Peter Stagg Dot Com

There are days like today I just want answers from my search engine, and I don’t want to sift through the quagmire of sites that rank high on Google but contain no redeeming features what so ever. An example  would be Yahoo answers. When the question is who should be the next president of the USA? Yes put this to a vote. However, if the question is “How much electricity does the average household use?” you want a real answer from somebody who knows what they are talking about. But, instead Yahoo puts this to a popular vote, so you get the question is “resolved” with the answer “who really knows?” or “Fish!”

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My other pet hate is sites that will only give you the answer after you have parted with your hard earned cash or go through a complex sign-in process. “How do I stop my arm from hemorrhaging having cut it off with a chainsaw?” - “Please insert thirty cents for the first three letters of the answer then press button A followed by button B” and you still get the popular answer not an expert answer - Leaches!

And what about those sights that ramble on with their personal opinions before giving you the answer! What if you could filter all these useless sights from your Google search results. Well you can. The CustomizeGoogle plug-in for FireFox allows you to filter your search results and make several other useful customizations to Google search and other Google inc. products. Thank you CustomizeGoogle you have brought a small amount of sanity back to my life.

My latest software toy is Drive-in from the Flip4Mac guys. The same guys who brought you, well, Flip4Mac and ScreenFlow. While ScreenFlow gets the big thumbs up from me and I could not do without Flip, Drive-in is a bit disappointing.

I love the concept and the execution. The idea is you create copies of your DVDs on your Mac as virtual DVDs that Drive-in can mount and then it or the Mac’s DVD player plays them (& Front Row etc.). This all works great and the virtual DVDs are so good you can even rip them using Mac the Ripper - but don’t tell anyone I said that.

What should be the killer part of this app is disappointing for someone like me who is not included in the universality of the USA. Let me explain. Drive-in has a feature similar to iTunes Get Album Artwork / Trak Info. If you give it the barcode number from the back of the DVD; to be more precise a UPC (Universal Product Code - say that with a yank accent) or a EAN (European Article Number - note the geographical preciseness), it will fetch the DVD’s cover art, description, production details etc. from [fan fare] Amazon (US, Canada, UK, France, Germany or Japan). Guess what - in Australia we don’t use UPC (not so Universal - its not a World Series guys if you don’t have any other countries playing) or EAN and you can’t reverse look-up either of them on Amazon.

In the end I resorted to a couple of online databases for EAN and UPC product codes and managed a reverse look-up to find the EAN code and then get the info from Amazon. Now I don’t expect the guys from Flip to recognize the Australian Product Number (APN) standard (no amazon.com.au anyway) but had I been able to look up the DVD’s info via something more reversible such as the ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) as well as the UPC or EAN I would not feel so all alone at the Drive-in.

Being a web developer I would not be without a really good text editor. I have two favorites; the classic standby BBEdit and my new best friend TextMate. One day I may sit down and write a nice comparison of the two and explain my disdain for dinosaurs like VI but for now all I want to do is highlight TextMate’s in-built scriptability that makes it possible to blog directly from it. If you’ve got this cool little editor take a look under the Bundles menu at the Blogging options. I’ll not explain in detail how to use this feature, its easy to work out - hey I did it. In fact this post and my last were both sent from TextMate.

I’ve finally managed to get my new theme to the point where I can apply it to this site. I’m going for clean and uncluttered and I hope to add lots of goodies for displaying images etc.

noun Psychology

1) a projective test designed to reveal a person’s social drives or needs by their interpretation of a series of pictures of emotionally ambiguous situations.

2) a poor excuse for a gambit in a post about this sites theme.

One of the things that broke when moving was my out-of-date WordPress theme so for the time being I’ll be using the classic theme.

Regular visitors may have noticed that PSDC was off-line for several hours today. That’s because PSDC now has a new home and is now hosted by aushosts. The move to aushosts came about because I wanted a more competitively priced Australian host for my site with more up-to-date hosting tools and a simpler administration back end.