My two week trip to Jordan was amazing! I visited quite a few interesting places (sadly getting ill during my second week impaired my travelling abilities somewhat) and met lots of great people too. I took plenty of pics, and many of them are online. Let me start with a few of my faves from Petra and the Dead Sea.
Had a fab day in glorious Mile End at the Lovebox Weekender festival. Highlight - apart from the company of my friends - was seeing The Flaming Lips live for the first time. Really spectacular is all I can say. You just have to be there to understand. Happened to take a few snaps whilst I was there. Here are a few of my faves…
More available at in my photo set at Flickr. And if I stop being so lazy I’ll upload some more from that day too.
So I treated myself to a nice Canon EOS 400D (or XTi Rebel to those over the Pond) and have started taking up photography. I wish I had more time and remembered to take my camera out more, but hey, I’ll get there, and I’m still having fun. So Flickr seems to be the place to be for all budding photographers, and I must admit I’m getting rather addicted to it. I could spend hours on end just clicking the Reload button on this page: http://flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/ - do check it out.
In the meantime, here are a few of mine that seem to have caught other peoples’ attention…
(This one was used at Flickr’s recent 4th birthday party!)
Do share your pics too!
Power of Nightmares is a fantastic documentary investigating the climate of fear. I remember seeing it when it was originally screened (a couple of years ago, IIRC). It’s a three parter - an hour each. Some bright spark has uploaded to Google Video. I’m not condoning the breaching of copyright, which this is a clear case. However, as I’m a UK TV licence payer, I, along with every payer, contributed to this, and I think it ought to be seen by everyone.
Check them out whilst they’re still online.
Part 1, perhaps the most important, as it sets out a lot of the foundations for the thesis, is not the most exciting. Parts 2 and 3 were fascinating.
Stumbled upon betterfonts.com today. According to the site it has over 10,000 fonts available as freeware or shareware. There are certainly a lot, and it has a pretty nice interface to let you browse them. I thought it was cool.
Actually, I won’t bother with another tongue-in-cheek post (even if some people detected 0% sarcasm). But following on, especially regarding the KDE is a big fat beast and GNOME is nice and lightweight debate, people should read a new comparison between the two.
Lubos Lunak has done some benchmarks regarding memory consumption. WARNING! SPOILER COMING! Well, the findings are certainly in favour of KDE, which surprised even myself. I’m not terribly worried about memory. I made sure my ‘puter was well stocked in this area when I bought it, but it’s promising to know that KDE is in fact a contender for lower-specced PCs too. Clearly the “bloat” isn’t making the difference that people expect.
One thing that got me thinking though was how much the choice of distro affects the performance of the DEs. So I intend to replicate the experiment at some point to see what’s happening on my Arch box.
An update to my string tokeniser library was released last week. For this version the main addition was a GUI frontend so that people could experiment with the library without having to do any coding at all. Nice.
Project page is here.
Believe it or not, we’re having a heat-wave in Britain! It’s very hot in London where I live, and my commute via tube and train (i.e., mobile greenhouses) is harsh to say the least. Last week a news report measured temperatures of 48C (118F) on the tube and 52C (125F) on certain buses!! Too. Darn. Hot. I’m from the north of England - I’m not used to this “heat” stuff.
I’m crossing my fingers for clouds and rain 
Not that I was particularly good at blogging at the best of times, but I thought I’d knock up a couple of posts. The main reason why I’ve been quiet recently is that since the beginning of June, my girlfriend was diagnosed with cancer. And not just any cancer, but a very rare type too! She’s only 24 and this is the second time she’s had cancer. So it’s been understandably tough for her, and as a result my life gets pretty hard too. Still, she’s amazingly strong about this and tries her best to keep plodding on as normal.
Whilst all this has been happening, my job has been getting more hectic too. Lots of deadlines; lots of pressure; and lots of resignations! We’ve lost 3 people in our (relatively small) department, including my line manager. So hardly a bundle of laughs, that’s for sure.
Hopefully things will perk up soon…
Last year I wrote a bunch of articles for OSNews. The majority were on Java, but one was for Arch Linux, and the other was about LaTeX. My article, LaTeX isn’t for everyone but it could be for you went down very well, and I was pleased when the editor of the online journal, PracTeX contacted me to include it in their next issue.
It wasn’t just the article, though. I thought that the cool thing the editor did here was to plough through the 120+ comments that were left that vent some of the problems that people have with LaTeX in the real world. Quite interesting, I think.
The latest issue has just been released, and a PDF version is due in the near future, I understand.
Oh, and I’ve just received my copy of the LaTeX Companion, 2nd Ed. Fortunately, I’m employed by Pearson, of which Addison-Wesley is an imprint, so I got it 1/2 price 
It’s a darn cool book if you use LaTeX on a regular basis and need to get to grips with some of the finer points of the package.
One of the annoyances of using someone else’s PC is that you often don’t have access to all the software that you have become accustomed, if not reliant on. This is even worse on machines in net cafes or work PCs that are restricted.
I recently wanted to get access to an IM client at work that could cope with multiple protocols. I could have installed GAIM, but the truth be known, I shouldn’t install anything on my work PC, and if I do, and get work, there has to be a damn good reason (i.e., it’s essential for my work!)
So, I’ve turned to the AJAX revolutionaries for help, and wasn’t disappointed when I found a site called Meebo. It’s a cool little site that bulges with AJAX goodliness. You get a pretty reasonable IM client all within your web browser, without all the Flash and Java applet complications. It just works! Sometimes I forget that this is all HTML+AJAX (and some nice graphic design). Very clever stuff, I thought.
You can just specify the login details for the IM network(s) of choice and it logs in for you. If you wish, you can create a Meebo account, which saves all the IM details, and so you can login to your usual accounts with a single username. Handy.
There is still some work to do with Meebo. I personally don’t like having lots of individual chat windows opened, but rather a tabbed interface that I can switch between (which is how I normally have my IM client open). You can’t do anything other that basic chatting, like web cams, file transfers, etc. Although, I quite like its simplicity, it’s refreshing.
Give it a whirl if you get caught out without your favourite IM app.
I’m not a huge gamer. I like games, but I’m not very good at them and so I tend to only play them for a little while (whilst the difficulty is low!) Fortunately, my brother works for a game retailer and he sends me many of his “old” games (he’s very good gamer and finishes things within hours). Anyway, the point is that I sort of like games, but they’re not a big deal, but then I saw Spore…
Spore is essentially a game that simulates the process of evolution. You start off life as a simple cell, searching for food sources, avoiding parasites, etc and it’s all very 2D. When you reproduce, you “edit” the next generation by making changes and then moving on. Eventually you become more complex and the world becomes 3D. It all sounds a bit weird but it looks very smart.
A great presentation can be found here. There’s also a good entry already in Wikipedia, even though the game hasn’t been released.
I’m still intrigued about how they will ensure that the player remains “hooked” because it does have the potential to get a bit stale. However, I’m hugely impressed at the vision of the game and it seems like it will really pull it off.
Is this the coolest colour chooser you’ve ever seen?
This is part of Kirill Grouchnikov’s excellent Substance LAF. Substance goes beyond the usual look and feel implementations, as it also provides components like this. I’ve become a recent convert to this LAF because of how easy it is to customise it, and I can’t wait for an opportunity to include this chooser too - it’s darn cool!
I stumbled upon a blog the other day and was impressed with the category list that you often see on a side bar of the page. What I liked was how each item was in a box with rounded corners. It was all nicely designed and changed colour when you hovered, etc. I’ve done menus with rounded buttons before - I needed lots of images. But this site was not using images here, as I could select the text. Hmm… better look under the hood…
It turns out to be a pure CSS solution and a single line at that:
-moz-border-radius: 2px
Gasp! What is this?!? Mozilla specific CSS! Good grief. Haven’t we been here before guys? After all the scorn poured upon Microsoft for constantly ignoring standards, I was slighltly agog at how our champion of compliance had started to sneak in its own proprietary elements in to the fray.
Calm down
I fired off a query to Google quicker than you could say “hypocrite”. What I quickly discovered was, thankfully, not Mozilla pushing it’s own ideas of what CSS should be. My fears were quickly allayed, and frankly, I was feeling a bit sheepish for jumping to the incorrect conclusions instead of thinking things through a little further. If you had forgotten, like me, that Mozilla is much more than a browser: it’s an application platform. Mozilla uses its own XUL (XML User Interface Language) for defining interfaces. To get the interface to do anything, JavaScript is used. From this it is possible to produce cross-platform applications. And this is where these damn tags fit in. They were in fact intended for use within XUL-based interfaces.
Mozilla is not recommending they be used for public webpages for obvious reasons. If they are, then they are essentially being abused. I suppose in some situations you could risk it, even though they are essentially being abused. If you want to find out what else is available, here’s a list.
Postscript
It has just occurred to me that whilst using proprietary tags is a Bad Idea, there is an unusal analogy. Things like rounded corners on boxes will be coming in for CSS3 (which isn’t even complete yet). However, there have already been many advances in the CSS2 standard. However, what’s the point of something like CSS3 in the real world? The fact remains that the vast majority of users do not run a browser capable of implementing the standards (cheers, Microsoft). In many respects, using the lastest CSS standards, you are in fact using a niche feature set that many people can’t appreciate. Judging by my website logs, the vast majority of non-IE users are using a Mozilla-based product. Therefore, if you’re using CSS2, transparent PNGs, SVG, etc, then you could be forgiven for using Mozilla specific features.
It’s something that always bothers me: why are cars manufactured to go faster than the highest speed limits? Why am I even thinking about this, especially when it’s Christmas? Well, I was reading an old copy of PC Pro magazine and a journalist also made a similar remark about cars going fast in reference to the music industry’s successful hounding of p2p networks.
Sony won its landmark case decades ago that deferred responsibility from itself should anyone use video recorders for illegal activities. P2p networks ought to benefit from the same precedent, right? Well, no. Because they don’t have the same expensive lawyers to defend their interestes.
So, why hasn’t anyone sued a car manufacturer yet for deliberately making cars travel faster than the speed limit? Speeding can cause real harm to people, not just to the bottom-line.
Dang, it only took two years to contradict himself since his 2003 I ain’t #%&$ing dead yet. Richard Pryor was a genius - rather fucked up, but, hey, that’s rock and roll. Under ‘occupation’, he described himself as “Fucking legend”, and he wasn’t wrong.
Mr Pryor, RIP.
Chanced upon this site earlier: http://turbulence.org/Works/nums/prepare.html. It’s supposedly a visualisation of the frequency of used numbers on the Internet, or something like that. However, I just thought it was quite a funky little Java applet. The actual results aren’t that interesting, I have to say. But the interface is pretty snazzy. Give it a whirl!
MS have been trumpting their new-look fonts for Vista. They’re nice, you have to agree. But, they’re Microsoft’s fonts and so they won’t want us Linux users getting our grubby hands them. This is where Mr Friedman comes in. He kindly published a great list on his blog titled, 25 Best License-Free Quality Fonts.
I personally warming to Lacuna:
I’m pretty happy with my Getting to Grips with Latex tutorials. I know they’ve gone down well because I get plenty of feedback from readers telling me so. But every now and then, I like to check how they are doing in the Google-sphere. If you type “latex tutorials” into Google, you get:
I come 2nd! Woo hoo! Now, I know it’s not first, but I don’t reasonably expect to leapfrog the Tex Users’ Group site. So, I’m pretty chuffed because most people doing a Google search at least sees the top few entries before they decided to click. The other reason I’m pretty happy is because I’m a new kid on the block when it comes to Latex guides. Latex has been out for decades and there’s no shortage of sites to help users.
An interesting aside is that the entry that appears on the Google results page says “Latex tutorials taking you from the very basics towards more advanced topics. Clear presentation and narrative flow.” But, that content doesn’t appear in my site. This must be what others have written about them! B)
I keep a little counter on the main page (which is basically a contents page). In the past 20 months, I’ve had over 130,000 hits on that single page alone, and I’m now at a rate of 10,000 hits per month.