Aaron Sumner

Yeah, yeah, long time no write–but I wanted to point out that today’s post about hacking Apple TV to support Boxee on Gizmodo inspired me to actually use that alpha Boxee account I’ve had for a few weeks and hack my Apple TV. Two words: Awe. Some. I tested it by watching the 2008 Orange Bowl on Hulu, right through Aqib Talib’s pick-6 (and the ensuing unsportsmanlike conduct penalty). Video quality wasn’t spectacular, but definitely watchable–especially for those times when something screws up on my DVR or cable provider and I need to watch one of the few shows I still follow online.

I’m going out to Costco tomorrow and wondering if I shouldn’t just go ahead and buy a big fat hard drive to set up as a NAS for media sharing to this thing now–

I’m adding a new category to share things I’ve had to hunt and dig for, in hopes it makes it easier for others who run into similar problems.

Long story short: My Canon Rebel XTi wouldn’t connect with iPhoto or Image Capture. Turns out Apple’s Raw Compatibility Updater 2.2 totally messed with the camera’s ability to connect to my computer. It took some major digging, but here’s what I wound up doing:

1. Locate the 2.2 version of Apple’s Raw drivers at /System/Library/CoreServices/RawCamera.bundle and trash it. You may need to restart at this point.
2. Download the older, 2.1 version of the Raw compatibility updater and install it. The first few times I tried I got an error message saying I already had a newer version installed. Eventually, though, it worked.
3. See if iPhoto and/or Image Capture (or whatever utility you use) works now.

I hope this helps somebody–seriously, it took a lot of searching before I finally found a discussion post on Apple’s support site explaining what was going on. I’ve already re-lost the link to it, but thanks to the person who posted this suggestion somewhere on that site.

I know, I know: A few weeks back I was all jazzed up about the BuddyPress project. Well, I’m not anymore. I’m also not too enthused about the new socially-aware MovableType, or Elgg, or PhpFox, or any of the off-the-shelf, “white label” social network platforms. (I’m also not too hot on Ning.)

Want to know why?

If you’re dealing with people who know their ways around social media and Web 2.0, the above-listed packages might work for you. On the other hand, if you’re like me and most of your user base has no exposure to Facebook or blogging or wikis (other than thinking Wikipedia is the root of all evil!), then you’ve got problems.

If you’ve read Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, you know that, essentially, younger audiences tend to be your heavy users of most social networks’ core functions (your Creators, Critics, and Joiners). But you know what? Building yet-another-tool for those folks is the proverbial fish-in-a-barrel situation. What do you want to do if you want to trick convince your core audience to share their materials, comments, and expertise?

That’s why I decided to forego what’s out there now and write my own thing. (OK, also, none of those above are Ruby and/or Rails in nature.) Over the last couple of weeks, in pockets, I’ve been developing a social network for people who don’t think social networks can be useful. (Screenshots pending.) It’s got groups, discussions, user profiles, and rudimentary social functionality (interested in a particular topic? Click it to see who else in your workplace might be a good resource on that subject). It’s still rough, and I’m having to bone up on some Rails techniques I’ve been ignoring/avoiding to make it work the way it should. I’ve gone out of my way to take as much of a plugins-first approach–if someone else has written great code, why do I need to duplicate?–and thus have been inspired greatly by Jim Neath’s excellent blog.

We’re going to start rolling out my work gradually in the coming week. I don’t know if I’ll release this code on a larger scale, since I’m sure most seasoned Rails developers could do the same thing in their sleep. At this point I’m more interested to see whether it can make any difference in individuals’ use of and/or attitudes about social media and its applicability to real, professional or academic uses.

Oh, and also, I’m theoretically trying to finish up my master’s degree with this project. So hopefully it goes according to my roughly-hewn plan.

This afternoon I walked down to the river to see how the dam was handling the rush of rain water (we got at least four inches of rain Friday night). I brought my camera along.

For those of you who don’t know, I live in North Lawrence, just across the bridge from downtown. A lot of people like to not officially recognize us as part of Lawrence, but I like it. I can walk to downtown in ten minutes, property is affordable, and it’s one of those parts of town that have still got a little character.

Along with the far east part of town, just off of K-10, North Lawrence is much more rural than the rest of town. For example, the city’s grain elevators are a few blocks south from my house.

A few train tracks run alongside the elevators. I’ve talked to one person who couldn’t take the noise and left North Lawrence because of it, but I’ve never found it to be that bad. The downside is getting caught at the intersection waiting for a long, slow train to move past.

The Union Pacific Depot has been restored and now is available for public and private functions. I’ve yet to go inside. This statue is out front. I’m not sure what it’s called, but I believe it’s a tribute to people in various service roles. If you know more, let me know.

OK, let’s get to why I went to the river. Here’s a shot of the dam. Note the large trees trying to make it over–I wonder whose job it is to clear them out. And yes, the Kansas River really is that dirty.

Here’s water that’s just gone over the dam. You’d think these were rapids. Suffice to say, you don’t see anyone boating around this part of the river (though there are landings just up and downstream).

Amazing what I’ll do when I’m putting off other work. A little background: Stratepedia, the hub for pretty much all of my projects at work, got off to a rough start a couple of years ago. The plan was to make a big splash as we migrated away from a long, somewhat confining domain name. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out–due to a domain registration issue, Stratepedia was kind of forced to make its debut earlier than planned. As a result, I didn’t get much time for logos, visual identities, and all that.

My first pass at it looked bad. I don’t even have any screen shots of the first incarnation of the site. Then, for that last year-plus or so, we’ve fun a site with a nice corkboard design that Amber put together. It did the job, but recently I came to realize that it was time for Stratepedia to have more of an identity of its own, starting with a logo and moving on to my attempts to bring a Kansas flair to our work (see Depot, etc. to get a feel for my general take on ed-tech website design; it’s kind of my reaction to overuse of silly “high tech” designs like Matrix-y letters, Star Trek fonts and green grids, and/or little red schoolhouses and apples). Enough setting it up–here it is:

That’s it–one page, linking out to everything we do. Cranked out over the course of about five hours yesterday, including an hour or so of browser fine-turning (if you’re looking at it in IE it won’t quite look like the screen shot; I had to make adjustments due to how that lame browser handles overlapping <div> elements and PNG files). At the moment I still think it’s the prettiest thing I’ve ever put on the web.

The logo is kind of, sort of a reaction to the greenification of the world–I’ve been wondering if it’s a fad or here to stay. I hope it’s the latter, but the cynic in me has doubts. Anyway, what started as me trying to come up with a Web 2.0-ish wheat shock turned into something much more simple; a pair of wings. I know it’s not the most original thing in the world, but I like it and think I have something I can use standalone (like, the Stratepedia Twitter account uses just the wings as a user picture) when needed.

In theory, I’m going to start rotating out the photograph. The sunflower shot currently online is a purchased stock photo; I’d like to solicit my photograph-taking friends to help build a rotating gallery of original, Kansas-themed pictures as a little value-added service (again, did I mention how much I dislike ed-tech web design?). This one will do in the meantime.