frank's homepage

zinepal.com is my latest project that I've been working on for half a year now. Zinepal enables you to easily create custom printable zines from any online content. While it is primarily intended for blog content it will work with any web page that provides substantial text or image content that can be isolated and reformatted for printing.

The Idea

There are two main ideas that motivated me to work on zinepal.com. The first is to bridge the gap between online media and the traditional paper media. Zinepal enables bloggers to easily make their content available as a printable zine. When readers print the blog zine the content is now reaching a whole new audience. Readers in coffee shops, on the bus, in the park ... all the places the Internet either doesn't go or is inconvenient to use. I mean, who wants to read the newspaper on their iPhone? This can create a viral effect as readers leave behind copies of the blog zine and new readers pick it up. For example, you may find a blog zine from local blogs in your favorite coffee shop, providing you with great alternative content that is relevant to you.

The other idea behind Zinepal is to cater to another group of Internet users. Currently you could broadly classify Internet users as content creators and content consumers. Content creators are the bloggers that regularly write on their blog. The consumers are the readers of blog content and other Internet news outlets. As a creator I may frequently write blog content that is not interesting to a larger audience. The consumers are now faced with the task of sorting through many blogs to find the small nuggets of content they are interested in. For example, some of my friends have hundreds of blogs in their feed readers and have to sort through all the uninteresting content to find the good stuff.

This is where the new group of Internet users comes in: the editors. As opposed to sites driven by popular opinion such as Digg or Reddit, the editors focus on their specific topics of interest and create zines based on this. As a reader I can then follow the zines of the editors I trust. I now have a human filter that does all the work of sorting through blogs for me. The advantage to the editors is the ability to gain recognition and readership for their custom zines, the same way good bloggers gain readership for their blog.

Technical Challenges

The biggest technical challenge for Zinepal was coming up with the technology to reliably extract and reformat content from all the different blogs and websites on the Internet. This was required due to the fact that most RSS or Atom feeds only include snippets of content in the feed. I've spent most of my time so far working on this technology and getting it to the point where it works reasonably well. It's still not perfect and I can think of a few more important enhancements to make, but at least for a start I think it is good enough.

Instead lately I have been focusing on the website part of Zinepal to enable users to actually start using the technology. So please, go ahead and visit zinepal.com to give it a try!

Due to the renewed popularity of File Type Manager (mainly because of Windows Vista) I've decided to make the source code available. Maybe somebody else feels like working on this program some more. Keep in mind that I wrote this when in high school and just learning how to program, so it probably isn't the greatest code. Also it's written in Visual Basic 6. Ugh.

File Type Manager 2.0.1 Source Code

Note that I've licensed it under the LGPL. It includes an ActiveX control that displays the file types, so you could re-use that somewhere else if you wanted to.

Two people in my life have started publishing their own web comics. The first one is my dad, who is publishing his Neatstep comic. He's actually been doing this for over a year now and he keeps refining and redrawing the cartoons. That's because he's a perfectionist ... and he wants them to be perfect. Either way, you can already check them out online at neatstep.com.

The other person is my former roommate Pat who is working on his Terrible Reality comic. He also started that a while ago, but then he went to Peru for a few months and stopped. But now he is back. I'm going to have to take credit for coming up with the phrase "Terrible Reality" that he is now using as the name for his cartoon. Maybe one day he will add a comic that explains the origin ...

Anyway, this is kind of funny since the two comics are both based on the life experiences of the writers, but they could not be any more different. You should check them out, they are both quite awesome.

I thought I would write a quick blog entry to update everyone on the latest happenings...

First off, since November 1st I'm only working part-time at GenoLogics. I'm spending two days a week working on a personal project. I came up with (what I think is) a really good idea for a Web 2.0 project. So I've cast away the chains of J2EE and I'm working with PHP and Drupal to create a nice Web 2.0 site. Yes, it will have all that AJAX goodness that the modern geek (user) is accustomed to.

Why PHP/Drupal you ask? Well, I did look into Ruby on Rails and also some Python frameworks. The thing is that I know PHP/Drupal very well, so I can be productive very quickly. At this point I just didn't want to invest the time to learn a new framework. Also, Ruby on Rails just didn't really turn me on, although granted I spent very little time looking at it. The thing is with Drupal I get so much infrastructure that is already provided for me: security, comments, user profiles, theming, page generation, etc. I'm not sure why I would want to use Rails and roll it all for myself. Having the support of a large Drupal user community backing up your infrastructure is also a big plus.

Anyway, the next thing is that I'm moving to Vancouver on December 1st. I'm getting a little bored in Victoria and also I think that the technology scene in Vancouver will be better. I'm looking forward to check out the Drupal and PHP user groups. Finding a place to live in Vancouver was pretty tough, but in the end I found a nice 1 bedroom in Kitsilano. So I guess I'm all set. :-)

On another note: GenoLogics is hiring. You should apply. It's a good place.

Quite a few people have asked me about this in the past. If you have a file how can you open it in the default associated application without querying the registry or using some other Windows API? Or if you program in Java how can you do it without using JDIC?

The easiest way to do this is using the "start" command. For example to open the file "readme.txt" in the default text editor you would do this:

C:\>start readme.txt

You can also use start to open folders or follow shortcuts:

C:\>start "My Shortcut"    <-- note that you don't need .lnk at the end

This will open the target of the "My Shortcut" shortcut. If the shortcut points to a folder it will open a Windows Explorer window for it, if the shortcut points to a document it will open it in the default application and if the shortcut is for a program it will launch the program.

The trick is that "start" isn't an executable. It is a built-in command of the Windows command line interpreter "cmd.exe". In Java (and other languages) if you try to create a process using the "start" command this will fail -- since there is no "start.exe" executable in the system.

Instread you have to invoke "start" through the "cmd.exe" interpreter. This can be done using the /C flag:

cmd /c "start readme.txt"

This can be run successfully in Java using Runtime.exec() or a ProcessBuilder. Simply calling "start" directly would fail. Note that this limitation is also true for many other Windows commands. If something fails to invoke you should always try running it using "cmd /c".