rant out.

iftttb

You could have seen it first on Google +

I just saw a local newscast that was warning people that during a storm the most dangerous part was the wind.
The stat quoted for this was that in 20 years 7 people had died in Georgia and North Carolina from fallen trees.

Now I don't know about you but that seams awful low. They presented the facts but used fonts, colors, and hype to twist the facts into a good way to keep you indoors and watching tv.

Meh
Iftttb

You could have seen it first on Google +

This is what I do know:
1. Anytime you try to mess with the audio of a Kinect device during a remote desktop session it fails with a null reference error.
2. Direct access methods (monitor/keyboard) don't have this issue.
3. it is bugging the hell out of me.

To correct this make sure you do a try on any Kinect Audio functions if there is even a remote possibility your user's will use remote desktop.

iftttb

You could have seen it first on Google +

You could have seen it first on Google +

He is a vietnam war vet and he wears his army jacket every-were, He sleeps with a quilt that looks like the american flag and say's a prayer over every meal. He is a true american in my eyes. I can only wish to be as patriotic as he is.

He said after the commercial, that is why you buy from american companies. They have a genuine interest in the success of our country. They share our successes and our failures and we theirs.

If you think about the history of Daimler Chrysler you can notice a pattern.

Buy American, or American Made.
David Bates – Owner of a PT Cruiser deemed the most unique car in america that is now worth as much as my computer system

iftttb

You could have seen it first on Google +

You could have seen it first on Google +

1. +Google+ to Twitter: Takes the short title of the post and the url and post to Twitter.
http://ifttt.com/recipes/18784

2. +Google+ to FaceBook: Shares the URL of the post (FaceBook will auto-generate the title and description) with the comment "My Latest G+ Post:")
http://ifttt.com/recipes/19024

3. +Google+ to Linked In: Shares the URL of the post (Linked In will auto-generate the title and description) with the comment "My Latest G+ Post:")
http://ifttt.com/recipes/19023

4. +Google+ to WordPress Blog: Shares the full content of the G+ post with the tag "iftttb" in the body of a post on the blog (with pictures) You should edit the post in wordpress to your satisfaction.
http://ifttt.com/recipes/19025
I hope you find these useful.
David

ifttt / Put the internet to work for you.
Put the internet to work for you.

You could have seen it first on Google +

If This Then That is a set of webapi's that allows you to interlink accounts with actions. http://ifttt.com

Why I Use IFTTT
I use ifttt in order to broadcast my message from G+ to my other social accounts. Recently I have decided that G+ will be my platform of choice for originating my content but I have felt like I just abandoned my friends and family on facebook, twitter, my blog, and IN. I didn't want to do that so I have been posting things in several areas which ment I didn't get it right all the time and left several big gaping holes in content that I sent out to my friends. This is where ifttt came to the rescue.

How I Use IFTTT
The first step is to get an RSS feed of your Google + account. I use http://gplus-to-rss.appspot.com/ all you have to do is enter your G+ user id into a field and it pulls back an RSS feed of your latest post.

don't know how to get your G+ ID? http://ansonalex.com/google-plus/how-do-i-find-my-google-plus-user-id-google/

Next you can either use predefined recipes or create your own custom task.
I chose to create my own as I wanted full control of the message being delivered.

The four action I have are:

G+ to Twitter: This action takes an abbreviated portion of any post in my feed and shares it plus a link to the full post on twitter.

G+ to FaceBook: This action takes the URL of the latest post and simply adds the message "My Latest G+ Post" on it. This behaves just like sharing a link on FaceBook, it will fill in the short description and url.

G+ to Linked In: this works the same as the FaceBook feed but with Linked In

G+ to my Blog: This is probably the most tricky one. I use wordpress as the backend to http://dlbates.com/blog/ so I wanted any google plus content that I tag with iftttb to post to my blog. For this I told IFTTT to search through my RSS information and if it contains the tag then post the content to my blog with a custom title and tag.

One more thing to mention is that if you do this like I have done you may want to disconnect the interlinking you may have setup through twitter and linked in or you will have duplicate post.

Enjoy
David

ifttt / Put the internet to work for you.
Put the internet to work for you.

You could have seen it first on Google +

yesterday was so nice outside we decided to let the kids burn off some steam. Daniel's friend Ayana (Yawny) decided to join in on the fun as well. I decided to snap a few photos while I was out there. It was good for me to get some fresh air as well since I have been cooped up in the house since last Friday.

Hope you enjoy your weekend!
David

You could have seen it first on Google +

I love JQuery and I love JQuery UI even more but what I love most about the combination of the two is that they are cross browser compatible, delivered over a CDN network, and open source. This means that I can use anything I build on top of these two very powerful platforms in any website I wish, including the enterprise ones.

I was recently tasked with building a lightbox element that would allow me to showcase Vimeo videos (or any other content) in a cross browser CDN enabled way. At first I scoured the web looking for the best jquery lightbox plugin. I tried fancybox, shadowbox, thickbox, slimbox, facebox, other younameit-box plugins but they all either catered to one type of content, failed in the cross browser arena, or had unknown or grey licensing.

On day two of my growing frustration a friend of mine suggested I look at JQuery UI and specifically the Dialog method. So I did and was instantly hooked, and while it didn’t provide all of the functionality you need from a lightbox it came pretty darn close. So I began hacking away until I got down to a pretty comprehensive lightbox solution for video and then wrote a little helper function to populate the content area on the fly and set the title. What follows is how to do that:

Step one: includes

So first you need to include JQuery and JQuery UI within your page. The easiest way to do this is use Google’s CDN by placing the following two lines in your head.
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src=" https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.16/jquery-ui.js"></script>

You will also need to include a JQuery UI theme you can use the starter theme hosted on Google’s CDN too!

<link href="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.16/themes/ui-darkness/jquery-ui.cs"
type="text/css" rel="Stylesheet" />

Again that needs to be placed in your head.

Step two: create a div

We need to create a div that will not only hold our dialog but also most of the embed code for the video’s we will want to play.
I would suggest adding this code near the footer of the page since it will load an iframe.

<div id="videoPlayerDiv">
<iframe id="theVideo" src="" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</div>


Step three .dialog()

Now you need some JQuery magic on page load as well as creating the helper function
<script type="text/jscript">
$(document).ready(function () {
$('#videoPlayerDiv').dialog({ autoOpen: false, modal: true, title: "RFMD Video", width: 664, resizable: false });
$("#videoPlayerDiv").bind("dialogclose", function (event, ui) {
$('#theVideo').attr('src', '');
});

});
function SetVideo(source, title) {
$('#theVideo').attr('src', source);
$('#videoPlayerDiv').dialog("option", "title", title);
$('#videoPlayerDiv').dialog('open');
$('.ui-widget-overlay').click(function () { $('#videoPlayerDiv').dialog('close'); });
};
</script>
This can go in your header or wherever you might have already put the $(document).ready clause.

Final step: Call your helper function

So now all you need to do is call the helper function and pass it the src url for the video and the title

<a href="#" onclick="javascript:SetVideo('http://player.vimeo.com/video/18888136?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&color=af0522"&autoplay=1', 'Courtesy Vimeo User 1024');return false;">Video</a>

You can prolly tell I use asp.net from the javascript surrounds and return false. If you don’t use .net you don’t need this.

Demo

Click to open demo