Burningbird

Vector Magic originated as a free online service hosted at Stanford University. You could upload a raster image, such as clip art or a photo, and use the service to generate a vector-based image. You could then export the image in a format such as SVG.

The service was simple to use and did an excellent job, especially if you're not experienced with using tools like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape's Trace functionality.

The developers behind Vector Magic split their software off from Stanford, creating a company named Vector Magic and began to offer the web services for a price. Unfortunately, the price was high: to download a vectorized image would cost about $2.50 American, which ended up being too steep for most folks.

The company then came out with a monthly "all you can download" subscription service, costing $7.95 a month. That's not a bad price for the service. However, the company also demands that you maintain a credit card on file, which is something I've never been comfortable with. Again, a case of good technology but not the best business practices.

I looked forward to the long awaited Desktop tool, where I could create as many vectorized images I wanted without having to pay $2.50 per vectorized download, or tie into a monthly subscription service that wants to keep my credit card on file.

Vector Magic just announced the release of their first desktop product, this one for the PC. The Mac version will following in a couple of months. This is a production release—if there was a beta release, it wasn't public. I tried the application and it is very efficient, and does a terrific job at converting raster images into vectors. For one license you can also run the application on two machines, though you have to activate the license on each machine over the internet. If something happens to one machine, an email to the company should be enough to open the license for install on another machine. Should be enough, as there is no formal deactivation process, like you would have with Photoshop.

However, the cost of the application is $295.00. This is more money than I'm willing to pay for a tool just to make a vector conversion of an occasional raster image. I'm not one to begrudge people making money off their work and products, but I've been effectively priced out of Vector Magic's market. It's time for me to return to an open source tool like Inkscape and regretfully leave Vector Magic for those whose use of the product either justifies the cost, or who have deeper pockets than mine.

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For those outside of St. Louis, we suffered a tragic shooting this week that left one young fireman dead, and two police officers seriously wounded. The event took place in Maplewood, which is just across I44 from where I live.

The fireman was Ryan Hummert, a 22 year old rookie and son of the former mayor of Maplewood, who just started work with the fire department last August. He and others were responding to a reported car fire when the owner of the car started shooting at the fire and police personnel who answered the call for help.

The owner of the house, Mark Knobbe, was a recluse cut off from friends and family, but had never given any indication that he would do an act such as this. After shooting at the police and firefighters, Knobbe set his own home on fire and then killed himself.

Tomorrow, the road outside of the complex where we have our town home will be closed for the funeral procession. I'll be standing on the side of the road, taking some photos and paying my respects. I'll post a follow up story tomorrow.

In the meantime, for those in the St. Louis area, the Missouri Fire Service Funeral Assistance Team has a page with information on visitation and the funeral procession. In addition, donations in Ryan Hummert's name can be made to The Backstoppers an organization dedicated to the support of families of fallen police and fire fighting personnel.

Procession route:

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Virginia DeBolt writes at Blogher about the recent "open tutorial" session the Blogher conference had on Sunday. I'm not much on conferences, but I thought this was an excellent idea. What typically happens at tech conferences is that the experienced people connect up with the other experienced people and the newbies are forced either into a generic crowd around the well known folks, or into connecting with each other. This is no bad thing, but there's no opportunity for dispersion, so to speak, other than in the formal conference sessions.

With the Blogher one-on-one tutorials, not only are experienced people helping inexperienced people, there's a breakdown of barriers between the old guard and the new, and in such a way that it isn't a "fangirl/fanboy" situation, either, which can only be healthy for all participants.

Returning to Blogher's one-on-one, one person who Virginia helped was Frances Ellen who had an interesting challenge.

Frances is writing a book, Story of Nadia, two paragraphs at a time, published twice a week. She's using Wordpress, which means that the entries are displaying in reverse chronological order, and without any tie-in with each other. The solution Virginia and the others came up with was to create a TOC for the sidebar that pulls the entries together in proper order. An idea that came to my mind when reading the post was to create chapter "categories", and have a category listing in the sidebar ordered alphabetically: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and so on. When publishing a new post, Frances would then pick which chapter "category" to place the posting. To ensure the publications display correctly, she can use chronological order for the postings in the chapter categories, when the chapter category pages are opened. This would effectively create a book without having to manually edit entries in a TOC.

As for the tag items Frances already has, these could be managed as "tags" rather than categories—though with a single purpose site, the meta information should be in the header as meta tags, rather than in individual post, since this information is repeated across all posts. However, these tags also tie Frances' work into the Wordpress.com tag cloud, so the repetition does serve a purpose.

Using chapter categories, with a sidebar entry, and chronological entries within the categories, not to mention, meta information in the header, should work at Frances' site without having to move any page, or leave wordpress.com. In fact, I'm not sure if Frances isn't doing this already, and if so, my apologies for a redundant suggestion. The only other recommendation I would make is that within the "Chapter" pages, to remove the sub-titles on the individual listings, as these disrupt the reading flow. This modification should be a theme change, and not impact on the existing site structure.

What Frances has works for her, but I can't resist using this challenge to plug Drupal, because it is just this circumstance that made me move to Drupal.

At my personal site, Just Shelley, I don't have a taxonomy or categories. Instead, I'm writing a series of "books", on specific subjects, with each new writing being a new "chapter" in the book. I've started two, and I'll probably end up with five or six "books" when finished. I don't plan on writing the books in order, either. I'll add a page to one, and the next time, a page to another.

I've made the first page of the books "sticky", which means they will always be on the front page, and always at the top of the page. Currently I have the site set to show three postings on the front page, but I'll eventually make it five or six: enough for the first pages of the "books", and perhaps a couple of additional entries for photos or whatnot.

However, I've set the feed to ten items, and when I publish a new book page, I publish it to the front page. Though it may not actually, physically show in the front page of the item, it will show up in the feed, so my patient, long-suffering friends following my long, meandering stories can be notified when I've published a new page to one of my "books".

Only the first page of each book will show on the front page of the site, but clicking through will open up not only the first page of the book, but a table of contents, as well as book navigation at the bottom of the page (as shown in my Drupal Live book, here at RealTech). You can then either use the book navigation or the TOC to click through to pages. You can print the whole book at once by selecting the Printer Friendly option at the bottom of the first page. This is particularly handy if you want to export the entire book in order to read on your Kindle or computer while offline. Pick Printer Friendly, and then Save As (single web page) from your browser. For Kindle users, use the free Kindle conversion email address for your account, or just pay the dime.

The tech to make this work:

• Use Drupal, of course
• I use clean URLs and the pathauto module in order to ensure friendly URLs for the book pages
• Download the development version of the token Drupal Module, because this one supports book titles, as part of the book page URLs. I believe this will end up being version 2.0 when released.
• In the Automated alias settings tab, in URL Aliases, I use the following setting for Node path settings, Book page paths: [book-raw]/[title-raw]. The only time I override the automated setting is for the first page, which I set to the URL for the book. Another option could be to add my own alias consisting only of the book title URL, pointing to the first page.
• Set the Post Settings to how ever many entries you want to show on the front page. Also set the Length of Trimmed Posts to unlimited—you'll want to manage your own book page excerpts, not let the system do it for you.
• In the RSS publishing settings, I set the number of entries to ten, but you'll want to use a number higher than your post setting count. In addition, I use title and teasers as content, but that's my own preference.
• This is also a personal preference, but I use the Atom feed module, and add a printer friendly link to the Atom feed by appending the following to the post using the Ad Insertion setting: <a href="http://shelleypowers.com/print/%id/">Printer friendly version</a>
• Speaking of printer friendly, I use the printer friendly Drupal module to enable this functionality. By using this module, people will be able to download or print the entire book from the first page of the book. They can also read the book directly from their feed if my web site design proves too much of a challenge for whatever browser and device they're using.
• Finally, and only because I am not using categories, I created a Page entry that lists each "book" with an associated image, and connected it to my Primary links via the Writings menu item. It's not necessary since all books will have their first page listed on the home page for the site. However, people are dependent on menus, so it's better to be redundant than risk confusing the readers who reach your site other than through your feed, or who may not know that the front page also serves as navigation for the site. I also have exactly one image gallery, created using the image module, containing all images I upload. I won't be uploading many, as they are mainly story illustrations or photos I think complement the site. In addition, I use the Lightbox2 module to provide slideshow and dynamic photo expansion capabilities.

I'm still relatively new to Drupal, so some of these steps may end up being unnecessary. However, the site works, the process works, and is relatively simple to maintain, so I'm happy with what I have.

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Scott at Lazycoder writes on his recent job interview experiences.

Certification and licensing should be about setting a base level of competency. You shouldn’t have to ask someone what the difference between a div and a span element is during a phone screen if they are a licensed web developer. You shouldn’t ask a C++ developer to find the memory leak in a given piece of code. What you really want to know are the intangibles. Are they a cowboy coder? Are they continuously trying to improve their skills or are they set in their ways? Will they speak up during a meeting if they see a bottleneck or problem coming or will they just ignore the problem? We, as a group of professionals, need to determine a structure and governing body that will allow us to not wonder if an applicant is lying on their resume, but instead focus on whether or not a person will be a good fit with the rest of the team.

Most tech interviewers haven't a clue how to interview. Instead, they set up some code, and allow the code to do the interviewing. Worse, they set up the interview in such a way as to make themselves look good, while making the process as difficult and painful as possible for the interviewee. Rather than a co-worker, the interviewer sees the interviewee as a potential competitor, and acts accordingly.

It's the only field I know of that uses this approach. Most other fields are populated by people who genuinely care about finding the best person for the job.

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From MarketWatch, in light of today's Hurricane Dolly landfall along the Texas/Mexican border:

As Hurricane Dolly bears down on the Texas Rio Grande Valley, the chairman of the Texas Border Coalition (TBC) today protested construction of the border wall by the Department of Homeland Security during the hurricane season and urged the government to refocus its efforts on rebuilding the levees that should protect the people of the Valley.

"It is unbelievably foolish for the government to be attempting to destroy and rebuild the Rio Grande River levees in the middle of hurricane season," said Eagle Pass Mayor and TBC Chairman Chad Foster. "The footings of the levees are being destroyed in the construction process so that the Department of Homeland Security can erect 18-foot concrete walls in their place. It is incredibly short-sighted that the government would open the levees at the same time that the danger is highest for devastating floods in the middle of hurricane season."

Illegal immigration is a big thing here in Missouri, for some unknown reason. Like the folks in Texas, we are also more at risk for floods than the possibility that some terrorist will cross over the border between Mexico and the US.

Dolly is set to hit directly on the border between the US and Mexico, at the mouth of the Rio Grande. Along the Rio Grande are the colonias, including Cameron Park outside of Brownsville, considered the poorest community in the US. The people there make an average of $4,000, annually. Most live in shacks without electricity and running water, on land sold by shady developers who promised these hard working people a decent community with all the utilities, took their money, and then skipped town.

What's sadder, is this is the community that now President Bush wouldn't visit, or even acknowledge, when he was governor of Texas.

Ignored then. Ignored now.

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