Finally! A Free Flash Video Player I Can Embed!

Chris tipped me off this morning on a free flash video player. Myself and several of my friends have been looking for a solution like this one. Video, audio, playlists with thumbnails, full-screen... All I have to say is, "finally!"



Sayonara YouTube, Viddler, and Brightcove. I'll take care of my own video now. (Okay maybe I'll still use you to convert my video to flash, then download it and post it with my free player.)

Learning Ruby: Day 3 (a day late)

Yesterday I spent time going through several chapters of the Build Your Own Web Apps... book and learned quite a bit.

First off, let me just say that Rails is pure genius. Just from the little taste of it that I got in these early chapters, it makes complete sense on why 37Signals works the way they do. It seems like their entire company is shaped around this methodology of agility and scalability. It's a beautiful business model.

Anyway, a lot of what I learned was conceptual thinking stuff, and how Rails is set up. Rails is, in fact as I mentioned a couple days ago, a framework that basically gives you a head start on programming with Ruby. It sets everything up for you in a tidy structure that tackles three main development principles:

• Convention over Configuration


• DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself)


• Agilie development

How to Add a Photo to Your Blogger Comments

Step 1: Click here to open a new window and login to http://blogger.com/. Use your Google account username and password (the same one you use to leave comments on blogger blogs).



Step 2: Edit your profile. Click the "Edit Profile" button as illustrated below.



Step 3: Scroll down to locate the "Photo URL" area. You will be putting the url to your uploaded photo here.



Step 4: Upload your photo.

• Click here to open a new window for uploading your photo to a free image hosting site. (Assuming you've already got your super cool photo that you want to appear next to all your Blogger comments somewhere on your computer.)


• Click the first "Browse" button to open a new window and locate your file on your computer.


• Once you find it, select it, then click "Open" and you will see the first box fill with text.


• Next, down where it says "Select image content," click on the dropdown to select that it is "safe for work."


• Finally, click the "Send file(s)" button to upload your photo.

Step 5: Highlight and copy your photo URL. Pay close attention here, because for some reason, Blogger won't accept all of the URL's that are given to you by this free image hosting site. So scroll all the way down to the last URL that they give you where it says "Hotlink a clickable thumbnail on any Website or Auction" - SELECT only the code as illustrated in the sample screenshot below and COPY it: (starts with "http://" and ends with ".JPG")
*Note* I had some trouble here with highlighting only a section of that last URL - it kept highlighting all of it - so I had to actually paste it into a text editor like Notepad or Microsoft Word to be able to select and copy only the section of the URL I needed.



Step 6: Paste your photo URL into Blogger and "Save Profile". I wouldn't close any windows just yet (in case the URL you just copied doesn't work for some reason), but now you need to go back to your Blogger window (where you were editing your Blogger profile) and PASTE the URL in here. Once you see it in there as illustrated below, scroll all the way to the bottom of this window and click the orange "Save Profile" button.



Step 7: Marvel at your genius. That's it! You should see a picture next to your Photo URL area. Now every time you make a comment on someone's Blogger blog, your image will show up!

Log Onto A Windows Wireless Network with Your Mac

Had to help the brother in London get signed onto a Windows Wireless network with his Macbook this morning, and ran across the solution to his problem in Apple's documentation on their site.

Click here for detailed instructions for signing onto a Windows Wireless network using your Mac's wireless card (Airport).

Learning Ruby: Day 2

Well, Hackety Hack was a good start for some basic Ruby understanding. But I found some other resources that have helped me out a lot as well in tackling Ruby and Ruby on Rails.


1. A free excerpt online on how to learn Ruby and Rails by Sitepoint. You can even download the entire book as a pdf!

2. Along the way, you have to install Ruby, Rails, and MySQL on your machine. I ran into some issues on mine when wanting to set a password for the root user in MySQL, but ol' Chris gave me a kind pointer to get the job done in OS X (just search for "root").

I got one of my biggest questions answered that confused me at the start:

Q: "Can you learn Rails without learning Ruby?"

A: Yes, but it's not recommended.
Rails is a framework for Ruby. So best I can understand at this point, not knowing Ruby while trying to learn Rails is like having a structure of a house that's been built for you without yet knowing how to use a hammer, nails, level, etc. (I could be wrong, but that's how it seems to me so far.)

I'm realizing lately that I've already wasted quite a bit of time in contributing to the wealth of knowledge available online - mainly due to laziness on my part - and for that, I apologize. I've gained so much from others out there willing to document their learnings and findings online, and I'd like to start giving back by documenting mine, just in case that one other person out there happens to run into the same frustrating things that I do.

Learning Ruby

Well, I dove in today. I'm tired of not knowing a programming language. HTML and a little bit of JavaScript only get you so far... and that's not very far. So, I'm learning Ruby (hopefully Ruby on Rails eventually too).

I found this great little program (originally aimed at teaching kids how to program) called Hackety Hack that walks you through several lessons and helps you build some real-life applications. It's been awhile since I've done much hardcore self teaching, so this kind of pace helped me quite a bit. It was frustrating however, because a lot of the code in the lessons just plain didn't work like it apparently was supposed to. So I wasn't sure if it was my mistake, or Why's (whytheluckystiff.net, who built the application). Either way, I know more now than I did at the beginning of today, which is nice. I just hope I can do what I'd like to with what I learn. (I seem to always have too high of expectations.)

I also ordered this book called Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide, which I hear is supposed to be really good. You can actually read the entire first edition of the book online for free at this link, I just got tired of reading my screen.

Office Office Office, I Love The Office

This episode on Thursday (10/11) was aaawesome. The opening scene cracked me up, because Art and Ike and I used to play the DVD logo game after watching a movie at the old bachelor pad. We wouldn't go to bed until it hit the corner successfully - hilarious that they brought it up on The Office. I love Creed's expression in everyone's reaction to it hitting.


I'm currently having to convert this week's episode of The Office for streaming so my brother (in England) can watch it. Dumb NBC blocks it from being watched on their website anywhere outside the U.S.

Speaking of the office, a fellow that I work with had his birthday this last week. Apparently he's known for playing pranks on people, so his Customer Service team brought me a photo of him (when he dressed up for halloween a couple years ago) to whip something up for his 35th. I just crack up at how perfectly the look on his face lended itself to this kind of a thing.

Congratufreakinlations!

To my brother, Caleb for his new job in Oxford, England at www.bathplace.co.uk.



You can follow his photos here: Caleb's England Pics

Website Value Calculator

Ran across this in my surfing today - a website value calculator! joelandtessi.com is only worth $71, unfortunately. But Chris' site is at almost $10,000 (his was the most valuable I could find out of everyone I personally know.)

What's yours worth? Click here to find out. -->

Stupid Ads

I'm aware this is nothing new, but I finally got so fed up today with stupid propoganda ads online that I decided to implement an ad blocker for my browsers.

For Firefox: Adblock

For Safari: Safari Block

Return

Hello,

For those of you who are previous readers, I thought I'd use this space now for more of a personal bookmark-type blog, noting some tips and tricks that I've discovered and maybe an occasional post on something I've read that is interesting to me. And if anyone benefits from my online "travels," then wonderful!

Keep your expectations low folks. It's the key to enjoying this, my resurrected blog.

Rain in Spain,
Joel