Archive for the ‘Things You Find’ Category
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
I have been meaning to post about this since I first heard about it, and spectacuarly didn’t. As of Tuesday last week www.drhorrible.com was host to the first of three episodes of Dr. Horrible‘s Sing Along Blog. The title is great in itself, however as it has been said seeing is believing and honestly if you have enjoyed any of Joss Whedon‘s work then you will really love this.
The mini-series covers a snapshot in the lives of Dr. Horrible (Neil Patrick Harris) the protagonist and his arch-nemisis Captin Hammer (Nathan Fillion of Firefly/Serenity fame). Unusally for Joss Whedon’s work it dosn’t have a strong feminist female character as such, however you will have to watch it to see why that may be!
It is no longer available for free on the web, although US and Canadian iTunes users can download it, international iTunes users have been promised it Soon™ and a DVD and Soundtrack look pomising.
Posted in Things You Find | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
The SMART .notebook format is simply a zipped set of XML and SVG files, This may be common knowledge but it is certainly the first time I have come across it.
To test it you can create a file in SMART Notebook rename the extension from .notebook to .zip, double click to open, you will be presented with several files named pagen.svg where n is a number, as well as a series of other files and folders including settings.xml, preview.png and metadata.xml.
The XML and SVG files can be edited in notepad, or perhaps more useful for the SVG files in a program such as Inkscape.
Posted in Sys. Admin., Things You Find | No Comments »
Friday, May 9th, 2008
Several of my friends and one of my colleagues are presenting their work at the artists open houses as part of the 2008 Brighton Festival. In no particular order other than that of the Fiveways Artists Group trail listing:
Rex Matthews – A colleague of mine.
Deborah Fleming – A friend from church, who is also displaying work with Liz Calmiano and Maureen Hawthorne.
Impressed with how creative everyone is!
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Thursday, May 8th, 2008
Catherine and I have been watching the GOD channel over the past three days, there has been and still is a great outpouring of the holy spirit in Lakeland, Florida, and the GOD channel have been broadcasting it to the world (well most of it).
I don’t know what God is going to do, but I am sure that he is changing lives there in Florida and all over the world through the ministries of the leaders there. It is not without criticism, I don’t know enough about everyone involved to make up my mind, chances are I will never know till I get to meet my Lord face to face.
Posted in My Faith, Things You Find | 10 Comments »
Monday, April 28th, 2008
I am sure that title is going to annoy someone an awful lot, but never mind. Richard Bartle submitted an opinion piece to The Guardian today, and as he puts it in his blog it is “Opinionated”.
I like it! I think it is something I had realised and accepted a long time ago (I was born in 1981) games are part of the norm for me. I learnt to program on a ZX Spectrum when I was 8, what did I write – computer games of course – pong, breakout, Thunderbirds (TV Series), rolling shooters. I even tried to write a Windows like GUI in BASIC (yes it had some serious design flaws). All of that was normal to me.
In case you missed the link above, here is opinion piece:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/28/games.censorship
Posted in Programming, Things You Find | No Comments »
Saturday, April 26th, 2008
I did something today that I have never done, that is rescue a kitten (maybe it was a young cat) from a tree. Initially I was going to leave it, as it is going to have to learn how to get down somehow, then it tried to get down forward and ended up clinging on to the tree. It was quite happy for me to coax it down as I stood below till I could reach down and lift it from the trunk.
Chances are the same kitten will be up another tree in the next few days, maybe its experience today will have taught it a better way to get down in the future, or perhaps just to meow until a kindly stranger comes to the rescue.
Did make me think about how we learn by trying things and making mistakes, I know it has been said over and over again about children being wrapped up in bubble wrap dosn’t help them develop good judgement. I do wonder if we protect our children and indeed ourselves too much by not taking risks when perhaps the reward is only to learn not to take the same risk again.
I am not advocating being reckless or careless in our decisions, just perhaps taking a risk once in a while when we don’t know for sure and, perhaps more importantly, we can’t practicably find out by other means.
Posted in Diary, Things You Find | No Comments »
Friday, October 26th, 2007
Now, I know that the larger monitors of this world have some interesting technological issues to overcome, however I think HP has made one too many sacrifices with this monitor:
w2207h 22 inch WIDESCREEN TFT
For those of you that didn’t spot it:
As pointed out on the E-O forums, the perfect monitor for fleet battles.
Posted in Things You Find | No Comments »
Sunday, September 23rd, 2007
Some friends on a forum I frequent have spotted a web application called The Political Compass the premise is you answer 6 pages of questions that gauge your political views. The result is two numbers which can be plotted as X and Y axis onto a graph that represent your political views.
My result was Economic Left/Right: -3.25 and Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: 0.15.
This is a result I don’t disagree with, however I don’t think it is as clean cut as this. Peoples views change over time, moral choices are affected by different influences to economic or financial issues, those influences can change regularly. When it comes down to it a decision needs to be made at the moment it is required to make, if I am presented with an problem be it moral, social, financial, technical, etc. I make a decision based upon experiences, morality, knowledge and in my case and more importantly for me prayer.
Academics and interested parties come up with these scales and measures to enable them to categorize people, this has been seen everywhere from Business (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) to online gaming (Bartle Test). For their purpose they serve their purpose and serve it very well.
They are however a hash function of an aspect of our personality at a specific point in time. I may be a INTJ in Myers-Briggs parlance or ESAK in Bartle Test parlance but that does not mean that all people who get INTJ in Myers-Briggs and ESAK in the Bartle Test are the same as me.
Posted in My Faith, Things You Find | No Comments »
Saturday, September 15th, 2007
I was reading Pete’s Images of Broken Light, specifically the interesting post about Microsoft’s public attitude towards Google’s Apps, it seems fairly typical of modern corporate America to rubbish someone else technology, brushing over their own failings without a second thought.
I don’t quite understand companies that do this, who are they targeting these comments at? Perhaps home users? surely they would use the free Google Apps Standard Edition as opposed to Microsoft Office Standard at £200 – £300, anyone could use Microsoft Office Live in the UK for free as well however it is still in “Beta” itself – how is that different from Google Apps “Beta”. What about Enterprise decision makers, clearly a press release is going to swing the opinions for a multi million pound roll out of a particular productivity suite – or not. Perhaps it is just sour grapes, after all Office Live hasn’t made nearly the impression I thought it was going to, certainly not in the UK.
Posted in Things You Find | No Comments »
Thursday, September 13th, 2007
I read an interesting article on The Register about the Firefox Plugin AdBlock Plus, the article covers a bit about the current favourable relationship between Firefox and Google which could be threatened by the increased usage of products that block adverts from being displayed.
I am no fan of adverts on websites, as you can see; this site is devoid of adverts for the conscious reason that I find them distracting. Many adverts can not be controlled, if I add adverts to a page then I am leaving some of my screen space open to be used by another company, doubtlessly this company will have different views on what is appropriate, perhaps they promote content I would find objectionable (betting or breaking of game rules for example).
This of course doesn’t mean that you can’t make any money out of blogs and other user generated content, my personal preferences is contextual links, not the automatically generated JavaScript kind but the ones that the author puts in his or herself. For example affiliate links to Amazon or Barnes and Noble for books and music, Eclipse Internet to recommend as an ISP or EVE Online to encourage people to join you in-game. So many companies run successful affiliate programs why do so many people still invest so much time and clunky and unappealing design constraints just so that they can include an advert?
I would be really interested in the thoughts of readers, does anyone else use AdBlock? do adverts on sites annoy you? or do you see them as a fact of life, after all they do pay for the free content we are consuming?
Posted in Blog, Things You Find | No Comments »