MBoffin.com - Recent Posts

Earth Bridge Feedback Forum - Dylan

8/15/2008 7:24:26 PM

As I develop Earth Bridge, and once it starts alpha and beta testing, I need a way to keep track of bugs, feedback, and so forth. I'm taking a cue from Stack Overflow and using a service called UserVoice. It's a really excellent feedback/bug/feature tracking site. Here is Earth Bridge's site:

http://EarthBridge.UserVoice.com - Earth Bridge Feedback Forum

I've seeded the page with an example feature request. Well, it's a real feature, but just so you can see how it works. There are a lot of new, planned features so I'm sure many of the ones that get posted right off are already being worked on, but the site will give me a good idea of what people think about those features, and how popular those features might be.

Woot! RC Helicopters! - Dylan

8/12/2008 1:48:21 AM

Today's Woot is a two-pack of RC helicopters. If you happen to be reading this before they are sold out, go get a pack!! These are amazing amounts of fun if you can find a good place to fly them. Armen bought me one for Christmas and it's really fun to fly. Rowan loves flying it too, so one of the one's I bought from Woot today will go to him (after an appropriate number of jobs done, of course).

Being a guy and a geek, I love all things RC. I think the coolest thing I've seen in years is the guy who mounted a head tracking video camera onto the cockpit area of an RC place and had the video feed going into a VR goggle setup that was tracking his head movements. He essentially had a live, free-looking view from the cockpit of his RC place. Seriously, folks, it's hard to imagine anything cooler. I tried to find the video on Google Video, but it seems to be gone.

What I want to do is something like that, but I don't have the cajones (or budget) to do it with an RC plane. Instead I'm going to try to do it with an RC car instead. It will still be fun to be racing around with my view being from the car itself, but with the ability to free-look around me while driving.

More Work on Earth Bridge - Dylan

8/10/2008 12:41:26 AM

I've been coding away on version 2.0 of Earth Bridge. I've gotten some really great (and fast) help over at Stack Overflow.

Having been subscribed to many usability blogs for the past several years is definitely paying off. I will reserve judgment on whether the interface I'm creating is "good" or not until other people have seen it, but I definitely like it much better than the old interface.

Regarding the interface, this is an especially tough application to create. First off, I'm not a UI designer. I'm a developer. (If you don't know why that's a problem, go read this.) What is trying to get out of my head is something like this. It's taking all my effort to prevent that kind of atrocity from happening. Unfortunately, the nature of this application is such that it only actually does one thing. However, there are about 200 ways of configuring how it does that one thing. So when it comes down to it, the whole UI of the application is just a glorified interface to a config file. So I really mean it when I say it's tough to create the interface. I'm doing my darnedest to keep from unleashing a UI atrocity on the users.

What am I doing? - Dylan

7/30/2008 1:51:18 AM

While I haven't been updating this site very often (read: at all), it doesn't mean I haven't been updating other sites. Here are a few other places where you can see what I'm up to:

TrueCrypt and Whole Disk Encryption - Dylan

7/30/2008 1:28:09 AM

I posted quite a while back about keeping my data on a USB key for easy access and portability. I later posted about using TrueCrypt for securing a section of that USB key for sensitive files.

Well, time went on and things changed a bit. First of all, I noticed that having a USB stick in my laptop all the time was draining my battery quite a bit faster than I could live with. This was to be expected, but it wasn't something I was happy with. Second of all, I found that when it came down to it, I really hardly ever used another computer where I needed to bring all my docs and apps over with me. Usually the only time I needed to bring all those files and apps over to another system was when I was either moving to a new laptop entirely, or I was formatting my system and needed to get back up and running again.

Due to the second reason, I changed the size of my TrueCrypt volume to just barely bigger than a standard CD could hold (see Peter's Evil Overlord List item #99) and kept all my sensitive files and all my portable apps in that one TrueCrypt volume. I then just kept that volume on my hard drive and mounted it as needed. (Which, truthfully, was all the time, since it had my browser in that volume.)

Then it came time to format my system and install Windows Vista Ultimate. Vista Ultimate (and the Business version as well) comes with a feature called BitLocker, which is basically whole-disk encryption. Your entire hard drive is encrypted, which means that if your laptop is stolen, you are safe. They can take the hard drive out of your laptop and hook it up to another computer and they still won't be able to get to your files. Well, alas, my laptop does not have the "Trusted Platform Module" chip inside that makes BitLocker work.

But then I remembered that TrueCrypt also has whole-disk encryption built in. So I figured I might as well try it, since everything was being wiped anyway. If it didn't work, I could just re-wipe and go back to what I was doing before.

Long story short, it works amazingly well. The process is extremely easy to encrypt your entire hard drive. TrueCrypt will not even perform the encryption unless it can read in your CD drive a correctly burned recovery disk. This means that you really have to screw up to lock yourself out of your own computer.

It's a very comforting thing to know that my entire hard drive is encrypted. If you own a laptop, I wholeheartedly recommend you do some sort of whole-disk encryption, either through BitLocker (Vista), FileVault (OS X), PGP, or TrueCrypt. (I personally would recommend TrueCrypt because aside from being free, it's also open source. This means that its algorithms and code are subject to peer review.)

EarthBridge and all things GPS - Dylan

7/30/2008 12:49:46 AM

If you know me well, you know I just love GPS stuff. I wrote Earth Bridge and Earth Stumbler almost (wow!) three years ago. Several times I tried to get back into coding Earth Bridge v2.0 and each time I kept getting pulled off onto other things and never making it far into the next version.

No more.

I've set up a new Subversion source code repository, installed Visual Studio 2008, and I am coding away. Since the program really needed a major re-architecture of the back-end and the front-end code, I'm basically starting from scratch. I figure it shouldn't take too long to get back up to where version 1 was in functionality, since I coded the original version of the program in only a matter of weeks.

I feel pretty bad about neglecting this program for so long. I love using it and have just about as much want for new features as everyone else. I will post updates on my progress as I go, and hopefully I can start alpha testing and then beta testing. (Real alpha and beta tests, though. Not an extended/forever Google-style beta test.)

I'm thinking of buying an Asus EEE PC for doing mobile testing of Earth Bridge, but it's still up in the air. I have other GPS stuff I want to do to, and a little micro-laptop would be great to have. Especially one that's robust enough to run Google Earth.

I have several other "mobile" GPS apps I'd love to start working on, but I need to get Earth Bridge moving first. I'll blog about the other apps I'm thinking of as I get to them. I personally think the market of location-aware apps is enormous and the number of apps filling that need is microscopic compared to what it should be. The new iPhone is starting to help that, but I think we're only at the very beginning of a whole new genre of applications. (As I said before, I love this subject.)

So, again, sorry to all of you who use Earth Bridge and have been waiting for an update. It is coming. I have kept a list of all wanted features and am going to be rolling out as many of them as I can as fast as I can.

Is this blog still on? tap tap - Dylan

7/30/2008 12:11:36 AM

It's been quite some time since I've used my own web site for anything like regular updates. Kind of sad, really. You'd think my own web site would be where you could keep up to date with what I've been up to. No so for the past couple of years. Sorry, folks.

Instead of dwelling on what kept me from here, how about I just start posting? Whoa, what a novel idea.

*cracks knuckles*

Here we go!

Earthbridge - abrenner

7/16/2008 12:09:08 PM

Dylan,

Any idea when Earthbridge will have a Garmin interface, I'd like to run GE side by side with Maptech's Offshore Navigator without having to change the GPS protocol.

Also, any way to change the moving icon yet to a sailboat?

Thanks.

Browsers and Color Correctness - dcormier

6/20/2008 4:15:56 PM

As some of you may be aware, Firefox 3 was just released. One of the really nice things they added is support for ICC color profiles embedded in images (though you have to enable it).

In a nutshell, this means that you'll see images more like how the person who created the image intended. Considering I see many, many images from my web browser (as well as allowing others to see my images), I think this is pretty important.

As Firefox is one of the most popular browsers in use today, a lot of people should see benefits from this.

You can go here to see if your browser of choice implements this feature. Mine doesn't.

For you Apple fans, this isn't anything new. Safari has supported this for some time.

Website Designers - rnewhouse

6/8/2008 7:25:47 PM

Well, I am doing some research to find some top-level web design firms (client project), and I am encountering the phenomenon of WAY too much data, not enough information. Seems like everyone who can spell "HTML" is billing themselves as a web design firm, and it is difficult to sort out the serious contenders from the fly-by-nights.

After a brief foray into a series of so-called "top designers" I was able to eliminate about 90% of them with one click. My rule of thumb is, if I gag on the index page of the company's own website, I am not going to put them on my list.

It's interesting how many "top designers" are still using 50 paragraphs in 3-point font, meditation music, elaborate flash renditions of blooming flowers, elaborate and/or too many fonts, and more colors than Baskin Robbins has flavors - on their index pages. Not to mention page after page after page of marketing hype with NO product-price listing, inconsistent links from page to page, pop-up windows and PDF pages... not to mention crappy proofreading.

As Dylan once observed, it should be required that people have a license to design web pages.

Anyone have any particular recommendations or notes about some of the truly substantial web design firms? I'm looking for companies with substantial numbers of clients and significant annual revenues.