Cameron's Thoughts

I wonder if it would be okay to hack one of the electronic construction signs if it was to correct the grammar that was used? I just saw a sign that said "Road Work", "To Began", "Mid-Late August".

Just wanted to share something I worked on last weekend, a QR Code Generator. It doesn't do a whole lot at this point, just makes some basic text and vCard QR Codes. But, I did want to experiment was jQuery UI and I did some of that with this page. I think it turned out pretty well overall.

Arby's appears to no longer have their Homestyle Fries. I liked those, and they got rid of them a while back, so I stopped going to Arby's. Probably around a year ago, the fries returned, and as such, I started going to Arby's again. Now, the Arby's near my work is closed, and the Arby's near my house doesn't have the Homestyle Fries now. So much for Arby's I guess.
On top of that, Wendy's has switched to newer fries. Wendy's fries were one of my favorites, only outdone by Cluver's. I am not a fan of the new fries they have however. They seem thinner and more dried out. They are basically as bad as Burger King's fries.
Ugg, this is a bad week for fries.

I've now gotten fairly far along in the progress of my new website. It's to the point now where it's fully functional. There are still some pieces missing that I need to get done before I replace my existing site with the new one. I hope to get it integrated with Facebook so that you can login with Facebook for comments. I may also allow logging in with Twitter at some point, but that will be further off.
Beyond that, I just need to add some of the features like the links that are across the top of the page. If anyone is interested in checking out the new look, I have it online at http://ct3.cbulock.com.

Since that is still in development, if it is down for you, that means I may be working on it. Feel free to leave any feedback.

There seems to be a new tech trend.... quitting Facebook. I don't care to explore the history and reasons why, but it basically comes down to general panic over the Facebook privacy system. I will admit that they have made some stupid mistakes when it comes to the way they have changed some default settings. But, what seems to be overlooked is that, every time Facebook does this, they place some huge message on the newsfeed explaining what they changed. I can only assume most people just close the message and not read it, because I've always been extremely informed about these changes directly from the Facebook website.

On top of this, the Facebook control panel isn't overly complicated. There are a fair number of options, but they also allow you to highly configure the privacy controls to a high level of detail. You can fine tune things so that individual people can't see certain items on your wall. I can't think of any other site that gives such control. They do offer some details on how the privacy works on their site. When you go into the privacy settings which can be found on the Account menu, you are given a page with six categories. On the top three, you are given a selection of various area's of your profile and what limits you want to share your privacy. Basically, everyone, friends of friends, friends or you can customize and make it so only certain groups of people can see the info. That seems pretty straight forward. If you are unsure that privacy settings are how you want, you can click "Preview my profile" and it will show you what your profile page looks like to the general random person viewing it. At the top, you can also type in a persons name and see exactly how that person would see it. If you ever have any reservations as to if your profile is locked down well enough, this is the place to go.

The next option on the privacy page seems to cause the biggest conflict. That is the applications and website settings. On that page, you can control things like how your information is shared with apps, and what your friends can share. You can also disable the "Instant Personalization" feature. Oddly, there is no link here to directly edit the sites and apps settings. That can be also found under the Account menu under "Application settings". Finally, the last two options on the privacy settings, search and block list, are pretty self-explanatory and basic.

While the privacy panel isn't basic, if you are really concerned about privacy issues, sending 5-10 minutes to explore the options really isn't a huge cost. I don't mind this personally periodically explore the options as I sometimes decide to change things around.

As for why I'm not leaving Facebook; basically those privacy issues don't bother me, so it's business as usual. Facebook actually makes things much nicer on a day to day basis for me. My phone integrates with it really well. Anyone I ever talk to on the phone is on Facebook, so when they call, I have their most recent profile picture display on the screen. I think that is very handy. Whenever I take a picture or a video, I can easily upload the picture or video straight to my Facebook account with just a couple of clicks. This allows me to share events with my family nearly instantly as they take place. On top of that, if anyone has their phone number on their Facebook profile, its already in my contacts. Facebook has become an overwhelmingly useful extension to my phone.

Of course, there are the typical social network reasons for staying on board with Facebook. No other place on the Internet has so many people I know together. That makes it much more convenient to stay connected with people and know what's going on. When I plan events anymore, I just set them up on Facebook and invite the appropriate people. Since usually 90% of the people I intend to invite are already on Facebook, this works out really well.

I also really enjoy the Instant Personalization feature. I am sick of having to sign up for accounts over and over again. Facebook already had the Facebook Connect feature which allows using your Facebook account to login to other sites, but this makes it happen a bit more automatically. On top of this, in many ways it is actually better to use this method to sign on to sites than to create new accounts everywhere. You have no idea the security and privacy settings on every site. It's true that Facebook could leak information, but if it is just in one location, that is much better than having logins on hundreds of sites. If at any time in the future, you want to disconnect your login from a site that you used Facebook Connect, or the Instant Personalization with, you can go into the Application Settings on Facebook and remove that site. If you didn't use Facebook, you'd have to figure out each site individually and determine their method of removing your account info. That seems to me to be much more secure than not using Facebook.

Anyhow, that's my random thoughts on Facebook. Feel free to comment.

Around six years ago, I mentioned that I planned to get archived versions of my old website designs online. It only took me six years, but I finally got around to doing it. I have some links and some short summaries posted to three different historical sites. One funny thing I noted, on the oldest page which dates to around 1997-1998, there is a guestbook link that is still active. The last post was from my brother 11 years ago lol.

Once upon a time, writing a webpage for a mobile phone meant that you had to really limit what you were doing. Mobile phone development had three main limitations:

• Small screen size
• Limited markup capability
• Slow network connection

The screens were very very small on older mobile phones. This meant that not much could be displayed. On top of that, the markup languages that were supported could not do very much. Long ago, only WML was supported. Later devices would support XHTML Basic Profile. This was pretty close to true HTML, but still only a subset.

What's really exciting now however, is that mobile browsers have, for the most part, surpassed the general capabilities of desktop browsers. The primary reason for this is due to the fact that Internet Explorer is still dominating desktop browsers, and the fact that mobile phones have a very quick renewal cycle. Modern mobiles such as the iPhone, Android phones and webOS devices all have browsers that are HTML5 compatible. On the desktop, you have Firefox, Safari and Chrome that also have these capability, but they aren't in such widespread usage, so you can't design your site with the expectations that HTML5 will be available. Once Internet Explorer 9 comes out, all the major browsers will support it. Microsoft will probably do something wrong with their implementation like they always do, so we will probably have to wait until at least Internet Explorer 10 or 11 until the desktop catches up.

So, to design a mobile site today, we still have the screen issue. But this is no where near of a concern as it used to be. The Nokia 3390 had a 84x48 resolution screen and the Nokia 3560, which had a full XHMTL browser had only a 176x208 screen. Modern devices are giving at least a 480x320 screen and upwards of 854x480. This is still much less than the desktop, but is still around the same size that was common to desktops only a decade ago. Though, the physical screen size still has a lot of limitations as much of the increase in resolution was due to increasing the pixel-per-inch count.

But, when it comes to the markup language, we now have the ability to go full force with some of the exciting technologies found in HTML5 such as the database storage and offline features. Markup language is no longer a limiting force in mobile development, quite the opposite, in fact. Mobile websites will actually have more advanced features than their desktop counterparts. Very exciting!

The last limitation, network speed, is also fast disappearing. While mobile phone networks aren't quite as fast as a cable modem, 3G networks are now covering most populated areas. This means we can at least expect speeds that are about ten times faster than dialup internet. With 4G starting to appear, some areas now actually do have cable internet-like speeds.