28 Jan 2006
NetMeeting video is still unbeaten. Trying to video conference with a guy in Melbourne today, MSN was on the cards but sucked even in a LAN environment, Skype was tried and looked awesome fullscreen and in a LAN environment, but bombed out pretty badly for web-cam support at the Melbourne end and in terms of bandwidth — you can’t even scale the video! — and NetMeeting was great in terms of reliability and decent quality over both LAN and Internet connections (and yes, it let you scale. Last update, 1996. Or whenver. A while ago!).
Unfortunately, NetMeeting is too difficult to use, and one end (or both ends… our end I’m 99% sure is working fine as I write this) had routing difficulties because, obviously, NetMeeting doesn’t use some crappy central directory server unless you select the “Microsoft, please steal my information” checkbox. Which, unlike the latest MSN Messenger install, isn’t ticked by default.
PC software makers suck. Earlier this week I… had an encounter with Tori’s laptop, featuring no less than 188 individual specimins of spyware: A new record for me. I started trying to dis-infect but eventually pronounced it vaguely beyond repair. The spyware was such that it was blocking sockets for all applications EXCEPT I.E. (presumably because it can control Internet Explorer infinitely better than it can anything else–more than a couple of sites were blocked, too), so I couldn’t even update the anti-spyware definitions. It’d also broken Windows Update. Yar, this be re-install territory. Caused, probably in no small part, by “ticked by default” junk.
27 Jan 2006
[Or, making up for a distinct absence of posting for various reasons not to be discussed but hopefully rectified – the content absence, that is – by this post.]
Until about three weeks ago, I was convinced I was going to take a year off between finishing school and starting uni to work full time. I’d roundly insulted a small web firm a couple of weeks before leaving for New Zealand, re-building their site with CSS in about three hours (it wasn’t perfect, but it was a decent effort) and going into their office to tell them their version sucked and mine was better. To date, the website in question hasn’t been ‘fixed’, as it were, but I got a call the day after I returned from New Zealand asking if I was interested in coming in for an interview. I’ve been working four days a week there since.
Tori came back. We spent some time together, and I kind of realised that putting off University for another year wasn’t a brilliant move, contrary to what more than a handful of… older people… had said. The main reason is probably social (which I don’t ever talk about too much on here, I guess), but financially it’s not… compelling… to stay any further away from the other side of Uni any longer than is neccessary, because “that side” means a job/career I’m interested in as a longer-term option, hence financial stability more so than in an industry I’m perfectly interested in provided I get to do the things I like — and where I am presently fortunate enough to be in a position where that’s pretty close to what I’m doing — and indifferent about it (the industry) otherwise. Social/political information theory notwithstanding, because that’s an entirely separate kettle of fish that relates both to my pre- and post- uni directions. Which are, incidentally, IT/connectivity/accessibility now, and education later. Somewhere in the middle there’ll be (is?) a fusion of the two, which has been bandied about a little over the last 12 months. I had a very interesting conversation RE: something along these lines last night, which will hopefully evolve into something in the not-too distant future!
So yes, as of Monday I’m officially an Arts student at the University of Sydney. In a way I feel bad about this because I’d said to work that I was planning on sticking around in a near-F/T capacity for a year (and at the time I had been), but at the same time this feels so much more… sensible? Plus everyone was mind-blowingly nice about it, even though I called on Saturday to say I’d be in late Monday because I had to enrol (because of when the offer had come in, and because I’d been putting off saying it the week before).
Anyway, in summary: I’m working nearly full time doing web development in an awesome role where I get to do lots of CSS, semantic-web junk, usability work, and some occasional JavaScript (though mercifully not too much! Still learning. If anyone else in Aus is interested in getting a copy of Jeremy Keith’s allegedly-excellent “DOM Scripting” book, let me know so we can order a few copies from Amazon and get cheaper shipping, because no-one in Australia is stocking copies for another month or three!). And as much or as little server-side work as I want. At the minute I’m unequivocally saying “little”, but that might change at some point, maybe. I’m going to uni, too. That doesn’t start until March, so I’m going to be working ‘normally’ up until then, and after that feeling my way according to timetables, how much of a life I have, how broke I am, etcetera!
Tied into the whole work thing, my first to-be-promoted-on-TV website is going live sometime in the wee hours of Sunday Monday, which is audaciously exciting. Not in the least because it will hopefully attract insane amounts of traffic, and the CSS-is-good-for-your-bandwidth-costs argument carries weight here!! It also features AJAX, chiefly for usability/bandwidth-saving reasons… but also because it’s just damn cool! Anyway, there will be posts, screenshots, etcetera (probably saying the same kind of thing I just said, only naming names and with pretty pictures!) scheduled for release here to co-incide with the site’s launch, so… watch this space.
As for Uni? English, Philosophy, Classics and (Ancient) Greek are currently on the menu. Greek… may be swapped out, possibly. For Linguistics or maybe Latin if anything, but possibly not. The reasoning behind it — because I’ve attracted many strange looks as I tell people I’m planning on studying Ancient Greek — is essentially:
- Learning another language (any other language) helps me understand English better. Doing English, no-one will ever explain grammar and structure of language to me. It sucks. Admittedly, Linguistics could prove to be useful in this department, too.
- Ancient Greek ties in with the Classics courses I’m taking. Don’t ask me to remember what they are, or even look them up, because I don’t have a copy of my preferences (they took it, because their stupid computers were stupidly broken. I’m so glad I’m not studying IT!) and it’s not available online yet and I’m just lazy. And trying to get this massive post finished so I can get back to having a life, or something.
- The New Testament is written in Greek. As Kristen so eloquently expressed it last night:
You can be one of those people at Bible studies who go “Well, the greek word for that actually means ‘this is ambiguous…’”
Heh. Marcelo coughed something that sounded suspiciously like “Moore College” (a Sydney Bible college) when he found out, but that’s not really what I had in mind choosing it… maybe, though!</li> </ol>
Anyway. The blog has nearly caught up to me. Almost. There’s a bunch of other stuff happening, but this is the glut of stuff I needed to write at some point and had been putting off!
27 Jan 2006
I broke that mystical bandwidth barrier today. Don’t really know why, still. I can only assume Dale was entirely correct about usage/faster upload, because goodness knows posting of content hasn’t been particularly up to scratch (in terms of volume, anyway) of late!
25 Jan 2006
The wonderful thing about IE/Win is you always know where you stand. Its foibles are comprehensibly documented, and fixes for many issues are available to those who seek them. Firefox 1.0.x Mac, however, is anything but thoroughly documented. My latest gripe? Floats, of all things. You’d think we’d have them sorted and worked out properly by now, but apparently not. Opera, IE, Safari and Firefox Win (and Firefox Mac/1.5.x) all behave perfectly, but Firefox Mac decides it’s not interested. Unless, of course, I modify the properties using the DOM and then set back to whatever it had been… in which case it displays as expected. Clearly, it’s a render bug rather than an outright misinterpretation of the specs, but annoying nonetheless. Not in the least because there is very little information about it available. Grr.
24 Jan 2006
It’s new, so far as I’m aware, and I can’t even build a decent test case for it. In one instance alone, if there’s a blank line between two elements (i.e. just for readability, doesn’t need to be like that), then certain versions of IE — and only when their traffic is being proxied through certain transparent/non-transparent servers — will display a blanking/”unknown” character.
At first it was thought this was just because of a dud character in a file, but then we tried using PHP to echo \n\r, \n, and \r in the place of a manually entered return: all of which resulted in the bug persisting. The only fix I’ve got is to use an HTML comment between lines
</element><!--
--><another element='element'>
Like that. Anything else, and we get a blanking character in there. Bizarre!
It doesn’t occur anywhere else on the site in question, and I’m not going to waste hours trying to build another un-branded test case which may or may not work! The problem affects IE only (though we didn’t do version testing), and only when traffic is going through (some) proxy servers. And only that one character.
It’s not an encoding problem per-se, though is obviously related to that in some sense. This is still internal-only, and it’s not being dished up with proper content-types defined in HTTP headers (because I’m still liable to change my mind as to how that should be done, and I’m not calling it until the site is about to launch/what is/isn’t required in terms of content-type–affected things is abundantly clear!), but seeing as it only has an impact when using through a proxy it’s pretty obvious it’s not JUST here. Shrug. I reluctantly deleted the linebreak and the box went away.