Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category

I knew there was going to be a fairly painful adjustment phase as I got used to OS X but there are some things that are really bugging me.

Like bugs. For example when I close my final tab on Opera it should go back to my quick launch screen so I can access a shortcut easily. But it doesn’t, it closes the window meaning that if I want to get back to my start screen I have to close the window and open a new one.

Then it’s the little things. For example if I’m selecting a series of files to upload, I move my select file dialog to just over the file boxes to make it a lot easier. But in OS X the file dialog box jumps back to it’s old location between every file.

The image viewing is rubbish as well. On XP I just clicked an image and it opened and then I could just use the arrow keys on my keyboard to navigate through them. No such luck on OS X on any of Preview (the default application), Quick Look (the integrated OS X viewer) or Xee (a little image viewer I grabbed to try and solve the problem). Indeed OS X has nothing that can stand up to the might of IrfanView.

I’m sure I’ll figure it all out in the end and a lot of the problems I will find a workaround or just get used to. I’m sure I’ll eventually find a convenient one keystroke way to lock my screen and remember not to use the scroll bar. But until I do they’re irritating problems.

This sounds far too negative though, in general I’m quite enjoying it, much like having a fly in your drink on a tropical beach – it’s annoying but you’re still on a tropical beach.

I love spaces (same as workspaces for you unix geeks, I can’t for the life of me understand why Windows doesn’t have them), I love the fact I can get 7 hours out of the battery, I love the fact it shuts down in 2 seconds flat rather than the 2 minutes XP takes and I love gestures. Stick with it and good times are ahead.

For those of you that aren’t aware, due to some unfortunate events that have befallen my recently I now have a new laptop. This one is going to be named Tolima and is a rather shiny MacBook Pro.

I went for the higher spec 2.5Ghz Core 2 Duo with the extended hard drive and so far performance seems reasonably swish. I haven’t really put it to the test beyond some big installing but it potters along quite nicely and does some lightening fast shutting down.

The battery life is also very nice, I squeezed around 7 hours out of it last night, a small amount of that time it was on sleep but I certainly wasn’t taking it easy installing going on 20gb of programs and I began to put my life back together. It’s also not much heavier than my old laptop while squeezing another inch into the screen which makes quite a difference to the point I wish I could run it at a higher resolution than 1280.

Only time will tell if I love it or hate it but I’m planning to duel boot it anyway as 7 really is a sexy piece of work.

With John having finally got a World of Warcraft group together for Atheist Society, we set out last night on our first exciting adventure as everyone started fresh characters under the banner of our new society guild, the Atheist Alliance.

Not having played for two years I spent Monday patching, or at the start clearing space to patch, as the installer informed me I would need to free up 15GB! However after a long, long period I finally got things finished 14 hours later and was ready to play. In grand news I also found my long lost original character which disappeared some time ago!

So we set out adventuring last night at about 8pm and next thing we knew it was 2am! We did however manage to get to level 10 in that time, which is quite impressive given the amount of time it takes to loot 40 wendigo manes not to mention factoring in the long period of time we spent knocking back beers at The Blue Recluse. We also have a guild tabard which looks very similar to our logo which is awesome.

Got myself an iPhone this week as, as much as I love my Sony Ericsson k800i which has served my exceptionally well for these part three years (it is honestly a fantastic phone) it is started to look a bit dated and as what most people would consider to be a geek, I decided I needed to move with the times a bit more.

So far I have thought it a very nice device to use, it’s not the greatest invention to ever benefit man kind but as a smart phone it does what it needs to do exceptionally well. I don’t use a great deal of applications but I am loving having Tweetie and Facebook at my finger tips and easy access to Wikipedia and the web has proved very useful as well – not that these are something specific to the iPhone of course.

It really came into it’s own at the pub today though when Norm informed me that my podcast feed was down. This was a most amateur mistake on my part of having the permissions set wrong on the config file and so when I did an upload the local copy which specifies the full domain name as the database host overwrote the live permission and MySQL kicked the remote connection from my server’s ISP into touch.

I needed to fix this fast so I headed over to the Apps Store and found myself a (free) SSH client which installed in a few seconds and allowed my to connect in to my server via SSH from my iPhone, go into the file I needed to update using vim and edit to the host to the correct setting. Problem solved!

The real test of course is when my number ports over on Tuesday and I start actually using it as a phone.

I also have yet to work out how I am going to set everything up – at the moment I have it syncing with iTunes at work because I don’t want to spoil my home machines with such software. However I need to sync it with my music so I can make use of the music functionality. And work out if I can connect it to the hands free kit in my stereo – otherwise I may end up making in car calls on my k800i still!

Having taken over iStock a while back, Getty have now aquired by other favourite stock site, stock.xchng.

Granted the quality of iStock has not dipped since Getty took over but the prices have certainly seen a significant rise since they did. It will be interesting to see what changes they bring in to SXC, they have already replaced the Stock Expert premium links with iStock ones though so far little else seems to have changed.

Vodafone started sending out tweets via SMS a few weeks ago but they never started arriving to my phone despite me having turned device updates on for several of the people I follow.

The solution in the end was to delete my phone and re-add it which seems to have worked a treat and now I am hapily receiving updates on my phone. No longer do I need to be sat at a computer 24/7 to see people’s updates – now it’s just because I want to be sat there.

While having a dig around to try and get Leanne out of the whole she had got herself into I found an interesting trick I can do with my laptop (and perhaps with my desktop but I don’t want to try it because I’ve got a dual monitor setup and all my applications positioned just as I like them).

If I hit Ctrl+Alt and an arrow key it will change the orientation of my screen so I can turn my laptop screen on it’s side. While this is fairly common with the new crazy swirly screen laptops and indeed fancy flat screen monitors, I had no idea I could do it with such a wide range of machines includng my laptop.

Of course, being a geek, the fact that this had virtually no practical value and nor would I ever really find it useful or want to do it is irrelevant – it’s just, because I can 😉 .

Continuing the ongoing efforts to get the technical set ready for Rationalist Week I’m currently busy installing software and configuring the computers that will be used during the week. As such they now have matching wallpaper so they look nice and pretty 😀 .

Speaking of Rationalist Week preparations, our lounge is now home to a large selection of food products, as per the picture below. Interesting this is just one of several big piles of stuff which is now ready for the week though I think both I, and my housemates, will be glad to get out of the way next week.

Today saw the March edition of Leeds Skeptics in the Pub. Norm had decided to pull out last week so Daryl bravely stepped up at the last minute to present his talk. There were quite a few new faces down there which was good to see, hopefully the word is starting to spread.

Daryl’s talk was amazing, it was about the power of exponentials and the technological singularity which obviously was of great interest to me as a computer scientist. It was interesting because we also carried out usual hat of skeptism but nobody could really pick any major wholes in the latest thoughts outlined by Ray Kurzweil in his book “the singularity is near.”

In the book he outlines that the technological singularity is both achievable and near given that technological growth is exponential. It really is a facinating area and one that I will be keeping a much closer eye on in future.

Well, sort of. AJaxian wrote a very interesting post about display: table CSS and how after all this time of moving away from table layouts to CSS layouts we are now putting it all into CSS so we can essentially use table layouts again. It’s about time.

We’ve all spent years moving over to CSS layouts and support has gradually been getting better but we still can’t do a lot of basic stuff that you can do with tables without lots of hacks and crazy implementations that shouldn’t be there.

Take for example creating columns. We’re still using faux background images to create the column backgrounds and then putting a clear: both div below everything which shouldn’t really be there in semantic mark-up because it has no meaning, it’s just a CSS hack. These are things we could do with ease using tables.

While I’m on the subject there is also an interesting article on TJK Design about building layouts without using floats, the site being built entirely using lists which degrades beautifully if you turn off CSS.