Next stop on the video compression path—Riva . It compresses. But the Riva player doesn’t seem very flexible. Then again, looking at that main web page…it seems like it should be more versatile than I am seeing so far. Maybe I have to play around with it. The problem with playing with any of these programs is that it wreaks havoc on my operating system and CPU usage.

I have a big problem. A 120 GB problem called my dissertation data. Since all of that data is video, I need to compress it, so I have turned been experimenting with divx compression software.
I started out with dr. divx. It keeps crashing. What kind of doctor is this?

Although it’s not something I give a lot of thought to, I have from time to time, wondered how people went about putting together their own site icon.

As always, the challenge to finding out how to do something is knowing what to call it in the first place. Turns out, the little picture in the url line next to the url is called “favicon.”

And it is fairly easy to figure out how to make your own: First, from the evil empire Microsoft and second, one I found even more useful from The Site Wizard. The second page also has a listing of a number of icon creation freeware, as you cannot, it turns out, make an .ico file in Fireworks.

The other key trick is to save the favicon.ico file in the root of the director. Just a word of warning, it seems like the icon is picky about updating, so every time you upload a new saved version, close the browser and re-open to see changes.

Not a vital web trick to know, but certainly a neat one.

Additional note: If you are viewing this page in Mozilla (Firefox) you will see the icon in the browser, if you are viewing with Internet Explorer, you have to drag the icon down to a favorites list to see the icon. Yet another reason to use Firefox!

New page: Educational Technology & Social Justice