Tuesday Nights

I posted some pictures from my Tuesday Night gaming group, this time it was a WAN party featuring Age of Empires II.  You can see some of the pics here: Geek Orthodox Album.

In other news I picked up a new Digital Camera yesterday and I must say I am pleased with it.  I opted for a combination of value and image quality, picking up the FujiFilm FinePix S7000.  The S7000 features a nice heavy, anolog feel great for those of us who cut our teeth on SLR cameras like the N90 and F5.  The image quality is actually quite good for its price range, 6.3 million effective pixels, or ~6.3 megapixels for around $550.

You can find other stats such as focal length, apeture settings and exposure modes on this page.  Anyone who is looking for a good, affordable digital camera, should definately give this one a look.

Not fair...

Apple released new monitors seen here, and previewed "Tiger" the next version of MacOS X.

While the monitors are tre´ cool, I am more exctited about the new features in Tiger.  There are significant upgrades to iChat, Safari, Core Services and the Finder.  Here are some sneak peeks:

Lets start off with the coolest one in my opinion, you can now have 3 members in a video chat:

This is just outstanding.  You can say what you want about eye candy and such but that is just swank.  There is no other word for it.  I have been waiting for the ability to add multiple streams to a video iChat with great anticipation.  And with the new codec one can only imagine how beautiful the feeds will be, although I am sure that you are going to need a pretty hefty processor and net pipe to be able to handle that much data coming across your wires.  I believe that this, coupled with the iChat Server that is included in Server 10.4, will be another strong offering for Apple in the enterprise market.

Next we hit the new compression codec in Tiger H.264/AVC.  This new codec is just amazing.  This standard was developed to provide a "network-friendly" video representation for use in "conversational" (video telephony, in use by iChat AV) and "non-conversational" (storage, broadcast or streaming, Quicktime Streaming and I would imagine the Music Store/Movie Store.) applications.

H.264/AVC really shines when compared to older standards like MPEG 2, typically increasing in the area of rate-distortion efficiency by a factor of 2.  Apparently the codec splits the data representation into one layer, the Video Coding Layer (VCL)which carries an accurate representation of the video content; and the Network Abstraction Layer (NAL) which formats the VCL and provides header information based on the particular transport layer or storage media in use.

Other than that the new codec follows the previously established block-based hybrid encoding approach first employed in H.261.

Now onto the second most exciting change for me, RSS features for Safari.  I have come to love this browser. It is fast, reliable and other than the over-used metal texture, it is well laid out from a usability standpoint... at least I think so.  My only gripes have been:

• There lack of a script driven sidebar.  That has been solved by the author of Saft apparently, you can find info here.
• And lastly the lack of any RSS aggregation or viewing in Safari.

Apparently my cries of pain have been heard in Cupertino and answered.  The Tiger version of Safari will ship with an interesting RSS reader/aggregator built in.  There hasn't been much rumbling in the blogosphere about the implementation other than a side note on Jon's blog, you can find it under the heading os x browser news on the right side.

I agree that:

1. the lack of a way to show the count of unread feeds, as well as assigning a value to frequency of updates...
but I disagree that:
2. it is not "the nicest of solutions", I see great potential in this interface (I find NNW to be bloated and over featured) and will wait to see what they come up with in the next 6 -8 months.

Either way I see this as a wonderful development.  There are many people that will now use RSS that did not before due to the trademark ease of use that Apple imbues all thier creations with, programs like NNW while powerful, are to cumbersome and complicated for the average user to contend with, I have found NNW to be a mess of buttons and features that are not intuitively placed in any concievable way.  The biggest contender to a RSS-ified Safari would probably be Pulp Fiction from Freshly Squeezed Software, unfortunately for them RSS-ified Safari comes with every copy of Tiger free.

Now onto Dashboard.   This has got to be the worst idea Apple has ever stolen.  I thought konfabulator was a collosally stupid idea, and I think that the Apple variation is a slightly better integrated, collosally stupid idea.  The "widgets" don't integrate with the UI at all, and they take up way more desktop space than should be allowed by law, not to mention they break everyone of Apples HIG guidelines.  I can't even talk about this anymore.  Moving on.

That is it for now.  I plan on finishing this up with a look at the new Meta data Search that has been added to Tiger, and the new 64 bit codebase and libraries.  Until then, stay well.

I told him, his "cool thing" quotient was full...

Apparently our man Reader Joel didn't listen to me, and I think that he was right to have ignored me on this one!

Here is a photograph of "blessed as a sub-deacon Joel" serving His Beatitude Metropolitan Herman at the Akathist for the Tihkvin Ikhon this past weekend at Holy Trinity Cathedral in Chicago.

I think I can let this one go Joel, but don't push it brother.

Another little teaser...

Soon, very soon.

Photmatt: Lucky in Google...

The Rest of Us: Unlucky

Photomatt has finally hit his goal, he is the "Most important Matt in the world", at least to google.  What does this mean to us you might ask; well I will tell you.  It means that Matt has taken his site off line, breaking all links to his articles and depriving us of his wit and insight.

Now I am assuming that Matt is doing one of two things here:

1. He is just messing with everyone, and taking his site down for a pre-determined span of time.
2. He is planning on re-launching the site under a new name or design, thereby keeping his word of taking down this website, but not depriving his readership.

Or he could be serious and we won't see anything from him other than dev updates to WordPress.  I certainly hope not.

Gmail invites

Well I now have 2 gmail invites to give out, I am thinking of selling them, not sure yet.

If you would like to aquire a gmail account, I am now accepting offers.  Email me @ chrisdmitri at gmail.com, we might be able to do some business.

Back Home again...

Heather and I arrived home from our whirl wind trip to Chicago last night around 10:30.

All in all it was an incredible trip.  Heather and I were able to meet another member of our Holy Synod, His Emenence Archbishop Job and were able to take the Eucharist from his hand.

We were priviliged to have been praying at a Vigil for the Saints of North America, in a Cathedral that houses the Epitrachelion of St Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow; the cathedral was also consecrated by St. Tikhon.

The Most perfect joy we had was of course watching Joel Wilson a dear friend of ours, be tonsured a reader, and blessed as a sub-deacon.  We have only known Joel for a short time, but in that time I have seen his love, servants attitude and a heart that is seeking God.  I look forward to watching from the sidelines as he runs his race; I can just imagine where it will take him.

I would be remiss to close this brief discourse without touching upon one of my favorite experiences from this weekend; being able to spend time eating and laughing with Joel's family.  I told him more than once that he is very lucky to have such a wonderful family.  Heather and I both found them to be warm and accepting... and at least one of them a bit insane, I think we all know who I am referring to *cough* Caleb *cough*.

Well that is enough for now, I am working on a proper entry that will explore the impact this weekend had on Heather and I, but for now I take my leave of you.

Chicago bound...

Well in around 15 minutes My wife and I will be setting out for Holy Trinity Cathedral in Chicago to celebrate with Joel Wilson and his family; Joel will join the rank of the Clergy this Sunday as a Reader and pseudo-subdeacon.

Well see you guys on the flipside.cd /chicago/illinois/christ-the-savior/

Gmail

I recently aquired a Gmail account set up yesterday and I am looking forward to putting it through its paces.

I will post a more in depth analysis of it later, but for now I need to spend more quality time with the system to really have an opinion.  One thing I can say now though; Safari compatability better be coming soon, and you should really be able to add a contact from your address book from the new message screen.  Seriously.

New UI for the WP Admin area

Before you get into the nitty gritty of this little excursion, you must be informed of a couple of caveats.

First of all, this design is for me, not everyone.  Some of my compatriots on the #wordpress irc channel seemed to dig it, so I am releasing it for them really.  What does this mean to you gentle reader?  Well it means that for instance, you must keep your window at a certain width to avoid nasty wrapping issues, if you have your monitor set at 1024 X 768 then you shouldn't have a problem.

Secondly, this includes my Overview page wp-glance, with the stats piece commented out, but if you would like to add that back in, you can download wp-glance, and follow the instructions to add the table for stats to your DB and uncomment the stats bit.

Okay, on with the show.

Well here is the first release of my new UI for WordPress.

Again before starting here, the purpose for this little experiment was to make the UI more comfortable for me, and to get rid of the stinking blue, of which I am not a fan.  Give me red baby.

Here is a screenshot:

Ok, so now on to business.  I tried to make this as painless as possible so bear with me.

1. First you need to download this archive.
2. After you have unzipped it, you will find a number of new .php files, and a couple of new images within the wp-admin folder and a new wp-admin.css file.
3. You now have one of two choices, you can either A.) backup your current copies of the .php and .css files, or you can B.) just drag and drop overwriting the current files.
4. You also need to add the images found in wp-images to your own wp-image folder.

That should be all you need to do, look for teh next version of this little endeavour that will incorporate more drastic changes to the layout of some of the screens.