Tech for Lunch!

I came across Animoto.com a little while back but did not have time to give it a try.  Looking back in my bookmarks of sites to re-visit, I decided to give it a shot to see just what it would create with my pictures and music. Here’s what I got with some of my pictures of my trip to Cancun:

Animoto is a web application that produces MTV-style videos using the images and music you choose. Produced in a widescreen format, Animoto videos have the visual energy of a music video and the emotional impact of a movie trailer. Best of all, no two videos are ever the same. Ever.

Basically, you upload the picture that you want in the video, choose or upload the music and let the Animoto engine do its thing.  You can send the end-result through the engine again if you are not happy with the results.  The video above went through it only once since it was only a test, but because of the way Animoto “Reads” your music and places pictures and animations to go along, no videos are ever the same.

As with many services of this type, Animoto offers a free version to try it out and offers two paid options.  The free version lets you create as many videos as you like, but you are limited to 30 seconds per video.  If you want to make the full-length videos, you need to pay 3$ per video or get the all-access pass for 30$/year which will let you make an unlimited number of videos.  All your creations can be embedded or published to various sites or sent by email or even to Youtube.

There are a variety of websites which offer similar services, but Animoto is the first one I actually tried.  I must say I like the result but would prefer a longer version.  Naturally, I don’t really need one, so I’m not going to pay 3$ for a video I can probably make myself if I were to put the time into it.  But overall, I can see this service being very useful when you need to create something cool very quickly and don’t want to use a boring old slideshow.

You can just give the free version a try and see if you end up with something you might want to use.

Just like every other blogger out there, I’m always on the look out for a new release of Wordpress.  I enjoy blogging very much, but the technical part has always been my favorite hobby.  There is no better way to do that but to install new wordpress sites for customers or upgrade my own with the latest release.

Wordpress 2.6 has been in the works for a short while, and now Beta 1 is available.  Ryan Boren has an article about this and here are the new features that he lists:

• Post Revisioning (see article here)
• A “Press This” bookmarklet for tumblelog style quick posting
• Caching of static files with Gears for faster Admin page loads
• A new and improved image editing dialog that offers lots of control over the images in your posts
• Theme previewing as seen on WordPress.com
• Built-in word counting in the post editor
• The ability to disable remote publishing for the security conscious
• XML-RPC API for changing blog options
• Better SSL support for the Admin
• Hierarchy-aware paging in the Manage Pages and Manage Categories admin pages.
• The ability to relocate your content directory
• The ability to move wp-config.php out of your web root
• Drag-and-drop sortable galleries
• Customizable default avatars
• Bulk delete, activate, and deactivate for plugins
• Check box range selection with shift-click
• TinyMCE 3.1.0.1 with lots of bug fixes
• jQuery 1.2.6 with some nice performance improvements
• jQuery UI 1.5
• Lots of bug fixes and performance improvements

The ability to keep multiple versions of the same article is certainly a feature that has been asked for over and over again and there are a few other features in there that I will be happy to have without using a plugin.  Version 2.5 was a major release because it was a drastic upgrade from previous versions, but 2.6 simply adds to an already excellent and complete package with more features and bugfixes.

I don’t recommend installing Beta 1 on a production server, but if you have a test environment that you can use, definitely give it a try and let them know if you find anything fishy.  The final release is set for mid-July 2008.

Google’s popular free 411 service GOOG-411 ( 1-800-4664-411) is now available in Canada. The toll-free directory service that uses Google results to give people phone numbers and addresses of local businesses launched in the States back in April of last year. Since then it’s added an SMS maps service that will send you a link to the WAP-friendly map. The computerized operator has also since been enhanced, and now has a voice closer to the all-seeing HAL 9000 seen in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 instead of the Microsoft Sam-like one from before.

With the updated version the real work is not just in the sound of the voice, it’s also in the service’s capability to understand what people are saying. To that end, Google’s official blog post on it says the voice recognition engine was tuned to better understand some of the Canadian dialects:

Although English is spoken in both the U.S. and Canada, there are enough differences between the way it’s spoken in the two countries that we engineered GOOG-411 especially for Canadian English. We incorporated some Canadianisms [sic] such as “eh,” “Traw-na,” “Cal-gry,” and, of course, “aboot.” We also took into account geographical differences. Whereas users in the U.S. are prompted for “city and state,” Canadians are asked for your “city and province.”

For the segment of French-speaking Canadians, the announcement also says an updated version of the service with support for localized French is coming soon, which might lead to international variations for large markets in Europe.

I have covered Spiceworks in the past and actually not that long ago.  But after writing about it, I started using it in an actual production environment and I love it.  Version 3.0 was already in the works and, after 2,500 beta testers have gone over it,  it has now been officially released.  My installation is already up to date.

Spiceworks is a free tool that lets you manage your IT assets, network and helpdesk tickets easily.  This new release is certainly very well done, just like the previous version and includes some 1,200 bugfixes and a bunch of new features.  Here are a few of them:

• SaaS Inventory Management – new inventory features include the ability to track SaaS services – such as online back-ups or e-mail hosting – which often account for more than 50 percent of IT spendings and are becoming more prevalent as SMBs migrate to “Cloud Computing” services. Inventory items that can be tracked include service costs, related contract dates, help desk tickets, outages, contact information, documents and relevant news.
• Network Glide^™ – the new Network Glide^™ feature allows users to flip through and view network devices, applications and services with a single click. This not only makes navigation easier but allows IT managers to view more aspects of their networks quickly in a single glance.  The network detection capabilities are also improved and allow you to have less “unknown” devices listed.
• IT Services Activity Feeds – allows the history of IT services to be viewed in an activity stream similar to a social networking application news feed. This helps the IT manager stay on top of issues with IT services.
• Report Sharing – users can now create customized reports and share them with other IT managers within the Spiceworks community. Users benefit from access to additional out-of-the-box reports customized to the needs of small business IT pros like them.  This feature is one of those that truly work when the community gets involved, and knowing the Spiceworks community, I’d say there should be some interesting sharing going on.
• Microsoft Exchange Monitoring – allows users to monitor their Microsoft Exchange server for up-time status, load, and mailbox capacity usage. In addition it integrates the Spiceworks help desk email functions with Microsoft Exchange.
• Active Directory Support – users can now leverage Active Directory to simplify the authentication and administration of the end-user help desk portal included in Spiceworks.  This feature is especially handy if you have and Active Directory to prevent your end-users from having to remember an extra username/password for Spiceworks.
• Third-Party Tool Integration – enables users to launch and view other network and systems management tools from within the Spiceworks user interface, making it easier to perform key IT management tasks.

These are the most important new features in terms of functionnalities, but the most important one overall, to me, is the increased speed of the system.  The interface is now 30-40% faster than before, and it shows.  This alone makes the upgrade worthwhile, even if you don’t intend on using the new features.  Using Spiceworks is even more enjoyable with a responsive interface.  Network scanning times have also been cut down, making then 20-40% faster.

Just like the previous version, I highly recommend you give Spiceworks a try if you have to manage any of the things it can help you with.  I mostly use the helpdesk features for my trouble tickets, but I have tested all the little features and all of them do exactly as they should.  Best of all, Spiceworks is a free download so it’s always a very welcome addition to your IT management toolbox.

Microsoft’s most famous Founder, Bill Gates, will be stepping down from his duties on Friday, June 27th 2008.

Bill Gates was a Harvard University dropout.  In 1975, he co-founded Microsoft with his friend Paul Allen and took the world by storm with his software we all know.  He made billions of dollars and totally revolutionized the way we work and use technology everyday.  Some people will argue that it would probably have been done anyways, just a different way, but we don’t live in that parallel universe ;-)

Over the last few years, Bill Gates has been giving away some of his duties in order to focus more and more on his self-funded charity the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  During this time, the Microsoft visionary tasks were still handled by him and so we did not see too much of a drastic change.

It will basically come down to three people to handle the tasks that he took care of regularly.  Ray Ozzy as the chief software architect and Craig Mundie gets the chief research and strategy officer duties.  The final person is one that we have already seen many times because he has been in the spotlight for a while, Paul Allen.  He gets the CEO position.  After retiring, Gates will remain chairman of the Microsoft board of directors and still its largest shareholder.

The impact of his retirement are difficult to predict, and the echoes go both ways.  Some think that we won’t see any notable difference from the software giant, while others believe that this will be a fatal loss.  I think that Microsoft has been working hard at following/establishing the trends and they should be able to keep afloat for quite some time.  I large company like that doesn’t go belly-up overnight and Bill Gates will still be watching because he holds that largest share of the company.

Microsoft software may not be the best every time, but keep in mind that it is usually the most widely used and so there are more people looking for problems and holes in their software than any other vendor out there.  I have yelled my share of bad words at Windows for giving some weirdo error messages and not letting me do this or that, but the fact remains that it is still very usable software and it keeps my contracts coming.

Have a happy retirement Mr. Gates!

The team that created Firefox 3 were so sure that the community was impatient to download their newest browser, that they asked Guiness to measure their downloads and set a new world record.  So they went ahead and declared June 17th as Download Day.  The period is actually from 11:16am(PDT) on June 17th to 11:16am(PDT) on June 18th.

Over that 24 hour period, FIrefox 3 was downloaded a whooping 8,290,545 times!  You can visit their official Download Day page to see the current download totals which is a 18,196,695 at the time of this article.

The actual download logs will be reviewed by a panel of judges before the record is definitely official.  The judges will be none other than Paul Vixie of the Internet Systems Consortium and Corey Shields of Indiana University.

Best of luck to the entire Firefox Team in their quest for a world record and thanks for the great browser!  If you do not already use Firefox, I recommend you give it a go, you won’t be disappointed.

Just a quick post to let everyone know that the long awaited Firefox 3 is now available for download from Mozilla. This new version has been in the works for a long time now(actually, 34 months to be exact!) and the entire Firefox Community has been watching and hoping for the final release. Boasting some 15,000 changes to improve performance, stability, rendering correctness, and code simplification and sustainability, Firefox 3 is an exciting product that I can’t wait to review.

Here are the Top New Features:

• Improved Performance  -  This is probably, and by far, the most anticipated improvement for this release.  Firefox 2 is an excellent browser, but its memory consumption is sometimes excessive and makes it a very fat application in the long run.  This release claims to load pages faster and use less memory.
• Password Manager  -  Such a feature was already available via some toolbars and plugins, but it is now integrated directly in the browser.
• One-Click Bookmarking  -  One click on the star icon at the end of the location bar bookmarks a site. Two clicks and you can choose where to save it and whether to tag it.
• Smart Location Bar  -  The new location bar learns as you use it. Type in a term and the autocomplete function includes possible matching sites from your browsing history, as well as sites you’ve bookmarked and tagged in a drop down.
• Instant Website ID  -  This is a security feature.  Click on a site favicon for an instant identity overview or click twice to get a detailed report.
• Full Zoom  -  Lets you zoom in the fineprint and on images more easily.
• Platform-Native Look & Feel  -  Firefox’s interface adapts to the OS you are using, whether it’s Windows XP, Windows Vista, Apple or Linux.

There are many more new features available and I will install this new version as soon as I get a chance to be able to review it in a future post.  stay tuned and let me know if you’ve already had a chance to try Firefox 3.

Every once in a while, comes a cool application that becomes a must-have in your toolkit. I work on the road a lot and connect to many customers’ machines remotely as well. I very often need to know what hardware is in their machine and I don’t want to have to install any software on their machines to get that information.

SIW is an advanced System Information for Windows tool that gathers detailed information about your system properties and settings and displays it in an extremely comprehensible manner. It can create a report file (CSV, HTML, TXT or XML), and is able to run in batch mode (for Asset Inventory Tracking, Computer (Software and Hardware) Inventory, PC Audit, Software Audit, Software License Compliance Management). These options make this a very valuable tool on many occasions.

SIW will give you the standard machine information in a very easy to read format and also adds some nifty tools for the technicians out there. You’ll find Eureka! will let you reveal the passwords hidden under the usual “****” masks, a MAC address changer and a CPU and Memory graph utility to monitor your machine’s health.

The very best feature of this product is the fact that it writes nothing to the drive where it’s running from so it lets you run it from a usb key on any machine. To make things even easier on myself, I’ve uploaded it to an easy to remember URL on my company’s website so when I need to use it I just point over directly to the executable, like www.something.com/siw.exe. This method allows me to run SIW even when I’m connected remotely to a customer’s machine and would not be able to insert a usb key since i’m not physically in front of the machine.

I like this tool a lot and I recommend it if you sometimes need to know what kind of memory chips are in a certain machine before you order additional RAM, for example. It’s a Freeware so I think it’s well worth your time to take a look at it and, perhaps, add it to your standard toolkit.

Here are a few screenshots:

Once again, I have to write about a web 2.0 application that I came across. But this one is very entertaining. I am pretty far from being the creative/artistic type so I usually don’t spend a lot of time on applications like this, but I found myself playing around on this one much more than I should have. At least I have something to show after wasting 30 minutes on that site, contrary to wasting 30 minutes on Facebook.

Go!Animate in their own words: “We are a bunch of guys who love animation and want to share our passion with the world! The problem is that animation requires very specific skills. Animators need to learn Flash or other advanced software before being able to create anything. They also need to know how to draw. That’s why we created GoAnimate, a platform that allows people to express themselves through animation without having to learn to draw or install any software.“

The tools found on Go!Animate are pretty efficient to get you started in no time. Very easy to use and if you just watch the tutorial, you should be able to create a little something right away. I did find that some things were missing, but I’m sure they will get added as time goes by. For instance, I wanted to add a credits screen at the end of my animation. There is only one credits screen available but it is not editable.

Tools are divided into different categories such as characters, speech bubbles, scenes (backgrounds), props, music and visual effects. You can use the ones that are supplied by Go!Animate or upload your own. There are also community supplied assets, meaning there should be more and more things available as the community grows.

Once your animation is complete, you can save it to your account as a private or public animation. Public animations are viewable to everyone on the site and you have the possibility of sharing via email or an embedded link, just like I used here on this site. I had to resize the player to fit my blog, (that’s why the Go!Animate text doesn’t quite fit) but it’s basically like youtube videos. You can also share directly on Facebook, Digg, MySpace, Reddit, Del.Icio.Us and Stumbleupon.

If you want an easy way to create and share animation online, without having to learn Flash and similar tools, Go!Animate offers a great way to get started and let the world know about your incredible animation skills.

Here is the animation I created while testing the service:

Edit: for some reason, many people seem to have a problem viewing the embedded version, so here’s a link to the actual page: http://goanimate.com/go/movie/54025/1

Flairbuilder.com is one of those web-based applications that make you wonder why people create just about anything online. It is actually a pretty neat idea, but I’m not too sure about its real-life applications, aside from the proof that it can be done. Flairbuilder is basically a web-based application that you can use to create web-based applications. It is built on Adobe Flex and lets you create a Flex application directly online.

The UI is somewhat a re-creation of Flex Builder, and will let you switch between Building and Coding just like the real thing. Here is a screenshot of a quick application I made… I made this one after I created a better one but accidentally closed the window, so it’s really simple.

Keep in mind that Flairbuilder is still a work in progress. It’s not even really in beta yet, but you can still have a look and perhaps you can try a few Flex functions without having to play with the SDK or setting up Flex Builder. You can find it at http://www.flairbuilder.com