Arc Tangent

The podcast that myself, @klepas and @chisa do together has finally got its own web site – so it’s not going to be posted here any longer!

The new site is: http://www.capitalpodcast.com/
The new podcast feed URL is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ACapitalTechTalk

A 301 redirect has been placed on the previous feed URL, so hopefully your RSS reader / iTunes will update automatically.

It’s been great having the podcast here on arwhite.org but it’s definitely outgrown this little blog. Long live the new site!

We haven’t forgotten the podcast, fear not! We’re in the process of relocating to a new, dedicated blog. We’ll post details here as soon as it’s done, and redirect the iTunes podcast feed appropriately. We’ll also be scheduling podcasts a bit more regularly (we’re looking at a bi-weekly release cycle). There’s some pretty neat interviews coming up – stay tuned!

If you have any questions or comments, or if there’s something specific you’d like to see us discuss, please drop us a line.

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.

(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!

(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).

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!

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!