Beau's Tech Blog

In repsonse to the Engadget article: http://www.engadget.com/2008/12/16/apple-announces-final-macworld-steve-jobs-wont-deliver-keynote/5#c16152216 I am personally disappointed to see it go. Apple has been ramping up their own special events for a while now and everyone gets excited about those, but for years MacWorld was the one big event other than WWDC that we expect big things. I can't help but think it has to be hard for Apple to knock one out of the park every year in January, but lets not underestimate the power of this event. While its value as a trade show may be limited and the explanations of the online and retail stores trumping the need for a trade show make logical sense, I can't help but think that the nostalgia and nearly un-rivaled coverage they receive from this one event is something that is hard to value. How many companies other than Apple can systematically pull this off every year and get the attention that they...

To follow up my previous post about the Griffin RoadTrip with SmartScan I bought on Amazon.... I did receive a replacement last Thursday. This time I used it in our TrailBlazer. It worked fine out of the box when I plugged it in, but it does seem very snug and I am a little worried this might not be the device to transport back and forth between vehicles for fear of what happened with the first one. After a weekend of use I have a few issues to complain about. I was hopeful that the SmartScan feature would work better. Unfortunately, it seems to pick stations that are far worse than the ones I find manually (usually in the 88.3-88.9 range). Also, while it works fine to charge and play the iPhone 3G, the adapters in the box do not include one for the iPhone or iPod touch, so I am using the 80GB adapter. It seems to fit snugly (maybe too snugly) and the home button on the iPhone is slightly covered. I also found myself fiddling with the contr...

Griffinroadtrip2 I just bought the GriffinRoadTrip SmartScan on Amazon for around $60 to use with my iPhone 3G, since this is one of the few that works with it (although not officially). I was replacing my older Griffin RoadTrip (without flexible neck). When the unit arrived, I took it out to the car to give it a try. My car is a Cadillac CTS and has an ashtray that you must flip down to access the cigarette lighter. This was a big reason I wanted the flexible neck, as the older RoadTrip never was ideally aligned and always slipped down under the weight of the 1st iPhone I used it with. When I bought the 3G, it wouldn’t charge it, so another reason I bought the RoadTrip with SmartScan. As soon as I plugged it in, it seemed really snug. It lit up and starting scann...

I just finished reading Jason Hiner's article on ZDNet titled "The top 5 reasons why Windows Vista failed." While I have plenty of criticism for Microsoft, I couldn't help but think what an incredibly biased article this was. You can read the article here: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=10303 Either Jason Hiner fell off his rocker or he is cleverly trying to create the perception that Windows Vista is this horrible thing. 5. Apple successfully demonized Vista Sure Apple has done a great job with their ads, but why are you comparing Apple ads to the demise of Vista? You only show the Enterprise adoption rates which are ALWAYS slow and I am quite certain were impacted very little by Apple. I think if you compare the consumer markets you might have a more accurate idea of what is really happening.   4. Windows XP is too entrenched. I agree, but is this a surprise for an OS that has been around since 2001? Micros...

A very common dilemma I come across as a PHP developer is how I want to handle creating thumbnails for lots of images. Sure, I could use some software and make thumbnails, but I'm talking about bigger projects that need to handle it for thousands of photos. I have been down the path many times of using PHP GDI+ and writing a function to do resizing. A couple of years ago I got fancier and made some proportiate resizing functions so that those pesky pictures people take holding their cameras vertically don't have to be squished into a pre-determined width of 100px. However, each and every time I do a project like this I always think how messy it is. If you have 50 thousand photos, you will have 100 thousand files once you pre-make all those thumnails. And what if the client comes back next year and wants a different size, or you decide to do something in-between sizes for another use? Heck, what if you update a photo, you have to reme...