Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category

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.

According to one of SitePoint’s year reviews, 2008 was the year of Twitter and 2008 having come and gone I decided it was probably overdue that I gave it a go. I have never been an avid use of my Facebook status but the more flexible nature of Twitter looked far more promising.

Perhaps more importantly, though, Twitter has not really spread outside the geek community yet and on the off chance it does, I need to be able to tell people “yeah, I’ve been on Twitter for ages.” Echoes of recent conversations along the lines of “yeah, I’ve been on Facebook for three years now” no doubt.

I am quite impressed with how easy it was to set my phone up and begin using it too. I’m a little disappointed I don’t seem to be able to add multiple phones but the idea of being able to update my Twitter while I’m awkwardly sat in a pub by myself waiting for whoever I’m meeting there to turn up is very appealing if only to give me something to do.

In any case, if you’re already Twittering (is it a verb yet?) then point me in the direction of your page. Mine can be found here.

Lenovo have just announced a dual-screen Thinkpad laptop which is rather cool indeed. Inside the main 17″ screen is a 10″ slide out screen which gives you extra space on your desktop which is becoming increasingly useful these days.

While I agree that at the moment the extra weight, cash and loss of battery life may not make it worth it, you have to remember that this is the first of it’s kind and five years down the line when the technology has developed a lot more this could be amazingly useful.

I love Windows. Windows XP is an amazing operating system. Vista was a bit of a disaster but then it was always going to be when it had to follow XP, possibly the best operating system ever in the history of computing.

If you’re thinking this is heading towards a Linux bashing blog post, you’d be right 😉 .

I mean seriously, all I want to do is play media. The kind of thing you can do fresh out of the box on any Windows install. Let’s ignore the fact I’ve been trying to get Ubuntu to play DVDs for years. Let’s just take a look at what happened on Saturday.

I brought up a computer to use as a media computer to play through the sound system so we could access all the music. Actually I bought two, an Ubuntu box and a Fedora box. Two distros, one of them must be able to play a simple MP3 file right?

Of course, given the nature of my writing, they couldn’t. What was really interesting though was not the fact that Linux can’t even play MP3s out of the box, but how hard it is to get Linux to play them. It took us three, count them, three, computer scientists sat round for an hour to get them playing. So you can’t even use the excuse “oh it’s just you Chris” because there were three of us trying to work this one out.

We managed to get it working in the end, albeit it not very well though I’m not sure if that was Fedora’s fault or not so I’m not holding it accountable for that one. But there you go, XP for the win.

Facebook have really been dropping the ball recently.

I don’t know what they have done to their photos uploader, but whatever they have done has broken it. I can’t say I’ve ever really had a problem with in until about a month ago when I started having a few problems, which have just started getting worse and worse.

For one thing it started crashing when I tried to upload large numbers of images. This has really annoyed me when uploading images for AHS Conference and London were I would be uploading 60 images at a time (into seperate album because for some, no doubt pointless reason, Facebook only allows 60 images per album) it would send them all which as you can imagine takes a long time and then crashes when it finishes.

The uploads are constantly failing too. Which again seems to wait until it has completed and all the images have been sent to bring up the normally “upload successful” dialog which comes up saying the upload has failed and you should try again. Which you possibly should, but not right away as the dialog would seem to indicate because it will just go on failing.

And to top it all off now, the “simple uploader” to use if their main uploader isn’t working, now rather than letting you upload the photos just sends you back to the main uploader without saving the photos, which, once again of course, sends all the data first which keeps you waiting for ages, before disgarding it all. Brilliant.

Yesterday Atheist Society completed our first successful webcast.

Not that we have previously had unsuccessful webcasts, this was the first time we tried it and it worked really well. I made use of the services on uStream which performed like a bottomless pit – flawlessly (I know, I know 😉 ). I’m really impressed with it to be honest, it has a lot of options and you can do things like overlays but the real jem is just how well it works out of the box as it were.

We had some technical issues in that the feed was password protected during our testing phase and then when I turned it off it kept prompting for a password anyway and wouldn’t except the previous password. Still once we got this issue sorted we were on our way achieving three viewers! On of which was myself monitoring the playback but that still leaves Norm and someone else geniunely watching it.

Tonight’s Halloween party provided an excellent if flimsy excuse to get my decks out in preparation for the festivities. It’s been quite a while since I’ve really had them out as I don’t have space in my room anymore so it was cool to get everything tested last night.

Having said that, when I got my old laptop out to boot up, the hard drive was missing.

I mean, it was still physically there. But the computer couldn’t see it 🙁 . Might have to try hitting it until it works again.

Back in March The Register published a very interesting article taking a look at Google’s AdWords system and how it can often be unfair to inexperianced users.

I didn’t see it at the time but Google having just announced another bumper profit I got passed a link to it and it makes a very interesting read. I’ve used AdWords before, admittedly not for a few years so maybe the features weren’t in back then but they could well have been, and wasn’t aware of some of the features the article points out.