Jeff Makes Software

OK, I need a distraction. Now that my wife has a camera phone, I'm slightly more interested in moblogging. Is there some specification for sending photos from the phones to Web sites that is fairly consistant? Google isn't pointing me to anything really useful.

Naturally if I'm going to do anything with it, I want to build it myself and not rely on someone else. :)

My HP laptop has had a problem with maintaining a good power supply connection since I got it in 2003, requiring you to sometimes jiggle the cord at the laptop to get it to maintain power. Finally, yesterday, it stopped working entirely.

I downloaded the service manual and took it apart, and I was horrified to see that the power connector on the motherboard was entirely broken off now, and that it apparently was being held in place with a small piece of electrical tape! Yeah, it was shipped to me from Taiwan with a piece of electrical tape securing a broken power connector on the motherboard.

Even more scary is all of the scoring from what I assume was a frequent short. I think I'm lucky the thing never caught fire.

I'm seriously pissed off about this, especially seeing as how I need the thing for my job. There's no point in me trying to put the thing back together, and I can't solder the connector back on. I can try to find a replacement, but I doubt I can find one that will fit the motherboard exactly.

Needless to say, I sent a very strongly worded message to HP about this. In the mean time, I have to figure out what the hell I'm going to do, because I can't stop working over this.

Did you see 24 on Fox this evening? Very blatant Cisco plug, when Cisco gear was credited with blocking a denial-of-service attack on CTU. Nice.

I'm trying to build a light-weight rich text editor that works in Firefox. So far so good, as I have the usual bold, URL, image, etc., stuff working. Where I'm stuck is inserting text. For example, if you want to insert "forum tags" for quotes, which we don't put in as HTML, how is that done? In IE, you can do it like this...

var box = document.getElementById(ctrl).contentWindow;
box.document.designMode = "on";
...
function makeQuote(cmd)
{
var edittext = box.document.selection.createRange();
var original = edittext.htmlText;
edittext.pasteHTML('['+cmd+']'+original+'[/'+cmd+']');

So in this case, selecting text in the editor then triggering the event would yield something like:
[quote]this is a quote[/quote]

How is this done in Firefox?

If you could have all of these people in the room with you at once, would you ever have enough time to ask them everything you wanted to ask?

There was apparently some confusion last week about whether or not Microsoft supported a bill in Washington that would protect gay rights there. CEO Steve Ballmer cleared the air in an e-mail to employees.

While the death of TechTV, and especially the The Screen Savers, is really sad as hell, it's really cool that several of the alumni from the show have come together to record an audio program. Leo Laporte announced the first show and you can download that MP3 show. He's also on with Patrick Norton, Kevin Rose and Robert Heron.

I was looking at some press release video today that was encoded with Windows Media and it's still pretty horrible compared to the alternatives. It does talking heads really, really well, but when it comes to video with a lot of motion, it's really horrible until you get into high bit rates.

For example, I recently compressed a few video clips for a client with high motion in QuickTime with Sorenson Pro (the codec generally used for movie trailers) and WM. I was able to get total bit rate with stereo audio at 320x240x30fps to around 120k with only a few minor compression artifacts. To get the same level of quality on WM I had to get the bit rate up to around 400k. What's up with that?

The funny thing is, Sorenson Pro 3 has been out now for at least three years.