May 28th, 2008 by jba in Uncategorized | No Comments →
So we moved to the new m700 (crummy low light camera phone picture above) at work and I’ve got to say I’m not impressed. Sure it’s much faster than the m400 and yeah the vista drivers actually work and the battery seems to just keep on going, but beyond that in almost every way it’s a step down from the old machine:
- The wide-screen display is actually smaller (shorter) and lower res (1280×800) than the old machine
- I don’t like the soft-touch keyboard they’ve used on the new machine
- The support clips for the display actually feel like they’re breaking when you twist the display into tablet mode
- The physical volume dial is actually a software volume nob, so you never actually know if you’ve turned the volume all the way down (useful for when using the tablet with one-note in meetings)
- The wide-screen display has finger-touch capability now, and in return for that the pen sensing capability of the screen seems to have gone too sensitive. I now get random strokes all over the place and can’t seem to turn down the sensitivity.
- I’ve turned the finger touch capability off because it kept stuffing up documents I was showing to other people (while touching the screen)
- I’ve tried to calibrate the pen 100 times and it still doesn’t draw directly beneath the pen tip when writing notes
- The annoying camera software starts up automatically and doesn’t seem to have a context menu, control panel applet or any other method of disabling the autostart for the always-on camera toolbar overlay. And no, it’s not int he start up folder.
End rant.
Tags: hardware
May 26th, 2008 by jba in Uncategorized | No Comments →
Just a quick post to say I’m still here.
Have gone through a rather difficult family experience in the past few weeks coupled with some incredibly hectic work loads at the office.
I’m still here and will continue to post where I can until i can get back to a normal work load. I also have an awesome new design for my blog that the Creative Director (no-less) at ninepxels, Joe Smith, put together for me, which I hope to be building using K2. I’m just waiting to actually get some time to implement the design.
Tags: life, wordpress
May 10th, 2008 by jba in Uncategorized | 2 Comments →
I ran into Processing at BarCamp earlier this year. It was quite an interesting concept. Slashdot has news of a javascript version of this system. This is mainly cool because it makes it that much easier to have a play around with Processing. Yay the good old days of demo writing.
Tags: cool, javascript, software
May 8th, 2008 by jba in Uncategorized | No Comments →
As linked to all over the web, Kaj Arnö has posted a blog post explaining that the Enterprise-only backup extensions that I previously covered on this blog are now to also be available in MySQL Community. This essentailly means that the encryption and compression backup extensions be available to the open source world.
Tags: database, open source, software
May 7th, 2008 by jba in Uncategorized | No Comments →
Miguel posts an interesting blog on cross platform stand alone silverlight. As Miguel points out there was already a way to do this with Moonlight on linux, but not on windows.
Using a Windows.Forms.WebControl to embed a sliverlight control is trivial approach to doing this. But Tamir has gone to the effort of wiring it all up for you now which is great. His approach also runs a HttpListener in a separate thread to enable the silverlight control to dispatch requests back and forth.
Tags: .net, silverlight, software
May 2nd, 2008 by jba in Uncategorized | 5 Comments →
Another gem from planet gnome. WebKit GTK and QT are finally getting pluggin support (follow the link for screenshot bling). WebKit is fast becoming the little browser engine that could. I’m looking forward to seeing the GTK and QT pushes bring on an age that gets us native Win32 WebKit. I can think of tonnes of projects where I needed a light weight, easy to embed browser engine and instead resort to IE shell hacks.
Tags: browsers, open source, software
May 1st, 2008 by jba in Uncategorized | No Comments →
According to this blog from planet gnome, open source projects are now able to use the flash spec to create their own SWF and FLV decoders. This is good news both for the open source projects that try to bring flash to linux and its ilk and for Adobe since there is no better way to put a spec to test than to have multiple implementations against it.
Tags: flash, open source, software
April 28th, 2008 by jba in Uncategorized | No Comments →
Mostly a note to self for future reference. Not quite an implementation of the much loved datediff function, but close enough to get what I want:
// yearValue, monthValue, dayValue are assumed to be populated by the UI somewhere
startDate:Date = new Date(yearValue, monthValue, dayValue)
seconds:Number = ((new Date()).getTime() - startDate.getTime())/1000;
differenceInYears:Number = seconds / 60 / 525948.766; // google says a year is 525,948.766 minutes
Every language should have a date difference function and the ability to handle timespans as native types.
Tags: flash, software
April 27th, 2008 by jba in Uncategorized | 4 Comments →
So I updated the header image on the blog. Took me a while to relearn my GIMP foo to get the grey-scale mask and desaturate the colour portions.
I also took some time to clean up the theme, ngatini 1.1, which had some malformed html in the footer. It’s been a long time since I hacked in PHP. I’m going to try and find some time to clean up the stylesheet in the coming days/weeks as the css seems a bit heavy for what it’s doing, in particular it seems to have some float overuse .
While I was at it I updated to Wordpress 2.5.1 and hacked on the output from the About-Me sidebar widget. It now has an extra option to turn the heading for the sidebar into a link to an about me page (to expand on the one paragraph intro). I’ll look to fill in that page some more in the coming days/weeks also.
Tags: hacking, php, software, theme, wordpress
April 23rd, 2008 by jba in Uncategorized | No Comments →
Found this info about a new free developers (fixed width) font over on the IEBlog. The great thing about this is that it has ClearType support, so is a fixed width font that looks sexy, and they get the developer friendly versions of 0, O, 1, L and I.
Yay for developers. Hurry over and download it now.
Tags: font, software
