Laurei: Showcase

I attended OSDC’s conference from the 25th to the 27th of November 2009. A great experience, learning, interacting where tech and philosophy mingle.

After painfully seeing good leads go elsewhere due to failures in my skype based phone routing and evil, evil ungrateful customer service from them I have decided to go with something more serious, sophisticated, and agile: enter Asterisk free PBX or “trixbox”. For the last few weeks I have turned an old computer into a powerhouse of connectivity and communicative options – what a mouthful. But this is a dream come true with surprisingly little outlay. Clients can direct themselves using a menu system to exactly who they want to speak to, and I can choose the most appropriate method of contact down to a tee. This is a seriously sophisticated system which can be designed from the ground up using features you have only dreamed of and telcos charge through the nose for: caller ID based routing, voicemail, follow-me, multiple diversion, failovers, dictation, emailed recordings. etc, etc, etc… And calls of course are all made at insanely low voip prices, so what are you waiting for? I am happy to show you my system and help you get the ball rolling today.

Out of love for my home country – Australia, I’ve completed a new website (through creativearm government web design) eschewing its ideals via the Australian National Anthem: Advance Australia Fair, its a Love Job, and it’s not going to pay the bills, but considering what’s out there are the moment, something modern and lively was crying to be made. +Plus I only spent a few days on it, not bad?

Enjoy AdvanceAustraliaFair.org

Just started the Freedom of Communication project.

The premise of the Freedom of Communication project is simple:

Right here, right now in 2009, this is a turning point where the ability to communicate between you and your loved ones is under threat. This is because of the trend increasing geographical distance we have from our family, friends, and business which causes us to rely on digital means (ie. the internet) to communicate with the people that matter most in our worlds – however: Corporations and the governments they lobby seek to control, block, charge-for, and own what would be natural communication between humans – and this is bad news, because communication is something we can’t live without!

With just a little bit of foresight one can see a world where unlike now, people have no choice but to use the internet to communicate, and this spells trouble if the corporate world is allowed anywhere near policy regarding communication.

With just a little bit of foresight one can see a world where controlling communication IS controlling thought.

Visit the Freedom of Communication project, or visit my post on why Australian needs the Fiber to the Home National Broadband Network

Took a typing test recently at Sarina Russo – just for fun. It’s a lot different from self-testing websites where on my mac keyboard I can usually get upwards of 60wpm.

Here it is:

People have really taken to twitter; we implemented a twitter feed from the UK El Salvador Embassy  originally because it was easy to update for the staff, and although it started off quite slowly, it seems to be a snowball effect with more people following elsEmbassy every day,  it’s a mixed bag, some are news organisations, some are private, but a lot are other embassies, which is a good thing, I’m glad government is starting to catch on to Web 2.0.  We have also started a Spanish language (that is ES-419 folx) so follow elsEmbajada if you like it… escriba en Español…

I’m well pleased that Aussiebodz, a Brisbane Spray Tan company, which I worked on its SEO campaign has made it to the top of Google for “brisbane spray tan” its core business description, as well as a few other phrases;  The company (perhaps as a result of its prominent ranking?) was approached by Extra on Channel 9 to do a segment on fake tanning which aired on friday the 3rd of October. Well done Aussiebodz.

Recently we completed the website for the embassy of El Salvador in the UK and also Ireland in English and Latin American Spanish. El Salvador is a small republic in Central America.

The site is rich in content and imagery that it almost doubles as a tourism site for the Republic – as usual the content it was designed for Google to pick it up quickly as it has done.

As this is a government website, there was great importance put on accessibility, there is graceful degrading for the evil IE6 browser, as well as some performance bells and whistles for compliant browsers via the use of jquery.

The embassy staff were lovely to work for, and they are very happy with their project.

Left to Right, Ambassador Dr Vladimiro P Villalta presenting Laura Rodriguez and myself with a diploma of appreciation.

*As seen on this site*

Just a simple one this time, but now I use it in almost every website search field I make. [kml_flashembed movie="http://showcase.laurei.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/searchbox1.swf" height="80" width="250" fversion="8" scale="exactfit" useexpressinstall="true" /] What you see in the video is an <input type=”text” /> box, but with the label actually inside it, instead if needing to take up space on the outside, what happens is when you click on or focus the text-box the label slowly removes its self and the text box is highlighted. A user can then type their search string unhindered by the label that was once inside it. When the person click off the search box the highlighting disappears and label is restored.I have already thought of a few things I can do for the 2.0 version, but as always let me know. Read the rest of this entry »

About the free flash image zoomer

A client was looking for a solution to seamlessly zoom into images on a website, we looked on every search engine, exhausted every link, and screwed around everywhere searching keywords such as “flash image zoomer”, “image resizer”, and just about every other combination, and we just couldn’t find one that fit the bill – so the “Flash Image Zoomer” was born. It’s the second Actionscript widget I have done in my life, I’m not really into flash because flash is not exactly open source but what it can do is awesome, wouldn’t you agree? I was originally going to try and reverse engineer a proprietry one I’d seen but after a while it seemed like it was getting nowhere so I whipped a version one, now I’ve revisited it, and developed a rich set of features to add on which are as follows.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://testtube.creativearm.com/imgzoom/imgzoom.swf?thumbf=3&thumbi=http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wallpaper/art/pia06890-1600-1200.jpg&imagebig=http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wallpaper/art/pia06890-1600-1200.jpg&w=400&h=300&l=1&col=0xffffff&z=6&u=0&o=50&ez=3" height="300" width="400" fversion="8" scale="exactfit" useexpressinstall="true" /]Solar System

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