Year: <span>2012</span>

Year: 2012

Cloud, Fencing, Fun, Thoughts, Video, Web Stuff

Software as a service is great…

 , , , , itemprop="discussionURL"4

…for some things. The other day, I amused myself by creating a video using a site called Xtranormal. You’ve probably seen 3D cartoon-like videos of people with stilted voices. It’s done by signing up for a free account, choosing a background and some characters, then typing in your script. This is converted, generally fairly successfully, to spoken words. The characters lip-sync to your script, you publish the video and you’re done. If you have a YouTube account, the site will upload the video for you. Video creation service provided on line, video hosting and viewing service provided on line. No …

Announcement, Comments, Other Blogs, Other Sites, Tip, Web Stuff

Repost – how to get your picture next to your comment

 , , , itemprop="discussionURL"2

This is a revisit of a post I made about three years ago, and repeated a year later. This has become more relevant recently because I changed the default avatars displayed next to comments to use random faces rather than random patterns. If you object to being portrayed as a grinning loon, read on. You may have noticed that some people’s comments have an avatar picture next to them (no, not the film with the Roger Dean visuals), while others have a randomly assigned pattern. On this blog, the avatar picture is a gravatar (globally recognised avatar), and you can …

Apple, Autodesk, Cloud, Comments, Polls

Why don’t you trust Autodesk?

 , , , , , , , , itemprop="discussionURL"27

As I mentioned earlier, any company that wants to move its customers to the Cloud is going to need the trust of those customers. Three months ago, I started a poll to try to get some measure of how trustworthy you consider Autodesk to be, in terms of doing the right thing by its customers. The results of that poll look pretty awful for Autodesk. Right from the start, the distrusters have outnumbered the trusters by three to one, with the current results showing an overwhelming majority of respondents (77%) not trusting Autodesk. Why? What has Autodesk done in the …

Announcement, Other Sites, Web Stuff

Dark times, dark sites

 , , itemprop="discussionURL"2

This site has gone dark for a day to support the movement against the proposed SOPA and PIPA bills. Rather than black out the whole site for a day like Wikipedia and thousands of other sites, I have decided to keep the blog somewhat usable. SOPA is really, really scary stuff. If you’re an American citizen, I encourage you to visit the American Censorship site and do what you can to protect the Internet from the evils of Big Content.