Entries by Daniel E. Markle

As I have needed to interact with photographers frequently for various projects at work, and finding myself taking increasing amounts of photos for commercial purposes, I have been doing quite a bit of reading on photography rights and pricing models. While investigating the ASMP (American Society of Media Photographers) site, I found an article on the perils of stock photography. Not only is it an important warning about making sure the photos you are using are unique and not from some overused stockpile, it is quite humorous as well.

I have been using Netbeans 4.1 for J2EE and Struts development for a while now. I like Netbean's out-of-the-box support for such development without the need to mess around getting plugins installed. I watched the new Netbeans 5.0 beta demo this evening and really liked what I saw. It takes about 30 minutes to watch and is definitely worth your time if you already use Netbeans or are not completely happy with what you are using now (which is pretty much always with most programmers I believe).

Infoworld's cover this week, just like the magazine itself, gives an unflinchingly accurate view of the present and future of the computing industry. There are so many elements in this picture which allude to the doom of Microsoft that I can tell the artist is someone who really has a deep understanding of the industry.

After using my own hacked-together blogging scripts for a while which required me to do raw SQL inserts into a database, I have decided to go with the Serendipity blogging package instead. This will be the last time my old rss feed will be updated, so you will want to visit my updated site soon and subscribe to the new rss link.

I have had quite a few discussions with people recently about the SPIM (instant messaging spam) problem. It seems like a simple problem to solve to me. I believe the Jabber network already has all the tools it needs to solve them; these options just need to be configured correctly on the servers.

We are not likely to realize the full extent of the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina for a while yet. The major news sources show the same damaged areas over and over again and give us no real insights as to what is really going on. This is the hole blogging and internet news is supposed to fill, right?

With the recent release of iTunes 4.9, I am discovering the world of podcasting. Podcasting is essentially on-demand radio.

I enjoy listening to talk radio on my hour-long commute to work, but nearly all the programs available nowadays focus on politics. I would rather listen to programs on computing issues, science, and other areas of interest to me. I was stuck suffering through the garbage large media conglomerates were willing to jam down my ear canal, until now.

Every few weeks a truck goes over on its side on the Clarks Ferry Bridge. The way it was designed, truck drivers experience a gradually curved stretch of highway at 65, fail to slow down to the 45 mph speed limit, and then flip when they get to the sharp curve on the bridge. I happened to have a camera along yesterday and managed to get a picture.

By popular request, I now have rss feeds for both my article and photo blogs. You can find them here (text blog) and here (photo blog), as well as in the left sidebar. They will also show up automatically in browsers that support rss feeds in meta tags.

Do you like the music in console games? Do you wish you could download it to your computer and play it again and again? If so, I have a site for you, http://www.vgmix.com. This site has some of the most inspiring remixes of video game music I have ever heard, freely downloadable for your listening pleasure.

We recently had issues getting Horde/IMP and IMAP/TLS to work. We couldn't figure it out,and web searches were no help as there were lots of people asking and no answers. The logsand messages were no help either, giving us no clue as to what the problem was. We tried'protocol' => 'imap' and 'protocol' => 'imap/tls' but neither worked.Then it occured to the fellow sysadmin I was working with on the problem, perhaps we need'protocol' => 'imap/tls/novalidate-cert', as we are using a self-signed certificate. That was the answer.

A disastrous announcement has been made by Adobe and Macromedia. Macromedia is being bought out by Adobe.

In the process of learning Apache Struts for a large project at work, I have discovered Safari. This online bookshelf, created by O'Reilly and some other technical book vendors, allows me to checkout books to be read in a web browser instead of having to buy stacks of paper books.

My father, Harry E. Markle, has been battling illness since he was a teenager.  More recently he developed heart disease and then cancer as side effects of the cocktail of prescriptions he had to take to stay alive.  He lost his ongoing battle on March 1, 2005. To commemorate his life, our family has put up a memorial website.

Some of you already know about my love affair with jEdit. I've also started writing Java/SWT applications in Eclipse. Recently, a friend convinced me to try JSP and Netbeans.