Google Wave: Day 2

I was surprised to have a few random people offer to accept a Wave invite over Twitter from me. Unfortunately for you random people, I have real friends and family who would get priority. That does not matter, since it appears that Google has closed the lid on inviting more people for now.

Here are some more useful links that I've come across for Google Wave:

• Starify, a simple little bot that has source code available
• Google Wave Extension List, a Google document collection of bots, gadgets, and extensions
• My Favorite Google Wave Bots by Gina Trapani
• Google App Engine is where most of the bots seem to be hosted

I went through and added a bunch of bots to my address book and then put them all in a group (found by searching for "appspot" in my contacts). I also created a personal wave with useful gadgets I might like to use later.

Google Wave first impressions

My sister-in-law sent me a Google Wave invite last week and it finally arrived this evening. So I have caught my first wave and played around with things a bit. I must admit the experience is a little underwhelming right now, but that is probably because I have not interacted with anybody on the service yet. Below I will jot down some notes.

Useful guides

Here are some websites I found that seemed particularly useful, or that look like they will be useful in the future, or that are written by people who generally write useful stuff:

• Google Wave Wikipedia article to answer that difficult question of "What is it?"
• Google Wave's support site for the official help line
• Google Wave 101 by Gina Trapani (TWIG panelist) for Lifehacker
• Google Wave first look by Gina Trapani for Lifehacker
• Wave Gadgets tutorial for extending Wave
• Google Wave: A Complete Guide by Ben Parr at Mashable
• Wavety.com the Complete, up-to-Date, list of Google Wave gadgets and robots
• TWIG 10 is an episode of This Week in Google focusing on Wave
• Wave Extensions featured by Google

Thoughts

As I mentioned before, I have not really done too much since I have not collaborated with anybody yet. As can be expected, there do not seem to be many of the obvious and necessary gadgets yet. For example, I would like to embed YouTube videos but have not figured that out yet. I also have not been able to integrate it with Google Groups. That is unfortunate, since I received my invite specifically so that I could use Wave with my in-laws who have an active mail list in Groups. I do like the Sudoku game.

Video

Here is a video about things to do in Google Wave:

Embed multiple Google calendars, the sequel

I put together some instructions of how to embed multiple Google calendars on Google Sites sites. I included screenshots and thought it looked pretty nice, plus I got some positive feedback for it. Unfortunately, Google seems to have changed something about how Sites interprets its calendar widget and made the hack I figure out not work anymore.

My attention was drawn to this by a comment today from a reader who had followed my instructions and received an error. Both his site and mine were complaining about chaining multiple site URLs like Google does in its own embedded calendar customizer. I noted the problem and said I would look into it later. Tonight was later.

This Google question indicated that somebody else was having a similar problem, but did not provide a solution. This chain of posts from the Google Calendar help group presented a solution similar to my original post and discussed a GUI solution from Google that I could not find in Chrome or IE 8.

Then I found this Google Sites help question that provides a work around. I am not entirely happy with it, but it is better than the error I was getting and gets the job done. You can find the instructions here. The trick is to insert a widget that lets you insert the calendar inside of it.

Tech news

My sister-in-law has a saying: "I have my finger on the pulse of America!" Whether or not that is true can be debated. I am definitely not one who can judge, since I am not even sure where America's pulse could be located (Everybody Votes on the Wii thinks I am very far away from popular opinion). This got me thinking about my niche. What does one do to keep their finger on pulse of Tech or Social Media? Feel free to share thoughts in the comments. Below is what I came up with. First I'll list the ones I actually use:

• twit.tv and TWiT in particular. Although not everything that flows out of the TWiT cottage is gold, most of it is pretty good. It also comes in easily-listened-to podcasts.
  
• Digg. The democratization of the news. Good stories are voted up, bad stories are voted down (a.k.a. "buried"). The best stories make it to the front page, where web servers go to be brought down by the massive Digg visits.
  
• Google News. Google aggregates news stories from wherever it can find them and puts them in one place. You can search for topics, or just see what comes up.
  
• Tekzilla. Tekzilla covers "hands on reviews of the latest gear, tips and tricks that improve the tech you already own and conversations with the most informative experts around."
  
• Engadget. I mostly use this for live event blogs (like of the keynote at Apple's WWDC), but the rest of stuff is interesting/good too.
  
• Twitter. For up to the minute information about what is going on in the world, follow the correct people/organizations on Twitter and let the good times roll!
  
• FriendFeed. Like Twitter, only with more features, fewer users, and an even geekier crowd.
  

Now for the ones I do not use regularly that I think have their supporters:

• Slashdot. I mostly missed the Slashdot generation. Editors play a more significant part in Slashdot, I believe.
  
• Gawker. I used to check in on valleywag. I'm not proud of that.
  
• TechCrunch. Mike Arrington is supposedly a big shot, but since I mostly affiliate with the TWiT army I do not really pay attention to trolls.
  
• del.icio.us. I used to use this, but I never really caught the vision for the social networking part. I used to use it for bookmarking, but I have since moved on to other methods.
  
• cnet. Tech news stories, reviews, blogs, forums, and product picks. Or something like that.
  
• StumpleUpon. I've never used it, but it seems to be another big way for sharing via social media.
  
• Yahoo Buzz. A Digg clone put out by Yahoo. I've heard some people say this has more users than Digg thanks to the Yahoo brand.
  

Like I said at the beginning: Think I am missing something important? Feel free to add it in the comments.

Six online sites for personal branding

I felt pretty bad that my initial post on personal branding was an epic fail. However, after watching how mainstream media also had an epic fail, I do not feel so bad. This post is also on personal branding, but I am not going to attempt to explain it again. This time I am just listing six important places a modern professional should establish his or her brand online:

• A website - Here is my website. It is not very mature (although I have various old ones scattered across the web), but it is my current site. A website does not need to have all sorts of bells and whistles, but it should be some place that your online presence may call home. There are a number of free web hosting services. If you get serious, you should probably get a domain name too.
• A blog - You are reading my blog. A blog is more dynamic than a website. Like websites, there are a number of free blogging services, Blogger and Wordpress being the most popular. It is easier to generate content for a blog than for a site. A blog can showcase your writing, which is valuable in any line of work.
• Twitter - My Twitter handle is @ncooprider. Twitter has the ability to reach many people really quickly. The commitment level is less than with a blog or with Facebook, so your Twitter-network can include people you do not know and you can send out less-than-stellar tweets. Twitter can drive traffic to your site and blog, or just serve as a medium for crowd sourcing.
• A Google Profile - Here is my Google profile. It is yet to be seen if this thing will really take off, but I think it is a valuable tool. You can see from my profile that my web presence was a little crazy, and this allows me to consolidate and clarify. This is crucial if your online brand extends beyond one or two services (which it must do to have real reach).
• LinkedIn - Here is my LinkedIn profile. This is the professional social networking site. It may not pack the power of Facebook, but it makes that up in focus. Keeping a resume online here is easy and effective (last month I got a call from recruiters through this and I am not even looking for a job).
• Facebook - My Facebook username is ncooprider. I got my first job out of school through Facebook. It is the biggest kid on the block. Some people hate it and there are a lot of things which are annoying about it, but it still lives up to its name.

There are many others that are useful, but these were the six I feel every professional should use. That goes double if the person is looking for a job, and triple if that person is in tech, media, or both. Think I am wrong? Post a comment!

Personal branding

The recent move by Facebook to allow the selection of usernames has prompted some to ask: why? The answer is personal branding.

Your online presence is part of your brand. I would argue that it is a very significant part. How much you care about or publicize that brand depends on a number of factors. One thing to note, however, is that a quality brand must be built up over time. In other words, it is easier to gradually build up and maintain your online presence than to find yourself needing one and thinking "hmmm, maybe I'll try the internet now."

Why would you need one? Well, I found my current job (it found me) through my online presence (facebook). You can make money with a strong enough brand through blogging or online content. Your online brand can help grow your online social network beyond your physical social network.

Getting a username is like having a professional logo for a business. A business could just write their name in Helvetica and be done with it. The same information gets conveyed, and people can find them. However, a nice logo grabs people's attention, and a nice sign will make it easier to find while driving past it.

Think about it in terms of trademark. Why do companies fight so hard to keep their trademark? In our information age the ability to reach down to individuals has multiplied exponentially. Do you want somebody infringing on your personal trademark? What about if that infringement affects your future job search? Your spouses future job search? Your children's future job search?

Here are some additional places to look on wikipedia:

• personal branding,
  
• online identity management, and
  
• reputation management.

Related to this topic is the idea of finding a market for quality content. I wrote a blog post about it. Only the paradigm shift is that you are the content!

Embed multiple Google calendars

UPDATE: 7/30/2009 AM - It appears that Google changed the API and that these instructions do not work as advertised. I will investigate this evening and hopefully post a working solution.

UPDATE: 7/30/2009 PM - I found a solution and wrote a blog post about it.

This morning I am home sick, so I decided to figure out how to embed multiple calendars into my new home page. Some of the instructions are Google Sites specific, but they should be adjustable to whatever platform you are actually using.

1. Go to your Google Sites page where you want to add the calendar
   
2. Click on Edit Page
   
   
3. Select the Insert menu and then select Calendar
   
   
4. For now you can only insert one calendar, so fill out the menu box for one of your calendars
   
   
   
   • Editing the object through this menu box again will write over the changes we are about to make
     
   • I suggest turning off the calendar title, border, and name
     
   
   
   
5. Click on Save in the menu box (A calendar widget should show up now)
   
6. Click on the button for editing HTML (for some reason this takes a while to load)
   
   
7. Open a new tab/window and go to your Google calendars
   
8. Click on Settings
   
9. Click on Calendars
   
10. Click on one of the calendars
    
11. Under the Embed This Calendar section, click on Customize the color, size, and other options
    
12. Under Calendars to Display, check all the calendars you want to display on the page
    
    
13. In the text box under Copy and paste the HTML below to include this calendar on your webpage you have to select and copy some text:
    
    
    
    1. Resize the box (click and drag lower right corner) so you can see all the text
       
    2. Ignore the text up to the second src=
       
    3. Select the text from that point up to immediately before &ctz=
       
    4. Copy (ctrl-c)
       
    
    
    
14. Go back to the tab/window for editing the html of the Google Sites page
    
15. Find the origsrc attribute and select its value
    
    
16. Paste the contents from the Google Calendar text box to replace the attribute value (ctrl-v)
    
17. Click on Update
    

I hope that works for you! In the end, you should have something that looks like mine. You'll notice that the calendars retain their privacy settings from Google Calendar. Most of mine just show free/busy information.

Nice quote from Cory Doctorow

From TWIT 183 -

Cory Doctorow: Using programmer tools to do other stuff is like using chef knives to cook, all right?

Leo Laporte: Yeah.

Cory Doctorow: It’s dangerous. You can really hurt yourself but they really work.

There's always a market for quality content

One of the first TWITs I listened to also happened to be the best one I have heard yet. TWIT 133 consisted of a panel discussion with and about Jonathan Coulton. I had never heard of him before, but the discussion about niche markets was fascinating and informative.

He quit his job as a software engineer to be a singer/songwriter instead, and now he makes more money doing that than he did as a software engineer. The "crazy" part about this is that he offers a lot of his content for free from his web page. He allows people to use most of it in derivative, non-commercial work (license). This is counter-intuitive to most people. What is also counter-intuitive is that people buy banana, robot, and monkey gifs on his site as a way of donating money. The point is that if you create quality content, somebody will pay for it. The trick is finding your niche. Coulton's niche is the tech nerd (Code Monkey is one of his more famous songs). I am having a hard time explaining. Check out his site and listen to TWIT 133.

Also, I think I saw him in Atlanta when I was flying back to Utah from my job interview at BAE a year ago. The airport was pretty messed up due to some ice (I was delayed for a number of hours) otherwise I think I would have got an autograph or something. It would have been a little awkward, since at the time my only exposure to him was TWIT 133. Don'y worry, I now have the whole year of Thing a Week.

Let me be clear: this is not a get rich quick scheme. At first I thought this was a new dot-com bubble. Maybe it was, to some extent. However, the bubble burst in October. Producing quality content that someone will pay for takes a lot of hard work, talent, and time. I do not have the time to put in the work, so my blog remains cluttered and not updated. However, many people I know have the time or have talents that are more easily shared over the internet (e.g. writing).

Speaking of writers, TWIT 184 talks about the death of print media. It is just not cost effective, especially with devices like the Kindle 2 coming out. One journalist I know had his local branch shut down this past year, and another newspaper employee I know was laid-off this week. If you have relied on printed media to publish your work in the past, I would highly recommend listening to TWIT 133 and TWIT 184. Then start self publishing on the web as much as you can. Create your own brand. It is worth something to the right people, and the right people are out there.

Subversion

I have been a late adopter of Subversion. For years I was a CVS user. Of course, I normally use repositories set up by somebody else. In grad school the FLUX research group still used CVS, so I used CVS. Now that I work for BAE Systems AIT, I use subversion because that is what they use. They migrated a few years ago to subversion from CVS because subversion is better than CVS.

I was never a power user of CVS. I basically checked things out and checked them back in. Occasionally I would start repositories or go into the server and clean things that I had messed up, but I never really needed to do anything fancy. I tagged and checked out dates a little bit. That's it. I mention all this because I am going to talk about some cool features of subversion. They might be present in CVS and I just don't know.

svn info

This is a basic command, but I mention it as a reminder. Once you start messing with the other commands below, remembering this one is crucial.

svn propedit svn:externals .

This one actually blew my mind. You can set up "externals" in subversion which link to other repositories. So if you use a lot of different tools from your company, you can link to your development branches for those tools. You can also link to external repositories as well. Very neat. Makes development using shared resources much easier.

svn sw respository .

This switches the repository. For me, I am developing on some branches for VxWorks, but I want to run valgrind on the my code. So I check out the linux version of the code, only I switch the repositories to use my VxWorks branches for the externals. Then I run valgrind.

svn copy repository new

Another basic command, but useful when branching. Subversion does diffs, so branching is not going to blow up your server.

Linking errors

At work I am porting some software from Linux to VxWorks. The code has already been ported to VxWorks once, but that was several years ago with a different compiler and IDE. The code base has also evolved since that time, so there is code rot. The process has been slower than I would have liked, but it is coming along.

A problem I initially had was that the project would compile in the WindRiver Workbench IDE without any errors, but then it would not find things it was expecting for linking when I downloaded it to the PPC board. For the majority of the errors I could tell by the name what I needed to include in the module, but for one I was stymied.

That is, I was stymied until I remembered readelf -s. That command prints out the symbol table of the compiled code. I used the PPC version of this command on my module and the x86 version on the original linux port compiled with debug flags. Combined, that gave me the file name of the offending function call.

Mac antivirus software

I am not a Mac user. For a while this was a "religious" choice ("Stupid smug Mac users who can't do anything without their stupid GUIs") but since the end of my time at BYU it has mostly just been a financial choice. However, my wife and I have inherited several used Macs during the course of our marriage. She keeps the best and then passes the rest to starving students we know. Having a Mac in the home has required me learning a few things about Macs (like using SAMBA to connect to my windows machine).

Unfortunately, a lot of my software solutions do not translate well to the Mac. There isn't as large a freeware community for the Mac, although it has gotten better recently. I can leverage the Unix side with open source stuff, but that sort-of defeats the whole "it just works" thing. If you are looking for useful Mac software, here is a good list of free stuff, although it is old (search for the products, as the links take you elsewhere in the internet archive).

Oh, yeah. The title of this post is "Mac antivirus software." I guess I better talk about that. My wife mentioned that she thought her Mac must have a virus since it has been running slower lately. I am not entirely convinced. If it was a PC then I would come to that conclusion, but she doesn't seem likely to have fallen for a trojan and that is about all that is available for a Mac, right? Anyway, I did look to see if there were any free anti-virus software available for Macs, since we can't get free licenses from my school anymore. Turns out, there are two popular ones:

http://www.iantivirus.com/download/ - Since I have never had a Mac, I have never used this software and cannot say much about it

http://www.clamxav.com/ - This one is based on the same code base as ClamWin, which I have used for my laptop

Of course, there are some others you can find through Googling (funny how that works). One thing you can also find by Googling is the discussion about whether Mac anti-virus software helps or hurts, since the software itself may introduce vulnerabilities and/or systems slowdowns. Interesting.

Windows for Linux/Power users

I am not really a Linux guru and I am not a Windows power user. However, I am comfortable in either environment. I do several things in each that make my life easier, and in general I try to make the two environments similar when I configure them. Below are some useful links I have collected for doing some snazzy/slick things with Windows that might not be for the average user. These are especially useful if you are a Linux guy working in a Windows world.

• Microsoft released some power toys for Windows that includes a desktop management system and some other nice tweaks.
• You can try X Mouse to get X11 mouse behavior in Windows. Highlighting cut-and-paste is useful.
  
• I have never used them, but MinGW is a collection of free header files and libraries for compiling windows programs that run without external dlls, such as cygwin's.
• Xming has been recommended to me as a good X-windows program for windows. Here are some notes. I tend to use whatever I find installed on my computer already.
• Last but not least, here are a few other people's lists of useful tools and tricks for those living in a Windows world:
  • Simon Peyton Jones has made a nice win32 cheat sheet
  • Win32 - GNU - Linux by Gregor Mitsch
  • David Welton put together a Windows for Linux users guide
  • My graduate school advisor, John Regehr, put together Windows Software for Unix Users

Windows software

Over the years I have collected lists of useful, cool, and free software for Microsoft Windows. Although I may not always have all of these tools installed, I have most of the tools installed most of the time. I share them here in case you have not heard of some of them before. Please share any you might think I am missing. Remember, they have to be free and for windows

• I heard from Dvorak about AVG Free, a free anti-virus program that should be adequate for home use.
  
• Microsoft offers a collection of Power Toys for Windows XP. Although their usefulness varies, I like the more intelligent task switcher and the desktop manager.
  
• Crap Cleaner lives up to its name. During regular use, stuff collects in Windows like plaque on teeth. Crap Cleaner quickly, easily, and simply gets rid of all the build-up.
  
• My daughter loves using Skype to talk to her great grandparents across the country. The setup is easy, it works for both PCs and Macs, and even my old computer can handle it.
  
• Handbrake rips DVDs and encodes them into other formats. It is useful for getting movies onto your iPod.
  
• Speaking of an iPod, you probably want to have iTunes installed. Other services are catching up and/or passing Apple's, but they are still the biggest kid on the block for now.
  
• For web browsing I use Google's Chrome. This is mostly because I am a small Google fanboy. Firefox is probably still the better browser, although Chrome has some nice features and a simplistic elegance that is fun.
  
• Flickr provides an uploader tool that makes uploading photos to their site very easy.
  
• Google pack has a good collection of software, although I must admit that the ones I use the most are imports not made by Google (Skype and Adobe Reader).
  
• The Open Disc aims to put a good collection of high quality open source software on a CD. You can see what they put on their disc and download interesting programs individually. I would recommend a few especially.
  
  • The Gimp is an excellent image editing program aiming to replace Adobe Photoshop.
    
  • Firefox is the best web browser out there as of writing this entry.
    
  • Pidgin puts together a bunch of IM clients into one interface making it very convenient to IM using AOL, Yahoo, MSN, and Google all at once.
    
  • I really like the Thunderbird email client.
    
  • WinSCP is useful for securely copying files, but I must admit that non-techies probably won't get excited about it.
    
  • Open Office continues to steadily improve as a free and compatible (for the most part) alternative to Microsoft Office.
    
  • Since I have not had a working printer for a few years, I rely a lot on PDF Creator. I can "print" to the pdf creator and then move the pdf to where I want to print it.
    
  • Although it is not the best anti-virus software, Clamwin is free.
  
  
• The Software for Starving Students used to make a good collection of free (not necessarily open source) software. They even had a collection of free software for Apple's OS X. Most of the Windows software shows up somewhere else on my list, which is probably why the project was discontinued and the list is only available on the internet archive.

That seems to pretty much sum it up. Anything I missed? I hope you try these tools out. Some of them may be a bit different than what you are used to, but you can't beat the price. Some of the free software is actually better than their costly counterparts.

Victory

Or how I got my DVD burner to work. You might recall from a previous post that I was having some trouble burning DVDs. At the time I achieved the desired functionality (burning a watchable DVD) by upgrading the firmware (from Liteon SOHW-1633S to 1653). However, I still could not burn data DVDs, a necessary feature for a family history project on which my wife is working.

This morning I decided that my iomega SuperDVD drive was not going to work with my computer, so I started trying to fix my wife's Mac Mini. It had also failed to burn the discs. I thought this strange, since "it just works" is one of Apple's selling points. Turns out it is also a lie. My wife's Superdrive is a Matshita DVD-R UJ-845C. After reading various help forums, I determined that an update on the Mini had broken DVD burning for a lot of people with this drive and that Apple and Matshita were both not doing anything about it. A simple firmware update would fix it, but none of the updates released by Apple seemed to do the job (1.0, 2.0, or the risky and recalled 2.1). So, I gave up on the Superdrive as well.

Now, just to be silly, I pulled the iomega SuperDVD off of my desk and plugged it into my wife's Mac Mini. Nothing appeared to happen. I inserted a blank DVD. It opened the DVD, I dragged files to burn from the computer, clicked burn, and waited for it to finish. Everything went fine. We are now on burn number five of our media of which we need ten copies. The Superdrive may not have "just worked," but the iomega external drive sure did.

Google Reader

Whether you know it or not, you probably read RSS (real simple syndication) feeds. You also probably share the items on these feeds with your friends. My favorite tool for both reading and sharing is Google Reader.

Here is a video overview of the service, including how to get started (the voice is kind of loud, so watch your volume):


Here are some other sites for getting started:

Google's tour of Reader

Another video intro to Reader

cnet's newbie guide to Reader

None of those guides is perfect, but they should all give you an idea. Here is my one paragraph guide for the super lazy and/or busy: Go to Google Reader and sign in using your Google account. If you are the last person in the world to have a Google account, now would be a good time to sign up. Now that you are in Reader, you want to add subscriptions. In separate tabs (if you are still using IE6, just give up and go home. Seriously) open up some of your favorite news sites and look for the RSS icon () or something that says RSS. Click on it to open a nasty looking text page (the feed). Highlight the URL and then go back to the Reader tab. Click on add a subscription and then paste the copied URL. Click "add" and then hope for the best.

Eventually you will get the hang of things and realize that there are different ways to do things, but that should get you going. One cool part of Reader is sharing. You can check your sharing settings under "Sharing settings." When you are reading an article or summary in Reader, at the bottom is a link that says "Share" and has a gray version of the RSS logo to the left of it. When you click on it, the logo turns orange and you have shared that article. The article then shows up in your public feed ("Shared items") and it gets shared with your friends. Here's a link to my shared items. That's it!

Alright, maybe the other guides are better. Oh well. Here are a couple of links for even more information:

Wikipedia entry on Google Reader

The official Google Reader blog

Internet Archive

I have been collecting a list of useful programs for another post. One of my favorite sites for finding the newest and coolest free useful programs was Software for Starving Students (I believe some students from BYU, my alma mater, started the project). However, those of you who click on that site will notice that the project is no longer maintained. Although OpenDisc is also a great project, I find it does not have the breadth that the SSS discs did. I found the most useful part of the web site to be the list of applications in their FAQ, and I really wanted to see what used to be on that list now that it was no longer there.

Enter the Internet Archive. I first heard about the Internet Archive on TWiT 144. Little did I know how useful I would find it to be. The Internet Archive is a pretty straightforward idea: archiving the internet. So they just make copies of all the tubes and put them in filing cabinets somewhere. . . . Obviously the process is a little different, but the idea is to archive the internet so when a page goes away, the information does not get lost.

The Archive has a search engine called the "Wayback Machine." I simply typed in the URL for the Software for Starving Students site and then clicked on "Take Me Back." Up came a listing of all the times the site had been archived. I clicked on the most recent archive, Jan 27, 2008, and discovered (to my delight) that the website was still up at that time. I clicked on the FAQ link and went to that page in the archive. It was a bit slow, but it was there!

What does this mean? If some web page has changed and you need info on the old page, you may still be able to find it. This also means that the pictures of you and your ex-boyfriend you thought you took down may still live on. . . and on. . . and on!

DVD burner

A while back I inherited a DVD burner. My media collection has finally gotten to the point where CDs do not work well for backups. This is mostly thanks to the nice camera my grandparents got me two years ago. The pictures take up more space, and backing them up no longer fits on single CDs. I figured a DVD burner would be useful to deal with this. Being the lazy/cheap person that I am, I never bought DVDs for it.

Here are the specs:
iomega SuperDVD
P/N 31367200
DVDRW16XUSB
Liteon SOHW-1633S burner

My wife did a family history project over the summer which needed the DVD burner so we purchased a spindle of DVDs. I had never burned DVDs before and knew little to nothing about how to do it. So I gave my wife no guidance on what type of media to purchase. It turns out that this was probably a mistake, as using high-quality media when burning DVDs is important. See The Golden Rules of Burning.

We tried to burn the DVDs and could not burn data discs. We tried both my "new" DVD burner and her Mac mini. This was right during my dissertation defense and our move to Massachusetts, so only a quick attempt was made and then the project was shelved. The DVDs never even seemed to start writing before an error occurred (sorry, I do not still have the error written down).

Then, a week and a half ago, a friend of mine asked if I could burn some movies of him teaching a class to a DVD. I said I would look into it and get back to him. This motivated him to get my DVD recorder working. It took a lot of searching, but eventually I found this forum thread which seemed to address my problem. The solution I tried was to upgrade my firmware to a 1653. This allowed me to burn the DVD media using the software which came with the burner.

A few warnings: First, the DVD creation software has two options for closing. The first is a quick version and that seems to work fine (played in my DVD player). The second option claims to be more compatible, but all it really seemed to do was kill the burn at the very end. Second, I always have burned (so far) at the slowest possible setting (again, see The Golden Rules of Burning). Third, I still have not successfully burned a data DVD. The player treats the media as CDs in the bundled software, and the windows driver says it's a CD player.

If anybody has any insight about burning data discs using a Liteon DVDRW SOHW-1633S USB burner that has been flashed with a Liteon DVDRW SOHW-1653S USB burner firmware, please feel free to share. I imagine I will figure it out on my own, though. I just need to put in the time. I will blog about my inevitable success!

My blog changes

I have had this blog for a while, but this has been my first semi-serious attempt to make it interesting/cool/useful/attractive for anybody other than myself. I am happy to talk about any of the things I did or ideas I tried, and will share code if you are interested. Hopefully I can be a useful resource for setting up your own blog.

What I am a little hazy on is how to set up the actual blog on Blogger and the process for signing up for AdSense. I did both of those steps a long time ago. However, I remember them being very straightforward. Since Google makes money on their ads, they want you to be able to put them on your blog!

To see how I did the three-column layout, checkout my previous post.

There were several widgets I wanted to add into my site. Adding widgets is easy in blogger. You just go to the "Layout" tab and then click on "Add a Gadget." The easiest ones to add are the ones Google provides, but you can add almost anything through the "HTML/JavaScript" option. You just have to not be scared of a little code. I added these four widgets using "HTML/JavaScript": FriendFeed, Flickr, Goodreads, and Google Calendar. Each site has instructions for getting the code, and then you just add it to through the Blogger add gadget interface.

I wanted to add a favicon and found these instructions. They do not seem to work. I looked around a bit for some other instructions, but they did not work either. If you know how to do this, please share. If I take some time to figure it out, I'll blog it.

There were a few tricky things I wanted that Blogger did not provide and that weren't straightforward cuts and pastes into a single gadget. This site has 15 useful widgets and scripts for Blogger. The two I use are recent comments and label cloud. Both have good instructions and are not difficult. They are more involved than the gadget interface.

One problem with the way I initially set up my Blogger template is that on really short postings (such as this one) the two half-sidebars on the right would slide underneath the post instead of staying underneath the full sidebar. The correct way to fix this is CSS or div tags or something like that. My quick and dirty way to deal with it was to put everything into a two column table. However, this slowed everything down as the whole table would load at once. A little research told me how to fix it using a colgroup tag.

If you have any questions about how I set things up, please let me know and I will see if I can answer them. If you have any comments or suggestions, please send those along as well! Thanks!