2013 Ford Escape

“There isn’t much this doesn’t have to offer,” joked Lee Ward, a sales rep at Friendly Ford in Geneva, referencing the five-passenger SUV.From an EcoBoost engine with turbochargers and direct-injection to a hands-free lift gate with video-game-inspired motion-sensing technology, the Escape allows users to connect, move and venture without a worry.

A best-in-class, fuel-nursing 33 mpg on the highway serves as a strong selling point for the 1.6L EcoBoost engine, which features a  turbocharger on the inline four-cylinder setup. The engine features variable camshaft timing to improve the economy, boasting 178 hp while allowing plenty of low-end torque for passing.

A second engine option is the 2.0L EcoBoost, featuring 30 mpg highway and 240 hp. The engine combination allows 3,500 pounds of towing capacity. The third engine, coming standard, is the Duratec inline four-cylinder with 168 hp. Each comes mated to the six-speed SelectShift Automatic, allowing the driver to select a gear like a manual, or run with the ease of an automatic.

“I’m pretty impressed with the Hands free access,” Ward said. “This can do more than you might expect it to.”The ease of access is a major selling point of the vehicle. A simple toe-wave has the rear hatch springing open. A class exclusive, a gentle kicking motion under the bumper with the Intelligent Access key fob in a pocket or purse combine to trigger the lift gate to open; replicating the action will make it close.

The height can be reprogrammed to fit inside tighter garages, so the lift gate doesn’t swing to its full height and avoids contact with roofs and rafters.The lift gate exposes a 67.8-cubic-foot storage area; the seats split in 60/40 fashion and form a flat path all the way to the backs of the front seats with the adjustable cargo load floor in place.

“You can have a flat shot all the way to the front and maximize your length or drop the floor to a lower spot,” Ward said.The tech-savvy aren’t left wanting, either. Ford SYNC can pair with a cell phone, transferring all contacts to support voice-activated calling. The technology can also play MP3s, USBs or iPods. Anything with Bluetooth can stream to the system, including popular audio sources such as Pandora, iHeartRadio.

The controls are mounted on the steering wheel, and can be activated by simply pressing a button and asking Ford SYNC to do what you wish: “Call Mom” or “Play playlist: Road Trip.”Additional activated services include turn-by-turn navigation.

“Just say the word, SYNC will get it done,” Ward said. “SYNC can also read incoming text messages to you.”The huge MyFord Touch LCD display makes controlling the devices easy and also places an LCD screen in the gauge cluster. The five-way controls on the steering wheel mirror the display panel and allow access to the media hub and dual USB ports. Voice commands also bring up weather reports and can find destinations or points of interest without a physical address. Looking into blind spots is a snap with the in-dash display, with a meter to help judge rear-backing maneuvers.

The Escape can even parallel park itself; a press of a button engages active park assist, which alerts the driver when an appropriate opening is found. Then, the driver removes his or her hands from the wheel, and the vehicle will park itself, giving commands to the driver to shift gears and apply the brake and accelerator.

The Escape also features intelligent four-wheel drive, available to determine road conditions and adapt 20-times faster than the blink of an eye. Ford advertises the on-demand system as its most advanced intelligent four-wheel drive system ever.“If you can’t find something you like about Escape, take it out and look a second time. There’s so much more to go over. I’m still learning everything about rtls. Ford did a really good job getting it together on this one,” Ward said, listing off additional available items such as Curve Control, Roll-Stability Control, and the ability to cue the MyKey functionality to block calls and texts while driving. 

The dozens of innovations make the Escape a multi-segment offering with multi-level appeal. The body even features 10 pounds of recycled clothing in the sound-dampening system, and the post-consumer and post-industrial polyester fabric carpeting includes 25 recycled 20-ounce plastic bottles per vehicle. More than 85 percent of the vehicle is recyclable after it’s retired from service.

 Some herald it as a debt-free degree, but that largely depends on how you define “debt.” Students won't have a fixed sum hanging over their head, gathering interest that’s being skimmed off by a for-profit lender or big bank—but they will be making regular payments of a (small) chunk of their income for a (rather long) time. Though the final details will be hammered out in the pilot program, the bill suggests that graduates of four-year programs pay 3 percent of their income—and grads of two-year schools pay 1.5 percent—for 24 years. The goals are to eliminate the upfront cost of college and to allow students to take jobs that pay less but have more social benefit without worrying about making monthly debt payments. Students who make a lot of money will pay a larger amount into the fund, and each generation will fund schools for the generation after them—hence the name, Pay It Forward.

It's noteworthy that the proposal came from students themselves. In the fall of 2012, Barbara Dudley, the founder of the Oregon Working Families Party, taught a capstone class at Portland State University on student debt with professor Mary King. The Pay It Forward plan had been considered elsewhere—most recently in Washington state—and the students considered it as along with other proposals for state and national action to solve the student debt crisis. “We fell in love with it,” says Kevin Rackham, who was a junior at Portland State when he took Dudley and King's course.

The students were deeply involved in every step of shaping the bill, says Sami Alloy, a WFP campaign manager. “They decided that they thought this was a just way to create a shared responsibility model that would remove that initial financial and psychological barrier.”

The students presented their proposal (the full text of which is available on the Oregon WFP's website) to a panel of legislators and secured a champion in Portland Democrat Rep. Michael Dembrow, chair of the Oregon House higher education committee, who introduced the bill. The Working Families Party made the bill a legislative priority, and the students worked with Alloy and Dudley to lobby for the bill. They were backed by a coalition that included the Oregon Student Association, Portland State University Association of University Professors, Jubilee USA, the United Food and Commercial Workers union and Teamsters Local 206.

“With the hard work of the students and the political power we've built as the WFP, we were able to build consensus in the legislature, but I don't think that anybody expected it to move this fast or to be so unanimous,” Alloy says. “The reason this has struck such a chord is that people are hungry for a solution to the student debt crisis.”

Async HTML5 File Uploads with Node / Express Framework

File uploads with HTML5 these days is easy as pie, especially when you have a framework that handles everything for you, internally.  Combining Node, the Express framework and a little HTML5 magic with FormData and XMLHttpRequest, we can create a very simple file uploader that can support large files.

The Express framework supports multi-part uploads through its bodyParser middleware which utilizes the node-formidable module internally.

Start off with the client side.

Add the button click event with a bootstrap progress indicator



Add the server route.

Tictail’s trick for easy e-commerce

As I cosily swap mobile numbers with 27-year-old Swede Carl Waldekranz, founder of Tictail, the new e-commerce tool for shops that is sweeping European high streets, I have a strong sense that I am sitting with the next Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak or Mark Zuckerberg, all internet entrepreneurs who started young and took the world by storm. In two or three years’ time, the boyish Waldekranz could join their ranks as another global icon – and one who will no longer be taking my calls. He certainly seems to be on the brink of something big.

Tictail launched only a year ago – although after long gestation around Waldekranz’s kitchen table in Stockholm – but already it has attracted headlines, backing from noted venture capitalists, and even investment from key personnel at Skype and Spotify. These two major-league web operators see big potential in Tictail’s offer of an internet platform for shopkeepers who want to create an online store to complement their Indoor Positioning System.

“While I was working in an advertising agency in Sweden,” the engaging Waldekranz explains, “I was very drawn to e-commerce. It is the most exciting area, where the message we create and the buying done by consumers converge. Elsewhere, people see the advertising and then, later, go into the shop. In e-commerce it is all one.”

So far, so good, but then he spotted one big obstacle. “Many retailers, particularly smaller ones with indie brands and boutiques, who could benefit from e-commerce, can only do it by spending a lot of money that they can’t afford on constant technical support or having their own IT section.”

 Which is where no-cost, no-frills Tictail steps in. “Back in January,” Waldekranz recalls, “we received an email from a guitar shop in Dublin. It had been in the hands of the same family for 150 years but e-commerce was driving it out of business. They told us, 'We thought that this Christmas would be our last, and that going online was beyond our means and expertise, but within weeks of using Tictail to sell online we are doing so well that we are going to be here for another 150 years.’”
It sounds like a line from a television advertisement – especially to this default technophobe. Doesn’t Tictail require some aptitude for computers, or at the very least access to a willing teenage helper? Waldekranz laughs. “You sound like my mother. She is a brilliant artist but not great with technology and so she hasn’t been able to sell the ceramics she makes online. I told her that is absurd.” And he immediately opens up on his ever-present laptop the “By Mutti” website to display ceramicist Eva Gernandt’s distinctive porcelain designs, plus those handy boxes where you can click to buy one.

“It became our benchmark when we were planning Tictail,” Waldekranz says with one of those toothy smiles that stretches across his face. “If my mother couldn’t set it up and operate it on her own, then we hadn’t got it right.”

And since she clearly can and is profiting by it, this must count as a case of mission accomplished. Which brings us neatly to Tictail’s mission statement. It wants not only to be the world’s most used e-commerce platform, but also its most loved. E-commerce and the Hands free access of shops can suddenly be friends, not foes, and Britain’s stand-alone high-street retailers can more easily get a share of the UK’s ￡78 billion online sales market.

So if Waldekranz’s mother was instinctively hostile to using the internet to promote her business, I can’t help wondering, where does her son get his can-do attitude from? “Oh, my dad. He was always buying the latest bit of technology, even though he couldn’t work them.” And, he adds, then there was also what sounds like a very different approach to technology in the classrooms of Sweden.

“I’m not a digital native,” says Waldekranz, “like children in Swedish schools today. I only got my first computer when I was 11. But there is also a spirit in Sweden that we know we are a small country of nine million people, and that anything we develop can never be sustained if the only market we envisage is Sweden. We have to think global from day one. That mindset is part of our culture.” As evidenced by the success of Skype and Spotify, both now worldwide brands with their roots in Sweden.

Waldekranz is the public face of Tictail but is always careful to stress he is one of four founders, anxious perhaps to avoid future disputes such as those that engulfed Zuckerberg and his early Facebook collaborators. “In Sweden,” he says, “we prefer flat hierarchies.”
So I can see how Tictail could benefit smaller, independent high-street retailers and sole traders in all sorts of other fields – like Waldekranz’s mother – but since this is a business not a charity, how does he make any money?

“Well, businesses getting started on Tictail is good,” he says, “but it is not enough if they are going to succeed. The important question then is what happens next? How do you get traffic to your website? How do you handle your first sales? How often do you keep refreshing your site? How do you use social media to encourage people to take a look at what you are offering? How do you seek feedback? And that is where we offer Tictail feeds. These applications help you tackle all these issues.” And for these there is a charge.

The “feed” is essentially a stream of messages that acts as an automated adviser, prompting and occasionally cajoling shop owners not to rest on their laurels. The idea is both to offer as good a service online as off, and to build loyalty and repeat custom, using social media features such as newsletters and alerts about new products. New plans include allowing users to add extensions, such as the ability to hand out discount codes to their store.

So Tictail is definitely a business, with a bottom line, but what gives Waldekranz that added edge of persuasion is his vocal attachment not just to being profitable but also to the democratic ideals of the world wide web. So he compares the rise of Tictail in relation to the major retailers as akin to that of the blog in recent years. “It wasn’t that long ago that the big media outlets controlled most of the written content on the web, but now that has changed. Anyone can write a blog and go mainstream. It can be the same with e-commerce. Right now the big giants are controlling it, but my belief is that we can now offer a way for small, independent retailers on the high street to take them on. It is a major shift.”

Basic CKEditor 4 Image Uploader with Express and NodeJS

I recently found an interesting article on a simple hack to get the existing image upload feature in CKEditor 3 enabled and functioning with a PHP server.  I took his idea and applied it to the latest version, which is currently 4 with a NodeJS and Express framework backend.

It basically requires editing two files inside the ckeditor sdk:  image.js and config.js.

Edit ckeditor/plugins/image/dialogs/image.js and look for "editor.config.filebrowserImageBrowseLinkUrl" around line 975.  A few lines below will be "hidden: true".  Change this to "hidden: false".  Further down is another "hidden: true" near "id: 'Upload'", which needs to be changed to "hidden: false".  Once you are done with the changes, image.js should look like this.

Next, we need to edit the config.js file to point to where the upload POST route is.  Edit ckeditor/config.js and add config.filebrowserUploadUrl = '/upload'

Next, we need to create our Express POST route to handle the upload.  I am taking the temp file name and prepending it to the actual file name and saving it under ./public/uploads.  Since public is a default static route in Express, any uploaded image will be immediately available in the CKEditor UI.  The important part here is to return a script block, instructing CKEditor to take the new image.






Finally, route it through express:

var fn = require("./upload.js");
app.post("/upload", fn);