Adobe CQ tools, tips, and tricks

I'm going to start writing about tools, tips, and tricks that make working with CQ easier, more fun, and productive.

See the new page dedicated to the topic, which kicks off with VaultClipse plugin for Eclipse:
http://paulflory.blogspot.com/p/adobe-cq-tools.html

If you have any favorites, please leave a comment!

Stuff my grandfather wrote

My grandfather (and later, my own dad) was a grist miller in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, from the early 1900's.

He wrote a collection of interesting articles about the types of and history of mill stones - those machines that turn grains (like wheat and corn) into stuff that we could bake, cook and eat, like flour and corn meal, and other yummy raw ingredients.

The history, evolution, and technicalities of these machines that made food processing efficient and scalable -- as part of the greater evolution of technology, of course -- is full of interesting, intricate details, ingenuity, innovation, and stories. Coming from a completely different angle in the sciences (namely, computer software), I find all sorts of unexpected analogs and parallels between the tech of the "Olde World" and today's frenzy of interconnected hyper-technology

As I shore up material, I think I'll post it here, or somewhere on the web, and possibly reflect upon the parallels of milling and the web-related stuff I do for a living.

Below are a few pieces I happened to stumble upon while randomly browsing the web last night.

Old Millstones by Paul B. Flory

http://www.angelfire.com/journal/pondlilymill/flory1.html

Millstones and Their Varied Usage by  Paul B. Flory

http://www.angelfire.com/journal/pondlilymill/flory2.html

Benjamin Eby Flory dressing a millstone:

Apple is now bigger than all but 19 countries in the world, by GDP

While saving up your pennies for the next iPad, consider: Comparing market capitalization to GDP, Apple is now bigger than all but 19 countries in the world. It's worth more than some entire sectors of the economy, including utilities, materials and telecom.  http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2012/02/28/apple-market-cap-poised-to-crack-5...

Heartwarming stories of vengeance

In September of 1864, as the American Civil War approached its conclusion, a slave-turned-soldier named Spotswood Rice wrote the following furious letter to his former owner, Katherine Diggs, and sternly warned her that she would soon be seeing him again — he was returning to Missouri, together with a thousand-strong army of black soldiers, to rescue his still-enslaved children. His anger is almost palpable. http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/you-will-then-know-how-to-talke-to-me.html

the amazing hatching process of critically endangered Lord Howe Island Stick Insect

a rumination while biking - how tech has changed in my few decades on this planet - remember typewriters?

While biking home from the coffee shop today, for some reason, it crossed my mind that information technology and access to info has evolved immensely in my few decades of existence - for me personally, as a regular citizen (albeit 1st world citizen) and as a tech worker.

 

While pedaling along, I continued to ponder how I had started out as a kid, pounding out silly stories on a manual typewriter. My uncle collected and repaired manual typewriters since he was a teenager (if you don't know what a typewriter is, you have the luxury of googling it, right here and now).

 

As a youngster, I found it frustrating how hard it was to find stuff at the library.

 

Yea, we had to drive (or otherwise commute) to a place that housed information in the form of books, journals, and other printed materials. And there was microfiche - semi high-tech, but a pain in the arse to track down via index cards (google that one too, if needed), load up the reels, then scroll through dizzying, headache-inducing black-n-white film. Index cards! The search engine indexes of in times of yore.

 

One of the prevalent points from this unexpected rumination was "damn, it was ridiculously hard to find information, track it down, or simply browse through stuff randomly".  Again, unless you owned a library, you had to first get to one. Then scour through index cards and pencil down Dewey numbers. Then walk to find books placed on shelves. Incredible luck if books were where they were supposed to be -- or weren't out in circulation indefinitely. Or didn't have half the pages torn out.

 

And you had to be driven and patient to actually bother doing all this.

 

The other point that rang in mind, before I switched mental gears back to focusing on the bike ride was this: today I often feel overwhelmed with the ease and degree of access to information.  It's blindly fast and accessible from wherever and whenever I want it - from a laptop, tablet, from a phone while in bed. Anything I can think of, or whatever randomly pops up on my screen can be chased down through endless halls via taps and clicks.

 

Text, wikis, videos, music, documents. Let alone IM, Skype, FB, emails, and other social interactive channels.

 

I don't even have to stand up and drive to a library. Unfathomable amounts of info are readily available from the phone that never leaves my side.

 

So, today, in contrast to the days of manual typewriters and limited access, the challenge is managing my time and learning how not to get sucked into the blackholes of information and online timewaster traps. 

 

It blows my mind how the information revolution -- even in my short years -- has shifted the problem from too-little accessible information to so much info you have to fight from drowning in it!

 

Vertical gardening, interesting architecture / idea. Sweden

http://www.notcot.org/post/46424/

Hilarious, sad, happy ending. Dog steals a baguette and tries to get it into her kennel

Helicopter self-destructs due to ground resonance. Yikes

When I Tell People I Work from Home

When I Tell People I Work from Home

More and more people every day find themselves working a real job from home, but that is still a novel idea for most of the folks around them. Actually, my home office looks like this. And when I tell people I work from home, they assume I am a housewife and have plenty of time to drive them somewhere or volunteer for their community project. Link

Top 10 Security Assessment Tools - LINUX For You

http://www.linuxforu.com/2012/02/top-10-security-assessment-tools/

Modern data centres deploy firewalls and managed networking components, but still feel insecure because of crackers. Hence, there is a crucial need for tools that accurately assess network vulnerability. This article brings you the top 10 assessment tools to address these issues, categorised based on their popularity, functionality and ease of use.

[humor] Blind date. Featuring Ellie Kemper

Is this the kind of thing you want to tell someone on a blind date? Featuring Ellie Kemper from NBC's The Office.

Bizarre painters and their weird & gross techniques

Yea, most of these are cheap-shot novelty painters, a few even tasteless to the general public, but anyway, if you must express yourself, whatever floats your boat...

 

The man who paints with his p*nis

The painter who uses vomit

The painter who paints with basketballs

The painter who uses human blood

The underwater painters

The painter who uses her breasts

The painter who paints with his tongue

The painter who uses dead ants

The painter who uses his eye

The painter who uses human ashes

 http://www.oddee.com/item_98091.aspx

 

 

Dangerous Looking Sculptures Made Out Of Pencil Parts

via neatorama.com

remember pencils? a new-found use for these obsolete tools :)

Phone booths as book exchanges

http://gracefulspoon.com/blog/2011/07/06/dub-002/

Even as they are rendered obsolete by the ubiquity of smartphones, I’m interested in pay phones because they are both anachronistic and quotidian. Relics, they’re dead technology perched on the edge of obsolescence, a skeuomorph hearkening back to a lost shared public space we might no longer have any use for. Something to be nostalgic for, in the way I can’t think about a phone booth without conjuring up images of an old, impatient woman banging on the door to one while I was inside using a calling card to ask for money.

Volkswagen Imperial AT-AT Walker

Volkswagen Imperial AT-AT Walker

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/laughingsquid/~3/8FN9wk8Cl9I/

In 2009, EMPIDOC posted images of this Volkswagen T1 van that has been awesomely transformed into a Star Wars Imperial AT-AT Walker.
via Jack Schofield and ThinkGeek
images via EMPIDOC and Lozerifornia

ok, let's try a 2nd post

refer to a link: http://www.hiwheel.com/custom_work/index.htm

 

include a

Test from phone

Candle

The Films of Cinematic Pioneer Georges Méliès, as Seen in Hugo

The Films of Cinematic Pioneer Georges Méliès, as Seen in Hugo:

Pioneering French filmmaker Georges Méliès, seen here playing two roles in his 1902 film “L’homme à la tête de caoutchouc” (aka The Man with the Rubber Head), made more than 500 films between 1896 and 1914. The film Hugo, one of 2011′s most award-nominated films, features Georges Méliès as a character and shows excerpts of some of his most famous films. We’ve collected a few of those and others here, plus a little more context on Méliès’ life and work.

Méliès began his career as a magician, and in The Vanishing Lady, one of his first films, he recreates a classic magic trick with the latest in film editing sorcery: the jump-cut. More details for film nerds here.

In another early film, The Haunted Castle (aka Le manoir du diable), also from 1896, Méliès uses more tricky edits to bring characters in and out of the film, sometimes in a puff of smoke and usually startling the trespassers in the nefarious castle. Very mild suspense elements by today’s standards, but nonetheless groundbreaking. This film is considered both the first horror film and the first vampire film. It’s the first (not last) fake-bat-on-a-string-that-turns-into-a-man film, for sure.

Méliès innovated constantly in his work: he was one of the first to use multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves, and hand-painted colour. Keep in mind the first film shot with a motion picture camera was in 1888–these were very early days. His films had no sound, if they were accompanied by music in theaters it was played live and was different each time. So any music on these videos is a much later addition.

Hugo features scenes from 1902′s A Trip to the Moon, probably Méliès’ most famous film:

[A Trip to the Moon] includes the celebrated scene in which a spaceship hits the the man in the moon in the eye; it was loosely based on Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon and H. G. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon. In the film Méliès stars as Professor Barbenfouillis, a character similar to the astronomer he played in The Astronomer’s Dream in 1898.

The film was distributed in black & white and hand-painted color prints. No color prints were known until a discovery in 1993. After 10+ years of work a restored color print debuted at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival with a new soundtrack by the band Air. See a clip below and the full black & white film here. The whole film is also available at The Internet Archive.

One topic not covered in Hugo is that this film was an early subject of film piracy, perpetrated by none other than Thomas Edison. This was a contributing factor to Méliès’ financial ruin and the end of his film-making career. Ironically, if not for the pirated versions we probably wouldn’t have copies of many of the 200 of his films that survive today.

Other notable Méliès films include the fairy tales Cinderella (1899) and Bluebeard (1902), Le dirigeable fantastique (1905) and 1911′s Les hallucinations du baron de Münchhausen–the first of many films made about a real German nobleman’s exaggerated adventures. The Film Journal has a great blog on Méliès and his work from a few years back.

Finally, one last colorful short Danse du feu from 1899, which like The Vanishing Lady above features his future wife Jeanne d’Alcy who is also a character in Hugo. Here’s more on this short from The Film Journal.