What may be good for a voice podcast, is not good for music.

Ever listened to a sermon podcast in the car and got frustrated fidling with the volume control when your pastor goes from really quiet to really loud or visa versa? To deal with this problem we post-process our sermon recordings with a software compressor, effectively making the recording all one level. (Actually doing this with software [we use audacity's compressor effect] as opposed to hardware at recording time introduces it's own complications and sometimes we still don't get it right. Primarily this is because it requires investigating each recording and then applying the appropriate compression ratio's.)

However, making a recording all one volume pits listening convenience against dynamic quality.

I Decided to take shadyvale.org from blue to green, being a lush valley and all that. The old logo didn't work, so I thought I would spend a little time and see if I could come up with something other than a plain text site name.

So I fired up the old inkscape, and played around a bit. I know so little about graphics or artistry, but was able to make use of the fine tool and took advantage of the Open Clip Art SVG Library.

I then set out to create a favicon (the little picture that appears in the address bar for those using cool browsers) which I have done previously in theGimp, and ran across a little web tool, FavIcon from Pics which did the trick. Just exported a png from inkscape and uploaded it to the site and was given a decent favicon.ico. It appears that the background is white instead of transparent, but good enough for now.

Note: IE 6 users, you will see an ugly site logo since PNG transparency was broken for years in Internet Explorer. Sorry, I am tired of providing work-arounds for the bug, I would highly suggest downloading a newer browser.

I have to say that the Drupal 5 rocks, the drupal core Garland Minnelli theme has met my needs, and with the included "color" module I was able to alter the colors of the theme without editing any css.

Anyway, let me know what you think.

Long overdue for some attention, I have updated shadyvale.org to Drupal 5.2. The upgrade from 4.7 was quite smooth, and everything should be about the same as it was. One exception is that I switched themes because the previous one wasn't updated for the new version of drupal. I was pretty much ready for a change anyway. The old logo didn't fit right for the new theme, so I held off.

I look forward to playing with some of the new modules available. I have a lot of catching up to do with the Drupal community which has really blossomed.

So...Firefox 2.0 launches today. I downloaded the full release last night and have been playing with it a bit. I looks clean, works the way it's supposed to so far, but the jury is still out.

For one, my theme has not been updated, which bums me out cause it was Japanese and awesome. That's not F's fault, but still.

Second, the tabs are movable, which is cool. But each tab has its own close button which will take some getting used to.

To be more positive, the tabs are movable, and it's correcting my spelling right now (at least I think it is, although Google might be, who knows anymore).

On November 21st, a new Inkscape (a very fine scalable vector graphics editor) was released.

Inkscape 0.43 is now available thanks to the work of many developers and the sponsorship of Google's Summer of Code program which sponsored four students to work on features for Inkscape. The main new features in this release are:

• Connectors: Objects can be connected using auto-routing lines.
• Inkboard Collaborative Editing: You can connect to other Inkscape users over a network and edit a shared document.

Very excited about the connectors, since I have been using inkscape as a free-form diagraming/modeling tool.  While flexible not as easy to throw stuff together as a traditional visio type app.  Connecters were the missing piece.  Be quite easy to build up a personal catalogue of useful svg shapes for diagraming, especially with resources like the open clip art library around.  The open clip art library has available over 6900 SVG files created by over 500 artists.

Three cheers for Google's Summer of Code, which helped some of my favorite open source projects.  Inkscape and Drupal included!  Oh and by the way, Windows users your not left out on all this great software, like the Gimp (free photoshop like software), inkscape is available for Windows.