26 May 2007
Remix07 looks awesome (and cheap). I’m already booked out for that week, which really sucks… even flying to Melbourne and staying overnight it looks like it’ll be a fantastic conference for… not lots more than a regular (i.e. non-MS subsidised) conference in Sydney. Its content is outside the scope of what I’d usually be interested in developing with, but I admit now to my insatiable curiosity into Silverlight, WPF, and the subtly-hinted-at media streaming aspects of the conference. Plus they’re giving away Expression Web to attendees, which would nearly ‘pay’ for the trip anyway. Sigh. Maybe next year.
25 May 2007
Whenever I need to find Firefox in task manager, it doesn’t ever take long. Firefox is the fat kid of web browsers… it’s kind of hard for it to hide. If it once were a sleek, lean fox, today it’s caught just a few too many stray chickens and drunk a little too much of Bean’s apple cider. It wouldn’t take any bulldozers to find this fox, just a moderate sized keyboard with three keys (no prizes for guessing the three-finger’d salute).
I haven’t had a great day with Firefox. Well… I spent 3-4 hours in meetings today, so I didn’t even have that much time with Firefox! Still managed to let me down twice, though.
Damn its indisposable development tools *sobs uncontrollably*
I think I’ll switch back to Opera for all non-development Internet-related activity for a while… unless anyone has any other browser recommendations? I’ve seriously thought about IE7, but its rendering is still just a little too patchy for me to be able to live with myself as an Internet user.
Bleh. Let it be observed: even high-profile open source does not always lead to a good product. Its memory management is nothing short of repulsive. It will regularly use more memory than Photoshop and Illustrator combined — admittedly, I use Photoshop mostly for web production and not high resolution print stuff (though that does happen a few times a week, and it won’t often go far beyond the 350MB that Firefox seems to manage fairly regularly)
I’m still using CS2, so there aren’t any magical CS3 memory management advances that make such a claim possible… Firefox just sucks :P
I’d blame Windows being in need of a reinstall (it’s been running since October… more than six months without death :P Plus I started out not being happy with it because it’d been installed from the guy I bought the computer off, I just hacked it to use my CD key instead of the one he’d used to test things… so it’s never been perfect), but really, it’s not that bad for any other application. I normally do a reboot once a week and things are fine… heavy duty graphics editing, occasional video editing, constant mail and occasional wordprocessing… and of all those things it is a web browser that can’t get it right. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so derisive about it seeing as I make a living off developing in this relatively simple world… but I am.
The flip side to all of that, of course, is that I’ve been trying to live (more) like a normal user the past few years. Essentially, recognising that it’s simpler to buy software than write it (WordPress, Flickr), using hackably-open technologies instead of truly open ones (WMA Lossless sans DRM), and a general abandonment of open source principles in favour of vastly improved productivity (Photoshop, Premiere, Office 2007, royalty-free stock).
It’s certainly paid off in terms of professional development and enhanced creative potential… but there’s something lost in not being able to hack visualisations hooked up to a webcam together on a command-line anymore. Admittedly, that sort of thing only comes around half a dozen times a year! But no matter, it’s all good fun. Given more friends who were into that sort of thing and some good music, I’d so live in the party house. I’ve not figured out how to do the same command-line video tricks using Windows just yet, so next time I’ll probably use Windows for visualisations (woo particle emitters!) and a separate Linux-powered laptop (maybe?) for webcam trickery. Then I’ll take webcam stuff straight out into Windows capture and skip my vis mixer altogether for once… I gotta learn to travel lighter anyway!
24 May 2007
Officially what I’ll be trying to acquire when I buy Shakespeare from now on. I have their The Winter’s Tale title, and it is nothing less than spectacular. It even includes as an Appendix the complete text of Pandosto. The Triumph of Time. (the primary source text for Shakespeare’s play). Pages 181-225 are devoted to this text alone… very cool. I do wonder if they do the same with texts such as Rosalynde as appropriate, or if this particular edition’s editor was feeling particularly benevolent!
Either way… highly recommended editions.
Also to acquire when next book shopping: Alice in Wonderland, for some opium-fuelled holiday reading. And perhaps Hitchhiker’s Guide to see if I can endure it nine years from when I last tried… less likely fuelled by opium, but from all reports it sounds bizarre enough to warrant suspicion of the involvement of some other mind-altering substances!
Holiday reading = after June 22nd, whereupon my last exam occurs. Then, off to lead on a study camp (perhaps time for reading? I can justify Alice as being in support of the HSC English ‘journeys’ core!) for a week, three days back home in Sydney (undoubtedly to be insanely busy) before going away to New Zealand from the 4th to 16th of July. My how time flies. I may or may not be at university in an equal capacity next semester due to a whole bunch of things, primarily related to its perceived importance and myriad other opportunities that are cropping up all over the place. It would be, for example, nice to have some money in exchange for funny hours in the form of more work (which I think I prefer to regular and boring hours) and not have to pursue useless assessments (I speak of one particular subject that has copped flak on this blog over the past few months) around this.
The CYIADA thing is progressing nicely. Michael came on board about a month ago as chief code monkey, which has been nice coz I’ve been spending a bit more guilt-free time in Photoshop. There is a two-fold reason for that, first of which being I don’t feel like I need to try and prototype anything on my own, and the other is that now he’s developing stuff, there’s an imminent need for front-end to make this thing saleable! We’re close to landing on a new name that doesn’t sound like something you’d use to gas people with.
There’s a meeting tomorrow arvo wherein we will speak of many things (except perhaps for shoes and ships and ceiling wax and cabbages and kings), involving a progress update, an extensive argument about names and inclusiveness, prayer, another argument about launch dates and where/how it’s going to be hosted, who’s providing SMS, how much money we’re planning on losing and for how long, how we’re going to promote it, open sourcing things we write, and lots lots more.
I should really update the CYIADA project blog, too, but we haven’t got staggeringly good readership over there anyway (well, not compared to here, though perhaps more after Southern Cross’ coverage – at the end of that article, which is effectively buried online, though less so in print… ironically we need online readers far more than print ones!) so hopefully that will wait until we settle on a new name (and associated domain name acquisitions take place).
Oh and in unrelated news, my camera turned up. It wasn’t in Selo’s car. This is a good and a bad thing… good because I have no money to spend on a still camera right now, bad because I have no reason to buy a new one even if I did :P It’s still got another six months of life left in it I think, though it’s looking pretty abused. Still takes decent pictures. I’m so happy with its performance over the last two and a half years (link goes to first photos I took with it), seriously. I will struggle to make up my mind when it dies about what kind of camera to get… a larger SLR would be more useful for production stuff and night time things, but this is so portable… I don’t know.
And there is a decent sized blog update.
Now, I should stop procrastinating and prepare to kick off some fairly pressing freelance work when I get back from uni tonight! Uni assessments, also, are proving to be rather worthy of procrastination. Ahhhh… I keep remembering “one more thing” to write about: 28 Weeks Later proved to be a seriously scary zombie flick. Saw it with Ben and Tori last night. Was ultimate year 10 flashbacks, only with added alcohol and late nights without concerned parentals! We went to Pizza Hut all you can eat afterwards… its so disgusting but such good fun :P
As for the movie… it’s quite messy. But it was spectacularly produced… I need to re-watch the first one, but I’m pretty sure it was much more in-your-face suspenseful. It sets up for a third film at the end, which vaguely irritates me, but… well, rumours have it that it’ll be capped at a trilogy only. And this was a really good sequel, so I don’t think it’ll matter too much. Wikipedia has full spoiler detail for 28 Weeks Later… See the film first instead if you can normally handle that sort of thing.
23 May 2007
I will not answer. Stop trying. Leave voicemail if you feel so inclined, but unless I’m expecting a call from an unknown number in that range of about five minutes, I’m not going to pick up. I dislike talking to people I don’t know well over the phone at the best of times, but people I potentially don’t know at all? No thanks.
Thankyou for your attention.
19 May 2007
The language bar will randomly change languages, and randomly disappear, and because it’s handled at an application-specific level (admittedly a largely sensible decision) this means restarting applications just to change the language. This pisses me off immensely. Almost to the point of “if Vista did it better I’d consider switching”, and I don’t even have that much to do with languages other than english.
I’ve not used this much on anyone else’s system, but haven’t done anything particularly crazy with it and it still sucks… soooo… I blame Windows. I’m almost certain mainstream Linux distros can handle this better, but know nothing about how OS X deals with it… shrug.