KJH World » Software

An Open Letter to e-Mail Form Makers

kjh — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 23:36:54 +0000

Does your website have a form where people need to/can enter an e-mail address? Are you a web developer that builds e-mail forms?

Then I have a simple request for you. Allow people to enter a ‘+’ (the plus symbol) as part of their e-mail address. Why? Because this is an extremely useful (if not well-known) feature of Gmail, plus other e-mail systems.

Yes, I understand that you’re attemptting to filter out spammy/hackerish or poorly inputted addresses, and I commend you, but this is a legitimate symbol.

Remember my post about e-mail minimization and sanity? The plus symbol is one such tool in the arsenal to auto-filter and label/tag. Help us help ourselves!

Lock down your Skype Privacy settings

kjh — Fri, 29 May 2009 22:27:56 +0000

If you use Skype, then you should do yourself a huge favor and lock down your privacy settings asap. This will prevent you from receiving calls and notes/messages from spammers, phishers and malware vendors.

Just today I received a rather legitimate looking e-mail that could easily be misunderstood to be from Skype. If I had clicked on the embedded link, and installed any of the software I would have been in for a world of hurt. It was one of those malware writers that makes you believe you have a virus/malware and says you need their software to clean your computer. Their ‘software’ in turn ends up being garbage that costs lots of money.

Here’s how to lock down your Skype settings:

Go to the menu Skype-> Privacy
Ensure that all of the “from” settings are from “people in my Contact List only“

Here’s a screenshot of what that dialog box looks like. Click for a larger version.

There is just one minor drawback. You will need to manually add new contacts before they are allowed to call/message you. A small price to pay for a lot more security.

Musician/Programmer Hacks “Guitar Hero” Controller

kjh — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 00:22:46 +0000

There sure are a lot of talented people out there with a lot of time on their hands. Owen Grace is one such gentleman, who decided to turn his Guitar Hero controller into something that could really play music, and taking it to its ultimate conclusion by forming a band (The Guitar Zeros) that plays gigs.

Owen didn’t electronically/electrically modify the guitar itself (although he put a cool Eddie Van Halen design on it), but mapped out the signals from the various buttons and then wrote a computer program that would interpret the keys and send them through a synthesizer to produce the sounds.

Take a look at this video where Owen explains how he did it and demonstrates playing. Obviously, he’s expanded the capability of this seemingly simple device a lot. In this picture, he looks like he’s playing some hammer-on/hammer-off or other advanced guitar technique.

Oh yes, if you want to do this yourself, Owen has put up complete instructions on the Web and made the software (called FretBuzz) open source.

Web 2.0 version of Visio

kjh — Mon, 07 May 2007 05:35:58 +0000

Yet another very cool, very online version of a traditionally desktop application is Gliffy. Gliffy is a very capable, although obviously not as feature-rich tool as its desktop counterpart, Visio. But who cares? Most of us really don’t. Using most of these tools, like Excel or Word or even Visio to its fullest extent requires a lot of time and experience. After all, games have been developed in Excel. Games! Your typical online spreadsheet doesn’t have that power, nor should it. I’m typically the first in line for more features, but not in this case. Let’s leave these online apps nice and small and quick, and they will serve the majority of users out there.

Mr. Alex over at Geekfoolery has covered some of the various other online, Web 2.0 versions of office productivity suites out there.

Windows, GUIs, 3D, Oh My

kjh — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 06:59:23 +0000

Windowing and Graphical User Interfaces are taking some more big steps. You may think that I may be talking about Windows Vista with Aero, but while it has some neat features, I’m not. Instead, let me first tell you about the coolest thing in X Windows window managers: Beryl. I’m totally going to date myself in this article by reminiscing about when I used twm, mwm, and fvwm. The X-Windows/*nix marriage was definitely something that I love – you have the power of a *nix kernel, a totally customizable command-line based shell, slap X-Windows on top of it and run any window manager you want. Your computing environment, your way.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Where was I? Oh yes, Beryl. Having been stuck in a predominantly MS Windows environment for years now, I’ve lost touch with the latest in the windowing advances. Luckily, I know folks who do keep in touch, and I was recently shown an extremely cool demo video of Beryl (and there are probably dozens of videos now). If you’ve seen demos of Aero and been wowed, prepared to be floored. Features in Beryl include warping windows, zooming in and out, using a cube as an abstration for a virtual desktop environment, transparency, wrapping windows around edges, and so much more. Just watch the video here:

But Beryl and Compiz are not the only 3D window managers operating on 2D applications. Last year, Sun introduced Project Looking Glass which is of course Java based. When Jonathan Schwartz did his demo, the crowd went crazy. Here’s another demo that explains better what PLG is and can do along with interviews of the main developer (just try to ignore the robot-like people presenting it).

But the fun doesn’t stop there. I picked up this next piece of coolness from Dave Zatz. It’s a video demo of a two-handed touchscreen windowing environment by a company called Perceptive Pixel. Unfortunately, there isn’t any info on their website, but the demo is amazing. I was left wondering how the system ‘knows’ what you’re trying to do when you touch the screen or a window or whatever. I’m sure there are rules, which means there’s a learning curve involved. And oh yeah, can I sit down?

All of these new windowing environments are cool, but the question is will it revolutionize or at least improve usability? Will it make me more productive? Or am I still just as well off with twm and the apps I need? Next big step – just let me think it.

Microsoft losing ground to Open Source Movement

kjh — Fri, 03 Sep 1999 18:18:32 +0000

Robert Cringley has just written a really interesting article on how he
sees the future shaping up for Microsoft, Intel and the Open Source
Movement and why. Yep, maybe we will all be running Linux and some free
Office Suite in the future… I can’t remember what it was like when we
were all running Atari’s, Amiga’s, Commodore’s and Mac’s and Windows
was slowly building its presence – it was probably similar, and no one
paid attention to Windows until they were actually running it
themselves.

He has also written a lot of really interesting articles in the past
that are worth taking a look at it. Just click the ‘Old Hat’ link.

Superbowl Commercial for Linux?

kjh — Fri, 03 Sep 1999 06:13:16 +0000

Ok, there really isn’t a commercial to be aired for Linux during the next Superbowl, but this writer got to thinking about what such a commercial would be like. The cool thing here is all of the follow-on ideas that were generated by the readers. Some of them are pretty funny, and when you think about it, many of them would make really good ads. (See, you don’t need to be in Advertising to come up with this stuff, just a decent imagination).