Independent, professional, advanced, internet applications developer seeks junior to intermediate developer to help with tsunami of projects. Become an independent consultant and learn the tricks of the trade from an internet veteran.

You will be developing world-class, engaging, interactive experiences using CSS/xHTML/jQuery on mainly ASP.NET C#.

This job may be for you if:

• You have a growing portfolio that is freely accessible
• You have experience and wish to become an expert in AJAX, JavaScript and client-side APIs/frameworks — jQuery in particular
• You have some experience and wish to become an expert in ASP.NET C#
• You strive to take designs and layouts created by others and making them function beyond the expectations of their creator
• You see simpler ways, suggest them, argue merits, and can let go and persevere if consensus is not in your favour
• You strive to deliver high-quality, production-ready code
• You are meticulous, detail and process-oriented
• You are okay working out of a 400 sq/ft home office in Brockton Village

If you love to learn and be challenged, then maybe this is for you.

Please email CVs to ryan@kharv.com

I have a complete Dynacord sound system and DJ gear to rent for small to medium sized parties, shows and events. This sound system is best suited for events from 50 up to ~ 300 people.

The sound quality that you get from this sound system is EXCEPTIONAL. You truly do get what you pay for when you chose Dynacord. This system is FAR superior to JBL, ElectroVoice (EV), Yamaha, Behringer, Mackie, and the majority of other smaller systems available to rent in the city of Toronto.

If you’re having an office party, loft party or if you’re a small bar/club that needs augmented sound for a live or DJ show then this is the sound system you should use. All gear is in excellent condition and looks very professional and clean.

Sound System:
2 X Dynacord PowerSub 315 (Powered Bins)
2 X Dynacord Sub 115 (Passive Bins)
4 X Dynacord D 12 / D 12-3 (12″ Top Speakers)
1 X Dynacord DSP 244 (Digital Sound Processing)
1 X Dynacord D 12-3A (Active monitor – the most awesome monitor ever)

DJ:
1 X DJ booth – WHITE custom built, portable dj booth with folding, adjustable height legs, side panels and 100′ inlaid BLUE EL wire. Nazca birds are depicted on the front panel
1 X Pioneer DJM-800
2 X Pioneer CDJ 1000 MK3
2 X Space-tek CDJ stands
2 X Technics SL-1200MK2

All gear is delivered, installed and picked up after your event.

To rent for one show (i’ll install a few days in advance if necessary):
The DJ booth and gear: $250
The full sound system (9 speakers): $450
Both: $600

Additional nights (two night gig for example) are $200.

Top Speakers can be flown for an additional fee.

I can remain through the duration of your event as a sound tech for an additional fee.

I will do smaller pieces. Prices are negotiable for smaller gigs, frequent/regular renters. Get in touch with me to discuss.

Here’s how the Blinker is looking now. I now have 3 of the 4 panels together (I’m short two lights and a dozen cables to finish the 4th). It uses an Arduino Mega, 64 macetech MegaBrites, an 4x20 LCD display, 4 rotary encoders, a power supply and a lot of wire. The wall will be seen in public for the first time on New Years Eve at the Promise/AlienInFlux/Good Times Gang party at 6 Nobel in Toronto.

I recently finished work on Jeff Warren’s everything and anything website jeffwarren.org.

He wanted to be able to make “pages” about all the various projects that he has worked on over the years and to put of the pages into “category” buckets. He was also clear that he didn’t want a blog. He was asking for a lot and he didn’t want to spend very much putting it together so I figured that Wordpress would be his best option – but how do you make Wordpress not act like a blog? It turned out to be a lot simpler than I had expected.

I started with the ADreamToHost theme as a base and then got to work stripping out all the “blog” like aspects from the code – comments, user account creation, etc – and then I started adding in some unique and helpful plugins. For sorting categories and giving them icons I used plugins called Category Icons, My Category Order, and Category Visibility. This allowed Jeff to easily add, edit, and remove categories icons and change the order of categories on his site. All that had to be done then was to alter the Main Index Template to show categories instead of blog posts like so:

<?php if (function_exists(‘put_cat_icons’)) put_cat_icons( wp_list_categories(‘orderby=order&hierarchical=0′.’&echo=0′),’icons_only=true’); else wp_list_categories(‘orderby=order&hierarchical=0′); ?>

Jeff also wanted to be able to have visitors sign up for an email newsletter for which I installed the Newsletter and WP-Mail-SMTP plugins. Newsletter is an extremely robust and thorough plugin that handles subscribes and unsubcribes through email confirmations as well as the actual batch mailing to all of your signed up subscribers.

For embedding media into his posts I installed QuickTime Embed, Smart Youtube, and the Audio player plugin.

Jeff came up with the look and feel of the main page layout and I used the ADreamToHost template as a base for all of the sub pages.

Overall I found the majority of the chosen plugins to be very easy to work with.

Jeff’s site is hosted on Dreamhost.

20.6% of Ethan Allens visits in October 2009 came from Internet Explorer 6 web browsers – 3.5% more than IE8 and 3.5% less than IE7. Internet Explorer as a whole registered nearly 62% of all visits to the site. I expect that there are quite a few IE6 users on systems that can’t be upgraded to IE7 – Windows 95, 98, Me and 2000. I have a feeling that we will see a significant decline in IE6 numbers after this holiday season but it’s going to persist at around 10% for quite a while. Maybe years. It will go down in history as the browser that never died.

One strategy is to encourage IE6 users on none IE7/8 capable systems to upgrade to Firefox. Pop up an overlay when they visit the site explaining to them that their browsing experience will be greatly enhanced if they switch to the Firefox or Chrome browsers. If enough websites start doing this then people will start getting the message.

Or maybe not.

Until the day comes when IE6 hits some magical number where clients will say enough is enough the coders can continue pulling their hair out.

This is an early (and one time -- it was taken apart on November 1st) version of this blinky lights thing that I’m working on. It uses an Arduino Mega, 13 macetech MegaBrites, an 4x20 LCD display, 4 rotary encoders, a power supply and a lot of wire. It’s meant to light up parties. My original intent was to make a 4X6 grid to hang on a ceiling but after sticking the lights to balloons and hanging it vertically I think I may, instead, make two vertical 16 -- 20 light pendants to hang on either side of a DJ. Hopefully I’ll have a more finalized version ready in the next month or so.

Sorry about the recording. I tried to redo it but my phone died on the second attempt so we get this muffled portrait view version instead. Oops.

When we were in Argentina I started taking quite a few more panoramic photographs than I normally do because of this amazing software that I stumbled upon called autostitch. It’s nothing new. It’s been around for over two years but I, apparently, having been living under a rock. One of my favourite panoramic photos that I took was this one of the Iglesia San Francisco in the town of Salta. A wedding ceremony was being performed as we walked by so we snuck a peak inside.  It was packed with people and the lighting was magical.

Take a look at the larger image or the original image to see more detail – careful the original is over 20 megs!

It appears as though there is a good distance between me and the church but I was standing kitty corner seperated only by a street wide enough for two cars to pass by. I only had my Rebel XTi and a 50mm portrait lense with me, which is good for shooting in low light but not good for getting a wide angle, so I set the ISO to 800, stood back and started clicking away. 60 photos later I had a library of very detailed photos of every angle of the church.

At home I loaded up autostitch, tweaked a couple settings and a few minutes later I was blown away by the awesome photo that it had produced.

Last week I compiled all of my panoramas from the last few years using a great piece of software called Autostitch. Here’s one from Phi Phi Thailand in 2004:

One of the things I don’t like about Autostitch is that the resulting image has no EXIF data in it. So I set out looking for a way to take the information from the first image in the set and transfer it into the resulting panorama. I really wanted to be able to do this in ACDSee Pro because it’s my image manager of choice but after digging around it looks like it’s not possible even in the latest version. After some searching I did manage to find a solution though:

ExifTool by Phil Harvey

It’s originally a Perl script but there are Windows and OSX executables available to download. It’s a command line tool so you’ll have to extract it into a folder that is in your PATH.

ExifTool can do all sorts of various EXIF related tasks but the one I was interested in was copying the info from one JPG to another and that is achieved by doing the following:

exiftool -TagsFromFile STA_2319.JPG (image from) IMG_2319_pano.JPG (image to)

And it worked like a charm. It even created backups of the file that it was modifying. Sweet!

Hi everyone. I’ve installed WordPress once again. Will I keep it updated? Maybe. In the last few months it has become obvious that I need to start marketing myself and my business for the first time in years. With the Ethan Allen gig coming to a close and no good sized prospects on the horizon I need to have a place where I can direct potential clients to so that they can see my body of work and the other things that make me tick. Postings will not be strictly work related but things will be more focused on my tendency to nerd out on just about everything.

I have a number of small personal projects that I’m working on while living in Buenos Aires until the end of March. I will keep you updated on their status’ here.

The posts that I’m planning on making this month are (in no particular order):

• ethanallen.com
• theblackhouseshirt.com
• Julie Stolberg’s blog customized
• this blog customized
• super awesome manager of popups, modals and overlays (SAMoPop)
• super awesome manager of forms (SAMoForm)
• Argentina pics
• Burning Man Airstream dream (The Soundstream)