I posted a tweet today where I comment on how I try my hardest to separate my work from my personal life.

I don’t talk about my place of employment, the work that I do (beyond sharing some code questions from time to time), and try my best not to rant about a specific industry.

From time to time, even with my best efforts, I have pissed off a few people by what I’ve written or said in public, off work hours, away from my buildings.

In my tweet, I said that I feel I do a better job of separating the workday from personal life than our government does in separating church from State. I hope my efforts are enough, as I certainly don’t intend to piss anyone off by my technical reviews, code sharing (never trade secrets), or other rants.

I am extremely passionate about the work I do – more than that, the industry for which I’ve made my career focus. Some shifts in how business is done or public misinformation about my industry breaks my heart, but I carry on. I do my best to educate without mixing the paycheck-generating business with my own opinions.

I hope you all enjoy reading my posts; I hope some are valuable in educating my audience, entertaining some and purposefully annoying my detractors.

At the end of the day, I simply want to remain productive and proactive in the industry that feeds my brain and my family.

Hopefully, a future will arrive that allows for apps to recognize content-levels automatically, possibly giving users a flip-switch (or options) to change the level of work-appropriateness they’d like content to adhere.

Until that time, I’m moving on to another area of focus on Flipboard: how much it has altered the way I consume local news content on my iPad.

To-date, there were three options for me to consume my local newspaper on my iPad:
1. Use their iPhone application in 2x view (not ideal).
2. Use their Web site in Safari (Flash interstitial ads make that less than ideal as well).
3. Use an RSS reader, such as Feeddler (lately my number-one choice).

Well, that’s changed with Flipboard.

As I wrote previously, Flipboard grabs links and external content mentioned by tweets and facebook posts, parsing the content and presenting it in a beautiful display. For instance, say you tweeted about Brier Dudley’s tech blog (with a shortened URL to a story/post). Flipboard would follow that URL and present a user with the story in all it’s textual glory. Tweets without a url are just presented as tweets, urls are processed and displayed as stories.

For me, this has made browsing the Seattle Times online much more enjoyable. I don’t get 100% of the content from their mobile or full Web site (as the only stories I’ll see are those that are tweeted from the @seattletimes account), but what I do see I enjoy. A great example of how much I’ve used Flipboard for consuming the Times: I just read a golf story (“Steady Bernhard Langer wins US Senior Open“).

Another nice feature: if a story contains an image, the image is presented along with the story, re-flowing in portrait or landscape.

Here’s some photos of what I’ve been seeing:

What about the legality, you ask?

I’ve been asked (and have read) “Is this legal?” I’m not a legal expert, but here’s my two-cent opinion:
1. The @seattletimes twitter account posts links to their own content, hoping users will click-through to read the stories. Flipboard presents that content in-part (I haven’t found a story short enough that it’s entire content is displayed by Flipboard). So one could argue that Flipboard is helping get users to the ST Web site in more volume. I find the content that Flipboard presents to be a good “teaser;” helping me decide if I really want to “read on web” (read more).
2. By presenting – even as a partial – the ST content without advertising, readers may escape the ABC statistics (an industry standard for measuring performance; also used to determine ad costs). This is a bad thing, and in my opinion the number-one reason why a publisher would disagree with their content being aggregated outside their control. From what I understand, newspapers rely heavily on the ABC numbers to determine what to charge for advertisements (a major part of their revenue); if readership drops (because potential visitors are not clicking-through to the full Web site), then advertising rates plummet, causing layoffs and the dreaded mantra “newspapers are dead.”

Summary

To summarize, I’m warming up to Flipboard. I’d love to see RSS feeds added, but I understand that’s not really their model (RSS is already organized – the brains behind Flipboard deal more with digging to discover the “meat”). I still have an entire page on my iPad devoted to news reading – from the AP, to the Seattle Times application, RSS readers, Time and Wired, etc.

The “news” page on my iPad. I go through each of these apps before bed. Sure, some aren’t really “news,” but there’s enough similarity to the apps to keep them all on one screen. Yes, I have the same “News” group on my iPhone.

For now, I’ll keep flipping through Flipboard as part of my nightly routine (I read all my news sources just before bed). If something better comes along I’ll discuss it. In the meantime, I may miss some stories from Flipboard, but I’m sure I’ll find the rest using my page of apps.

The addition of Twitter and Facebook streams looks beautiful – I can browse (in a newspaper-style layout) the tweets, links, photos, and messages from both services quickly.

While I do love the layout (I’m a print guy, after all), I did find one problem with two areas of worry: The content from your Twitter and Facebook stream is presented in Flipboard’s own choice of layout. Meaning, some photos or links from your friends might show up as small boxes, or nearly fullscreen.

In the section view, this means any NSFW content uploaded by your friends (and we all have friends that post non-work safe images, or is that just me?) could be nearly fullscreen.
In the photo-slideshow view (which is displayed on-launch), that same content could appear fullscreen.

I use the slideshow view while my iPad is docked in my homemade cardboard dock at work, that way I can quickly glance at any given photo as it comes across and tap to read more. It’s a nice feature 99% of the time. That is, until a friend’s photo of a night out drinking or another’s link to a punk show (displaying an angry panda) might take some explaining to a hovering boss (as just happened to me).

Flipboard in the dock - showing the angry panda

Flipboard in my hand - showing a photographer-friend on a night out

Twitter stream - yes, that says 'warm weather humping' with a nude photo

As much as I’m enjoying Flipboard, I can’t recommend one using it as a work-safe slideshow or browsing app if anyone could be hovering in your work area.

That said, totally worth the wait for my custom access. I’m looking forward to the ability to add in news feeds in the future (hint at a request there, guys and gals), video and more.

I’ve written a plugin (for CodeIgniter) that handles the string as input, checks for empty lines (excessive \r\n’s), cleans e-mail addresses (pretty), and converts URL’s to their full ‘a href’ layout.

The problem I’d like to solve: many of the URL’s I’m finding are “long” – meaning, they are over 100 characters long. I’d like to shorten them to, say, the first 20-30 characters, followed by ellipsis (eg: “http://www.chadedge.com…”).

Using substr() inside a preg_replace() will not work (substr chokes or preg_replace chokes – neither like being wrapped up that way).

Any ideas?
–

Here’s a before:

its hard to find a good one and most of us are not to thrilled with some of the local repair shops. i have found a really great guy in north seattle. he does beautiful full restores, maintenance, rebuilds and great work all around. have been using him for a while (including correcting some of TL's work). He also sells NOS and repro parts for a better price then anyone local. the is the best i have found and really a great guy to work with. feel free to email me and i can tell you why i like NCVH better then TL. 

http://northcityvintagehonda.wordpress.com/

http://www.northcityvintagehonda.com/servlet/StoreFront

And the after:

its hard to find a good one and most of us are not to thrilled with some of the local repair shops. i have found a really great guy in north seattle. he does beautiful full restores, maintenance, rebuilds and great work all around. have been using him for a while (including correcting some of TL's work). He also sells NOS and repro parts for a better price then anyone local. the is the best i have found and really a great guy to work with. feel free to email me and i can tell you why i like NCVH better then TL. 

http://northcityvintage...
http://northcityvintage...

Update (2010-07-26): I have written a solution by editing (a bad idea, of course) the url helper (system/helpers/url_helper.php) in the function auto_link.
I highly recommend you do NOT repeat my process; however, as this is a one-time hack for a special circumstance, here’s what I did:

In url_helper.php – at the function_auto_link: There is a section of code that parses any found URL in to it’s “bits” (stripping http:// etc). I checked for the length of the url, and if it’s +20 characters, I substring it down to 20 and add an ellipsis to the string before returning the full linked-url chunk.

The code:

Again, I don’t recommend you follow my example – it’d be better to subclass the helper, but in my situation this works just jim-dandy.

For the most part, you’d be right. With one minor exception: corrupt fonts.

Mind you, this might be unique to me, but I offer this tip just in case you’re presented with the same issues I’ve faced.

First, the screenshot of iTunes shortly after my migration:

The solution I used to fix this font issue was to open Font Book (remember that app? Probably gets used as much as once a year I’d imagine). Launch Font Book and look for any fonts that have a yellow triangle (alert) next to them. CMD+click on the fonts and choose “Resolve Duplicates.” Or, you can just select-all and run the same command.

Quick as a whip, the problem was solved.

The only other issue I had with my migration was iTunes failed to see my music, movies, etc (and crashed quite a bit). A Software Update check fixed this (turns out, I was running 10.6.3 on my new machine, with an older version of iTunes, etc). Once I updated the OS and the available apps, all was running at top-speed.

Watson, I.B.M’s latest creation in the field of question-answering machines, is blowing my mind with every article, study, and video I can find. Here’s a promo video from I.B.M:

I’ve been researching a Bayesian matching system for comparing and binding news stories from different sources, with the goal of being able to match using only two sources (totally breaking away from the base logic of a Bayesian match algorithm). A question-answering machine may be much better and figuring out small matches in strings and titles where a pure keyword-based match would fail.

Let’s hope the Jeopardy! tests go well as I.B.M has suggested that Watson could emerge in business uses in the next couple of years.

PS: Here’s a longer article by the NY Times (which I read last night and tweeted about)

This is getting crazy.

What chaps my ass is when a designer/developer takes credit for a design that was not theirs – one that they have made adjustments to, while leaving the core design in-place. Further, when the core code lives on, with some adjustments, I also get a rash.

The case here is Muumuu Heaven, a Web site that a buddy of mine were hired to develop by an employer of ours. It was a rough time in our development lives – with difficulties in communication, slipping deadlines, design changes, underbidding, etc. A lot of the hardships were my fault, but in the end I was happy with the result. Not the best development in the world, but I applaud the designer I worked with for his color choices, images, etc.

It’s been a few years, the Web site has gone through some updates and changes – both in design elements and code, but much of my designer’s look/feel remain (meaning: the exact images he designed are still in-play; the scaffolding is the same); the code for navigating the site is the same.

On the footer of the Web site is a link for “Site Credits.” I had no supposition that Muumuu Heaven would credit the designer or myself, but I was surprised when the new designer and developer took credit for work that was (at best) half theirs.
This continued on the developer’s own Web site (which is where the following screenshot came from).

I’m not asking Muumuu Heaven to give us credit now, I’m just ranting about the ass-rash that things like this give me. I’ve contributed on many projects and do my best not to boast about being “the man.” If you’re going to claim ownership of a design or development, then make sure it really is YOUR design/development.

(end rant)

Of course, I had to ruin it by trying to cut a wake/sleep hole (dammit!), but beyond that: score!

Here’s some early photos:

And a brief video:

Details over the next month.