Friday, September 16, 2011

Twitter, the Missing RSS and the Graffiti

I was recently setting it up so that the tweets from my ParsedContent Solutions twitter feed would be propagated to my Facebook page of the same name.  At first I was trying to figure out the best way to do this.  Sure, I could have activated the Facebook integration inside the Twitter account, but it was stating that it would post that to MY Facebook wall, which is not what I wanted, I wanted it to go to my businesses wall.

Well, after some digging and reading, I activated a Facebook application called RSS Graffiti.    Its an interesting app because it manages the posting of your feed to your different pages and it handles multiple so its really cool.  The settings in the app allow you to tell it where to post what feed and how often to poll for new content.

In setting it up, you have to first give the application permission to post to your page's wall.  This isn't a problem since that is what I am wanting.  After that though you are asked for your feed url.  Now, on Twitter you used to find the atypical orange RSS feed button near the bottom right side of your page.  You would have just had to click on it to see the feed url and copy it.  Well, I didn't see it and started a bit of a search to try and find it or something else that I could use.  I finally found an intriguing article that enlightened me to the fact that Twitter had officially removed the RSS button and feed, but that was only in lieu of their API, which they prefer everyone use.

Yes, this is a break from what standards would dictate, but its their service and you unfortunately have to conform to their way of operating.  The article did enlighten everyone to the url that you would need to use for your feed which is as follows:


     https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=username


In the above you would simply replace 'username' with your twitter id.  You can test this url by copying and pasting it into your browser's url bar as it will work fine.  Once you have it you simply plug it into RSS Graffiti and voila, a feed to pull from.

Keep in mind when that even after putting in the feed URL into RSS Graffiti, I recommend you go through the settings for the app and ensure its posting the way you want it to.  There are 3 options for posting:

  1. Standard:  This posts the tweet to your wall and states its from the Twitter feed.  Recommended for most feeds.
  2. Compact: For publishing shorts from things like Twitter without changing your Facebook status.
  3. Status Updates:  This posts the tweets to your wall as if it were a Facebook Status update.  You can't even tell that this came from the Twitter feed.
Whatever you choose, test it to make sure its what you want.

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

OSx and the bashrc

A couple of months ago I purchased my first Mac, a 13" Macbook Pro.  I have to say that I am absolutely loving so far.  The interface is pretty sweet, but for me the best part is that its got a *nix back end.  Learning a new environment like OSx after coming from the Linux world is not a difficult transition, but it certainly has its little speed bumps.

This evening was one such speed bump when I decided to add some things and customize my .bashrc.  The first thing I noticed….. there wasn't a .bashrc in existence yet on the system.  This simply told me that it was pulling its initial settings from /etc/profile (which in turn sources /etc/bashrc on OSx Lion).

So, I went and created my own .bashrc in my home directory, added my settings that I liked to have and copied some of the stuff from the default /etc/bashrc file.  I then saved the file and sourced it with ". ./.bashrc" to test the settings and ensure I didn't break anything.  Cool, all looked to be fine.  I closed the window, opened another one and that is when I noticed that the changes I made were non-existent.

So, I did a little bit of Google digging and quickly learned that by default, OSx looks for the .bash_profile, not the .bashrc file.  That is a bit of a change from Linux as it does look for the .bashrc.  To not look for it is a bit ludicrous in my opinion (as rc files are the most common settings files in the *nix world), but this is not a standard *nix platform.  So, I did what any geek would do and created a soft link for .bash_profile that pointed to my .bashrc that I had just created.  Yes, I just created it and was going to be damned if Apple was going to tell me I couldn't use it.  Call me stubborn, but its my environment, not theirs.

So, after that little speed bump, I need only edit my .bashrc and resource to have my changes take effect.  Now, on to see what other funky differences I can discover.

Monday, September 12, 2011

Online Cloud Storage Review


With the advent of things like Netbooks (laptops that either have no hard drive to speak of, instead using a solid state device, or have a small hard drive), cloud storage has become a necessity in this day and age.  Cloud storage is nothing more than storage for your files and media, provided by companies that are either able to or specialize in that service.

The storage itself ranges from a couple of gigabytes up to the Terabytes, providing more than enough storage for your average user and their files.  The nice thing about a lot of the cloud storage options is that you can typically access your files from anywhere and any computer or device with web access (or an installed app, such as a mobile smart phone).

I personally tend to use the storage for things like my music (in mp3 format) and also for documents that I want to have access to wherever I am.  I have had a number of friends ask me about the different options that I knew of for online storage so that got me thinking, "Hello, blog post.".

I went out and did a search for online storage and quickly realized that not only was I getting hits for what I was looking for, which is storage that one could access but others could not see, but also the more 'social' storage options like media fire, where you upload files up to your storage limit and others can see the files that you have uploaded.  This did not work for me as I am a bit security conscious and there are plenty of things that I really don't want to share with others.  Granted, I don't put the really sensitive stuff online. Things such as credit card numbers, password and other such goodies should never be put into the open like that, unless you are asking for trouble.

So, after weeding through a plethora of hits from my Google search, I made myself a list of the services that I wanted to review.  I limited them to having at least 2 gigabytes of storage at a minimum.  The features provided by each of these companies varies from site to site, so if you are trying to decide on some storage, please remember to take the time and review all of the features offered.  You may find that paying that little bit per month (in some cases) is well worth it for your needs.

A number of these are relatively inexpensive for the amount of space provided.  Of course, there are also those that are a bit pricey for those of us looking for the cheapest, yet reliable way to store our data.  All in all, do your homework and find something that fits your needs and your budget as best as you can.  Worst case you could always invest $129 in a 3 terabyte external drive and store your files locally, yourself.  That way you pay one time for the storage and are solely responsible to yourself for keeping your data safe and backed up.  For those that want their data online, here is what I found out about the services that I reviewed.

Dropbox:   First up is one of the more popular services and one of the primary that I use.  A DropBox free account nets you 2 gigabytes (gb) of space when you sign up.  The nice thing about Dropbox that most other services don't provide is that you can send out invitations to your friends and family to join as well and any of them that use your invitation to sign up, they get 250mb extra and so do you.  The more people that accept the offer the more space that you can accumulate for yourself and best of all, your limit is raised forever, not just for a limited time.  The only catch is that the free accounts are capped at 8 gb of storage.  So, once you get enough people to join to give you that much space, you are capped and only they get the extra bit.  Once you sign up though, you have some signup tasks to complete that will also net you some initial extra space.  One thing I really like about dropbox is the application that you download and install onto your system that does all the synching.  Upon installation you setup your Dropbox folder.  This is the folder where you "drop" anything that you want storred online.  Once you drop a file in the folder it is automatically uploaded to the server and available.  If you have the application also installed on any other machines, the file(s) you uploaded are automatically synched with them, downloading to their dropbox folder since you would be signed in with the same account. If you want more space, you can upgrade to a paid plan and pay about $10 per month for 50 gb or 100gb for $19.99 per month.  The desktop application for Dropbox is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OSx.

Spideroak:   The free account on Spideroak is limited to 2 gb and unlike Dropbox I didn't see any offers to increase this for free.  They have an upgrade to 100 gb for $10 per month, which is 1/2 the cost of what Dropbox wants for 100 gb.  When you sign up, you enter your name, email and user name and upon clicking "Create Account" the application you need is auto downloaded to your machine (or prompted to download if you have your settings as such).  After the app is downloaded go ahead and install it.  When you run it for the first time you will need to first specify a password for your account, after which you go right into the application.  In the app you will have to specify the folders that you want to backup.  If you want a different folder that isn't listed, just click "Advanced" in the upper right and select the folder you want to use.

Box.net:   Box.net only has online access for the free accounts.  To get a desktop app you need to have a paid account.  The free account allots you 5 gb of space, while the paid accounts are 25 gb for $10 per month.   Much less space for the money on the paid account than you get with Dropbox or Spideroak.

Syncplicity:   Free account limited to 2 gb of space.  Paid account has 50 gb for $15 per month.  Again, a touch more expensive for less space.  This has an app available for download, but is only for Windows and Mac users.  Linux is not supported.

ADrive:   The free account for ADrive is set to 50gb.  That is an impressive amount for a free account.  Unfortunately it was quickly discovered that the upload speed for this service is incredibly slow.  I was only getting about 2-3K per second when attempting to upload a small, 2 megabyte file.   Also, there are ads in the free account.  To get rid of the ads you would have to have one of their paid accounts.  There is no desktop app or synching available for the free account with this service.  It is completely web based for uploading and downloading.  The paid accounts have a desktop app but its only for uploading, downloading and scheduled runs.  No synching for that either.

Zumodrive:   I said in the beginning that I was limiting this list to services with a minimum of 2 gb of space for free.  Well, with Zumodrive you only get 1 gb initially, but upon completing their dojo (tutorial), you get an extra 1 gb added to your allotment.  There are paid plans that offer:  10 gb for $2.99/month, 25 gb for $6.99/month, 50 gb for $9.99/month, 100 gb for $19.99/month, 200 gb for $37.99/month and 500 gb for $79.99/month.  For their app they support Windows, Linux, Mac OSx, Android, iPhone and even Palm Pre.  One nicety about this service is that it claims to integrate smoothly with iTunes so that you can store your music in the cloud and simply download playlists for listening instead of taking up your diskspace with storing the mp3s.  If your a heavy iTunes user, that may be something to consider.

iDrive:   This service offers 5 gb of space for free.  It also offers paid accounts of 150 gb for $4.95/month and 500 gb for $14.95 per month.  Considerably cheaper than some of the others.  The list of features for this service is quite nice and should definitely be reviewed by those considering it.  This service is geared heavily towards being an online place to back up your data, not just store it.  They offer a desktop app with scheduling and folder watch/synching and even offer versioning for files (that way you can get an earlier version of a file if needed), but its limited to the last 30 versions of the file.

Mimedia:   This has one of the larger free space allotments, coming in at a whopping 7 gb.  You can upgrade to a paid account and get 250 gb for $9.99/month, 500 gb for $20/month or 1 Terabyte for $35/month.  For the price, this service ranks up there at one of the cheaper ones for "space for your buck".  They tout themselves as media storage (audio, video, photos), but also support regular files and backups as well.  There is no desktop app that I could find so you are limited to using the web interface with this service.

Skydrive:   This is a free service provided by Microsoft, for those users with a Hotmail/Live email account.  It provides you with 25 gb of free storage for your Microsoft Office or other files..  There is no desktop app so you must use the web interface.  While it doesn't have an app, 25 gb is still a sizable amount of space, and its free.

Amazon Cloud Drive:   If you have an amazon account, then you can get access to the Amazon Cloud Drive service.  They provide an initial 5 gb of space for free with the option of upgrading to a paid account with 20 gb for $20/year, 50 gb for $50/year, 100 gb for $100/year and so on, up to 1 Terabyte for $1000/year.  Initially it seems costly, but those are yearly costs.  Divide by 12 and it breaks down a bit more sensibly.  The 100 gb allotment is less than $10/month.  Like others, there is no desktop app and you are limited to their web interface for uploads and downloads.  One nice thing though is that songs purchased through amazon.com can be stored here and do not count toward your space used.  Plus, for a limited time (no idea when this promotion ends), they are offering the storage of unlimited music files for free on all paid accounts.  This means that it wouldn't effect your storage used.  And it doesn't say that the songs had to be purchased through them either, but I would read the fine print to be sure.  If they don't require that, then this is a pretty sweet deal for those with gigantic music collections.

Opendrive:   This is the final service reviewed.  The free account offers 5 gb of space.  You can upgrade to 100 gb for $5/month, 500 gb for $15/month or 1 Tb for $35/month.  These are some pretty decent rates for the storage amount.  The free account is limited to 200K max speed though, so be warned.  The paid accounts are not metered. Also, there is no auto synching for the free account.

Well, those are the services that I have reviewed.  I hope that this helps you a bit in your decision to choose an online cloud storage provider.  As always, check the features and always read the fine print.  Make sure of what you are signing up for before you click.

Sunday, July 31, 2011

Bookmarks, bookmarks.....everywhere

I don't know how many people here use a service that is, or is simlar to, delicious.com, but I have been using delicious for a very long time. Long enough that I have about 4700 bookmarks on the site.
With the recent turmoil this year surrounding delicious, specifically Yahoo! doing their a-typical "we don't need this anymore routine", put the delicious site up on the chopping block and looked for a buyer or threatened its shutdown. Users like myself, who have been using it religiously and love it, were a little taken aback by the possibility of impending doom for our beloved bookmarking site.
After following the issue for a couple of days I decided to check the net and see what similar sites existed out there. I found a list of similar sites (or what was said to be similar), but was not really impressed with most of them. My issue with most of the sites I found was that all I was really looking for was a bookmarking site. I wanted something that operated like delicious, but wasn't delicious. The sites that I stumbled upon ended up being what is affectionately referred to as social bookmarking sites that actually allowed you to bookmark a site, but then took it to other levels of sharing by integrating with your other social networks and getting you involved in other ways of sharing your bookmarks. I was not looking for all that though.
Sure, I don't care who sees my bookmarks, that isn't the problem. My problem is that those sites had an excessive amount of features and some were even cumbersome and confusing to look at the demos of. Call me simplistic, but that's kind of what I was looking for.
Now, before you go asking me "Why didn't you look into the firefox bookmarks as they sync online", I did. I tried them briefly, but I found that the syncing was not automatic and it took an excessive amount of time for what I bookmarked to show up. Why? Who wants to wait? Not me and not many in this day and age.
Well, needless to say I found a site that was very up and coming and still in its early infancy. The site is called Grazely. At first glance it seemed new and inviting, and was. I created an account and imported my bookmarks into it, all 4700 of them (approximately). After doing so I took a look at the toutal count of bookmarks on the site and it was just under 20K. So essentially, about 1/4 of the sites bookmarks came from me. I was on the site for about a month and a half when the developers announced that they would be shutting down for about 5 days to do some major maintenance. The maintenance lasted about 2 weeks and ended up being a total site overhaul, redesign and recoding.
I got back in yesterday with a fresh invite (having already had an account previousl) into the Beta launch. They completely changed it, yes and so far, I have not put together an opinion of the site as of yet. The developers apparently changed it to be a secure bookmarking site, where you bookmarks are encrypted. Personally I am not sure how I feel about this yet. I don't see the need right off for my bookmarks to be encrypted. The bookmarks I have are saved because I found the link useful or plan to revisit it and I would love for someone else to find them useful as well. I have a very open source mindset and that comes from me developing with open source, so I do not yet understand their need for security of bookmarks. If I want to have a bookmark that I don't want anyone else to see but me, I just need to be able to mark it private and its hidden. 'Nuff said.
With that, if you use any other bookmarking site and are curious about Grazely, hit me up. I have an invitation to the site to give away and yes, its first come first serve. I don't know how popular bookmarking sites are with everyone, but hey, you never know so I figured I would offer it up.

Saturday, July 23, 2011

Thoughts on HTML5

Let me preface this post by stating that I am one of those coders that believes in doing things the right way. It is absolutely appalling to come across messy, uncommented code that leaves you scratching your head trying to figure out exactly what it does. Its just as appalling to come across a website, look at the code and discover that they used tables for the layout of the site. To top it off, none of their tags are closed making people with my coding beliefs shudder.

I know there are people out there reading this who say "So what? What's the big deal?". There are standards out there for a reason. Granted they are a bit more enforced in HTML when you use the XHTML standard as you are forced to close your tags, but that still doesn't stop people from using tables for the layout of their site.

I have been looking at HTML5 as a means for creating my new website and am finding that there are things I do and don't like about it currently. One of the things that I am non-plused by, but am going to have to live with is that the people responsible for HTML5 regressed and decided not to enforce the need to close all of your tags, as XHTML required.

I found this to be a good thing, forcing coders to make their code a bit nicer and actually pay attention to the details. By opening this up and allowing people to use thier own styling choice, this is going to make supporting someone elses HTML5 code a bit of a headache.

That point aside, I am finding that to code in HTML5, you have to add a lot of checks into your code to see if certain new add-ons are supported in the browser that is accessing your site. For instance, with forms, they have added a lot of new types which make browsers that support them have a bit more intuitive reactions to those fields (like date pickers or color pickers for dates, or even the email type that tells a mobile browser to configure it keyboard to support email addresses specifically). Unfortunately, at this time, the only browser out there that has support for all the forms additions in Opera. While Opera supports a lot of HTML5, not a lot of people use Opera. Its use is dwarfed by that of Firefox and Chrome.

I have been really thinking about whether I want to use HTML5 and write the code to do the tests, but that really isn't going to be an option going forward. HTML5 is out there and is here to stay. The support in browsers will only continue to increase but the concern is going to be users. There are too many people out there using older versions of browsers. Listen people (you know who you are), just because its working for you doesn't mean its right. You are not only forcing a lot of developers to code for the fact that you are refusing to update, you are actually not getting the proper experience out of a lot of websites that the rest of us are.

I guess I will just have to suck it up, code it once and reuse it.

Sunday, May 22, 2011

Why Plaxo....Why?

I have been using Plaxo for some time (a few years now) and the whole time I have had their free account (now referred to as a Basic membership). When I started using the service it was just that, an address book and that was all I really wanted.

Over time, they have advanced and upgraded their system, providing further integration into the world of social networking. With that foray, they have also added different levels of membership. That is fine, and I expected that as such, I would lose certain functionality from the Basic membership, and have. But, there is one feature that I have lost and must say that it is a bit disturbing. With the Basic membership, you are no longer allowed to export your contacts from your address book without paying for their Premium Sync service (even though all you want to do is export and not actually sync with another device or service). I just want to back up my contacts now and again, keeping a copy in case anything ever happened to the Plaxo servers or Plaxo itself.

So, after steaming a bit and having a bit of a livid rant with a friend over the whole situation, I did some investigation into who I could get my contacts out without forking over $$ for the "privilage" of backing up my data myself.

It took me about 20 minutes of looking around but if you go to your main address book page, you will see that there is a complete list of all of your contacts. There is a top line right above the first contact that has a blank check box on the left and a few buttons (email, merge, print, delete and Add to group).

If you click the empty check box on the left of that row, it will select ALL of your contacts in your list. Then, simply click on the "Print" buton. This did two things for me: first, it opened a window relatively quickly that showed the output. This window is HTML based and if you look at the URL bar has a wicked long URL. Second, it opens up another window that has print options. Simply select the option to Print to PDF (if you system offers that) and you can then print them to pdf so you have a copy.

My interest though was in the first option, the HTML output. I right clicked on the HTML and version and selected "Save as", saving the html output to a file. When I examined that file, it was quickly apparent to me that the output was pretty nice and the way they formatted things, it would not be that bad to parse and output to a CSV file. Once I have it in that format, I can then use it to import into other services or even a database of my own.

Either way, I will be working on a script to parse the HTML file and extract all of my information. If I get something relatively usable, I will share it hear for others to use as I am sure that I am not the only one that has been in this predicament.

Tuesday, May 03, 2011

To Setup Or Not To Setup?

I know, that is a pretty vague question I pose as the subject of this post. To clarify, I am talking about a mail server. On my new server, I have been setting up a lot of things, but one thing I have yet to setup was a mail server.

I was torn because I really wanted to have mail from my new domain and without a mail server, that just isn't possible. First and foremost is that I have absolutely no experience setting up a mail server. You have to think about things like:

- the installation of the software for mail delivery (ie: Postfix, Sendmail),
- the managing of spam with software like SpamAssassin.
- the increase in traffic on your site due to email

As you can see, there are a lot of things to think about, and this short list is just that, short. So, in speaking with a friend today led to a suggestion which, in a matter of only a couple of hours work, I have implemented.

I have Ben Howarth of CodeGecko to thank, not only for the suggestion that follows, but also for his guidance in setting it up. I also want to thank him for being so infinitely patient with me as I can ask a lot of questions when I am learning something new. You rock, Ben!!!

The suggestion that Ben made was to use Google Apps Standard (Free) Edition. He quickly enlightened me as to the fact that it would use my domain and that all the emails would be for my domain. The sweet part is that Google handled all the email server end of it, which means you get Google's absolutely incredible spam filtering capabilities and scanning for attachments. It also comes with a bunch of free apps such as Google Docs, Google Chat and much more.

A quick search of the internet on setup guides for Google Apps landed me here, which proved to be a good "get you going in the right direction" guide. It at least got me to the sign up site, which it what I needed.

The sign up process was pretty painless and even the verification was cake (upload an html file to your site, visit it and then tell the setup you did it). When it came to the DNS setup on GoDaddy (where I bought my domain), that is where Ben really shined. He gave me a really good set of explanations into the inner workings of CNAME's, MX records and DNS as a whole, helping me to get a better grasp on it than I previously had.

Its hard when you are a geek and all of a sudden have to work with technologies that you have never messed with before, but its wonderful when there are friends who are willing to help.

After all was setup, Ben dropped another Easter Egg in my lap, telling me that instead of the nice long URL that Google gives you to access your email accounts, you can set it up for your domain. I really do owe him about a case of beer now. I have, with his guidance, set it up as a sub domain of my site. Once again, Ben ROCKS!

Once I get it all written up, I will have to post some details on the setup of MX records for Google Apps in GoDaddy as well as CNAME's. I am just having so much fun with all of this. Now off to the next setup and configuration task.

Monday, May 02, 2011

Disabling Account Creation In BugZilla

I don't know about anyone else, but I am one of those guys who likes to implement what security I can on the server(s) that I have. Recently I have been doing setup on a new machine and have setup BugZilla as my issue tracking software.

I know that plenty of people have plenty of suggestions as far as the different software's that are available for different tasks. I have gotten some earfuls from some of them asking "why the heck would you choose that?". Please know ahead of time that the software I am using, I have chosen because:

#1: It meets my needs
#2: I have either used it or played with it before and am comfortable with it.

I have nothing against other software's, I just have the stuff I like and I use it.

Ok, that said, I have installed Bugzilla on my new server and have it setup with an account for myself. Upon getting it to that point, I quickly decided that I did not want anyone just creating an account, so I looked into how to disable account creation by anyone and here is how to do it.

1. Log in as an Administrator
2. Go to: Administration->Parameters->User Authentication
3. Scan down to the bottom of the screen till you find 'createemailregexp'.
4. Clear out the value in the box
5. Client "Save Changes"

AFter that, log out and ensure that the button says "Login" in stead of "Create Account" and your all set. After that, in order to create an account, you will need to log in as the administrator.

Thursday, April 28, 2011

Odd PHP error

On my new VPS server, I am working on getting a lot of things I need installed and configured. Well, one of the tools I need has minimum requirements. I was checking the PHP version information with the following command:


$ php --version

Here is what it spit out at me:

PHP Deprecated: Comments starting with '#' are deprecated in /etc/php5/cli/conf.d/mcrypt.ini on line 1 in Unknown on line 0
PHP 5.3.2-1ubuntu4.7 with Suhosin-Patch (cli) (built: Jan 12 2011 18:36:08)
Copyright (c) 1997-2009 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.3.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2010 Zend Technologies


That line in bold is what bothers me. So, I did some quick Googling and voila!!!

It looks like its a simple bug, but even trying to update the php5-mcrypt module was no help as it tells me its at the current version. So, per the bug page, I edited the mcrypt.ini file (as root of course) and changed the '#' to a ';', as was suggested. After doing that, it just worked, and perfectly, without the error.

The Wonderful World of Setting Up Your Own VPS

There is nothing like the learning curve that comes with setting up your own VPS. Sure, there are plenty of things that I have had experience in setting up, but there are things that I have never had the opportunity to dabble in. Its actually quite fun, albeit frustrating at times.

For instance, Apache is an amazing web server, but trying to configure it to support a subdomain is a pain in the @$$! I have followed a number of forum posts and tutorials and done a lot of what was mentioned, but still, no joy. Unreal! When it works, its amazing, but when you are trying to do something specific, its a picky pain.

For anyone who is curious, here are the stats on the server that I got:

Hard Disk: 100 gig
Memory: 512 mb (with a burst to 1024 mb)
CPUs: 4
Bandwidth: 1.5 Tb per month.

Here is the page describing the different configurations. To tell you the truth, I looks at a lot of different providers and Semoweb provided the most disk space and bandwidth combination for the price.

Plus, their customer service has been top notch so far, both through chat and on the phone. No real issues, more questions from me. If your looking for a provider, I recommend them. So far I haven't had any issues.

Monday, April 25, 2011

Converting jpg files to svg

I am by no means a graphic designer. In fact, I am quite far from it. I do however have a need at times to work with images to get the results that I need, and like a lot of developers out there, I don't exactly have the funds to just hire one, nor do I know any (which would be incredibly handy sometimes, gotta say).

Today I was looking at some images online and found one that really liked, but was only able to get it in .jpg format. So, I did some digging and found handy instructions over here that guided me to converting the jpg to an svg (Scalable Vector Graphics) file. Once converted I was able to re-size the image without pixelation or blurring.

The instructions, as were provided, are for doing this under Ubuntu Linux, which I run. If you are on another OS, sorry, you will have to either see if this application is available for your system or find a similar application that will do the job.


To Convert .jpg files to .svg format:

1. Install Inkscape, if not already installed: sudo apt-get install inkscape
2. Start Inkscape after it is installed and then import the image under File->Import
3. Using the arrows on the image, re-size it to the size you wish, then hover your cursor over the image and hit Ctrl-Shift-D. That will bring up the Document Properties box.
4. Click on the Shrink To Fit button to re-size the image desktop to your images size.
5. Client File->Save As to save your image. It will default to a .svg file.

That is it. That's all there is to it. Hope this helps you in your quest, if you had one.

Thursday, March 17, 2011

New Perl News Site

I was browsing Reddit, as I do most days, and I found a posting titled, "New Perl News Site Lauches". Click the link to read their site announcement.

Being a lover and developer of Perl I decided to check it out. The site is quite new and only has a few posts up, but here is looking forward to a plethora of content on a favorite topic.

The new site can be found here.
 
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