18 May 2006
As per the last post highlighting the location of 3-phase power, tonight occasioned a trip (er, perhaps “drive” would be more appropriate when speaking of power) to Sydney Uni, to test a dimmer under the cover of darkness. All is good! And, so far as covert theft-of-wattage goes, it was a great deal of fun ;-) No photos of the occasion, unfortunately.
Everything went well until we tried to unplug the 3-phase from the socket, and the stupid thing ripped out of the sandstone. It wasn’t properly mounted to start with, but there was still a bit of an “oh crap” moment. Especially seeing as the thing was LOCKED in “On” position… yeah, probably not the safest of operations, but everything worked and it’s not like we needed to rely on it staying in place for a show or anything (obviously didn’t bother screwing it into place). Yay for ridiculous amounts of lighting powah.
18 May 2006
Flickr’s new Organizr is a huge step backwards. It takes an incredibly usable Flash application, reworks it into a much-slower JavaScript version (that’s still just as inaccessible, and who really cares about screen readers seeing as we’re dealing with vast numbers of photos? *flamebait*), and in the process removes useful graphic (as in, having the quality of graphs, not graphical) elements, replacing them with numeric date selectors, etc.
Oh, yeah, and they’re browser-sniffing and rejecting anyone aside from Firefox, Safari, and IE. Which is ridiculous because Opera is so much easier to get to work with stuff than Safari is… in fact, it’s one of the better behaved browsers. Meanwhile, Flash would work on anything and so many people have Flash it’s hardly a great problem. To choose between a great, usable app and a less-usable, quasi-standards-embracing, still-just-as-inaccessible app seems like it should have an obvious outcome. Sigh. Why couldn’t they just focus on making the Flash thing work better? Multi-select dragging in the Flash UI was the last thing I really desired from Organizr: beyond that, I’d be pretty much content with existing features. But no… they had to go tear it apart. Grrr. Just because programmers like numbers, doesn’t mean the rest of us do. Bring back the drag-and-drop!
p.s. Yes, I know you can get to the old version still. It’s not that so much as the new version seems like a massive regression with absolutely zero advantages, and development on the Flash version is going to be in permanent hiatus (at least until they realise I am infallible and surrender in their folly, etc., etc.)
17 May 2006
I was trying to describe to someone what a 3 phase 32A 415V socket looked like (at least in Australia) the other day and discovered nothing of assistance in Google at all.
So here are two photos.
Note the easter-egg in this image. If you go to Sydney and need to show someone what one looks like, there are about four on the front lawns.
Feel free to steal these images, etc./link to this page. Deep link images and die a horrible death. I’ve refrained from doing BadThings to a couple of MySpace users thus far, but if anyone with slightly more brains tries it then the images will probably turn into things you’d rather they didn’t. Here ends the warning that also applies to every image published here.
17 May 2006
So I’m back to building stylesheets. Feels good. Gets the blood pumping.
Makes me want to strap a bomb to my body and go into Microsoft’s offices ;-)
IE is fun, but PNG support is seriously painful sometimes. Do anything slightly adventurous and it all blows up in your face (no pun intended). I’ve decided IE needs a mascot like Firefox (a cute fox) so that I can get a voodoo doll stuffed toy that can sit in the corner of the office to be pummelled as required.
17 May 2006
So I’d accidentally replaced-from-HEAD a project in CVS here, having not worked on it for a week or two and having forgotten I had, in fact, made changes. Oops.
Fortunately, Opera will save your tabs of everything forever in a tab-cache (as well as a file-cache, but rendered), so as soon as I fired that up I knew I was saved! Such a liberating feeling. I love Opera. *saves images, markup + CSS and hurriedly checks in*