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pdw @ zoomshare
blog pdw
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Older Entries
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Thu, 12 Jun 2008
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| And Now For Something Completely Different |
I have this love/hate relationship with the Sci Fi
channel, I love to hate their commercials.
Nothing drives me crazy more than watching
Battlestar Galatica or Dr. Who - which given its
BBC origin isn't even filmed for commercial breaks
- to be force to watch the 100th ad in the last
hour for the monster movie of the week staring Kevin Sorbo.
In these tough conditions one has to keep their
wits about them and find any value - entertainment
or otherwise - whenever possible. Luckily for me,
I'm not the only one who finds the Sci FI network's
commercial breaks so grating. My two partners in
crime, my wife Katie and my best friend Brandon
have teamed up to create the Sci Fi Poem Project
featuring haikus and other
stylings using the titles from various monster
of the week movies.
Without further ado, I give you the first - of
maybe a series:
A lone "Dragon Fighter", From
a "Dragon Dynasty" with his "Dragon Sword" in a
"Dragon Storm"
Or
This "Man-thing" leader of "Interceptor Force"
shall "Encrypt" this "abominable" "absolon" "Aztec
Rex"
Or this variation
"They Are Among Us"
this "Deadly Swarm" of "Man
with the Screaming Brain"
Shouting "Do or
Die"at thy "Fire Serpant", "Infected" with
"Harpies"
These "Fallen Ones" believed the
"Sabertooth" from "Beyond Loch Ness"
Soon after
battle, "Pumpkin head vs. Demonic Toys" in which
this "Savage Planet" was changed
A new "Epoch
Evolution" begun as "Skeleton Man" and "Painkiller
Jane" begat "SS DoomTrooper"
This "Headless
Horseman" on "Raptor Island" in peace, no more the
"Pumpkinhead: Blood Fued"
Now you know you want to
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Posted 17:13
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Tue, 03 Jun 2008
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| A Word From Our Sponsor |
Worried you don't have enough time to find Dad the
perfect gift for Father's Day? Not sure if he needs
a new hammer from the near by hardware store or an
iPod from the local electronic store?
While Father's Day is Sunday, June 15, less than
two weeks away, the fine folks at Amazon wish to
remind you that there is still plenty of time to
pick up a cool gift for Dad online. Better yet, you can
shop their hardware
store for the perfect hammer or their electronic
store for that iPod, not to mention ties and DVDs,
watches, games, and big
TVs -- Amazon has what Dad
wants (and what he needs).
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Posted 07:42
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Mon, 26 May 2008
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| Up and Coming Album Upgrade |
Deep within the Zoomshare office resides a
collection of servers running a duplicate copy of
our application for development and testing. Within
this damp lab the mad hacker/programmers, including
yours truly, slave over every line of code, looking
to improve performance and reliability.
About once a week a service bell rings summoning us
from our dungeon to "The Meeting Place" where that
week's directive is read to all within ear shot.
For the past few weeks the directive has repeated,
exactly the same, like a drum beat, over and over
"Improve Photo Albums, Improve Photo Albums". Then
with little warning we are pushed back down the
stairs to our lab, deprived of sunlight and all but
bread and water, until one day at the Sacred
Council of Fogg the Stone of Wine declares "It is
done!"
Eh, ok, maybe not quite like that. Yet, we do
indeed work everyday on improving Zoomshare and indeed for the past
few weeks within our lab environment we have been
focusing on enchantments to photo albums and soon
those changes will be seeing the light of day. That
of course brings us to the big question: What in
Photo Albums will be changing?
Album Changes: Navigation
First and foremost the biggest change to
Zoomshare sites for visitors will be a new
navigation scheme, designed to allow a visitor to
easily move between individual images and removal
of the awkward "pop-up window".
At first, navigating images within album looks the
same; first a list of albums in alphabetical order,
followed by a collection of thumbnail images
representing the various sorted images within an album.
Thumbnail View
However, everything changes after the next mouse
click. Previously when a visitor clicked on a
thumbnail image a pop-up window would open with a
full-size view of the image. Within the upcoming
change upon mouse click the thumbnail view will
disappear and be replaced with a new "mid-size"
view of the image.
The new mid-size view has the following enchantments:
- Mid-size view of image
- Embed Codes for the image <--
More on this in a bit
- Previous & Next navigation to view album images
at the mid-size "level"
- If a free site, a new ad space
Mid-size View
To view a full or originally uploaded size, a
simple mouse clink on the mid-size image will do
the trick. However instead of a pop-up window,
which most web browsers restrict these days, a "lightbox" effect is in place in
which the image opens in a "modal dialog box". Simply put
everything within the browser window is "grayed out" to draw focus to the
image "on top of" everything else.
Full-size View
Album Changes: Embed Codes
With the addition of the mid-size view to
photo albums another element the "Share" or "embed
codes" have been added alongside each image to
enable sharing of your images among visitors to
your site and the web in general. Depending on the
size of the image each image will either have a
collection of Small & Original or Small, Medium and
Large code for embedding the image into a web page
or bulletin board.
In addition each image will include a URL to use in
instant messages or emails as well as the embed
code for the Zoomshare Flipbook Widget containing
the whole album in which the individual image is a
part of.
Use of these embed codes is similar to other codes
found on the web today; the visitor simply uses
their ever handy copy and paste abilities to select
and copy the embed code they wish to use, then
paste that code into the desired location as needed.
Selecting Share Code for Embedding
Album Changes: Console
Don't want your images to be "shareable" by
your site visitors? No problem, within console a
new album setting allows a Zoomshare user to
control which, if any, albums are "shareable". By
default all albums are, so if you wish to limit
which albums provide share information one simply
needs to disable the feature as desired.
Console Disable/Enable Share Information
Even if a Zoomshare user wishes to disable
Share information for the outside world,
within console the embed codes for any image can
still be found for use within Zoomshare pages or
elsewhere.
To access this new Share information within console
two new features have been added to the Add &
Sort Photos section of the photo album console.
A "Share" link above each new image provides for
that image's embed codes when desired. Simply click
on the Share link to reveal the necessary
information.
In addition to the Share link, the embed
codes for each image are also provided in the
Info section of each image, just in case.
Share Information within Console
Back to the Pit of Despair
As with all change it will take a little bit
of time for the dust to settle. If anything seems
amiss or if you have a suggestion, comment or
feedback, please do send them our way at: customerservice
at zoomshare dot com. But with any luck the
Shared Wizards of Zoom will declare "It is Good."
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Posted 20:21
8 comments | Post a comment
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Mon, 19 May 2008
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| The Software Supply Chain Problem |
Last week a dust up occurred in part of the
software industry relating to a security issue in a key software
toolkit. Apparently two years ago, someone ran
an analysis tool on the source code to the security
toolkit OpenSSL in the Debian Linux distribution.
The tool reported an issue within the OpenSSL
package included by Debian, so the Debian team
decided that they needed to fix this "security
bug". Alas the solution broke a critical element of
OpenSSL, its random number generator, (Long story short, a truly random
number generator is critical to software encryption
tools such as OpenSSL.) The end result is that for
the past two years security applications on Debian
and Debian related distributions have been
"hackable" and need to be rebuilt.
Each side in the matter is blaming the other. A
member of the OpenSSL team suggested that "had
Debian [submitted its code changes], we (the
OpenSSL Team) would have fallen about laughing, and
once we had got our breath back, told them what a
terrible idea this was." Debian developers on the
other hand have noted that the email address
provide by the OpenSSL team is incorrect and that
overall documentation on the part of the OpenSSL
team is lacking.
As with our own service issue from a few months
back pointing fingures isn't as helpful as
discovering where the chain broke and why. In both
cases the issues are eerily similar, a break down
in customer/vendor communication.
In Boston Ben Hyde deftly makes a connection between his local
butcher's meat packing industry and his own and
in the process wonders what might be the fallout of
interdependent web applications circa 2008. Here in
Chicago, the former hog butcher for the world, I
think we are just starting to see questions and
concerns of "quality control" starting to percolate
into the public consciousness as the software
supply chain between "suppliers", "vendors" and
"customers" grows in sophistication.
Last Labor Day the Chicago Park District recently
revealed a statue at the corner of Pulaski and
Foster, just a short walk from my home here in the
Albany Park neighborhood, in honor of the local
park's namesake, Samuel Gompers. Samuel Gompers
was an American labor organizer, union leader and
founder of the American Federation of Labor (AFL).
Unlike some of his contemporaries, Gompers doesn't
seem to have considered himself a Socialist,
Anarchist, or even a Communist, which in today's
political world would probably place him and his
beliefs somewhere near the center of America's
political spectrum. Although at the time he's
ideals clearly fell progressively left of center.
Upton Sinclair, a junior
contemporary of Gompers, was, no doubt about it, a
Socialist actively advocating socialist views. In
fact, while he gained particular fame for his 1906
novel The Jungle, which dealt with
conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, in
turn causing a public uproar that partly
contributed to the passage of the Pure Food and
Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act in 1906,
Sinclair himself felt the meaning of his work had
been lost on the general public. His outcry wasn't
about the conditions of the meat so much as it was
about the human tragedy lived by the workers in the
plants handling the meat.
And yet, The Jungle did ultimately bring
about change. Perhaps not the change originally
intended by its author, but change did come to the
growing complexity of the American food supply
chain of the early 20th century, a supply chain in
which the quality control problems of the time
started to get dealt with as regulations and
greater customer awareness started to take hold.
A Zoomshare service outage, while problematic, is
correctable. A security breach from improperly
patched software from two years ago is a little
harder to correct....
Recently TJX Cos., a discount retailer that
operates T.J. Maxx, Marshalls, HomeGoods and A.J.
Wright stores started mailing notifications to customers
about a recently arrived at settlement to a
class action suit in relation to a January 2007
report that computers that handle customer
transactions at a number of its chains were broken
into.
What if - and this is just a hypothetical here -
what if the TJX issue was related to the
Debian/OpenSSL fiasco? Who would legally be on the
hook? TJX? Debian? OpenSSL? All three?
What are the implications? We are already seeing
customers and regulators react. Services such as
Zoomshare post Privacy Policies and Terms of
Service. States such as California have passed laws
requiring immediate notification if customer data
is compromised.
It seems easy to wonder if the computer industry is
one Upton Sincalr expose away from greater public
and governmental outcry. Even without a
"man-of-the-people" individual looking to correct
some of the inequities in the IT industry one can
see changes are brewing as the overall complexity
of our systems grow - along with our greater
dependence.
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Posted 22:29
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Thu, 15 May 2008
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| Vid of the Day |
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If you spent your time while watching the above
"music video" trying to name all of the various
software applications on that Mac instead of
watching the lovely lady, you probably need to get
out more.
Yes, I was playing "name that app" the first
time I watched it, but I'm married....;-)
Via Thought Palace
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Posted 12:23
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