I quite like this. Completely unplanned as I was just looking for a quick shot to show someone.
Author Archive for Pete
but can you undock?
Going by the sample chapter Andy Budd has produced a well writen and, most importantly clear book explaining CSS.
CSS Mastery is now on my ever growing shopping list, along with upgrading my ageing copy Photoshop 5.5.
It’s all Apple’s fault. No, really. I went with Kim down to the Apple store in Regent St just after xmas because she wanted to have a look at the video iPod.
So I’m wandering around looking at various bits and pieces when I notice there’s a G5 and large tft monitor vacant. So I walk up have a look in the applications folder as I usually do, spot Quark and fire it up.
I’m used to a 17″ crt at work and suddenly find I have loads of desktop space for toolbars, pallettes and, well everything. Quark is running even worse than it does on my G4 at work so I’m unimpressed although I now suspect it’s Quark that’s the problem and not OS X on a G4.
Anyway, we leave, Kim with new black iPod and me with head full of widescreen monitor. This isn’t good. Not for my bank balance anyway.
Last week I gave in and splashed out on a Dell 2405FPW, possibly the most expensive, non-essential thing I’ve ever bought.
I was a little disappointed initially as I was used to running at 1600 x 1200 on a 19″ crt and windows and text was larger on the 2405 although the resolution was set at 1920 x 1200. I still have more desktop space for apps than the 19″ but it’s took a little while to realise this.
Games on the other hand are incredible. I haven’t tried a DVD yet but can imagine the effect to be the same. It won’t be long before I’m used to things this way so I’m trying to make the most of things now before the shiny effect wears off.
Damn you Apple. Thank you.
I became an uncle just before xmas. I wasn’t overly bothered when my sister told me she was pregnant as I don’t see her very often and I didn’t really get the significance of the whole event.
I saw him for the first time in December when we got together to celebrate my dads 70th birthday and I realised that rather than being just another baby he was actually related to me. I understood for the first time why and how children can affect people. I look at him and see a connection rather than something I can’t (or won’t) understand.
Welcome to the world Lewis.
As you can tell we’re still alive at monki towers and we’ve made one or two changes. We upgraded and have changed to a very nice pre built theme for the moment. Once we figure out the new bits and pieces then PRS may get running again.
With that in mind we’re going to run off again because it’s 2am and we really should be in bed.
I saw announcements recently that Opera was now a free download. The comments I read at Anne’s site and 456 Berea St seemed positive and some seemed genuinely hopeful that Opera would now become a force in the desktop browser market place.
While I have no strong feelings about Opera one way or another I can’t see it happening.
Opera has always had a free version, y’know, the one with the banner ads?. Opera didn’t gain much prominence when it was “free”. I can’t see that changing now it’s free.
I don’t think that users really care about banner ads if it allows people to get what they need. Look at Kazaa. That had banner ads (and spyware) but was installed and used by many people - I don’t know the figures for installation/use so I’m being purposely vague. Anyway, my point is that I don’t think banner ads was ever really Opera’s problem.
I’ve tried various versions of Opera over the last few years starting with either 3.x or 4.x (I can’t remember) and have found the claims of it being a fast loading browser to be true when using the back or forward buttons on a cached page but it didn’t grab me enough for me to use as a main browser. It’s number 3 on the list of browsers I reach for to test pages in which is why it still lives on my dev machine, doing strange things to my layouts. That could simply be my coding although Andy Budd seems to think it’s all Operas fault.
Let’s face it, Firefox isn’t even that great a browser. The underlying engine (Gecko) is but I’ve never been very happy with the browser UI. Any browser UI for that matter but that’s a story for another day.
So, Opera’s problem? Mozilla has been around for a number of years but was only used by those looking for an alternative. IE users were still saying “so what, I’m happy with things as they are”. Firefox only took off once people started spreading the (security) benefits of it over Internet Explorer. Even if Opera started marketing their browser along the same lines are those that made the switch from IE to Firefox going to switch again. Why would they? Too little, too late.
There we have it then. Opera doesn’t sit behind IE and Firefox because it has/had banner ads. It just wasn’t sold to the masses very well. It’ll be interesting to see what Opera does on Linux where desktop users are more likely to chop and change apps and try new things but I won’t be holding my breath.
Ooooh Doom film trailer. If other game tie-ins are anything to go by it’ll be crap. See you in the cinema queue.
Just a quick note to wish my sister and her husband Jez a happy birthday. Yep, they share the same birthday, although there’s an age difference of 52 years.
Just kidding. It’s 27 years difference :)
While I remember this there’s a GTK2 theme for DR17 that fits in with grey/gold look of the default theme.
Things are starting to come together.
Want to try Enlightenment DR17? Of course you do. Don’t want to install all those bits and pieces and then find it’s not for you? Now you don’t have to.
Elivecd is a cd based version along the lines of knoppix and it’s variants but the only window managers available this time are Enlightenment DR16 and DR17.
There’s a review of Elivecd over at Flavios Techo Talk although I’m not sure how involved the author is with Enlightenment, if at all, so I’ll leave it up to you to decide how biased it is.
Certainly worth keeping an eye on and with cd based distros being used nowdays as rescue disks this may well be a good way of working within a familiar environment if the need arises.
via Edevelop.org
Talking of the Mercury music awards (heh it turns out to be called something else) I decided to keep a closer eye on things after Bloc Party.
Which turned out to be a good move otherwise I’d have missed The Go! Team. God, I thought this lot were brilliant. I’ve always had a soft spot for people who just couldn’t keep still on stage and they were all over the place, in a good way. Watching them I had the same feeling as seeing At The Drive In for the first time on Jools Holland’s show. You get the feeling if you look in one place for more than 2 seconds you’re missing something else, and you probably are.
The music? It was loud. It was shouty. I loved it. Feed me.
I was sick as a dog on wednesday night, so much so that I’m still feeling the effects today, so I’m sitting at home writing this. Just catching up before I go back to bed.
We first saw Bloc Party on the live coverage of this years Glastonbury. To begin with I wasn’t sure one way or another, live performance being what it is but towards the end it all came together. We liked Bloc Party.
It wasn’t until I was at the airport a couple of weeks back that I picked up the album which has made them grow on me even more. I hadn’t realised they were nominated for the Mercury music awards as I don’t usually take much interest in awards. Kim was watching it while I was in the other room and I wasn’t paying much attention but something filtered through to my subconcious as they started playing “So here we are” and I went to have a look. Brilliant.
We like Bloc Party. Very much.
And… we’re back. Went to Italy for a week and there was the usual bedlam at work prior to anyone going away so I didn’t have much time for other things.
Things of note now I’m back?
Textpattern had their first official release. Old news for those who care I know but there’s always been something elegant about the user interface that’s drawn me back. The Wordpress UI seems clunky by comparison. My opinion of course.
Once I get time to get things installed and running on the new pc I’ll try it out.
I finally got around to picking up Dan Cederholm’s Web Standards Solutions Which is pretty good. Some of it confirmed some things that I was already doing anyway, which is always good to know and gives a different (and at times simpler) version of things I tend to code. Definately worth buying.
There’s other things worth mentioning but I’ve things to sort out so I’ll leave it to next time.
I must admit that the xmlhttprequest thing ( I can’t currently use the “a” word without wanting to punch myself in the face repeatedly) seems pretty interesting. It still relies on having Javascript turned on of course although I’ve never seen any data to show what proportion have js turned off so it may not matter anyway.
The point is to put a bit of thought into where and when it’s used so the user isn’t punished for their choices. What’s the phrase, “graceful degredation”?
Being the form freak that I am you can bet the xmlhttprequest thing (txt ?) is going to be sneaking into some of my work but not being a javascript coder I couldn’t really see how it all came together. There’s a post on rajshekhar.net that describes the process in a format that even I can understand. I think I’ve found a good enough reason to get to grips with javascript.
Rajshekhar link was via Deep Resonance.
New pc smell permates monki towers at the moment as I finally put together a new system over the weekend. It’s amazing what a 2GHz 64bit cpu and 1 gig of ram can do to spruce things up and there’s a 200 gig drive ready to be filled with Kims iTunes purchases. The laptop will be so relieved.
Now all I need is to get a keyboard whose “m” key doesn’t stick. Oh the trials we go through.
Proof, if any was ever needed that cats are smarter than dogs. Assuming we overlook the default Internet Explorer thing of course.
I recently had to re-write the order form for my companies website. The previous version mixed HTML and PHP using lots of echo()’s and made sense when I orginally wrote it. It was only later, when my bosses wanted me to add new options to dropdown boxes and change things around that I realised what a pain this was.
The current version was written using templates and OOP. While, for what ever reason I still don’t quite get it I can see the advantages of using classes and templates when a project starts to get complicated.
It’s just going to take time for it to click completely.
Someone went to all the trouble of recreating the front of their ipod from wood. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.
Via Gui galaxy
Possibly the saddest part of Thursdays attack is those waiting for news of loved ones who haven’t been in contact yet. As much as logic dictates otherwise, I don’t think I’d give up hope either. It’s what makes us human.
Finally got around to installing Enlightenment DR17 a couple of days back. I have to say that screenshots really don’t do it justice. You see it in action to appreciate the little bits of eye candy that happens as you move about the desktop. Windows have drop shadows generated by enlightenment itself without intervention from the X server.
It’s not all looks though as windows open very fast, on par with any of the *box series of window managers by my estimates. I haven’t really delved into configuration yet as I want to play around with it before I break it. Everything is kept in .e as opposed to .enlightenment so both DR16 and 17 can be run on the same machine.
I won’t bother with screenshots as there’s not much to see theme wise at the moment but have a look at get-e.org for documentation and a few themes if you’re interested.
I’ve also restarted my GTK2 theming experiments, attempting to apply styles to individual widgets instead of the ubiqutous “*”. The problem with using a catch-all is that everything gets the style applied to it (kind of obvious really but I said it anyway), including buttons and input boxes on web pages and as I want a dark theme this clashes with the lighter colours of a lot of websites. Trying to find which GTK widgets apply the colour styles to these elements has proves a bit of a pain so far.
To think, I do this sort of thing for fun.
Doctor Who came to an end last weekend and has left a little hole in my TV viewing.
I was worried that it might feel quite dated but the whole look was brought kicking and screaming into the 21st century. It’s a pity that Christopher Eccleston decided to leave after only one series as I felt he played the Doctor really well. We’ll just have to see what David Tennant brings to the part.
We’ve been watching Glastonbury excerpts on TV over the weekend. Kim was waiting for the Magic Numbers but they didn’t play due to the singer losing his voice. Not the best thing to happen to a singer but there you go. I wasn’t sure about Bloc Party. They’re the sort of band I should like but the set didn’t really move me until 2 songs from the end. Worth picking up a cd though.
Off to watch Primal Scream.
Update: Kim tells me the Magic Numbers did play in the end. They just didn’t make it on TV.
I can’t say I’ve ever really been impressed by Javascript. Oh sure, on the surface you can do lots of interesting things with it but browser support has always been varied (only works with IE or Netscape for instance) and then there was always the issue of those that surfed with Javascript turned off. Me for instance.
But I noticed recently Jeremy Keith posting about a get together which started me thinking. If these people who are aware and use web standards are happy to use it then maybe things have moved on since I last looked at it although I’m not sure what relation Javascript has to the Document Object Model (DOM).
It would appear that things have move on since I last flirted with the webs evil twin*.
An article on Digital Web would appear to be a good place to start figuring out uses for the DOM. Especially as I enjoy creating forms. No, really. Honest.
*It’s a joke dammit. I’ve never been one of those who thought Javascript evil. Just not convinced of it’s useability.
The Mac Mini turned out to be what we were looking for in a Mac. Cheap. Kim had mentioned a few times about getting a Mac (especially after I bought her an iPod) but my current obsession with a certain Windows only based game had put me off. Oddly enough when we first discussed getting a PC a few years ago I wanted a Mac but Kim had far more knowledge of PC’s and, well, it was her money we were spending so we went the PC route.
For a while we could have switched as Quake3 (and some others I played) was also available on Mac as well as PC but unfortunately it became too late when I discovered Eve. It’s sad when the things you want to do are dictated by a game but there you go. Who said I was perfect?
I’ve needed to upgrade the PC for a while now so was looking at that when they launched the Mac Mini which seemed to be ideal. We could use the Mac as the main work machine for both of us and I could setup a Shuttle PC as a games machine. Sounds good doesn’t it?
Until Apple announced the processor switch that is. Macs tend to hold their second hand value though and it’s still going to be useable due to the emulation software Apple will be using (whose name escapes me at this moment in time) so it may not be an issue.
In my opinion the key with any hardware upgrade is to think in terms of the current market and just buy when you need it. If you look ahead you’ll always be waiting a few more months for something better.
If you continue repeating things often enough you’re bound to be correct at some point. A friend pointed me to news report on news.com stating that Apple would be switching to Intel processors and the mac community breathed a collective sigh of “here we go again”.
The weird thing was that this time it was true. An awful lot of people, like myself, who’ve used Macs for a number of years simply dismissed it as another rumour to add to the pile of ones already discarded.
Apple have always been hardware manufacturers. Mac OS was simply the interface and the fact that people liked it was the carrot to make them buy the hardware. If they released Mac OS as a standalone OS running on x86 architecture then who would honestly pay the premium that Apple charge for it’s hardware?
The question for me is how are Apple going to stop people from buying a copy of Tiger and installing it on their home built x86 rig?
I had thought that maybe Apple hardware would carry a security chip that the OS has to detect before it can be installed on that machine but then realised it won’t take 5 minuites for someone to code a crack for it. Well maybe a bit longer but you see what I mean surely.
Are they going to stop them or are we seeing a new direction from Apple? Let the rumours begin.
If a week is a long time in OS X then it’s been at least half a lifetime since I last said something.
So what have we been doing all this time?
I finally decided to take all the web code/design skills I have and start putting them to good use. It’s obviously taking a while to get things moving so I’m juggling a day job with what I want to do, which is what most people do I guess when starting out. Getting a business website for myself is something that keeps slipping down my “todo” list. This place could also do with a revamp as well.
Eve still continues to take up a lot of my free time with the side effect that, as it doesn’t work under Linux (yet) I spend all my time working in Windows. I can’t remember the last time I booted into Slackware. Eve does have some support under WINE/cedega but not enough to make it playable and I’m too lazy to keep booting back and forth.
As far as the OS X work related problems I was talking about back in November are concerned they never really went away. We just got used to them and created workarounds or simply said “we can’t do that anymore”. I wonder if that happens to other companies when a big change over occurs.
Well that’s all I’ve really been up too since November. I think I’ll post some thoughts on specifics under seperate posts. It’ll look like I’ve more to say than I actually have.
The much anticiapted upgrade to OS X hasn’t gone so well. We spent a week testing one machine with all our RIPs, printers and other devices and most seemed fine. With the one or two that wasn’t ok we found a workaround anyway so off we went and upgraded the whole studio. Then things went badly wrong.
We run a Windows 2003 RAID server and the OS X finder seems to have a problem seeing files we’ve just updated, the result being that we have to wait a few minuites for the server to update before we can use the file on OS X. For the first couple of days we couldn’t figure out why the files we were dropping onto the imposition program weren’t the updated ones. Then there are the odd things to do with filename lengths.
There also seems to be an issue with postscripts made in Quark 6 and 6.5 but lets not go there.
Generally while we were able to do things at a fast pace with Mac OS9 and the server we’re now having to wait for OS X to agree with the server on what’s there before we progress with any job. Oh and sometimes doing “save as…” in Quark 6 will make some of the images disappear. I could go on but I’d rather spend the time doing something constructive but needless to say we’re not happy.
Oh joy.
I am so close to Mac OSX that I can smell the leather. I swear my G4 knows what coming as well as it’s started playing up more than usual the last few days with apps crashing all over the place. I’ll give it a couple of weeks and then see if I can get another 512mb of RAM in there.
Remember the remote sentry guns that made an appearence in the special edition version of Aliens? There’s actually a toy version available as “room defenders”.
Sadly the whole concept is ruined by some supposed satisfied customer quotes:
“It looks great, it’s fun and my room has never been safer!”
Er…yeah right.
Did I ever mention that a friend of mine from way back actually worked on the sentry guns for the film?
Hot off the press (or #edevelop as it’s otherwise known) is this nice little screenshot of the current Enlightenment DR17 build.
Your all jealous now aren’t you. Thanks to Codewarrior on #edevelop for the screenshot.
A month ago we were looking at upgrading the machines to OSX but, of course things never go to plan. We currently have one machine running with upgraded apps and spent the last four days trying to get it to talk to our various printers but as it’s not my machine then I only get to play with it after they’ve left work for the day.
Favourite bit so far? Discovering I have an Apache install to play with. Oh and that Expose might be more than just a neat trick.
Least favourite bit? That animation that takes place when minimizing a window. It just makes me feel sick.
A couple of nights back we were hit by a comment spam bot. Fortunately we’re not that regular when it comes to posting so it wasn’t too time consuming shutting off the comments for each post.
Once we’ve sorted out a couple of things comments will be back on.
Venice didn’t really click with me to be honest. The people there are really friendly but it all kind of melded into one. A typical conversation went like this;
Kim: Do you recognise where we are?
Me: No.
Kim: But we’ve been down this street six times in the last two days!
Me: Did you just call me Piggly Wiggly?
I didn’t suffer tech withdrawal quite as much as I thought I would. The evening we returned there was a series of programmes about Venice on tv. Life’s like that sometimes.
As you may (or may not) have heard me say on numerous occasions we’re still using Mac OS9 at work as we can’t afford the downtime in the studio to get all the different devices working together. Something happened this week thats forcing us to finally upgrade to Quark 6 and as Quark 6 is OSX only then you can see where this is going.
Unfortunately for me it’s going to be happening while I’m away so I’ll get to miss out on all the fun. I’d rather be on holiday but all the same, I wish it could’ve happened while I was there.
Earlier in the week I decided to check on the site stats for monkiboi dot net and found two or three site I hadn’t seen before clocking up marginal hits. After checking further they turned out to be Livejournal Manson freaks who’d decided to hotlink a blackbox screenshot I have of a Manson theme and use it as a background to their own site.
Initially I was peeved as hotlinking (and with no credit either) is up there amongst other web crimes such as eating babies. My next thought was to substitue the image with something altogether less savoury. The idea lasted all of 10 seconds when I realised I was being a bit petty about it all.
We’re talking marginal hits so as far as bandwidth theft is concerned, so what? It’s a non issue. The non-credit bit hurt but that was just my ego and that’s big enough as it is. I’m confused as to how these site found the image as they don’t appear to link to each other and google doesn’t turn up anything but what the hell.
I guess the reason I’m feeling so generous about the whole thing is that these people remind me of my teenage years. Yes I was a goth. My teenage years seemed to be full of the usual self doubt and I tended to express my fears by listening to the Sisters, The Birthday Party, ASF and the Banshees. Life didn’t feel pleasant but at least my music made me feel better.
Reading a livejounal written by a goth is a one way trip to anguish city with it’s only stop being torment mall, but that was me all those years ago. I so wanted to stand out from the crowd, to be noticed but to also be accepted by the “normal” people around me, the problem being acceptance and (the idea of) individuality are poor bedfellows. Trust me, you may think you’ve managed to combine the two but your friends just think you’re odd.
The idea that wearing dark eyeliner and having black spiky hair as a way of expressing your individuality is also at odds with the fact that every goth looks just like you. My teenage brain couldn’t cope with that one and so I dismissed it entirely. Of course this is entirely my take on the whole thing and some would argue they do it for different reasons. What do I care?
I’d like to think I wasn’t as anguished, disturbed and fucked up as these people appear to be but I’d probably be suffering from a selective memory. Still, I thought I’d give them a break.
While I’m on a posting frenzy I may as well get this one down. I haven’t been to Design by fire for a while but a link took me there and I have to say the design (at the time of writing this) looks really good. I’m a real sucker for orange. And drop shadows. Orange and drop shadows. Mmmmm. Chicken.
We’ll be in Venice in a few days time. I realise we’ve left it a little late but that’s what life’s like around monki towers. Disorganised.
We have guide books and things but any tips on where to go would be appreciated.
Jon Hicks has done some graphical updates to Sage, a fork of RSS panel reader which is no longer in development.
Jon uses OSX but the improvements are still valid for other platforms and another version is available from Josh Jarmin if you prefer.
I’ve just realised the date. I’ve always been really bad when it comes to remembering birthdays. It’s not as if they move about each year but I still get caught out. I think my family have given up on me but every now and again I like to suprise them by remembering to get them a card or something. It doesn’t always get there on the correct day but…
Usually it’s a something but then you are talking to the man who turned up at a friends wedding reception with an Easter egg as a wedding gift so something could be anything. Really.
Have a good one sis.
update - While talking to my sister last night I found out that her and her husband share the same birthday and I only discover this after they’ve been married 2 or 3 years. Told you I was disorganised. Anyway, happy birthday to you both. The dead fish is in the post.
Did you know Gmail browser sniffs? I thought that sort of thing went out with “best viewed in…” etc. Having to use Mac OS9 and disliking IE5 my only option is to use a Wacom version of 1.3.1. I’d guess it’s a security issue but it’s still annoying all the same.
After following the Gbrowser story for a few days now (fortunately some of the lnks have been collected together at 456berea street so I don’t have to work to hard) I have to admit to being a bit confused as to how I feel about the whole thing.
A big part of me believes it’ll turn out to be vapourware. A stray comment on bugzilla and the whole thing get blown out of proportion.
Then there’s the part that want’s Mozilla/Firefox/whatever it’s called to succeed. I’ve followed and used Mozilla since 0.8. There’s a history there that I don’t want consigned to a footnote by an upstart browser. Can’t Google simply adopt Firefox? If they’re happy to use the engine then why not use the whole thing?
More recently though (after reading various peoples thoughts) I’ve started to think that maybe whatever Google does it’ll be good for the user (and the devs). I firmly believe that Gecko is currently the best browser engine available today and if Google can get Gecko onto a lot more machines then that can only be a good thing. Maybe it’ll finally force MS to put some serious effort back into IE and bring it into line with current browser technology. I did say maybe.
All this because someone stumbles across a public entry on bugzilla. Vapourware indeed.
The Etherdoxproject has had some content added and code tweaked. It’s proof for me how far I’ve progressed as there were some things that had me wondering why I’d opted for that route instead of the way I’d do it now.
For instance I used <strong> to represent headings. There’s nothing really wrong with it but nowdays I’d use a <hn> tag. It still didn’t bother me enough to go and change it though. I’m too lazy.
As far as I’m concerned people can use tables for layout, non-semantic mark up and have sex with animals but it’s just made me realise how far I’ve come over the last year. I must have been really bad a couple of years back.
Actually I lied. Sex with animals is just weird. Especially if you use tables for layout.
Monkiboi Dot Net hit the big 3 a few days ago. Happy birthday mate (and if that isn’t surreal then I don’t know what is).
We went live earlier this week and although there’s one or two bugs to sort out they’re only minor so allow me to present Colourcards. Again I was code monkey on this one not designer but it looks pretty good. Expect a liquid layout sometime in the future, but don’t hold your breath. One down, three to go.
Ernie Ball died sometime last week. I don’t remember the make of strings I used on my bass as it’s been a while but practically every guitarist I ever played with used his “slinkys” so it’s still a part of my past.
The award for my favourite web comic of the moment goes to Copper.
# cat /dev/hdb > /dev/dsp - Use CTRL-C to kill it when you’ve had enough.
What? September? already?! So what happened there then? As usual when we disappear for a while work is to blame but we’re back. For the moment at least.
I missed the newest release of enlightenment which, according the enlightenment.org Has theme transparency available to the end user. I thought this was a theming addition but then realised (because I don’t have 16.7.1) that it must be something available in the user menu. Sounds fun.
One of my projects is scheduled to go live this week although, technically it’s been sheduled since er… May. The biggest problem has been that real work keeps getting in the way. Plus a mix up meant the order form was re-written twice. Expect some slippage.
My journey into classes is continuing at a slowish pace. I started programming at uni writing (rather bad) assembly language for micro controllers and I think that method of planning and writing code has stayed with me, so I expect to see lines and lines of code in one file. At the moment the only advantage I can see with classes is cleaner code in the main file but then I’m still having trouble with this concept of “objects”. Mind you, at least I don’t have to worry about stack pointers and 2’s complement anymore.
I’m having trouble getting to grips with some aspects of PHP, although it’s probably more to do with programming in general than a particular language.
Functions I get. Using arrays? I can get them to work in the end. Classes? I just don’t get classes. Functions seem to be called methods(!?) and why would I want to use classes anyway? How does $this --> work?
Don’t worry, I’m just letting off some steam. I’ll google for an explanation later.
It was Kim’s birthday yesterday but due to work we ended up heading out to eat today instead. Dim sum. Mmmmm.
Probably my favourite time to eat in Chinatown is late on a summer evening. Sitting on an upper floor of China China with some roast pork, crispy pork and rice with sounds of the street below coming through the open windows. It’s pretty much empty on the upper floors by then so there’s a feeling of calm despite the noise below.
I was going to get Kim a remote for the iPod but the things I’d read online about it made it seem a bit…er…crap. So she got Strictly Ballroom instead. I’m much better at spontaneous gift buying than for events. Honest.
Sometimes when something is bothering you but you can’t figure out quite what it is, the best course of action is to strip the thing right down and take it from there. I guess it would be possible to make this site even more minimal but then you wouldn’t be able to read this. Even I have my limits.
This post is going to look so stupid in the archives :)
Got hold of a copy of Slackware 10 yesterday so I’ve been busy setting that up. If I really knew what I was doing I’d have home set up on a different partition so I didn’t have to copy all my config files over each time but as I said…if I really knew what I was doing…
Best bit so far? It’s a bit sad but when my monitor is blanked the XOrg version of X starts instantly. It was always annoying how it’d have to move the mouse around and hit keys repeatedly before X would respond. This is a good thing. Small but good. Also font’s are looking spiffy in most things. We like spiffy here at monki towers.
The fact that I’m running all these new things means I’ll finally be able to try those programs that refused to work before. I’m a comin’ for ya Skippy, ya hear me now!
Expect anguished posts over the next few days as I break things.
Tired. Been playing Eve a lot this weekend so it’s my own fault but it doesn’t help when you have a work shedule like mine. I’m still trying to fit the finishing of my companys web site into that shedule. How long ago was it I started? The main problem is that it doesn’t feel like work to me (work isn’t supposed to be fun) so I usually abandon it to do some “real” work.
I’ve also become the code monkey on a revamp of a popular open source projects web site. I realise that last sentance is clunky but it’s probably not right to mention which one as it’s still in the early stages but I was pleased to be asked.
Why is it that most of my CSS based problems stem from Internet Explorer for mac. Is Mac IE used on OSX? Please tell me it’s not.
Kevin over at denial has put up a great new design and moved to Textpattern at the same time. I tried the early gamma versions and really liked the UI but couldn’t really get to grips with creating a whole site with it. That doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s a good bit of kit but that it didn’t work for me at the time. I’m fed up of moving systems so I’m going to stick with wordpress. Unless something new and shiny catches my eye that is.
Who would’ve expected this to work on images? Not me anyway.
width:xx%; - where “xx” is your value.
But it does. (Semi) scalable JPEGs, GIFs and PNGs. I’ll have to experiment as it opens up some interesting avenues for layout.
While browsing on sunday night I found a link to HardOCP Doom3 hardware guide which has a page listing the hardware requirements. I thought I’d be close to the minimum specs but I didn’t think I’d be under the requiremements. For a start I need Windows 2000/XP to play. Yeah I know, I know but it’s my choice as to what I run. Well, it was my choice. Seems like I’ll finally have to give Mr Gates some more money.
The 1GHz Athlon might have just made it as I was (just) getting away with playing Black and White with a PII 350MHz and a Voodoo 2 sli rig (I’ve still got them under the bed. I’m a sentimental fool :)) but the final straw was the 2.2Gb of hard drive space. Kim’s been on at me to upgrade for a little while now as using iTunes has eaten all the available space on the laptop so I guess I’ll have to put some money aside to keep us both happy.
The worst bit is that I find this out on the week of release. Ok, maybe I should have been paying a little more attention to things other than the great screenshots but…ah hell, I’m just stupid.
The good news is that once upgraded I’ll be ready for Half Life 2… surely?
We went to see Measure for Measure at the National Theatre last night. It’s not something we’d have chosen but the tickets were given to us so off we went.
As usual I didn’t bother too much with what the actors and actress’ were actually saying but simply listened and tried to pick out the meaning. Hmmm that doesn’t make a lot of sense but I know what I mean. Shakespeare’s guide for writing seemed to be “why use one when you can use ten words instead”.
We had fun although we could have done with an interval as we were there for two and a half hours during which my bum fell asleep. It never seems like a good idea to get up and wander around rubbing your bottom, or anyone else’s come to think of it unless it’s that sort of play of course.
Afterwards it was off to Chinatown for some barbecue pork, crispy pork and rice which was as good as always.
Why do people insist on using the “Granny test” when arguing if Linux is ” desktop ready”. I’m not refering to any particular piece of writing or site but I have to say I find the notion a little bizzare.
The PC as it stands is not a microwave, tv or other household appliance. Maybe in the future it’ll be seen like that but currently it’s not and that’s important. Firmware doesn’t get upgraded on household appliances and they generally have a single basic use unlike a PC. Has anyone in a marketing dept ever said “Take some of these buttons off the remote otherwise it’ll confuse grannies and aunts”? Didn’t think so. Hell, I use Linux, PHP, ASP and built my own machine. Can I manually program the video recorder? Can I fuck!
Some Linux distros can be difficult to install but then so can Windows. No, really. You give someone new to computing a Windows cd and tell them to install it. It should be easy but they won’t be able to do it alone because they’ve never done it before and will need reasurance. The obvious point here is that they don’t need to learn how because most new Pc’s come with Windows pre-installed. Granny will certainly never need to learn how to install Windows will she?
Unified Desktop? You show me any electrical equipment that has the same looking buttons in the same place across different models let alone makes. Granny uses something until it breaks down so she buys a new one. Are you telling me she’ll never use it because the buttons are different? No, she’ll adapt like the rest of us. If granny has never used a PC then she has no preconceptions otherwise use Gnome or KDE if she’s more comfortable with “bar” styles. There are ways to hide all that “confusing” text at startup as well.
There will never be a bell that goes off that says “Ding! Linux is desktop ready”. It’s the general public who’ll decide if it’s ready. We’ll only realise it after the event. Getting it onto machines that people will buy is the problem here not how they use it.
Monki Towers has been an Internet Explorer free zone for the last couple of weeks. Kim read a newspaper article about the various security issues and decided that was it. I wonder how many others thought the same. It probably coincides with the 1% increase in Firefox usage I read about recently.
Half the fun of getting software to run on Linux is trying to interpret the error messages. I finally got Evidence to run after going through the error messages and finally realising what it was it needed to run. It’d be really nice if someone wrote a utiliy that ran in the background that brought up a message box saying “Hey! you need to get this library to get this to work”, and no, I’m not talking about apt-get or it’s clones.
Still can’t get Skippy to compile though.
The GTK2 theme I’ve been working on looks nice but nothing more. There’s nothing special about it. Looks like I’ll have to rethink this one a bit.
On a slightly different tack, now that every Linux distro and their dog has a package management system which (supposedly) takes care of dependencies what’s the main selling point of Debian? I’ve never tried it so I’ve nothing good or bad to say but I’m curious.
We saw Spiderman2 last night and it’s not that different from the last one. The action bits are great. The rest is just slow. Sloooowwww. The comics never interested me so I guess that’s why I didn’t take to the films.
Staying with the subject of films I saw Awakenings recently. Since Good Morning Vietnam I’ve tended to avoid films with Robin Williams in them as I find them overly setimental and my sugar intake is already too high. We started watching as there wasn’t anything else on at the time but somehow I got caught up in it. While Williams was ready and willing to do his usual thing Robert De Niro’s acting made the whole thing watchable, although it didn’t need the pseudo happy ending the film makers gave it.
As people we tend to work around our shortcomings when doing things. Can’t get the hang of “a” but find “b” relatively straightforward? Then there’s a good chance you’ll use “b” 99% of the time and “a” only when you have too.
For a while now I’ve lived under the assumption that I’m quite good at the XHTML/CSS part of development. I suck at anything javascript related but can mockup a layout quite quickly but (and this is the key bit as it turns out) only if I’m working to my layout so I can do things my way.
I’m currently putting the finishing touches to my companys new web site. Being a print company we have plenty of graphic designers (and good ones at that) but all of them are used to designing to a size and having it stay that way. It’s been a trying time for both sides with some changes in direction from them and some embarresment from me:
Me: “No, you can’t do that I’m afraid”
Boss: “Well this site does it” - types in url
Me: “Ah…oh..er…well I’ll give it a go then”
Lets not forget the different browsers and platforms out there as well. Just when I think I’ve got it working ok on the pc side something doesn’t look right on the mac. Why is always someone else who spots these things?
I suppose it’s all part of the learning experience really and I just hope I haven’t come out of it looking too bad. We’ll see as they’re designing the site for a sister company and if they offer it to me then I guess I passed the trial by fire.
The kitchen is pretty much done and life is returning to a semblance of normality here at monki towers.
I’d written a rant on Aqua style themes but deleted it as I wasn’t really making much sense. If you’re going to make a case for something it may as well be coherent otherwise you just look an ass, which is something I’m quite capable of doing without needing to rant thank you very much.
I know I’ve been tired this week but I’m sure I saw an add for a 30″ flat screen monitor from Apple. I’m not sure I’d be too popular if I bought one of those home and I’ve certainly got more important things to spend the money on right now, but later? who knows.
You ever have one of those days when nothing seems to compile correctly? Me too. Obviously I’m managing to narrow this sites readership right down to 0 by asking but going through the output from Make hoping for a translation of that obscure error is never fun.
While on the subject does anyone know what DHAVE is (I think that’s what it says) because it crops up frequently during Make? The first few times I compiled code I kept thinking “Who’s this dave?”
Operation Kitchen Freedom has started in earnest with skirmishes occuring all day between the builders and the cupboards, with the tiles also coming under heavy attac