Roo's Ramblings

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.

SwingBling - my new blog to showcase Java Swing

arooaroo — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 09:27:35 +0000

I think many people who know me know I’m make quite a lot of my GUI apps in Java. Whilst I found the API a struggle at first, I soon realised that it was extremely powerful and flexible. I do believe that Java’s Swing toolkit is excellent - it’s largely spoiled by it’s poor looking cross-platform look and feel.

Still, some people may know about Jacman - a Swing app which I think it looks pretty darn good. And there’s Romain Guy et al’s Aerith which is a superb looking app. Java is powerful; Swing is powerful - where are all the desktop apps?
I therefore wanted to start something which acts as a focal point for are issues relating to Swing and the Desktop Java effort. A showcase for good quality apps; discussion about Desktop Java issues; and a place for showing off little tips and tricks. So, SwingBling is the place to go. (Do get in touch if you are using some handy Java apps that you think others would like to know about.)
The first post was Java 6 on the desktop - part 1 which is an overview on some of the improvements users of Swing desktop apps will benefit from in with the soon-to-be-released Java 6. (This was also linked to on OSNews).

How memory works

arooaroo — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 18:56:51 +0000

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.

How hard disks work

arooaroo — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 18:42:12 +0000

Some computer users, even technically savvy ones, some times get confused about how hard disk performance is affected by the data it holds. Let me clarify: the more data you store on the hard drive, the slower it gets. It’s obvious when you think about it - each of those bytes of data adds extra weight on the disk platters which means it takes longer to spin-up and spin-down.

So, you may have thought that all those techies who keep going on about “bloat” were a crazy, but now you can see it makes total sense. Disk I/O is the biggest bottle-neck in most workstations and so reducing that is paramount. Don’t be fooled, software package size is the key factor in application performance, it’s nothing to do with poorly written algorithms, for example.

As we know, KDE is a poor performer because it comes bundled with lots of additional applications. Even though these applications are not loaded until requested, the sheer presence of them, as discussed earlier, will weigh down the hard drive. Functionality and ergonomics are not “real” metrics! Saving those micro-seconds is what keeps the world spinning around.

Continuing this, remember not to use a “bloated” OS, like Ubuntu or Arch Linux, as these OSes can occupy hundreds and hundreds of megabytes of disk space. Use muLinux or if you don’t mind the performance hit, Damn Small Linux. Don’t worry if you don’t have access to software that you want or are used to, at least the alternatives you get in these small Linux distros are also lightwight, and that’s all that matters.