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IE 7 blows January 29, 2007

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I’ve finally started using my Windows machine at work against so I’ve upgraded to IE 7. I must say that it blows. You can enable a menu bar but it goes _underneath_ the location bar. Oh hang on… you can disable it with a registry tweak. Better but the UI is still ugly (it positively jars when used with the “Classic” style) and I had to go through all the options to make sure it wasn’t doing evil things behind my back (like tracking my surfing via the “anti-phishing filter”).

I’d prefer to turn off the search bar but at least I can make it use Google. Firefox lets me turn it off. Safari doesn’t. A hack lets me at least fix Safari to use google.com.au instead of google.com (stupid Apple!).

Now I’m stuck with two useful buttons (home and RSS) waaaay over to the right while everything else is over to the left.

At least it doesn’t bork on the layout and Javascript stuff I’ve got on my blog.

Update 30 January 2007

It seems that someone over at Microsoft thinks explorer windows looking at a mounted share should have the same privileges as a web page. This means that (amongst other things) double clicking a .zip file gives me a warning. If I increase the security of the Internet zone, I can’t even open the same file. How crap!!!

This site has information about how to enable the Intranet zone and how to use that to make everything sane again. The only thing I can add is that when you map a network path to a drive letter, the “UNC” checkbox isn’t enough and you also need to enable the first one.

I’m just glad I was actually able to fix this without causing IE7 to whine at me (Your connection isn’t safe!). I don’t think I can say enough how full of shit the decision to link Internet Explorer and explorer was. Why the hell should an upgrade (and a _mandatory_ one at that) to a web browser change the experience I get when exploring my “local” filesystems?

Isaac's first Gymboree session January 27, 2007

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Isaac had his first Gymboree session today. We started Emily younger but his reflux means that we would have spent half our time cleaning up vomit. Now that he’s walking he doesn’t really vomit anymore.

Just like Emily, he couldn’t handle the mats and spent most of the time falling over everything. He loved sliding down things. He went through tunnels and climbed up ramps. He definitely enjoyed himself. He really liked the bubbles and tried to pop them with his finger. He fell over during parachute time and smashed his face on my foot so he cried for a bit. I don’t know how long it was before Emily became obsessed with Gymbo but Isaac wasn’t interested at all today. He was off looking for bubbles to pop instead.

Isaac started swimming a few weeks ago. I took him for the first time on Thursday. He really seems to like the water and doesn’t come up spluttering as much as Emily did at the start. He even managed to monkey around the pool but he needed assistance to keep his head above the water.

We took Isaac to a GP today. He’s been on Losec but it doesn’t seem to be working as well as it did before we took him off so we’re going to try a higher dose. We’ve also got a pillow under his mattress so he can sleep more upright and we’re not giving him a bottle at night anymore (I reckon the liquid, even thickened, is hard for him to keep down). Other ailments were ruled out so it’s definitely reflux that’s the problem. I guess that means we’ll be seeing a specialist soon.

Emily tries drinking January 26, 2007

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We had an Australia Day/Birthday party today. It was a small family gathering at my dad’s house. My brother decided to let Emily have some of his drink but didn’t realise how string it was (it had vodka in it) and didn’t stop her when she tried to keep going. He realised how much she’d had and so we watched her. We were eating lunch and she sat there eating nicely so we thought she might be ok but after lunch she got up and couldn’t walk straight. It’s a shame we didn’t have a video camera there because she was so funny and we were all cracking up watching her. She kept losing her balance and fell over a few times.

We put her in the pool and tired her our by having her swim back and forth between us. She crashed in the car on the way home and seems fine now.

Underwater World January 26, 2007

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We went to Underwater World on Wednesday. Our main aim was to see the giant squid they have (the only one that’s been caught apparently). We also figured it was a good thing to take the kids to because they love Shark Bay at Seaworld.

About half way there I turned to Bree and said, “We should have brought the camera”. D’oh!

We watched a seal show which the kids enjoyed. There was a really neat aquarium they’d made from a car. It was just sitting there looking like a car but it was full of water and fish. There’s a heap of displays that are basically small tanks with a particular environment and some animals from that environment; literally millions of fish of all shapes, sizes and colours. They had a variety of rays in an open-topped tank low enough for kids to put their hands into… but then they had a “Do not put your hands in the tank” sign, which was sensible (since the rays would probably bite or sting you) but strange. Perhaps the tank didn’t originally hold rays.

Of course, their primary attraction is the underwater tunnel. It’s a square shape and there’s a conveyor belt which is nice because it means you don’t have to wait for people to walk forwards. The kids loved it. There’s a zooming effect as the fish swim up to the glass. When a shark swims up to you and fills your vision it’s pretty cool.

There was an attraction there called Dinosaur World. They have animatronic dinosaurs which is cool but totally freaked out Emily. They have some controls that let you move some wooden skeletons too but most of them were broken.

The squid was pretty cool. It’s encased in ice which should preserve it for ages but I can’t help but think a plastinated model would be better, especially since you’d be able to clearly see it from all angles. Perhaps it’s not possible to plastinate a squid. The ice block was about as long as me but the squids tenticles were wrapped around a bit. It must have been at least twice as long as me. The eye was as big as my fist.

It was interesting with the kids. We pretty much couldn’t do anything that involved standing still for too long (like reading all the writing next to each tank). The squid was with a collection of deep water stuff but it required lots of reading so we had to skip through.

Isaac's reflux sneaks back January 22, 2007

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So about 3 weeks ago, we took Isaac off of his Losec (which reduces stomach acid). We tried a few months ago but he had a tooth coming though and that’s always made his reflux worse. This time though it was fine. That is until the last week. Isaac’s been acting strange. At the drop of a hat he’d just crumple on the floor. The thing is, it was more like a tantrum than anything the reflux made him do so it took us a while to figure out what it was. We’re going to put him back on Losec for a few days to see if it helps, just to really be sure it’s reflux. The thing is that we pretty much exhausted all the non-invasive options for handling the reflux so we want to be really sure that there’s nothing more we can do.

NeverWinter Nights UI flaw (stores) January 17, 2007

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Ok… so it’s not really a flaw, it’s just a very bad UI design. Until today, I had no idea that there were multiple screens in each tab in the stores. I mean, tabs makes sense, screens make sense but screens in tabs just does not make sense. All this time there’s been little arrows and a 1/5 indicator but it never occurred to me that this would do anything other than navigating the tabs.

The only good thing about this is that since I’ve had less to spend my money on (all the good stuff isn’t on the first page), I’ve saved up heaps and even found most of my best items in chests (thanks to the random generation). I went on a shopping spree and picked up 2 katana +3 (replacing 2 katana +2), a 3+3 shield with +6 for dragons (replacing 3+3 shield, handy since I’m about to kill some dragons), a belt with immunity to death magic and fear (supplementing my strength +3 belt when it’s more important to stay alive), a helmet and cloak (replacing my previous helmet, 2 cloaks and a ring). I would have got armour too but I picked up the current best armour (8+3 with freedom) from a chest yesterday.

So I’m now down to 1 vs 2 swords (extra defence vs faster killing), +3 AC amulet vs poison/drain immunity amulet (spiders, ghasts and mummies do poison/level drain) and now +3 strength belt vs death magic/fear immunity belt (handy for the big bosses who always give me fear).

About the swords. I’m as specialised as you can get with katanas. After getting all those feats and the awesome great cleave, I moved onto the 2 weapon feats. Going for pure grunt was good at first (I could clear a room very quickly by combining single-strike kills and great cleave) but I’m finding that 2 weapons tends to be better now (since I can’t kill anything with a single strike anymore). The improved 2 weapon fighting feat gives me 3 hits per round, essential when there’s half a dozen guys all trying to hit you while it takes you half a dozen hits to take out each one.

I’ve noticed that this current level (the one with dragons) is very sprawling and contains seemingly-pointless dungeon crawls. I went through an entire map in the fire giant castle for absolutely nothing. There wasn’t even any good treasure in there and once I was done I just had to walk all the way back out.

I’m now going to have to do the dragons bit again because when you feed the red dragon dead blue dragon, the effect does not last for long. I did that before running off to kill the green dragon and bring it’s eggs back which means I can’t then kill the red dragon to get the gold dragon’s reward. Trust me when I say you’d be more confused if I used their names instead of their colours.

Update 24 January 2007

So I also just found out something even more annoying. Many of the expensive items have features like ‘haste’ and ‘freedom’ but there is NO information anywhere (in the game at least) about what these terms mean. I got a pair of boots that had ‘haste’, figuring they’d let me walk around quicker (which they did) but there was no indication that they’d also give me AC+4. I kept putting on my boots of hardiness (only AC+3) when fighting monsters because I didn’t know about that. Worse, I sold a “ring of power” that I found because I didn’t know what ‘freedom’ was (and it wasn’t any better than my ring of elemental protection otherwise). When I went to buy it back, the store wanted almost 200,000 GP for it!

I’ve now finished the original campaign and am about to start Shadows of Undrentide. I had a quick look and it seems that while I can re-use my previous character, the game isn’t designed for you to start at level 16. The monsters scale so that they’re still challenging but nothing else in the game does. Being the favoured pupil at school when you’ve saved the world from the Old Ones isn’t really believable. Worse, there’s no chance of getting good items from stores for ages. Being able to buy a basic sword isn’t helpful when I’ve already got enchanted +3 swords.

Aging according to Emily January 16, 2007

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So Emily knows that she’s 2. She also knows that Isaac is 1. I asked her today how old she thought I was and she said, “three”.

A new take on an old problem January 9, 2007

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So I’ve been using a custom-built system to deal with the excessive heat given off by Eve. It’s primitive but it works. Basically, a script polls the temp (using an older speedit version) and adjusts the minimum fan speed based on what the temp is doing. The algorithm is crap but it’s been good enough that I haven’t bothered to do anything about it.

So I was looking around today and stumbled on this forum post that discusses an alternate way to achieve the same thing. In fact, this solution looks much more like what I want. Oh wait… many pages into the discussion this idea is abandoned for SMC-based utilities, including my own fanspeed. Sigh. Why must everyone be so quick to drop good ideas for bad ones? I’ll have to look into this further, since this sort of logic tuning is exactly what I was trying to put into fanspeed.

Luckily, as a result of reading to the end, I found out that Fan Control has temperature-based speeds (using the SMC too, not speedit like fanspeed does). The algorithm seems to be less intelligent than fanspeed (no increasing the fanspeed if the temperature doesn’t come down) and it’s definitely less aggressive but the GUI is sooo much nicer and it’s GPL so I can tweak the algorithm a bit. Actually, it might be enough to just tweak the allowed ranges (so I can make the “curve” look like what I get out of fanspeed).

My first Qtopia apps January 8, 2007

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I’ve written plenty of code for Qtopia but until now, I haven’t really had anything worth distributing (either because it’s part of the product or it’s something nobody else would want).

That’s finally changed. May I present Alarms and topinfo.

2 Birthdays January 8, 2007

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We attended 2 birthday parties on the weekend. It let me give the camera and lenses a workout.

I started off with the 28-90mm lens. I definitely found it to be more useful then the 18-50mm lens. There was one or two times when the wide angle would have been nice but most of the time it was a simple matter to step back a step or two. The real surprise for me was how good and useful the 70-300mm lens was. Obviously it needs a bit of room between you and your subject but with a bit of light (there was plenty of that) it’s able to take very crisp photos. I got shots of the kids running around and they’ve come out great.