19 May 2005
I’m starting to get a tad sick of my trusty 9 year-old ViewSonic 15GS-3 CRT monitor, with my eyes suffering somewhat due to the inevitable compromise between resolution (screen real estate) and refresh rate (headache-inducing flicker).
It puts up an admirable performance for a 15″ monitor (I’d say probably the best I’ve ever used), and manages 1280*1024 at 60Hz just fine – but a 15″ screen really isn’t meant to be run at that kind of resolution, and 60Hz is just TOO low (I can’t generally pick flicker above 85Hz, but anything below and it’s unpleasant) a refresh rate to use permanently.
The problem with screen resolutions is that it’s impossible to ever go DOWN a notch – I used to run at 1024, then shifted to 1152 for ages, and have recently switched to 1280 to make life easier. All this on the same monitor! So I’m wishing I had a bigger, unflickery screen right about now.
Does anyone have recommendations for a 17″ LCD? Looking for something which does 1280*1024 and has DVI (VGA would be cool, too) input. The response time isn’t particularly important as I don’t do video or games…
18 May 2005
I think, if I had my time again, I’d start a new blog for Extension 2 and eventually print it all and paste it into a journal. I would write more often, from anywhere in the world, and everything would be centralised, linear. “Boring”, but all there. If I wanted to include things I’d drawn or diagrams, etc, I’d scan them… I go to that sort of effort, absurdly, whilst not bothering for a plain physical medium.
It’d certainly beat the anarchy which currently passes for a “journal” of the process of composition in months past! At some point in the next two weeks, I somehow need to sit down and sift, paste, annotate, and generally make intelligible the dribble of work that has been steadily produced (although never consolidated into one) over the past months, before I’m required to submit that thing for marking.
18 May 2005
Documented here as much for my own reference as anything else!
Back in the bad old days of table-based layout, there used to exist a way to vertically align content through using the valign element. For whatever reason, CSS doesn’t have an equivalent vertical control for objects… but there is a way around this.
By setting a property to display: table-cell;, it’s possible, through the use of vertical-align in CSS, to essentially achieve what we used to be able to do with valign.
For example,
display: table-cell;<br />
vertical-align: middle;
will make the contents of the element to which those styles are applied display in its centre – useful for vertically centering content on a page.
You can see this in action on this W3C CSS Tips & Tricks page.
14 May 2005
It was good. Better-than-last-year good, but that was sort of anticipated. There were 19 performers all up, ranging from skits to musical performances to stand-up comedy to political-campaign style baby wielding.
The voting was a success, with about 160 people throwing in their voice – but primarily just via standard voting terminals, with SMS voting not being heavily used. I don’t think it was the result of people’s hesitance to use SMS, but rather incorrect promotion – the programme should have featured SMS codes for all acts, as well as instructions on how to vote on the back cover. We were going to do a brief “how to vote” video, but ran out of time to cut it together, which also didn’t help things.
The ticketing system was also partially to blame – there were two types of ticket; standard voting tokens (for use at the terminals) and SMS tickets, which featured a unique code. More than a few audience members were looking for the non-existant SMS code on their ticket – more signage outside was required, and I didn’t get a chance to talk to the ticket sellers, so it’s possible they weren’t asking people how they’d like to vote.
Anyway, SMS voting was barely used, but needed a query that was stupidly complicated to figure out who voted for what (at least compared to last year’s system). I hadn’t thought about how the votes would be returned that hard, thinking I’d be able to quickly cook up some SQL to do it, as per last year… so at about 4pm (FOH opened at 6:30pm) I realised that it was a little more complicated than anticipated, and I made a slightly-anxious phone call to Michael, who managed to cook up the following over the phone.
SELECT participants.name, count( votes.For_ID ) AS count
FROM participants
LEFT JOIN votes ON participants.ID = votes.For_ID
GROUP BY participants.ID
ORDER BY `count` DESC
Dale, you’re a freak, but thankyou!
Learning how to use LEFT JOIN is now high on my to-learn list.
Anyway, the results themselves were wonderfully controversial – the winner was The Aaron Carter Tribute Band, of Year 11, which was in direct competition with The Backstreet Toys of Year 12 all night — and Backstreet Toys came in second place with just one vote between them!
Third place was Jack Wright, who was a mere three votes from the winner – and all three were leap frogging each other for the duration of the voting period. Exciting stuff to watch!
Thanks to all who went on the night, you helped raise over $700 for Assistance Dogs, and hopefully had a lot of fun in doing so! Special thanks also to Ben for his ability to keep driving in the small hours of the morning, to Steve and Guy for coming back and cooking up vision, and to Digihire for reduced-rate hire of a MX-50 vision mixer!
