Gang–I wanted shamelessly promote a friend of mine who has recently stated a new tech blog to help you get your Cisco on.  Visit him at All Time Defense

Bryan (or Mad Dog, as he is known to his friends), has a great deal of experience with Cisco security products and is now inviting you to walk with him (in a purely plutonic sense) down the road of Cisco Voice Over IP.

Personally, I think you should read his blog early and often.

Popularity: 33% [?]

Hello, Everyone!  I wanted to point out some less-than-obvious functionality that most blogs feature.  In particular, the RSS feed.  It seems that people who use it love it…and people who don’t use it…well, really don’t know much about it.  SO–at the risk of sounding pedantic, here goes.

RSS stands for “Really Simply Syndication” and can be thought of simply like a morning newspaper.  That is, if we can even remember what a newspaper is in our day and age .  A newspaper did/does a fantastic job of compiling bits of information and delivering it as a package to one’s door.  An RSS feed is essentially the same–whenever a web or other RSS enabled content is updated, an RSS Client notices the change and grabs the new content for the user.  SO, if you have “subscribed” to this site’s RSS feed, you have probably received this particular post inside your client without having to visit the site itself.

Which is very cool and very convenient.  If you aren’t currently familiar with this technology, I’ll give some tips later on.

More to the point many Content Management Systems (CMS) have this built in.  Such as Wiki, manufacturer websites, on-line stores, community forums, and many others.  I realized that most people just aren’t using the technology recently while setting up a professional organization chapter website.  I made sure that the other members were aware of not just the main RSS feed, but all the other feeds that were buried within the site–like Recent Changes on the Wiki that is it’s own discrete feed.  (This article is actually an edited cross-post of the one I wrote there.)

Anyway.  The I’ll get to the point.  Use an RSS client.  Here’s how:

Clicking on the link above in a modern web browser like Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 3 will expose the built in RSS client.

The simple fact is, that using a browser as an RSS feed reader is rather less like an RSS Client and rather more like a plain old book mark.  Which seems to be a little silly.  There are two other ways to subscribe to RSS feeds.

The first is via a stand alone client.  There are a few of these, most are free and pretty sturdy.  If forced to use one, I would personally go for RSSBandit, which can be found at here.

However, my personal choice for catching RSS feeds is to bring them into my email client.  That is the logical place for me to receive updated information on a random basis.  My email client is always open and does a great job of notifying me when there is something new.

There are many email clients with RSS clients built right in.  Among these are Microsoft Outlook 2007, which is an excellent product for many reasons.  Also is the robust and feature-rich Mozilla Thunderbird–which if not for Outlook, would be my choice of email clients on the Windows platform.  For Linux, one of the many common plug-ins for the excellent Evolution email client handles RSS reading.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of email clients in the world today are Microsoft Outlook 2003, which does not have a native RSS reader.  So, to add this functionality in, we will have to install a plug-in.  I have been using RSSPopper for Outlook for six months and believe that I can recommend it without reservation.  RSSPopper can be downloaded from http://www.rsspopper.com

After a simple install and a quick restart of Outlook 2003, it is up and running.  Now it is possible to configure some feeds.

Click on the RSSPopper button that has been installed in your Outlook toolbar, and select “Edit Feeds”.  Click the “New>>” button on the right hand side Feed Info window, and select “New RSS/Atom Feed…”.

With the “Feed Information” box ready, select the entire feed URL to the feed and paste it into the Link field.  BTW, you might have noticed–RSSPopper supports more than just RSS and Atom.  I can be used to keep your Outlook synchronized with a web-based calendar via iCal support.

Now, simply click the “Get From Feed” button, which should bring back the feed Title.  Click OK twice and away you have a new feed. Sharp eyes will see XML logo badges or RSS badges on many websites–I have nearly 30 or so feeds I monitor daily.  It helps me stay informed.

Good Luck!  And keep watching for XML or RSS badges on websites!

Popularity: 45% [?]

Ordinarily, I try to keep this blog about tech stuff, but well, I have to break from the norm for just a minute! Forgive the self-indulgence.  This kind of stuff doesn’t happen every day.  Ok, not to me anyway :).

He’s pretty great, isn’t he?  Unfortunately he has my hair–in fact after he received his first bath, he looked like he had a bad run-in with a Van de Graaf generator.

Now back to our regularly scheduled geekdom…Huh?  Oh, I guess we can apply a bit of Internet meme here.  Lessee… in the first picture, the caption could definitely be “Don’t Taze Me, Bro!”

Oh, now that I think about it–check out the birth announcement.

For those who don’t know:  At the hospital, the day after a birth they come around with a strange-looking cart that seems to come from a high-tech medical TV show.  It is actually a downward pointing camera that is specifically designed to separate new exhaused and stressed parents from their revenue.

Because the hospital needs more revenue.

So they take some pictures of every baby and then try to sell them back in a variety of sizes and formats.  One of which is the birth announcement format.  No thanks!  With my trusty Canon A620 and a little time on my laptop, I had created what I considered an excellent birth announcement.

I first took several shots of the baby at a fairly high resolution.  Loading these into Fireworks, I touched them up a bit with the Dodge tool.  This helped even out his complexion a bit–it’s pretty hard work to be born.  I cropped out an oval shape that feathered out on the edge and just dropped it to black and white.

Secondly, I used another favorite program to whip up a quick vector image for the scallops.  Basically a bunch of identical circles with the top half whacked away.  I saved that as a windows meta file and imported it into Fireworks.  Once there, I copied it and flipped one upside down for the bottom border.  Then on both I filled with the baby-blue color, applied a slight sideways drop-shadow and small bevel to the edge.  (BTW, it’s good to remember to keep the light unified–so the shadow and the bevel both appear to be lighted from the same source.)

Next, I placed the text on the blue spaces with the font I wanted.  I wanted to dress it up a bit, so I added a white outlined box, changed the line to dashes and fattened them up a bit.  I then applied a grain texture to them to simulate thread.

So far my only cost is about 45 minutes of time.  Ah, but here’s where the magic happens!

The hospital wants a parent to pay $40 to over $100 for a set of birth announcements!  And who knows how long they will take to be delivered…  With my method, I got 55 of them professionally printed on glossy photograph stock for $9 and had them in my hands an hour later.

“How?” you might ask.

Wal-Mart.

I created an account, uploaded my final announcement jpeg, and was done.  Well, mostly.  My wife, in a spurt of craftiness, bought some brown ribbon (with little footballs on it) that we put on the top left corner of each announcement.  If fact, that is the reason behind the space there.

Anyway.

Technology is grand.

Popularity: 47% [?]