February 25, 2009

Lucy's Musings of Tiredness

This dodgy keyboard of mine turns the word 'blog' into 'bog' if I don't hit the L key hard enough. Is this a reflection of the quality of the vast majority of blogs out there or is it pure coincidence? It reminds me of the Bog of Eternal Stench in Labyrinth, where Bowie wears tights and seems to have put his finger in the power socket. Why is it that British power sockets are so huge, and why do I always forget when I go to plug my cellphone in without the adapter? I'm looking forward to having a new phone, be great to have one that actually has the numbers on the keys. It's lasted a long time though, unlike some socks that I got recently that are already wearing through. It'll be nice to buy some shoes that don't require socks, I'm looking forward to getting some heels, I may turn into a shoe junkie, lots of different colours, I'm already thinking of ones that will go with the awesome black vintage dress I bought yesterday... Vintage clothes are so fun but sooo expensive, should really look at more op shops, really the difference between vintage and secondhand is a 0 on the price tag. I'm really freaking tired, in fact have passed the point of being merely tired, no doubt I'll do what I did last night in a similar state which was start laughing for no particular reason (though maybe it was the word 'rudimentary' - oh dear, there I go giggling again and it makes *someone* think I'm up to something) and wonder if I'm going insane. Yup.

Great hall locations: Miscellaneous  |  Talked about by: 0 Fraggles

January 24, 2009

Test from iPhone

Test post from iblogger

Another line goes here

Great hall locations: Miscellaneous  |  Talked about by: 0 Fraggles

October 14, 2008

Busy Times

I feel a bit bad for not posting here very often, but I'm so busy with work at the moment that I often don't have the energy and since I'm working practically 7 days a week don't really have anything intetesting to write about either. Work wise I'm looking forward to finishing a couple of big projects and while the hours are long, the end product will pretty be awesome. It's now less then two months till I head to the UK, will be nice to be with my lady again. The English winter less so, but I don't mind. That's all for now.

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September 23, 2008

Font Embedding

I'm currently working on a web project that makes use of the new Vista/Office 2007 fonts, and font embedding. The embedding works like a PDF in that the fonts go along with the document, so if the user's system doesn't have them installed, the page still displays as intended. Font embedding is currently microsoft/internet explorer only technology, however Safari has just starting supporting font linking. So between these two browsers I've got everyone covered, as this particular site's users generally use the system default browser, IE on Windows and Safari on Mac.

There's a few gotcha's with Microsoft WEFT eot creation tool through. Obviously since it subsets you need to make sure all the letters you intend to use are on the page(s), and also it doesn't parse the css properly, so things like "text-transform: uppercase" are ignored and potentially needed characters left out. Also the @font-face need to come as the first thing in the document, prior to the main style sheet for them to work reliably it seems. It's finickiness aside, I actually like the microsoft system, mainly because the subsetting and compression makes the embedded versions of the fonts makes much smaller, so the initial page load times are better on an empty cache.

Great hall locations: Web Development  |  Talked about by: 0 Fraggles

September 16, 2008

Redesign Performance

An interesting idea I came across today, from the Yahoo site....

Anticipated preload - preload in advance before launching a redesign. It often happens after a redesign that you hear: "The new site is cool, but it's slower than before". Part of the problem could be that the users were visiting your old site with a full cache, but the new one is always an empty cache experience. You can mitigate this side effect by preloading some components before you even launched the redesign. Your old site can use the time the browser is idle and request images and scripts that will be used by the new site.

Great hall locations: Web Development  |  Talked about by: 0 Fraggles

September 15, 2008

Multiple Monitors

Turns out for a little while now the Wacom control panel has an option for swapping your tablet between monitors. I'd avoided multiple monitors since by default the tablet surface is stretched over both screens making the mouse cursor pretty much uncontrollable. However you can assign one of the buttons on the tablet to swap between screens and the cursor only works on one screen at a time, in a useful fashion. Now I can get 29% more productivity when I work 100 hour weeks--yes I feel a bit over worked at the moment. A bit of a rest in a couple of days tho I hope.

Great hall locations: Computing  |  Talked about by: 0 Fraggles

August 7, 2008

Ha

And you thought the last post was a hoax, well not quite. I'm not posting details of mu lovely holiday with my equally lovely partner just yet. As I still haven't finishing sorting the photos of us. Been working my arse off in incredible heat over here, tomorrow's forecast is for 38*. Previously, after my holiday but before now, I went to Prato for a day trip. They had a exhibition on sports fabrics, thought it would be a bit different rather than the usual art museums around here. Some of stuff was pretty techie, fabrics that get charged with sweat and draw oxgen into the muscules, solar panel fabrics, knee guards that are soft but become solid if you hit them--I had seen that stuff on Discovery Channel last year, so neat to play with it in person. Haven't been up to too much else interesting, a lot of work recently and its been too damn hot to do anything anyway. Still running in the mornings around 6.30am when it's still cool, and hoping to add one session at the pool each weekend. Being talking to my friend Aeisha about going (she's been a few times already), it's like $15 a time so def only a once a week thing. That is all for now.

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August 5, 2008

Yes, I know...

I be will updating this blog soon, I have almost finished sorting the 1200 odd photos from our holiday and will post here in the next week or so.

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June 26, 2008

Strange News From Bree

Well the lack of posts isn't because I've been lazy, or haven't been doing anything. It's just I haven't been doing anything particularly interesting. I've been working a lot prior to my holiday next week, up to 14 hours per day.

However, I have been to up a couple of things outside of work, my morning coffees and visiting the supermarket. The supermarket in itself having been interesting, learning to battle the self-checkout machines that really don't like reusable shopping bags. However I've since decided the last machine on the left has dodgy scales and is best to be avoided. These machines if you've never used them weigh your groceries as you bag them and compare it to the barcode you just scanned, if the two don't match it gets rather shitty. The problem is the shopping bag weights just a faction more than plastic ones. Anyway, they have two areas you put your stuff on left, scan it in the middle and bag on the right (the bottom of bagging area is a scale) once you're bagged all your stuff you put your money in the machine and go, when it works it saves you heaps of time, when it doesn't, well it's still faster than going in the normal checkout!

The other night about week or so ago I went out for drinks with my flatmates, Marco (Italian) and Andrew (Australian). Now drinking out around here is expensive, it only other time I drank out (at an actual bar that is, since you can drink whatever you like in the street and most people do) it worked out at about $14 kiwi for bottle of Becks beer. Since then I haven't drank out for obviously reasons! However this time we went where the Italians go, to this little deli on the other side of town. We were able to sit at a table and have nice bottle of wine each, cheeses and bread. Sum total for the evening, $7 kiwi!! Try getting a cheese platter and 3 bottles of good wine at a pub in New Zealand for 20 bucks. So yeah, moral of the story avoid the places with tourist prices, which are usually 5-6x what the same item would be at the supermarket.

I also watched the first game of the 2008 historic soccer the weekend before last, the Calcio Storico Fiorentino. The game is more like a cross between rugby, wrestling and bare-knuckle boxing than soccer in reality though. There are very few rules, and as long as the refs aren't watching beating the living crap out of your opponent is perfectly ok. You score a goal by throwing the ball into the long net at the end, however if you miss it's ½ a point against your team. The game I watched was our team Santa Croce (azzurri / blue) vs. Santo Spirito (bianchi / white) which we won 5 to 3½. The final yesterday was between Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella (rossi / red), and unfortunately we lost 8 to 5½ I believe. There are actually four teams, with the fourth being San Giovanni (verdi / green) who played Santa Maria Novella the day after the game I attended, these being the four ancient city quarters.

Yesterday was also a public holiday over here, the Feast Day of San Giovanni (St. John the Baptist), so pretty much everything was closed so I found out after work (after walking 20 minutes to the supermarket in 35° heat, ug!). I didn't go to the final because I needed to finish as much work as possible this before my break. Though in retrospect, I probably should of, nothing was open and it was noisy as hell, with half of Florence outside my window, helicopters swirling low overhead and all the drums and church bells ringing—made concentrating a bit difficult!

Last night for the public holiday there was also the most impressive fireworks I have seen in my life. Much better than even the Easter ones at the Duomo last year. We were standing on Ponte Grazie (the bridge closest to home, with most of the rest of the city as you can see in the photo below! lol) and the fireworks were going off out of over the water in front of us. However the best part was as they were expanding out, they were coming towards you. It was like you could almost reach out a touch them, they looked that close. There were several that exploded with one colour, then flew out further and exploded again, and then did this again. And also ones that made shapes like the outlines of crosses and so forth. Pretty damn impressive, the display went on continuously for 40 minutes as well.

Great hall locations: Italy , Travel  |  Talked about by: 0 Fraggles

June 21, 2008

High Quality Album Art

I'm really loving this site that I found today, it's high resolution art album for really picky people like myself. Beautiful high quality scans, carefully retouched and colour corrected. So far it's the best album art I've found, and I've been looking for a while. My FLAC's and MP3's are now looking better than ever.

Album Art Exchange

Great hall locations: Music , iPod  |  Talked about by: 0 Fraggles

June 15, 2008

MP3 Repacker

I've been working with MP3 stuff for over 10 years now, so it's not often you come across a new program or utility you hadn't heard of before. However I found something new today, possibly because I hadn't thought to look for something like this before. It's a program that processes 320 CBR files and makes them smaller VBR files losslessly by reducing the frame-sizes where they have just padding (the data doesn't fill the whole 320). Visit this Hydrogenaudio Thread for more.

Great hall locations: Music , iPod  |  Talked about by: 0 Fraggles

June 10, 2008

iPhone 3G

After the initial oul, I want, it's more of a nice but not really. 3G and GPS are cool, as is the geotagging of photos taken on the phone, however the camera still isn't of high enough resolution to be useful and I'm somewhat doubtful of how good the GPS will be. The GPS on my friends' Nokia N95 is a bit bollocks, and I doubt either would compare the external datalogger I've bought, since it costs half the price of an iPhone. Like most things dedicated devices usually work better, even if slightly less convenient.

Great hall locations: Computing  |  Talked about by: 0 Fraggles

Warfare

There is a battle going on here, unforeseen in planning and blood is being split on both sides. Something I never considered, the war against the mosquitos. It appears that due to our proximity to the river, these little buggers are carrying out planned night-time rides in ours and possibility our neighbours' homes. Now these are not your normal everyday mosquitos, oh no no, theses are evil blood sucking beasties of the night. And if your hands and arms are not available will gladly bite you on the face, which is the reason for me sporting a big welt below my left eye the other day. Last night there was seven, count them seven sitting above my bed, which I squished. In the morning it looked like someone had been shot, there was blood splatters everywhere. Tonight I'm trying one of those mosquito repellents you plug into the wall, they stink but I really need a good nights sleep. Got a bit of RSI in my hands, left one had swelling yesterday, so quality sleep is now a priority.

Great hall locations: Italy  |  Talked about by: 0 Fraggles

June 3, 2008

Windows XP Service Pack 3

Well I finally decided to upgrade this morning, being overseas without all my software and stuff I had been deliberating for a few weeks. However, after trying the service pack in a virtual machine and hearing about speed improvements, I took the plunge.

The update went smoothly, and the only problem so far is the virtual pc's networking has lost the plot again, but that's not too difficult to fix. The speed improvement is definitely real though, during Windows boot the loading progressbar doesn't even get across once now and the desktop is fully loaded in about 5 seconds after logon, which is a noticeable improvement over SP2.

Now with Firefox 3 only a few weeks away, much better productivity appears to be on the the horizon :-)

UPDATE: There appears to be an updated version of Virtual PC 2007 for XP SP3, read about it here.

Great hall locations: Computing  |  Talked about by: 0 Fraggles

May 30, 2008

iPod Touch Keyboard Tip

Quite often the iPod's autocompletion gets the word wrong, requiring you to move your finger way up the screen to click the cancel button. This is a real hassle and breaks the flow of typing.

However I've found an easier way, I have two languages installed and hence have the change language button to the left of the spacebar, which you click to toggle between languages. Double tapping it turns out to be an effective and conveniently located cancel suggestion button :-)

Great hall locations: iPod  |  Talked about by: 0 Fraggles

May 28, 2008

Hot Like Miami

The weather here has really started to heat up, which of course would be great if I wasn't stuck inside working all day. Yesterday it was pretty bad, I had so much work to get out and it was hot, not normal hot but that hot like you get in Vegas, where you feel yourself pushing through the air around you, like sponge cake. Makes thinking straight about coding really difficult.

Today is going to be little better, the forecast is for 31° however it seems to be consistently above that in actual temperatures. Summer here may well be quite unpleasant, and I now have better understanding why the entire country shuts up in August and goes to the beach. Unfortunately some of us will need to work during these months, fingers cross it doesn't get much higher!

Below is a picture from my iPod's weather application last night, notice the time at the top:

Great hall locations: Italy , Travel  |  Talked about by: 0 Fraggles

May 25, 2008

Italy Recap

I'm sorry this has taken longer than expected, but I've had so many things going on, I haven't had the energy to update this. Anyway, some news--finally!

My first couple of a weeks in Italy didn't go particularly smoothly. I got sick and had a lot of difficultly eating well due to staying at a hostel in the middle of nowhere. I ended up losing about 8kg in weight in the course of 2 weeks, which isn't particularly good. I also was having a very hard time finding somewhere to live, I was struggling with my Italian and not being in the best of health wasn't helping either.

During all of this I was still trying to get some of work done. However after finding out that both of my Vodafone sim cards had been cancelled and buying new ones, I found there was almost no Internet coverage at the hostel, so I had to sit outside in the cold to upload my work, often at 33.6kbps modem speeds and then go back inside to get AC power. Then I got robbed they took my cell phone (so I lost everyone's phone numbers and all my the text messages I'd saved from my girlfriend) and the plug adapter to plug in my laptop, so was completely cut off for several days and couldn't get any work done either. A replacement adapter also turned out very difficult to find, as there's no Dick Smith's or Travel Stores kicking about here.

Fortunately in the end I managed to find a nice house, though it wasn't available straight away and I ended up staying at this other place temporary. This is where things started to get better, as the girl I was sharing it with was Australian and had an Aussie to European plug adapter (was use the same plugs in New Zealand), so I was able to use my computer for the week it took to find a replacement. I had to buy a new cell phone, fortunately since the sim card in the stolen phone was only 2 days old, they were able to transfer my number and credit. This proved very fortunate was there was an expats get together in Florence I had been invited to however the directions were on the stolen phone, no problem I thought call/sms and ask, hmm numbers where all on the phone too, excellent. In the end I waited around 2 hours until my friend Nicki called and asked if I was still coming.

Since then I've been pretty boring, just trying to get through the backlog of work and get my health back up to 100%. I'm back to my normal weight now and exercising regularly etc, health ok though a little run down again at the moment, as I worked too many long hours this last week... not much else to report. The apartment I ended up getting is in Santa Croce, it's quite a nice place modern with aluminium joinery, double glazed and new appliances etc. I'm sharing a room to keep costs down, as this place and Italy in general is very expensive. In the apartment is an Italian, a Mexican, a Canadian and an Aussie, all guys, 5 of us in total. Below is a picture of my side of the room, I did a bit of shopping at Ikea as the room was pretty bare before (the photo with the plant is newer).

Great hall locations: Italy , Travel  |  Talked about by: 0 Fraggles

May 12, 2008

I'm Back

Sorry about the long delay, it was partly due to me getting organised in Italy and partly due to my Movable Type (Blog Software) being shagged to the point of being unusable. However both are fixed now, and I'll start posted some interesting stuff again soon.

Great hall locations: Miscellaneous  |  Talked about by: 0 Fraggles

April 2, 2008

Photoshop fails to import clipboard

Photoshop seems to have an annoying bug (or feature) where it stops importing the clipboard. I often copy and paste screenshots from Firefox and Quicktime, only to find photoshop ignoring the new content. I thought it only applied to my old Photoshop 7, but it appears it affects all versions including CS3. This registry change fixes the issue.

Open the Registry Editor and add the following:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe\Photoshop\10.0]
"AlwaysImportClipboard"=dword:00000001

Where 10.0 is your photoshop version.

Great hall locations: Computing  |  Talked about by: 2 Fraggles

March 18, 2008

Burnt Out

The total lack of entries here is mainly due to me having absolutely no time to update this thing at the moment. I've been a little burnt out recently and in the process of trying to do less, so I have some down time, I won't be updating this for at least the next month, possibility longer. Normal service will return once I'm settled in Italy. thanks.

Great hall locations: Miscellaneous  |  Talked about by: 0 Fraggles

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