from it into Typo3 without too much difficulty.

Now to Good Friday stuff then Easter...

WEC: Installation & HTTP Compression

Installation of the Web Empowered Church platform was smooth and easy. I was a php software developer prior to entering ministry, so  there were no difficulties with the installation. The symlinked install approach even made the upgrade to the 4.1 version of Typo3 very  easy. The docs from WEC make the process simple enough that anybody with basic linux web server administration experience could set it up. The only thing that might make it easier would be to offer it on a vm image with a basic linux installation.

The biggest gripe that I had with WEC after initial configuration was the size of the css it generates. My css customizations and the default set generated by all of the plugins result in a total CSS overhead of nearly 90k. Our front page is graphpically intensive, and includes 125k of graphics/flash.  My goal for the redesign was to keep the entire footprint of the home page under 150k. This wasn't a problem based on my template materials and the planned content. The problem happened when I realized that nearly 90k of css was required, bringing the total size of the page to about 245k. That doesn't seem to bad if you're sitting on a broadband connection, but about 10% of our population is on dialup (according to Google analytics). A 56k connection would take nearly a minute to download the page.

HTTP compression to the rescue. Last Thursday I decided to enable the mod_deflate Apache module and configure our WEC site to utilize it for all content except for images, flash, mp3, etc. We're basically making sure that everything leaving our web server is compressed - either within the file itself or via the mod_deflate compression. We're running a SuSE linux system as our main web server and the setup was painless. Enable the module that was already installed with Apache 2 and configure it for the virtualhost/directories with our WEC site. 

According to the new compression logs I put in place the overal size of the page has dropped to 135k with minimal impact on server performance. I haven't done any stress testing yet, but I don't suspect there will be a problem on the system we're using. Simply by turning on compression I can shave over 100k off our main page load.  Most every modern browser supports http compression and if a browser won't support it they'll get uncompressed content.

I do wonder about the size of the generated CSS, but with the http compression enabled it will be awhile before I bother to optimize it.

Schweitzer Web 2007 - Web Empowered Church

We're very close to launching the new design for the Schweitzer web site. This update is more substantial than a design refresh, it is a complete overhaul. One of my first goals when I came on staff was to migrate away from using static pages for the web site. Last year we implemented a Joomla system that has served us fairly well, but is severely lacking in workflow tools tht will let us empower each ministry to maintain their section of the web site. This year we've made the leap to typo3 and the Web Empowered Church platform. Over the next week I'll be writing about several of the components of this migration.

To launch our WEC powered web site required:

• installing and learning the WEC/typo3 platform (then later upgrading typo3 to 4.1)
• designing a custom template for the templaVoila plugin
• reforming our content to fit a new hierarchy then migrating the content
  
• casting the vision for the myConnection section of the web site
• implementing http compression

I'm presenting the final layout and structure to the full staff on Monday after getting the sign off from Bob, our senior pastor, on Thursday. We'll do content migration from the existing site this week and start shooting myConnection videos next week. The goal is to launch the site on Palm Sunday. Special thanks to the folks who stuck around during Media Lab on Wednesday night to help hash out the action based content hierarchy, but more about that later.

G5 Update

Good news at the end of last week about the G5. The problem was indeed a dead power supply that was covered by Apple. The first replacement was DOA which prompted a frantic budget reorganization to figure out how to buy a MacPro while the problem was identified. The lack of any other brokenness showing up lead the tech to order a second replacement power supply and it worked. The G5 is now happily back beneath my desk and the budget for the year remains as originally planned. I do have to admit that I was a bit excited about a shiny new MacPro.

Dead G5

The G5 we use at Schweitzer for the main video editing workstation gave up the ghost last Thursday. I'd run down from the media suite to the main office Thursday afternoon and when I came back the system was unresponsive, with black screens, and refused to reboot. It's been in the shop since then, but I found out this morning that a new power supply (which would have been a free fix) didn't solve the problem. I'm praying that whatever they find is the actual problem can be fixed inexpensively and make my decision easy.

So currently I'm looking at options - our iMacs have worked well for projects (about the same speed as the dead system), but I hate to spend the amount required for a suitable iMac to replace our main system without a speed bump. I also don't really like the notion of moving the internal drives from the G5 into external cases. I'd been planning to put together a ghetto-tastic array this year, but it looks like a Mac Pro may be in store instead. Repairing the G5 is also a possibility, but I've set the threshold for expense at 60% of a new system, of course that may be too high given the rapid swtich to Intel.

Anybody got suggestions?  

Switched to GoDaddy

This is the first post within my new hosting environment at GoDaddy. I finally got tired of the headaches with my dedicated server that required it to be power cycled every so often (I know it has a hard drive issue, and I'm suspecting that one of the dimms has gone bad) - since it's in Columbia it required bugging the colo facility to reboot it. The GoDaddy environment is one of their virtual servers and so far it's been flawless - it's even faster than my previous server.

Adobe Community Summit 2006

 I'm on my way back from the Adobe Community Summit - an event for User Group Managers and Community Experts. It was a phenomenal week of networking, learning more about the Adobe strategy and product lines, and training. After going through two days of Flex training I've got to say Flex is absolutely going to rock the RIA world and when Apollo comes along the desktop environment.

Monday night I ate dinner with my dad at Loft - a sort of mediteranean/american cafe. We sat on the rooftop patio which was great. As hot as it is in San Jose right now it's nothing like the heatwave in Missouri. I ordered the chicken parmesan which was breaded with panko bread crumbs. After using them for the croquettes I've decided that anything that is fried is better with the super crispy panko.

Tuesday several of us went to Tied House - a local microbrewery. The beer was good, but not exceptional the food however was pretty good. I had their game burger which was buffalo. The fries were your standard variety bar & grill french fry - nothing special.

Thursday night was Indian night at Tandori - a small, almost hole in the wall establishment on 1st street behind the  Fairmont. The food was outstanding, the prices are great with large portion sizes. It's done in a quick service style which actually works pretty well.

Friday a group of us went to Bella Mia and celebrated Joey's birthday. Several people had suggested Bella Mia, but I wasn't very pleased with it. I ordered grilled lamb which was served with creamed corn and a potato goat cheese gallete. The food was good, but not worth the price. I'm curious how it is for lunch.

I wish I'd gotten to eat at E&O Trading Company, but I think I'll be coming to San Jose more often in the next couple of years so there's always more opportunities. 

MAKE - Technology Crafting

I'm a huge fan of MAKE. I very rarely do any of the projects that I read about and I haven't subscribed to the print magazine (although I'm very tempted). O'Reilly gave out some copies for me to give away at the Macromedia User Group and my wife's comment was that it was like a craft magazine for guys. I scoffed at the idea, but now I have to admit that she was absolutely correct. The fact that yarn has now hit the MAKE scene is disturbing in many ways. Read about knitted robots

Bloglines Aggregator

I've been searching for an aggregator that fit my style of blog reading for quite some time. I've tried a variety of tools and nothing seemed to fit just right. The solution has been just to have blogs I read in bookmark groups that get opened as tabs in Firefox. Over the weekend I migrated all of the sites I read to Bloglines and so far I've been very happy. It's nice to have my aggregator in the form of a web site -- that way I can access it from any computer. It also will be nice to be able to update my blogroll to actually reflect the sites I read. Look for some updates to the site in the coming days/weeks. I may even move away from Movable Type if I can figure out a way to migrate my content effectively.

ODEO

I got an invite to Odeo last night and I have to say it's pretty slick. As far as tools for finding and subscribing to podcasts it's the best I've seen. Podcasting has always seemed a bit lame to me, perhaps it was just the tools that were available. The audio creation portion still isn't done yet, this is the part that I think will be key. Having a good interface to find and subscribe to audio feeds is great, but having an easy way for people to produce audio feeds will be even better. From what I've seen so far, this service is going to be very slick. No word on pricing yet but I'm guessing that the business model will be to charge people to produce/host podcasts. I'm skeptical about what price people will pay to podcast. I'd bet that it isn't very high -- unless odeo sees their main source of revenue coming from commercial producers.

Radio Kerner (or Wallstreet Squeezebox)

For quite some time now I've been pondering two things:
1. What should I do with that old Wallstreet G3 Powerbook?
2. How can I play my digital music on my stereo easily?

Until today the answer to item one has been leave it in a bag in the closet until I come up with something better. Item two always involved hooking up our iPod or a laptop to the stereo.

The easy solution to this is to get an Airport Express or something like the SqueezeBox from Slim Devices. Both of these are fine solutions, but they cost money and don't solve the what to do with the Powerbook question.

That all changed today. This morning I put together my own streaming media solution. I haven't tried video yet, but iTunes visualization works well,so streaming video shouldn't be much of a problem. The setup is quite simple -- computer with wifi hooked into stereo, music player, music streaming software, and a music library.

The Powerbook now sits with all of our AV equipment and is hooked up as video device 3 (svideo and audio from the powerbook). The Powerbook is fairly low tech (250mhz g3, 384mb ram, 4gb hd, and a Lucent wifi card) and is running OS X 10.2. The music playback and visualization is all handled by iTunes.

iTunes only has two items in the playlist currently -- Radio Kerner and Columbia, MO's 102.3 KBXR (because there isn't a AAA radio station in Springfield). We're using iHam on iRye to control iTunes remotely (basically selecting BXR or our own mix and hitting play).

Radio Kerner is powered by a computer also running iTunes (for cataloging purposes) and SlimServer 5.4 the software that powers the SqueezeBox. It provides a great web-based interface for putting together playlists. You could even stream different music to other computers in the house (with iTunes).

So far so good. To make it more radio like I may record some interstitials to litter through the music randomly.

In other news, I'm 1 person away from a free iPod, I'll post a link from the first person who completes my final offer.

New Powerbook

My 667mhz Powerbook G4 being in need of an upgrade is being replaced with one of the new 1.67ghz systems with a superdrive. We ordered my system and one other for the office with some software from MacZone February 8th. Everything but my powerbook has shown up and I'm anxious to get it. It's being shipped by FedEx and has traveled from Shanghai to Alaska hopefully to arrive in Chicago very soon. From the MacZone warehouses it will be overnighted to me. FedEx says it's arriving in Chicago on Monday so I should have the new system early next week. I can't wait.

VOIP

So I got my Packet 8 starter kit from FedEx today. So far setup has been a breeze. Three easy steps: 1) unpack 2) plug in ethernet, phone, and power cables -- the network cable is plugged into a linksys wireless router 3) call the activiation number. I've made a few calls today and with the cable modem not too many problems.

Downloads don't seem to impact quality, but uploads certainly take their toll. I'm going to have to play with it some more to determine if it's all it's cracked up to be.

Educara SURVEY 2.1

I should have written about this last week, but just thought I'd slip in the post today. Educara has officially released version 2.1 of our SURVEY product. Downloads are available from SourceForge (there's a link on the SURVEY product page).

This release doesn't have a lot new features, but we've got a good plan in place through the rest of the year. We're striving to make SURVEY the best online data collection tool on the market.

Macromedia Dev Net Subscription?

I've been a loyal Macromedia DevNet subscriber for a while now. I've encouraged others to subscribe. Today I got my third notice email about my DevNet subscription expiring. This one tells me that I only have 29 days remaining in my subscription. I'm torn about whether or not to renew it.

Macromedia says:
"You've got a lot to do. That's why you can't afford to let your Macromedia DevNet subscription expire. In 29 days you will no longer receive timesaving resources and upgrades to the development tools you use every day.

"Make sure you're equipped with another 12 months of software upgrades and DRKs delivering product resources. At only $US 599*, can you afford not to renew?

I say:
Well Macromedia, it's been nice and all, but what does my $599 really buy me. I've not been all that impressed with the DRKs lately. Originally they were great, but I'll be real honest, the last two or three haven't done much for me. Yes I'm busy. Yes I like not having to worry about software upgrades. But the problem is that it's really cheaper the other way around. I still have to hassle with upgrades for certain software that I use (like Director) and if I'm hassling with one, why not with all. Heck a Studio upgrade is about half the price of the DevNet renewal.

What would make upgrading a no brainer (even if it cost more):

1. Make DevNet include more software (think MSDN). If DevNet included a broader range of software it would be more valuable to not have to hassle with upgrades. Include Director, RoboHelp, RoboDemo, etc. Macromedia for a long time has wondered how to get Flash users to use Director, I say give it to them in DevNet.

2. Information on what to expect in the coming year. I don't need a lot of details, but I'm sitting here thinking there was just a fairly major free Flash upgrade, will that be all I see from a DevNet renewal? All I'm asking for is that the assumed 18 month product cycles aren't really 24 month product cycles leaving people who moved to DevNet during an upgrade out every other year. In the past year of DevNet the only upgrade I've seen has been to Contribute.

3. Cross Platform licenses. I don't use a Mac at the office and a Mac at home. I use a Powerbook and a WinXP desktop. I only develop on one system at a time. Shouldn't my two install license be useful on both of these systems (assuming I follow the usage guidelines?).

4. Central. Assure me that whatever Central development tools are made available are well supported and included in the DevNet subscription and I'm in for another year no problem.

5. Quarterly subscription payments. Okay so this one probably isn't too feasible, but let's say I'm renewing at $599. It would be great for me to have $175 billed each quarter to my credit card. Bill me when my CD ships. I know this is more expensive for Macromedia, but I'm willing to pay for balancing the load across the year. It makes keeping several seats current more affordable and I'd bet that would be appealing to businesses that don't fit the volume license program but still have several seats of Studio. It also has the perk that Macromedia gets sustained revnue from subscribers over the whole year, not just at renewal time.

Like I said earlier I'm really torn about this renewal. I use these products all the time. I think they're the best tools on the market for my needs. This is really just a financial decision. I've got to weigh what I pay against what I get. I'm a big supporter of a subscription model for software sales, but the subscription shouldn't cost more than what you get if you don't subscribe. The only benefit I'm seeing right now is that I can deduct 100% of the subscription rather than depreciating it like my accountant does with all other software.

I may still upgrade, I'm on the fence about it. I'd certainly like to believe that I'll get value from a DevNet subscription over the next year. I welcome your comments, especially if they include other reasons for renewing the DevNet subscription.

Springfield Macromedia User Group

As some of you may know I had been managing the Mid-Missouri Macromedia User Group for quite a few years now. After the relocation to Springfield I found it necessary to have a MMUG here as well. Since there wasn't one already I'm now the manager of the recently formed Springfield Macromedia User Group (or SMMUG).

I decided that I wanted more of a portal web site for this group than I had done in the past. I spent a good part of today getting it set up and working using GeekLog - http://www.springfieldmmug.org.

If you're in the Springfield, Missouri area and use (or are thinking about using) Macromedia software we'd love for you to join us.

Ben Forta!

Today the Mid Missouri Macromedia User Group will be hosting Ben Forta. We're hoping for a large turnout, but I'm a little concerned. We've done better marketing for this meeting than for any other so hopefully it will be good. If you're anywhere near Columbia, MO and interested in Macromedia products you should come (mmug.showmeinteractive.com).

On another note this is my last meeting as the MMUG manager. Myra Ferguson will be taking over starting with our July meeting. She's already got some great meetings planned out for the late summer/early fall. I'm sad that I'll have to miss them.

SURVEY 2.0

So the purpose of this blog was jointly food and technology. I don't know that I've posted anything tech related here yet. Odd since I spend all day working on computers. The technology should pick up though. We're working on some major things.

This week has been really long. We shipped the second version of our data acquisition software (Educara SURVEY) this week. The public announcement will be coming in early December. I'll share more details once those announcements have been made.