Epis­ode 5 (“Adobe and OpenAtrium Extra­vag­anza”) : Play Now | Play in Popup | Down­load

Down­load here!

Wel­come to epis­ode 5! Just Teresa and Pas­cal this week as Andy is over­seas. The two dis­cuss altern­at­ives to the Adobe product line for folks work­ing in the web world (so ras­ter and vec­tor image edit­ors and text/code edit­ors) after Teresa has been re-considering her pos­i­tion on Adobe and it’s pri­cing. Pas­cal has for while been using the free and open source image edit­ors The GIMP and Ink­s­cape so he’ll be shar­ing his thoughts on those.

In the second seg­ment Pas­cal inter­views Ian Cairns, the pro­ject man­ager from Devel­op­ment Seed, a com­mu­nic­a­tion strategies busi­ness based in Wash­ing­ton D.C. who recently released their intranet and pro­ject man­age­ment sys­tem as an open source pro­ject. Open Atrium, the pack­age, rests nicely on top of the already pop­u­lar open source con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem Drupal and installs in a breeze.

The inter­view covers:

* the run­down;
* the licens­ing of the pro­ject;
* the server require­ments for run­ning Open Atrium your­self;
* the fea­ture list;
* the story behind Open Atrium;
* cool use cases, includ­ing the World Bank;
* the big ques­tion: ‘can this replace the almost industry de facto stand­ard pro­ject man­age­ment pack­age Base­Camp from 37 Sig­nals’?;
* trans­la­tions and multi-lingual sup­port;
* doc­u­ment­a­tion, and help­ing out.

# Links in order of appearance

1. Teresa’s Twit­ter profile
2. Pascal’s Twit­ter profile
3. Avi­ary software
4. Acorn
5. The GIMP
6. Ink­s­cape
7. Corel Painter
8. Note­pad++
9. Coda
10. Text­Mate
11. Devel­op­ment Seed
12. Open Atrium
13. Git­Hub — online source revi­sion con­trol with free host­ing for open source projects
14. Drupal — open source CMS
15. Open Atrium translations
16. Open Atrium Twit­ter profile
17. Ian Cairns’ Twit­ter profile

We’ve decided to switch the show to a when-we-feel-like-it sched­ule because Andy has buggered off to Europe for a month and Teresa will also head over­seas for a while at the end of Septem­ber. Don’t worry though — we’ll all be back and in the mean time we’ll be bring­ing in a num­ber of cool peeps to chat with in interviews.

The show as usual is licensed under the Cre­at­ive Com­mons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Aus­tralia license — take, share and be merry. And of course, stay tuned for more shows and interviews.

Finally, we want to pass along another thanks to Dean Klemick for giv­ing us two Sing­star USB micro­phones which we hope you may noticed in some form through the improve­ment in audio qual­ity. Thanks Dean!

Show run-time: 60 minutes.

 

 Epis­ode 4 (“IE Voo­doo Doll”): Play Now | Play in Popup | Down­load

(Pod­cast will be up on iTunes, or you can grab it here)

We bring you epis­ode four, where we wel­come our third pan­el­list, Teresa Watts who shall be join­ing us in the future! After dis­cuss­ing Teresa’s awe­some hand-made IE voo­doo doll we move onto a good chat about our busi­ness endeav­ours and employ­ment exper­i­ences. We cover Andy’s busi­ness and his les­sons learned since clos­ing it end 2008 (focus, cash-flow and buf­fer sav­ings, the pros and cons of out­sourcing, ded­ic­ated work­ing pos­i­tions) before mov­ing onto Teresa’s and Pascal’s exper­i­ences in in-house and freel­ance pos­i­tions. Issues here include focus and struc­ture but restrict­ive and lim­it­ing in man­ner, becom­ing bored by work­ing on the same thing long-term, though how­ever how it was a good exper­i­ence — we both learned what we did and didn’t like doing.

Finally we all shed our wis­dom on the life­style that is freel­an­cing. Here we go over the abil­ity to vet cli­ents (yay!), com­mu­nic­at­ing with cli­ents, the import­ance of net­work­ing and being act­ively involved in your industry’s com­munity (Twit­ter, LinkedIn, SIGs, con­fer­ences, speak­ing, …), pri­cing, sep­ar­at­ing work envir­on­ment from the rest of your liv­ing space, and hav­ing an act­ive web pres­ence. Oh, and as usual Pas­cal makes a fool of him­self, but nicely gets a stab back at Andy.

We’ve got inter­views con­firmed with Donna Ben­jamin on open edu­ca­tion and Ian Cairns of Devel­op­ment Seed on Open Atrium — stay tuned. On that note actu­ally, Pas­cal has set up Open Atrium on open.klepas.org and has a guest test­ing group set up. Email or @ him on Twit­ter to get an account and have a play.

Recor­ded post-show, this week’s ‘fuck you of the week’ goes to Apple for it’s fail­ings in sav­ing and syncing voice record­ings via the Voice Memo app prop­erly and ‘the tip of the cap’ goes to Teresa for her IE voo­doo doll — srsly, check it out!

1. Teresa’s web­site
2. Teresa’s IE voo­doo doll tutorial
3. Teresa’s blog
4. WSG announce mail­ing list, to stay up-to-date with web-related events
5. Nick Fink’s list of user exper­i­ence events (world-wide)
6. Open Source Developers’ Con­fer­ence — Bris­bane 25–27 Nov.
7. UX Aus­tralia — Can­berra, 26–28 August (regis­tra­tions still open till the day!)
8. Aus­Tender gov’t website
9. Aus­tralian Web Industry Association
10. Port 80 — informal meet­ing of web industry folk
11. Moo.com — cus­tom busi­ness cards and stationery
12. bicubic.com — whole­sale print service

The intro theme is the open­ing of track 26 of Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts III. It’s licensed under a Cre­at­ive Com­mons license and avail­able from the NIN web­site and in full on vari­ous peer-to-peer net­works (leg­ally of course given its license). The show oth­er­wise as usual is licensed under the Cre­at­ive Com­mons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Aus­tralia license—take, share and be merry.

That’s all this week — stay tuned!

 

 Epis­ode 3 (“Richard Nixon”): Play Now | Play in Popup | Down­load

(You can sub­scribe to the RSS feed for this pod­cast at http://arcwhite.org/feed/podcast, and down­load the file dir­ectly from here)

Ep. 3! From this week forth we give a quick shout-out of events nearby and around in the web-field that we con­sider inter­est­ing and poten­tially worth attend­ing on top of the nor­mal bag of news. Oth­er­wise we have a quick chat about the Face­book acquis­i­tion of Friend­Feed, the new Google Search (beta!) and a brief men­tion of this week’s über ‘wankism’: a web­site ded­ic­ated to chairs titled ‘chair whore’.

Pas­cal men­tions a short update: his site is live — check it out at klepas.org — and notes he wants to write a howto/review/info art­icle on using Jekyll from a designer’s per­spect­ive.
The main fea­ture this week con­cerns the recent lively topic of online news media, par­tic­u­larly revolving around Aus­tralian media baron Rupert Murdoch’s decision to alter his media conglomerate’s busi­ness online model from ad-driven to a pay-subscription model. We dis­cuss more in-depth the prob­lems that print media and online media out­lets are run­ning into as of late, par­tic­u­lar in mon­et­ising an online dis­sem­in­a­tion model some­how, and whether or not that will fly with today’s web-tuned audiences.

This week’s ‘fuck you’ goes to Sydney Morn­ing Her­ald (who get no link from me! –Andy) for includ­ing advert­ise­ments that play music upon page load. Mean­while, our ‘tip-of-the-cap’ to Mark Pesce, Pia Waugh and Sen­ator Kate Lundy who we are plan­ning an inter­view with to dis­cuss the awe­some work the two are doing in the open gov­ern­ment arena.

Other links in order of men­tion:
* as always mail us feed­back via arcwhite@arcwhite.org and klepas@klepas.org — we’d love to start a mail­bag.
* Cas­ual WSG Sydney meet­ing on 18:30, 13. August, Pump­h­ouse, Darling Har­bour, Sydney: http://webstandardsgroup.org/event/177.
* WSG Sydney meet­ing on 19. August http://webstandardsgroup.org/event/176 — 82 peeps already registered (free).
* Vis­ion Au. are run­ning two work­shops on web access­ib­il­ity 19–20., August, Mel­bourne: http://bit.ly/vision-au-a11y-1 & http://bit.ly/vision-au-a11y-2.
* Web Dir­ec­tions South ’09, Sydney: http://south09.webdirections.org/.
* Edge of the Web, Perth: http://www.edgeoftheweb.org.au/.
* Usab­il­ity eval­u­ation and train­ing work­shop in Can­berra, 01–02., Decem­ber : http://www.peakusability.com.au/training/evaluation-and-testing.html & http://www.peakusability.com.au/training/web-usability.html.
* For other web, design, and tech-related events in Aus­tralasian region sub­scribe to the WSG Announce mail­ing list: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/.
* Face­book acquires Friend­Feed: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/facebook-acquires-friendfeed/.
* New Google Search: http://www2.sandbox.google.com.
* For your weekly dose of über wank: http://chairwhore.blogspot.com.
* Pascal’s new site: http://klepas.org. [You’re such an atten­tion whore! –Andy]
* Again, Jekyll: http://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/.
* Jason Santa Maria’s beau­ti­ful web­site: http://jasonsantamaria.com.

This show is licensed as usual under a Cre­at­ive Com­mons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license.
OAO.

Epis­ode 2! This show we cover some errata which turned into a mini-feature sec­tion with updates on web­fonts, not­ably devel­op­ments at TypeCon2009 and thoughts con­cern­ing EOT — if the pro­pri­et­ary com­pres­sion tech­no­logy was not used and URL/domain root bind­ing wasn’t in effect then could it be the web font we could all use and pick up tomor­row? Also: men­tioned: a neg­at­ive Microsoft stigma, shitty Safari @font-face web­font hand­ling dur­ing the down­load of the font file, and a note on where to find good, freely licensed fonts for @font-face font link­ing (see the links below).

 

 Epis­ode 2: Play Now | Play in Popup | Down­load

The second fea­ture focuses on secur­ity, with good­ness for all. We cover briefly import­ant points for sys admins before address­ing secur­ity con­cerns for developers. Next up Pas­cal provides your weekly dose of wank with more secur­ity related [Sort of? –Andy] design and user exper­i­ence mus­ings and finally both Andy and Pas­cal fin­ish the sec­tion with some advice for man­agers and the legal folk who deal with web con­tent.
Andy closes the pod­cast with a big ‘fuck you’ to a cer­tain pop­u­lar com­pany named after a fruit who are doing awfully stu­pid things by deny­ing cer­tain applic­a­tions from being sold in their stu­pidly con­trolled applic­a­tion store (HINT: I’M TALKING ABOUT APPLE), and a joint ‘fuck you’ to buy.com (et al.).
We should note the Open Atrium review is com­ing — we’ve both been busy or between doors too much in the past week.
In order of appearance:

• Can­berra Google Wave Hack­a­thon — Sign up fast!
• TypeCon2009 Web Fonts Panel Recording
• ttf2eot con­verter utility
• HTTP Access Con­trol Moz­illa Developer Cen­ter article
• List­ings of TTF/OTF freely embed­dable, licensed fonts: http://www.fontsquirrel.com and http://tr.im/webfontslist
• SQL Injec­tion Attacks (Wikipedia)
• Cross-site script­ing attacks
• Secur­ity Now Epis­ode 195 on SSL
• Bruce Schneier’s blog
• Insec­ure Pass­words in use by secur­ity pro­fes­sion­als (Dean Kam­in­sky gets hacked, art­icle c/o Wired.com)
• The buy.com (and Orbitz, et al.) credit card third-party advert­iser scandal

This show is licensed Cre­at­ive Com­mons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Aus­tralia
If at first you don’t suc­ceed, try a big­ger explos­ive.

@klepas and I put together a pod­cast. It’s going to be a bi-weekly sort of affair (or whenever we feel like it). I should note, first up, that the audio qual­ity is pretty ter­rible. It was a first shot and not one of the three record­ing devices we used were really up to scratch — we’ll def­in­itely have that fixed before next time!

 

 Epis­ode 1 : Play Now | Play in Popup | Down­load

In this epis­ode, we discuss:

1. Recent events in the world of web fonts (pro­pos­als to bring more fonts to the web, and the advent of TypeKit)
2. The pro­nun­ci­ation of Opera (Oh-pear-uh? Op-er-rah?)
3. Static vs. Dynamic Web­site Con­tent Generators
4. OpenAtrium, a new intranet pack­age based on Drupal (which we’ll review next time around!)

Turns out ID3 metadata in MP3s is pretty lim­ited — our show notes in the MP3 cut out about a third of the way through. So, here’s some use­ful links:

1. ‘Beau­ti­ful Web Typo­graphy’ talk slides
2. Typekit
3. Kern­est
4. Jekyll
5. Devel­op­ment Seed
6. Drupal
7. Open Atrium
8. http://klepas.org/
9. http://klepas.org/beta

The intro music we used is the open­ing riff of ‘Fake It’ by Brad Sucks (http://www.bradsucks.net/albums/out_of_it/), licensed CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unpor­ted (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).
Since we’re just get­ting this off the ground we’d love feed­back. Feel free to email us — arcwhite@arcwhite.org and klepas@klepas.org.
This show is licensed Cre­at­ive Com­mons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Aus­tralia (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/au/).
We hope you enjoy!