jump to navigation

Supernatural's Recycled Set June 28, 2007

Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a comment

So I’m watching Supernatural (All Hell Breaks Loose Part 1) and Sam wakes up in this town. Holy crap, I know this town! I’ve seen this set before… in some strange movie I watched late one night on SBS. It was in spanish or something and I can’t even remember what it was about but there was a lady, a donkey and possibly a man walking through this town (which was in the middle of a desert, not wet like it is in Supernatural).

Mind the gap June 19, 2007

Posted by a1291762 in : site , add a comment

I’ve decided to take the plunge. My blog still exists in it’s previous location but every page has a link to the new location on blogspot. I’m in the middle of updating my xml template I did ages ago to more closely match my classic template. Of course, I can’t stand to use default crap for everything (and doing _anything_ with the online tools screws up the XML Blogger returns to you) so I’ve had to learn more than I really wanted to know about the XML format Blogger uses. I mostly did this last time I looked at this but then back then I was trying to mimic a much less featureful blog :(

One thing I’m already peeved about… conditionals. Admittedly they are more powerful than what classic templates had but they have no boolean logic. AND can be kind of done with nested ifs (doing the else for this is a pain though). OR requires copying the code or using an includeable… Thank God for includables! They’re a great way to separate common bits of code.

I imagine it will take some weeks to get everything sorted out.

Keywords have been removed from all posts and added as Labels.

Stuff like images and some links will be broken until I go and update all the links. The old blog had images and stuff beside the blog content, relying on the base URL being set but I can’t put such things on blogspot and I use relative links to all the blog pages so I’m going to have to update all the non-page links. Ugh.

It’s so fast not having to wait for FTP uploads. Then again, I can’t test anything locally anymore so I have to hit the blogger server much more often when making template changes.

The searching is much better than what I had before. I’ve just removed my stuff because there’s a search box on the blogger toolbar (that I have to use now I’m on blogspot).

Update 20 June 2007

The main page and item pages should now have parity with the old blog (it even says “1 comment” instead of “1 comments” now!). I’ve taken all the “flexibility” out of the template and as a result it’s actually possible to understand what it’s doing now. Using the GUI controls to edit the template kills my modifications anyway so it’s not like I’m going to miss that ability.

I’ll start on archive pages tomorrow (they could be a bit tricky).

Update 21 June 2007

Archive pages are back up to full function. I had to create a second archive widget so that I could get access to the archive data (used for the next/prev month links).

Most impressive is what I’ve managed for the label and search pages. They both show up as index pages so I’ve had to sniff out the title and use JavaScript to fix the display. Search even highlights your terms like Safari 3 does though my code is bogus, it just calls innerHTML.split(” “) which can break HTML tags up.

Update 22 June 2007

I finally got around to testing out the new blog in a variety of browsers. Unsurprisingly there are no issues in Firefox or Konqueror. Equally unsurprisingly IE 7 (what I have at work) screws up both the layout and the JavaScript. I’ll get around to fixing it but it’s not exactly high on my priority list. I think I’ll put up a suggestion for IE users to upgrade to Safari ;)

Update 26 June 2007

This has to be the most updates to a post evar!

Thanks to the awesome MultipleIEs program, I’ve got IE 5.5, 6 and 7 all running at once (7 is native, 5.5 and 6 are standalone). The installer comes with IE 3, 4 and 5 too but they’re all not supported by Blogger anyway (3 works unstyled, 4 and 5 break on the Navbar).

I see the changes I made (blind because I didn’t have IE 7 installed at the time) work in IE 7 so that’s good. One thing I tried to fix (not very well apparently) is that Blogger’s search box doesn’t work if you’ve got ActiveX disabled (so much for having strict security). Since searching is done via a trivial URL I put in my own search box that just uses a form but it doesn’t seem to be working. I’ll fix that up later.

Just to weigh in on the whole Safari vs Windows rendering issue… I much prefer Safari’s rendering. I’m using “light” because it matches the system a bit better. The system’s rendering to me looks like… well, it looks like it’s not being smoothed at all. The “blurry” text that Safari uses makes my eyes feel better… except for this: IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII. Those I characters (I’m using a Sans font) all look different because my font size and DPI mean that the vertical lines aren’t all sitting on a pixel boundary. I guess the Microsoft algorithm would do that “more correctly” but while this does show a problem with Apple’s rendering it’s not actually relevent when reading a block of text. It’s like people who test cameras by pointing them at walls or test charts intsead of actually taking pictures.

Update 26 June 2007

Safari 3.0.2 ate this post!

3.0 exhibited a similar bug but I didn’t see it in 3.0.1. In 3.0 I noticed that some sites would not get all the text in a text area widget. When I submitted an update to this post with 3.0.2, it ate all of the text. Luckily I hadn’t closed the browser and I could press Back to get the contents of this post!

Apple doesn’t let you download “old” Safari releases and I installed both 3.0.1 and 3.0.2 via Software Update so I thought I was out of luck but then I found this site that has copies of the old releases. Yay!

Testing the new Safari June 17, 2007

Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a comment

The old safari had a bug (that I didn’t see anyone going on about) where it would truncate text submitted in text areas. I’d guess it’s related to the resizing text areas feature. It seems to be gone in 3.0.1.

There are some bugs in Safari that make no sense at all unless nobody at Apple bothered to use the software before releasing it.

Open a new page (say, google.com) and notice how the keyboard focus is incorrectly indicated. The text field on google’s page is visibly indicated yet the keyboard focus appears to be on nothing. Perhaps you need to have google as your homepage to reproduce the problem… then again, posting to my blog I clicked the bookmark bar, clicked a link on the page and the next page that loaded (with a text control in a frame) did the invalid focus thing. HCI 101 says you DO NOT indicate input focus unless you’re going to deliver events to the indicated widget.

Hang on… I see what’s happening. When you open a new window by opening the Safari shortcut again the new window does not get focus. Similar to my blog’s iframe. In both cases Safari has not detected this lack of focus and has drawn the focus indicator.

Another one… the bug report window has no horizontal scroll bar yet it doesn’t wrap text. Again, HCI 101 says you wrap text or provide a scrollbar. How can Apple’s text area widgets not follow this behaviour?

Emily does a wee! June 16, 2007

Posted by a1291762 in : emily , add a comment

I was woken up this morning to the sound of something big being moved. I thought it might have been Isaac pulling his train toy into bed but then I heard a wee. Emily finally got off her bed and did a wee by herself! She put her seat on the toilet and remembered to put it away afterwards. There was no calling to us or anything.

Update 19 June 2007

It seems we have a new alarm clock. I’m not sure if Emily wakes up because my alarm clock goes off (but gets up instead of snoozing) or if she’s just waking up anyway but we’ll always know when she’s up now because we can hear her go to the toilet.

Fixing Boot Camp 1.3 June 12, 2007

Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a comment

Geez. Apple has released a broken Boot Camp installer for the second time.

The problem isn’t (as I initially suspected) VMWare tools.

The Boot Camp 1.3 drivers appear to have a broken kbdmgr.exe (either that or it just doesn’t work on early MacBook Pros). You can get a working kdgmgr.exe from KeyboardSetup.exe in the Boot Camp 1.2 drivers. It installs fine over the top of the 1.3 drivers and restores the brightness and volume keys.

I made this post using Safari in Windows XP on a MacBook Pro with Boot Camp 1.3 and working volume keys… except that Safari has a serious bug where it chops text out of text boxes like the one used to edit this post and most of the text was removed!

Other than that show-stopping bug, Safari seems pretty nice on Windows. Apple still hasn’t figured out how to do win32 threads properly yet. The UI freezes that plague iTunes seem to be a problem for Safari too. Perhaps the porting layer they have is stuffed? I do note that with the non-native title bar and the menu bar below it, Safari just looks wrong. I think it would be better to fit the title bar beside the menu bar if they’re going to do it that way or even better, just give it a native frame.

New Flash June 5, 2007

Posted by a1291762 in : camera , add a comment

So I wanted to get a new flash for Adam’s wedding but at the time all I had read pointed towards only 2 Pentax-brand flashes working in my camera. For around $1000 I’d rather have a second camera but then I’m not a pro. I guess if you’ve got a K10D and some good quality lenses an extra $1000 for a flash is not a big deal.

For some reason, I failed to consider the fact that Sigma (or another third party lens manufacturer) might also make flashes. The Camera Warehouse at the Hyperdome moved so I went and had a look at the new store. They’d previously had a pretty crap range of DSLR stuff so I was pleased to see that they’ve now got a good range of both cameras and accessories. Even more impressive (to me at least) was that they’ve got a cabinet containing lenses, flashes and stuff so you can actually see what they’ve got instead of having to ask for everything (which I hate doing).

Something caught my eye. It was a Sigma EF-500 DG ST (PA-PTTL). The PA-PTTL indicates that it works with Pentax cameras. Strangely, nothing I could find online indicated if this would work with a K100D but it does support the *ist DS (similar hardware) so I figure it’s just a slightly older flash (we always get older stuff here in Australia).

Since I’m paranoid about stuff like this I took in my K100D to test it out. They did have a K100D on display but I also wanted to check out a wide angle converter lens against my lenses so I had it there anyway. The flash seemed to work fine except that it wouldn’t actually fire… oops. They were using batteries that were too flat. A quick change and all was well. The flash moves something in the head to focus the light tight or wide to match your lens. It seems to indicate the 35mm equivalent focal length which makes sense given that the Pentax flash mount hasn’t changed since the film SLR days. The flash goes out to 28mm equivalent which gives me vignetting at 18mm (27mm equivalent). The flash has a super wide mode you activate by flipping out a screen that lets it go to 17mm equivalent. It’s got an AF assist light (something the K100D lacks) which uses a red LED to illuminate the focus spot. It does an awesome job considering I can barely see the light and it much better than the K100D’s built-in flash-based AF assist (which I never use because it’s so bad).

Of course the important features of an external flash are speed and bounce. This one handles both nicely. I was doing portrait photos the other night and the camera’s read buffer filled up before the flash ran out. Seriously, the camera was holding back the flash! Of course, standing back a bit (ie. longer flash times) meant that the flash ran out first. I noticed a strange situation where the camera would take a photo with flash only to have the flash cut out half way through because it ran out of power. As a result, the image was stuffed. This only happened on the fourth shot in a row (holding down the button). It was strange because if the flash is empty the camera just takes a non-flash photo. I would have thought the flash would refuse to fire if it was below a certain threshold. Anyway, it was easy enough to avoid. Just a small delay between shots let it keep up with me. I did notice that since it could keep up with me I could take two photos before people thought to look away. The camera could get off two photos in less time than it takes to do red eye so people just assumed the first flash was a red eye-reduction flash. Bounce was a mixed bag. I suspect I’ll need to practice it before I’ll get consistently good results. I did get some really nice shots that clearly showed off the soft, diffused bounce light but in other photos I just got the top half lit normally and the bottom half dark.

One thing I had a big problem with was shadows. Holding the camera normally resulted in good shots because the shadows go down behind the people. The problem came when I took portrait-orientation photos. All of a sudden I had this big light off to the side producing bigger shadows than the built-in flash. If I can get bounce sorted out this won’t be a problem because I can just bounce the light off the roof. Another thought that occurred to me is that I could get someone to hold up a reflector to bounce the extra light back into the shadows. There might even be something that’ll hold a flash correctly for portrait shots (like say, that big metal thing over here).

So… um. yeah. I was writing then I got distracted by The Mirror Project which showed up when I tried to search for “portrait flash”. I guess I got everything down. The flash was $300. The wide angle converter didn’t work (it’s designed for people without 18mm lenses). The lady helpfully informed me that they have a nice ultra-wide Sigma zoom lens for $700 but that’s a little more than I’m willing to spend right now.

Oh yeah, I took photos for my sister’s formal. Just a day after I got the flash and I certainly gave it a work out. Luckily the photos didn’t all die as a result of my inexperience with the new gear :)

Emily's first visit to A&E June 3, 2007

Posted by a1291762 in : emily , 1 comment so far

We took Emily to A&E for the first time last night or rather at 4am this morning. We’d been at Bianca’s formal and had come home late. She seemed ok at that point but woke up coughing and wimpering at about midnight. Isaac woke up at about the same time. I was apparently useless (as I usually am when I’m not awake) but Bree managed to get some cold medicine into Isaac and get him back to sleep. Emily though was another matter. She dozed once or twice but not for long. So at 4am Bree had had enough and we all piled into the car and headed up to the Mater. At that time of day it only takes 15 minutes from Logan! I dropped off Bree and Emily and since Isaac was asleep I just parked nearby to wait for instructions.

It took a little while but eventually Bree was told there would be a wait so she SMSed me to go home. I drove off and got all the way to the Gateway merge before she SMSed to say that they were done. Apparently once they got through triage it was all really fast.

It turns out Emily has a viral middle ear infection. There’s no anti- anything for that so we just have to dose her on pain killers. I didn’t know this but you can combine Panadol (Paracetamol) and Nurofen (Ibuprofen) when kids need stronger pain relief. Emily had already had Panadol so they gave us some Ibuprofen and it made Emily feel much better.

After a brief attempt at waking up, Isaac let us all sleep in till 9:40 when he woke up and went into meltdown because he was so hungry. Emily said she was fine but we dosed her up again just in case. We went out for lunch which the kids enjoyed and I got a pair of Jeans, something Bree seemed to think was hilarious.