My digital scratchpad's got a few things on it I wanted to share. None are "meals" in and of themselves, so, here's a batch of leftovers. Take what you want and leave the rest for someone who likes reheated tuna casserole.

Introversion is Not a Disease

I found myself nodding a lot as I read this article on introverts. Western society is so oriented toward extroversion that those of us who *are* introverts can often find our perfectly healthy psyches being questioned by people all over the place.

This article does a great job of explaining what the actual difference is. When I spend a whole day in meetings with project managers (many/most of whom are extroverts who draw energy from other people), I've been asked why I look so tired and wiped out. When I respond that being around that many people all day is exhausting for me, I get this strange look that makes it clear that they don't understand.

If you are an introvert (even if you're in denial), you should read this thing. And, if you're an extrovert who can't seem to "get" why that group of introverts in IT doesn't seem to enjoy the loud company get-togethers, this might give you some insight.

Snitter: A Twitter Client on Adobe AIR

I've been intrigued by the cross-platform application engine that Adobe's got in beta. Writing apps with HTML and Javascript is something I've messed with at various time (including HTA's and various proprietary attempts at this idea), but I think Adobe's platform might have a a better shot and this might be a better time for it to succeed.

Anyway, I ran across Snitter, a Twitter client written for Adobe AIR. It's one of the first apps for AIR that isn't just a proof of concept. It actually is nicer than most of the other tools in that particular niche. Nice work, though the default color scheme was a little bleeding-eyes worthy.

Stopping the Automatic Windows Reboot

I caught the raw end of the Windows automatic reboot followed by a 40 minute install of Office 2003 updates on a client site this week. I was mid-compile, preparing for a production push of code when the screen just went black and then I was staring at the BIOS startup.

I'm just glad I wasn't halfway through *actually* deploying the code when that happened. Anyway, I definitely took note of this download to beat this particular problem back a bit.

In the past few days, quite a few people have tipped their hats, grabbed their coats and waved good-bye to membership in 9rules:

• brokenkode.com
• h3h.net
  seopher.com

• danlockton.co.uk
• www.standardsforlife.com
• baires.elsur.org
• www.i-marco.nl

As those posts trickled out, a couple of people emailed me asking about my involvement in 9rules. That's because in December of 2006, I posted that this site was added to the 9rules network.

I submitted this site because the network was made up of high quality *sites* full of interesting content. I will admit that it was at least in part an attempt to validate that this site fit into that category.

The focus, as far as I could tell from the outside, was on the sites. To apply for membership, you don't submit yourself (i.e. with an email address), you must submit a specific site.

However, after getting the thumbs up, I discovered that there was also a "clubhouse" forum for members. For a few weeks, I stopped in every few days. There were some good conversations, but nothing that was interesting enough to overcome my aversion to forums.

I get that lots of people really dig forums and all of the social, "chatty" features of modern social networking sites. I just tend not to get involved in or excited about those aspects. I've come to see it as just another personality difference.

If I have an idea worth sharing, I put it up here or on one of my other public feeds. The same is true if I have a reaction to something online or an opinion about something. It's entirely up for and open to the public. Anyone who's interested can read AND respond to my ideas.

Forums, particularly closed-off private ones, do not do that. By design, they limit participation in the conversation to those who've been screened and deemed worthy.

After that initial few weeks, my involvement in the forum tapered off. It did, indeed, feel like the clubhouse it's name predicts. No big deal, I thought. After all, the network is about quality content on a bunch of sites, right?

While it may have been once, it clearly isn't anymore:

"If you feel you are contributing by your entries being shown, 9rules is no longer a good fit for you…"

Ironically enough, it appears that the decision to require participation in the clubhouse, took *place* in the clubhouse, pretty much self-selecting population essentially banishing those who aren't present to argue.

To me, this whole medium is about opening up the channels of communication and for expressing oneself. I thought that recognizing those sites that fostered that by virtue of high quality content was what the 9rules network represented.

Clearly not.

Personally, the point is probably moot as I didn't actually get the email in question. That's because I was apparently dropped from the network at some time between July 1 and July 6 of this year and didn't notice.

I don't recall seeing any notification or requesting that I step it up in the forums. That's not to say that one wasn't sent. It's entirely possible that one was sent, but caught in my spam filters.

Regardless, when I redesigned this site, I apparently had already stopped actively considering this site part of the network as I forgot to put the logo in the template. Of course, that happened on the 10th, with a couple of posts in between that were posted before the theme switch, but not included in 9rules aggregation.

So, while I didn't actually have to make the choice this week to let this site remain in the network or not (as it was apparently made for me back in July), if I *had*, I would have certainly taken this opportunity to remove it.

It's sad to watch a community put up walls and pull activity inside those walls in the *pursuit of* community.

Nearly everyone I've ever met has some irrational fears. Most have several. They range from common fears like being afraid of heights (a fear that has a distinct survival advantage) to being afraid that you left the coffee pot on while you're at work.

I've got one about being afraid that I left the garage door open.

Every time I leave the house from the garage, despite watching the door go down right in front of me, by the time I return, I'm nearly always gripped by the fear that I'll see the garage door wide open as I come around the corner.

Because we've got dog doors in the garage, leaving the garage door open means that the dogs aren't confined to the property. Normal experience has shown that leaving the door open for as little as a minute can result in the dogs wandering the street.

It's an irrational fear because hitting that button on the visor and watching the door go down is pretty much as automatic as turning the lights on in a dark room.

Most of the time when you are self-aware about these fears, you can work on a rational override. You can see Bozo the Clown and tell yourself that the clown will not eat you.

That is, until you have your irrational fear validated.

Tonight, after leaving the house for 2 hours to have dinner and hit Target, we pulled into the neighborhood to see the great glowing void of the garage peering out onto the street.

We both turned to each other, dead sure we'd seen the door close when we left. We raced inside, calling out to both dogs. Within seconds we heard the howls of each in turn.

Somehow, they both slept through our entire trip, never the wiser that the great wide open was waiting for them, just through the back door.

It turns out that something had fallen into the beam of the safety laser by the garage door. So, while we watched the door close, when it got to the bottom, it turned itself around and opened back up once we were out of sight.

Unfortunately, now my irrational fear has just been validated. I'm even more likely to believe that I left it open on each trip out. I can only imagine what kind of psychological damage would come from having a bigger irrational fear validated.

Photo: Sébastien Bertrand

Last night, I found myself with a bit of free time and mental energy for the first time in quite a few weeks. I headed over to my backlog of "interesting crap" for something I'd marked for later review and took notice of a real-world project using the Zend Framework.

A couple of months ago, I dipped my toe into the Zend Framework for some specific tasks, but hadn't really had time since to look at it in a more general way.

Given that the Zend Framework differs from many of the others out there in being more of a set of libraries that are designed to work together and less of the magic "do it for me" stuff that, while it feels good at first, always tends to make me uneasy.

The linked article about building fav.or.it with the framework does a good job of showing the breadth of components. I was mostly interested in some of the bits that I often put off too long in building applications: logging, exception handling and caching.

That's the stuff that lets you write your own code, your own way, but helps you do it correctly. I wrote a quick test app to try out those features: a basic podcatcher for podcasts.

I used the Zend HTTP Client (instead of CURL or wget) to fetch files, with proper exception handling and logging of the activity. I also used the RSS bits for obvious reasons and included the Cache to keep from hammering the remote sites' RSS every time the app loaded data.

Other than a few early glitches with include paths (why is it that pointers to libraries are a pain in the butt in every mainstream language?) it came together fairly easily.

Of the pieces I was trying out, the Cache is the one that I dug the most. I'm a HUGE proponent of caching stuff whenever you can. There's no reason that data that changes once every six months is fetched on each and every page request.

The Zend Cache module lets you not only cache normal "files", but, by including " 'automatic_serialization' => true" in your options for the cache, you can serialize pretty much any object/variable you want. You pretty much only need to provide a unique name for later retrieval and you have handy caching of whatever you need.

Since a lot of the stuff I write doesn't fit neatly into the CRUD (Create Read Update Delete) mold that many of the frameworks like Rails, CakePHP and company tend to impose, having a framework that's a little more laid back and free about how to do things is a handy thing to have in your toolbox.

You may have already seen this video (it's from mid-August) on resizing images in a more content-aware way: called "seam carving". If not, take a look.

I've shown that video to a few people over the last couple of weeks and nearly every one of them asked where they could get software to do that. The package that everyone points to is the GIMP plugin "liquid resize".

The only problem with pointing people over to that plugin is that it's not exactly obvious that it shows up under the "Layer" menu in GIMP. Similarly non-obvious is exactly how to use it to get the best results.

If you just fire away, you don't get the benefits of preserving people's faces, for example. Instead, you get a distorted image that's little better than if you had just resized it and ignored the proportions.

Fortunately, a tutorial for using the liquid resize plugin landed in my RSS reader this morning and I thought I'd share.

Oh, and, for the record, while GIMP is typically run on Linux, you CAN run it on Windows as well. Just make sure you run the GTK installer before the GIMP installer (both on the site).

If you don't like the results that the GIMP plugin gives you, take a look at this other implementation of the idea or wait for Photoshop to integrate it (they hired the guy from the video).