Maxwest Technical Consulting Inc

Just posted the initial drafts of what we hope will turn into a useful Network primer for non-Networking people on how to understand user performance and what can and can't be done about it. See "The Network Story" http://maxwest.net/?q=networkstory

While there are many online tools to maintain websites, after messing around with several, we've found two that seem to lead the pack for our needs. For singlar websites, Wordpress is still one of the easiest content systems for individual users. The significant advantage there is the ease of updating the content in place through the Administrative interface. This includes installing plugins without the need to download and ftp packages.

After a couple days of beating around with the old code from the Konfabulator version of the BC Ferries Webcam widget - I threw out the whole thing in favor of a from scratch Dashcode version. While Dashcode does have some nice templates and features - really going from scratch with your own thought pattern is where I needed to be. The new widget has a cleaner look and feel but also a much cleaner code. See the Software forum for the BC Ferries Widget or direct download link here.

After fighting with Dashcode for about 24 hours, I quickly discovered that most of my problems involved overthinking the problems. For example, after scouring Google for solutions to load and reload images from the web into a image containter the answer was so trivial that I missed it several times.

URL = "http://www.example.com;
document.getElementById('picture').src = URL;

Where "picture" is the name of the image container in the layout.

A long time ago in a galaxy far away there was a concept of 'Widgets' taken from product lore and applied to the computer interface. The first widespread use I ever had was with a tool called Konfabulator (which today lives on as Yahoo Widgets)

While there are a massive number of environments, scripting languages, and APIs that are designed to make programs lives 'easier', it is impossible to even keep up with more than a couple. While you can get involved in several they all fall into a a relatively few categories

• Application Programming - full blown implementation for desktop operating systems. Using a common programming language like C and yypically relying on the OS APIs to manage the user interaction

Hands up if you have had your iPod earbuds ripped out of your ears when you are walking, running, working out, or trying to get something out of a pocket or bag? Hate it? Well this is worth a try.

The fact that the Internet can bring you information from around the world is both interesting and captivating. For example, there is this newspaper in Lawrence Kansas that probably most people outside of the immediate area would never have heard about. The noteable exception is a lecture recorded by IT Conversations.

In the continuing move off local data. The next step was calendar services. iCal was my local calendar service of record and I did sometimes use Google Calendar. While those two could talk to each other (iCal and Google Calendar Integration ), the sticking point was 'over the air' syncing for the iPhone. Well the workaround for that is to use the Microsoft Exchange syncing that is availible from Google and the iPhone

Is it worth storing your own data anymore? That is the question that we've been struggling with for almost a year. For any user that buys a new computer and has to 'migrate' their data, the question of what all that stuff is an why do I need it has to come up. For me, it has always been the movement of email from one computer to another. This is even tougher when you start using multiple machines. Double-tough when you add an iPhone or other handheld. Syncing?? - don't even get me started.