Roo's Ramblings

Trip to Jordan

arooaroo — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:29:41 +0000

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.

A cup of tea solves everything

arooaroo — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 21:14:43 +0000

Lovebox Weekender - Victoria Park, London

arooaroo — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 22:24:50 +0000

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.

Flickr is wonderful!

arooaroo — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:58:32 +0000

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!

Jacman source

arooaroo — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 11:21:35 +0000

I didn’t realise how many people would actually want to look at the Jacman source. As it turns out since I released v0.4 I hadn’t made the source available (through sheer laziness). I’ve had quite a few emails and PMs and so I have finally put an end to this omission this morning.

The source is now available via the Jacman Project page.

Paxman

arooaroo — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 23:01:38 +0000

Non-Brits may not have had the pleasure of the Britain’s finest newsreader/interviewer, Jeremy Paxman. Here’s how he signed-off last week, informing viewers that he wasn’t 100% supportive of the editor’s future improvements.

Video over at YouTube.

Jacman v0.4 released

arooaroo — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 19:40:05 +0000

It’s been a while but the latest version of Jacman was finally rolled out today. Functionality wise, there’s not more to report on - I’ve added some filters to the Install dialog which should be helpful for those who simply like to browse around the package repos. The application basically received a bit of a face-lift. A new look and feel looks a lot fresher in my opinion. The eye candy has also been boosted, but it’s not easy to spot unless you are using Jacman itself (try hovering over a button. Nice, eh?!)

Give it a whirl and see what you think. Also, I’ll never say no to any Java developers who wish to help out and become part of the Jacman team

Power of Nightmares - BBC documentary

arooaroo — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 19:03:06 +0000

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.

Bon Echo

arooaroo — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 18:55:36 +0000

I don’t use Linux 100% any more like I used to, which is a shame. It’s largely because I do a lot of work from home and it I need to be in Windows. And when I have booted in to Arch Linux, I tend not to pacman -Syu very often - I don’t know why, I guess it’s a it ain’t broken thing. Anyway, upgraded yesterday and I had 200Mb of stuff waiting to be upgraded, including Firefox 2. I’ve been using FF2 since it was released on Windows and I was happy to see it has graduated out of testing in AL. However, I forgotten about all the fuss about FF branding, and now AL has ‘Bon Echo’ instead.

A few things struck me:

What a silly name.
What a silly logo - not even SVG.
That silly name is now in the user-agent.

I dare say that no-one else cares about the first two points - and fair enough. However, point three is something that slightly grated. It’s only a name, for god’s sake! Within 5 mins of launching FF2 (or BE2) on AL I was on YouTube, and whilst it seemed to work ok, I was constantly distracted with a little message about an unknown user-agent. It made me think about the fact that there are many websites looking out for that user-agent string for reasons other than browser stats.

As annoying as it is, browsers are not 100% compatible and so web devs have worked hard to try and ensure their site works great on the main browsers. Web devs know about Firefox. “WTF is Bon Echo”, I imagine they are saying.

It didn’t take me long to dive into about:config and change the user-agent back to what it should be. In hindsight, perhaps I should have left it to see if there were any possible side-effects: does gmail work properly? What about Hotmail? Meebo? And so on. So now I will need to change this manually each time pacman upgrades FF/BE, right? Bugger that, I think I’ll just download the official binary and have done with it.

BetterFonts

arooaroo — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 17:44:17 +0000

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.