Still As Life

Maybe it's just me, but when you are paying hundreds to thousands a year on a website, you expect it to work, and to get a response about problems quickly.

I have come across a few web companies that only work like this if it is the easiest thing for them to do. Most recently, the company that owns the system that the store I work at uses for our website.

As I do the majority of the website content maintenance and general store IT work, and as a fellow web designer and developer myself, I understand their situation, however, I do not think they have handled it well.

The content management system that they have written, while it is a good idea as there are few good systems in their area that are also easy to use, has had some problems.

It is a nice, simple and clean system, but for the past 5 months, almost as long as I've been working at the store there have been unresolved problems constantly springing up.

Some of the user updatable things on the website do not save to the database, we have been asking to have this fixed for 3 months, but none of our emails regarding this have gotten a reply, ever, when we have spoken to them in meetings or on the phone once we have given up emailing them about it and not getting a response, we have been told it would be fixed within the week, it still isn't fixed.

Another problem sprung up about 2 months ago where images would occasionally get mixed up and an entire category would display the same image, an image that seemed to be randomly chosen from the database. Again, whenever we emailed them about this there was no response.

About 2 weeks ago, after they did an update on the system, a problem sprung up in almost every link from a product page where a forward slash was missing from the URL's. This is a major problem as customers can then not get back out of a product page without going back to the root address manually, or by using the back button. This is a big issue. When we had a meeting with them on a Friday, we were told it would be done by Monday and they would call us to confirm it was working properly.

We did not receive a call, and the problem still is not fixed.

This is very, very poor service and I do not think it is acceptable in any industry.

We have been speaking with them for a couple of months now about redesigning the website as the template has been the same for a while now. As of last week, when my boss wrote them a somewhat angry email about all of the problems with the website, they finally replied, after a couple of days, to tell us they were not going to fix the problems, as they were redesigning the website anyway, so they would just do that and sort out the problems then. This is all well and good, except that it has taken them a week to start to implement the new design, and now that they have started, it is full of glitches and they have not given us an ETA on when it will be all sorted out.

It is less than a month until Christmas and we have alot of customers through the website, so a working website is vital, especially at this time of year.

It's one thing to have a bit of a wait before things will be completed, but leaving us completely in the dark and not even acknowledging our complaints is no way to do business.

I wonder if they treat all of their customers with this much disrespect, or if it's only us since they knew our store owner prior to us starting up a website...

It is very frustrating not knowing if the company that is supposed to be fixing the problems has even received the problem note. However if it's something that won't take much effot on their part, they respond within an hour, which one can only assume means they get the problem emails, they just don't want to deal with it and thus behave as though they have not received them.

I'm not going to mention the name of the company, but if you are getting this treatment from a web design firm, you should be treated better.

Labels: design, internet, work

I seem to be coming across a few smaller, but good local movies lately. Last night I saw Perfect Creature on DVD with Rhi. Filmed predominately in Auckland, this movie has a great take on vampires that I have never seen explored before.

The main idea behind it, is that the church, or the brotherhood as it is called in the movie, is made up of vampires who are living in harmony with humankind as protectors of the species. However, there are no female vampires, and when one of the brotherhood starts attacking humans and drinking their blood directly, rather than drinking the blood donated to the church, things are thrown into turmoil and its up to a detective and the brotherhood to catch him.

I mentioned there are no female vampires, however, at the end of the movie this changes, but I won't ruin it for you.

In my opinion, this movie was excellent! I believe it was directed by the director of the Lord of the Rings, and the quality of the movie was great. All of the acting was well done, and the time period was conveyed well. As it is set in an alternate dimension, we expect there to be similarities as well as differences, and this has been shown excellently!

I highly recommend this movie to anyone who enjoys a good vampire movie. It is far from action based, but it does have some excellent action scenes as well. The special effects were not over the top, but they were very effective, and the theme of the movie was consistent the whole way through.

Enjoy.

Labels: movies

Some people should just learn to keep their mouth shut. It amazes me how any one person can be as completely stupid as the woman in the clip below, yet she feels no embarrassment at all about a grade 5 student being smarter then her!





"I thought Europe was a country?"

"Is France a country?"

"I'm listening to what you're saying, but I only hear what I want to."

"Hungary...thats a country?"

Anyone related to her must be quite embarrassed...

Labels: rants

On Monday evening, I was at uni, for no other reason then that the router at home was completely rooted yet again and was failing to do anything useful at all, and being that it is not my router, and I don't have access to the internet password, I couldn't do much about it.

As one can no doubt imagine, this would be really quite annoying, however, at 8 or so, my good friend Rhiannon sent me a message to see if I wanted to go see a movie as she was quite bored. Sounded like a plan as I was quite over working on a slow connection for that evening.

We decided to go see Gabriel at 9:15, so I had just enough time to get from uni to the cinema at Garden City. I wasn't really sure what to expect from the movie, given that it was meant to be about purgatory, which, as a Seventh Day Adventist, I firmly believe does not exist and is merely a creation of men.

All the same, it looked like it could be interesting so I decided to go along with it. The first 20 minutes or so of it are really a bit boring and introduce you to a series of characters with some bad fake accents. However, it does get much better.

It is a dark action/gothic style of film and the story of the movie revolves around an arc angel, Gabriel, fighting to restore the light to purgatory, as it had become controlled by the fallen.

It really quite surprised me actually, but as the movie progressed, the story line became quite interesting, and while I don't agree with the concept of the movie, I think it was done really well and had some very good idea's, such as portraying purgatory as a city.

The film techniques remind me a great deal of SinCity, and while the acting is not always good, particularly among some of the fallen, much of the acting is very well done, though I think it would have been better if some of the characters had not attempted fake accents.

It was easy to pick up in the first 20 minutes that there were a great deal of Australian actors in the movie, and as it progressed, we both thought it must have been filmed in Australia as well, turns out we were right, it was filmed in Sydney and in the Hunter Valley in NSW.

I've read a few comments on it on the IMDB Gabriel User Comments page, and there are some very poor comments on there that I have to disagree with. There are comments about it being a low budget Aussie film, and for what it is, it is good. Other's just not giving it a chance at all. Personally, I thought it was a good idea, I don't think the fact that it is an Australian film should even matter. Sure, some of the acting is a tad embarrassing, so what? There is plenty of bad acting coming out of the American film industry as well. My opinion of it is that it was well executed, and is definitely one of the better low budget films out there and it left me wanting to see more.

This could in part be that some of the plot occasionally left out information or seemed to skip seemingly important things, but I don't really believe this is the case as the things that seemed to be skipped were mostly explained later on. I think the wanting to see more was caused more by the fact that in it's genre it was well done, the action scenes were not over the top, but they were executed excellently, and while the plot had flaws, it kept one very interested the whole way through.

I definitely want to see it again, but after it is out on DVD.

Labels: movies

Well this is interesting, I just read an article in the Sydney Morning Herald about energy ratings for computers. There have been a lot of things going on as far as energy conservation and greenhouse emissions goes lately around here. First there was the introduction of the star rating system for plasma and LCD tv's because of the (in my opinion) unfounded argument that they both use significantly more power than CRT's. Now this is fine really, except that I don't agree with much of what I read, but that's for another time.

Now though there is talk of a rating system for computers themselves, from 1 to 5 stars, similar to the system used on white goods like freezers and refrigerators. The article which can be found on the Sydney Morning Herald website from earlier today goes into findings and so on, and sure, I can see why greenhouse emissions need to be reduced and energy needs to be conserved, but as was pointed out in the article, "...most big-brand computer and component makers are already likely to be complying, as they must meet the stricter European laws to ensure global sales." So in this regards, the 24 million or so computers in Australia will be predominately from these big brand manufacturers. Optima, Dell, IBM, HP, Apple and the big brand laptops like Sony, Asus, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Apple and so on. So this means it will most affect the smaller computer stores that put together computers themselves.

These smaller companies are using your everyday components that you find on the shelf and many are not put together with minimum power consumption in mind. Many of the smaller computer store's I have been involved with don't even have the equipment to check the power consumption of a computer.

So any computer that doesn't meet the minimum standard will become illegal to sell. Currently it is being considered for implementation by 2009, so thats plenty of time for these smaller companies to sort out things like this, but I expect it will increase the cost of computers through the small stores and thus affect their sales and income.

This then raises another question for me, unless individual parts are made illegal to purchase, there is no way to police the power consumption of all the computers being produced. While it's not the main computer source, there is a large market of people who build their own computers and computer's for others at no charge. These people aren't going to be checking power consumption, and I don't see any way that this can even be checked.

Aside from making individual parts illegal, which I expect would be a very bad move for the government, the only way I can see for this to work is to put pressure on the component manufacturers to make each individual part meet power requirements, presumably also using a similar system. Of course, this is not unreasonable, but it is going to be quite difficult and a lot of work to implement. To make this worse, the configuration of a computer is near limitless, even in computers from a manufacturer like Dell, anyone can add something else without much difficulty. The only computer market that is even remotely controlled in this regard is the laptop market.

I mean, the chances of there being multiple computers setup exactly the same as my desktop are quite low. I know one person with the same motherboard and CPU as me, and a similar video card, but thats about it, and even in that regard, my motherboard is slightly different. Of course theres far more to it than that.

Power supply: Antec TrueBlue 480w
Motherboard: Asus A8N-E
CPU: Athlon 64 3500+ 939
RAM: 2x 512mb Kingmax DDR400
Video card: HIS Radeon X800 GTO 256mb, 256bit
Optical drive: LiteOn CDRW/DVD Combo Drive
Optical drive 2: Pioneer DVR-109 DVDRW
Wireless: Belkin 802.llg PCI wireless card
Additional HD Controller: Promise SATA1510 TX Series
Hard drive 1: Seagate 120gb PATA
Hard drive 2: Samsung 30gb PATA
Hard drive 3: Western Digital 80gb PATA
Hard drive 4: Seagate 200gb SATA
Hard drive 5: Seagate 400gb SATA
Hard drive 6 & 7 in RAID 0: 2x Seagate 320gb SATA
2x 120mm fans
2x 80mm fans

Sure, I don't doubt there is any number of combinations of my hardware in Australia, but the number of combinations is huge, to control this will be a massive undertaking, and as I see it, any attempt to remove the control I have over the hardware in my computer in this regard is an attempt at my freedom as this is something I love being able to do exactly what I want with, when money permits of course, which it hasn't for a while now as much of the hardware would show.

I think this is a very extreme measure and doubt it would come to that but I suppose with some of the inaccurate "proof" I've seen for power consumption for the plasma's and LCD's (for another article), I expect there could be just as much of this around for cutting back computer power consumption, so I suppose one can only hope it doesn't get too bad.

Labels: hardware, politics, rants, technology

I was just having a read through a news article on the Sydney Morning Herald regarding Kevin Rudd's new education plans and am I the only one that finds "...the Government's plan to provide computers to every high school student..." a complete waste of my taxes? I knew about this before Labour were elected, yes, and this was one of the many things I counted against them.

I just went and had a look at the details on the official Australian Labour Party Website at an article from November 14th titled "Federal Labor's Education Revolution - A School Computer For Every Student In Years 9-12"

So reading through this, that's all well and good, but "A Rudd Labor Government will invest $1 billion over four years to turn every secondary school in Australia into a digital school." And, "The National Secondary School Computer Fund will allow secondary schools to apply for capital grants of up to $1 million to acquire new or upgrade information technology equipment."

That's a lot of taxpayer money, but here's what I don't understand about it, every student has access to computers anyway, why do they all need their own, and if they do, why shouldn't they have to work for it like every other person in the country? Sure, I have my own computer, I have my own laptop as well. Actually, if we want to get into specifics, I'll be completely upgrading my desktop in a few weeks time at which point I will have two quite powerful computers, along with my Macbook Pro, and my old laptop which is still decent, despite its generally dieing. And hey, you know what, I'm a university student that doesn't live at home. I have to pay all my own bills, rent, phone, internet, power, car, etc and aside from my HECS, I get no government assistance at all. I get no money from Centrelink, no rent assistance, no free computer gear, I have to work for it all and pay FULL taxes at the same time.

So here is the biggest thing, yes, my university has better computer facilities than most school's, but the fact is, the vast majority of school's already provide adequate computer access for students, along with internet access. As it was, at one of my schools, albeit a private school, they had almost as many computers as they did students, and it was a small school, I'm talking 50 students. My other school, a public school, had at least 5 computer labs that I know of, for all I know there could have been more as I kept finding them all over the place as well as the library which had a computer section with 40 or so computers in it. Additionally, they had laptops and projectors that were loaned out to students for use in classes if they needed them for whatever reason. As I said, this was at a PUBLIC school.

I am sure the grant would be great for schools to upgrade labs and so on, but in my experience, most schools already have systems in place for this sort of thing. The public school I mentioned had a 3 year rotation in the 3 main labs and library. One lab would be upgraded each year and any extra money in the budget meant one of the other smaller labs would be upgraded as well. Every 3rd year the library would be upgraded along with one of the labs.

So yes, the grant would no doubt be helpful in that way as it would allow a bigger budget, but for a lot of schools, my question is, is it really needed? And as far as buying students their own computers, I have to pay and always have had to pay for all of my own equipment and I don't see how it is fair at all that I should have to pay for other peoples gear. I personally think something like this should be restricted to the school only, even having enough computers for one per student located at the school is a waste of money. They aren't all going to be used all at once and I believe it will be a long time before they ever will be, if they ever will be. They can be used for most things yes, but for food tech, visual arts, music, drama, industrial arts, any of the creative and performing arts subjects cannot be completely reliant on computers, they can only partially be computer oriented and I'm sure there are more subjects as well that fit this bill.

The money would be better spent actually upgrading school facilities, such as air conditioning in more classes, and better lab equipment and so on.

Please note, this is just my perspective on it all and I am sure it will benefit someone somewhere, I just don't believe it is a worthwhile use of my and every other taxpayers money.

Labels: politics, rants

The Still As Life template should now work fine for anyone using Internet Explorer (it hasn't changed for any other browsers).

I'm really not sure what the problem was, I haven't changed any of the current code, I just added a couple of CSS tags to the main column and to the navigation bar. The word-wrap and overflow tags. To my knowledge these shouldn't matter, but after adding them the template seems fine in Internet Explorer now.

All I did was add:

word-wrap: break-word;
overflow: hidden;

Really, these shouldn't affect anything, but apparently the word-wrap fixes long text breaking the navigation float, and the overflow fixes long non-text content breaking the navigation float in Internet Explorer 6 and 7.

Labels: code, internet

I have just discovered that my blog template doesn't work correctly in Internet Explorer, no big surprise there though I suppose. Instead of the navigation being on the left, it is being put below the blog, even though the spacing is created on the left for it. I have a feeling it is something to do with the float tags and IE's dodgy support of them. My apologies to anyone who has been viewing my blog in Internet Explorer and the navigation had been out of line. Hopefully I'll have it fixed this afternoon.

Labels: code, internet

Labels: rants, special interest

Having just spent 2 hours at the cinema watching 30 Days of Night, I feel that I would like my $7 back.

I am glad I get a student discount cause I would be really annoyed if I had spent the full $14.50 on a ticket only to find out how much of a let down it was.

30 Days of Night is a movie about an Alaskan town (don't ask me which exactly as it was not something that was emphasised in the movie) that has a month of darkness.

During this month though, something unusual happens and vampires visit the town and kill almost everyone bar a few survivors. In the end, our hero, Eban, the sheriff, turns himself into a vampire in order to be able to fight the vampires, and then dies in the sunlight as the sun comes back on the morning of the 31st day.

The story itself was not that bad, but what could have been quite a good plot was ruined by an overly beastial portrayal of the vampires, despite their being able to speak a language that seemed quite cool.

I think they would have been better portrayed with a degree of class such as in Underworld, or even Blade.

I had quite a few quibbles with 30 Days of Night in regards to some of the story points.

The first was that when Stella was in an accident just before the darkness came, she commented that her car was totaled, but apart from the tractor being half on top of it, it looked completely undamaged, no visible damage around the tractor or anything.

The second was later, when they were hiding in the attic of one of the houses, they had a lamp on, and they were watching the outside through a torn flap in the roof. Now maybe it's just me, but if it's dark, and there is any gap at all in the attic roof, the light will show through to the outside, and if there is a gap as big as the flap they were looking out, it would be quite visible. Yet the vampires never found them in the attic, despite the fact that they were wandering the roof tops, so many of them would have been eye level with the emitted light.

The third was, it took over a week for there to be a blizzard so they could use it as cover to move outside, and it only lasted for a duration of about 2 minutes in the movie, I would estimate in what they achieved in those 2 minutes that it may have been more like 5-10 minutes if it were real. I'm no expert on it, but surely in that area there would be blizzards, or at least heavy winter storms a bit more frequently than that, and for longer. I know that when we have summer storm weather, we get one almost every day for a week or 2. Not the same I know, but I expect it would be similar. They did mention that it was a whiteout once or twice, which would make sense to be less frequent, but I still don't think it really worked that great in that regard.

There was one or two other things that really annoyed me about it, but it would seem I have since forgotten due to paying less and less attention to it.

No doubt there are people who thought a lot more of it than I did, after all, IMDB's user rating's put it at 7.1/10 at the time of writing this, but I thought it could definitely be better.

Labels: movies, rants

Sitting in the Microsoft MiX On Campus presentation, it's currently about three quarters through and Nick Hodge, Professional Geek, is giving a presentation on Microsoft's new web based Popfly software based around their new Silverlight software. We have just received free Red Bull, and this is proving to be quite the interesting look into what's happening at Microsoft at the moment.

Now I have to say, while the entire day so far has been quite the interesting and I will be going over it in it's entirety this evening, this Popfly is looking like one of the most interesting and useful things to come from Microsoft of late.

It creates mash ups of various web based programs to create new things without needing to know the code behind it.

Nick has given a few examples thus far and it is really quite interesting. It takes one block, such as a Flickr block feeding information into a Virtual Earth block. This mashes them together effectively so that if you search for a particular keyword, such as sunset's, it will display all photo's that have that keyword, and the location that it was taken, based on the location entered in the Flickr details. This is quite cool and is very simple to use and then implement into a website.

Apparently raw HTML can be put into the mash ups as well, however it has to be written with Microsofts Visual Studio Express. This could be annoying, but as the Express version is free to download, this is not so bad.

Nick went on and also showed a few cool examples on his own website, such as how he has incorporated his Flickr galleries into his website and so on. There is also a web based Live Messenger front end incorporated into his site that is pretty cool. Effectively, when the user is signed on, anyone can message them from the website. While some people could find this quite annoying, I think it could really be quite beneficial, and so far, all of these things, including Popfly, run great on a Mac as well.

It's still in it's beta stages, but it's starting to look like Google's free software push is really starting to push Microsoft to work on free software as well which is great!

Labels: code, internet, software, technology

This weekend just passed I have been away on holidays visiting my family for what was meant to be a relaxing weekend at the end of a very hectic week. It didn't end up being relaxing, but I suppose it was restful, in a way.

One of my old school's, Blue Hills College had gotten the contract to distribute Castle and Chrisco Hampers for this area, and had asked for volunteer's so that it could be done as a fundraiser for the school. From what I can gather, it sounds like it will be a pretty decent fundraiser as there is meant to be some $A25,000 raised over the next month.

My parents and sister had volunteered to help out on Sunday so I thought I might as well go along and help out as well.

I honestly never realised just how many people bought things through Chrisco and other things like this, they always seemed too expensive to me. At the warehouse though, we had two refrigerated containers full of frozen hampers, and two refrigerated truck trailers full waiting to be transferred to the containers as the ones from the containers are delivered. That's just for 4 days worth of deliveries! Not to mention the things that were already out of the containers waiting to be loaded into delivery trucks, and this is not a big area! I can only imagine how much must go out in the cities, especially Sydney and Melbourne!

I ended up going out in one of the truck's on a delivery run, I think we went to 16 different places on the run, it just amazed me how many of them the parents were abusive and yelled at the children like they were yelling at dogs.

Of the 16, one there was no one at home, three were retired couples, and of the other 12, they all had kids, and there were only 3, possibly 4 that didn't yell at the kids. Some of them you would see one minute yell at the kids, then the next at the dogs, and there would be no change at all in the way they yelled at either of them. I was just astounded that 2 thirds of the families we delivered to had so much verbal abuse as commonplace. I mean, a lot of these places I delivered pizza to as well when I was working at Domino's, but I had never seen this before. I still find it hard to believe just how much of it is happening.

Labels: rants

All I can say is wow!

I just discovered Guido Daniele's website, completely by accident, and I have to say, this guy is quite the amazing hand painter. Most of his art is pretty cool, but I strongly recommend checking out his animal hand paintings.

They really are stunning, and they are amazingly realistic! If you get a chance, they really are worth having a look at.

Enjoy.

Labels: art

Yesterday I spent a good many hours working on changes to a client's website that had to be completed by this morning. What should have been only a couple of hours of work ended up actually being 14 hours of work. The thing that took the longest ended up being a series of Javascript mouseovers and links. The reason for this is that at the time they were done, they were originally not meant to be links, just mouseovers.

So I had used a Javascript preloader to load up the images and also provide the mouseover changes:

<script type="text/javascript">
<!-- Hide script from old browsers

function MM_preloadImages() { //v3.0
var d=document; if(d.images){ if(!d.MM_p) d.MM_p=new Array();
var i,j=d.MM_p.length,a=MM_preloadImages.arguments; for(i=0; i<a.length; i++)
if (a[i].indexOf("#")!=0){ d.MM_p[j]=new Image; d.MM_p[j++].src=a[i];}}
}

function MM_swapImgRestore() { //v3.0
var i,x,a=document.MM_sr; for(i=0;a&&i<a.length&&(x=a[i])&&x.oSrc;i++) x.src=x.oSrc;
}

function MM_findObj(n, d) { //v4.0
var p,i,x; if(!d) d=document; if((p=n.indexOf("?"))>0&&parent.frames.length) {
d=parent.frames[n.substring(p+1)].document; n=n.substring(0,p);}
if(!(x=d[n])&&d.all) x=d.all[n]; for (i=0;!x&&i<d.forms.length;i++) x=d.forms[i][n];
for(i=0;!x&&d.layers&&i<d.layers.length;i++) x=MM_findObj(n,d.layers[i].document);
if(!x && document.getElementById) x=document.getElementById(n); return x;
}

function MM_swapImage() { //v3.0
var i,j=0,x,a=MM_swapImage.arguments; document.MM_sr=new Array; for(i=0;i<(a.length-2);i+=3)
if ((x=MM_findObj(a[i]))!=null){document.MM_sr[j++]=x; if(!x.oSrc) x.oSrc=x.src; x.src=a[i+2];}
}

// End hiding script from old browsers -->
</script>

Along with the body tags to go with it:

<body onLoad="MM_preloadImages('../images/image1.jpg','../images/image2.jpg')">

Except we have 8 mouseovers, so there are a fair few more images in the preloader.

Now I had been using the following code where the images were located in order to perform the mouseover function:

<a href="javascript:;" onMouseOut="MM_swapImgRestore()" onMouseOver="MM_swapImage('image1','','images/image2.jpg',1)"><img src="images/image1.jpg" border="0" name="image1" />

This was working great, but when it came to adding a link it became difficult. I didn't want to edit the main script as it is used by other pages for mouseovers without links, so I needed to do something inline. I spent a couple of hours searching and trying different alternatives for this, but nothing I found seemed to want to work correctly. A few things I got to work in just Internet Explorer, but not in any other browsers, I got some to work with the link but lost the mouseover, I had a few solutions that opened a new window, but wouldn't open the page they were meant to and so on. It proved to be far more difficult than placing it in a separate script, and looking back it may have been a better option to create an additional script in addition to the main one, but I hadn't thought of that at the time.

I finally came across a solution that seems to have worked:

<a href="javascript:;" onMouseOut="MM_swapImgRestore()" onMouseOver="MM_swapImage(image1','','images/image2.jpg',1)" onClick="javascript:window.open('http://www.website.com')"><img src="images/image1.jpg" border="0" name="image1" /></a>

Once I worked this out, the simplicity of it amazed me, yet every possibility I tried seemed to be equally simple, they just didn't work correctly.

I hope this is useful to someone as I know that I had trouble finding a solution to this with a quick search.

Good luck and enjoy.

For anyone interested in the sites that I looked at for information on doing this they are as follows in no particular order:

• HTML Goodies
• Page Resource
• Rick Strahl's Web Log
• W3 Schools
  

Labels: code, internet, special interest

One of the most annoying thing's I have ever come across in my web design experience, is when working on a website with another designer, they are adding formatting, either in HTML or using inline styles, in the HTML file instead of in the CSS file. This is extremely frustrating when I try and do things using the external style sheet and I find I don't have the control over them that I should have, and this is frustration is compounded, when I know that I wrote the style that should do it myself and all of a sudden, it's not there anymore and I have to go hunting through the HTML looking for whatever snippet of code he has added or taken out of the style sheet.

Of course to make things even more difficult, he has added it in multiple HTML documents so I have to go through 30 odd files and remove or modify this tag to do whatever I needed.

His reasoning is that this makes the code easier to manage, but I really don't see it, it just seems to create more work from where I'm sitting.

So the only way I can see that this can be even worse, is that he is my boss so I can hardly complain about his coding practice, despite how illogical his reasoning is.

If there is one thing I can't stress enough to people, it is to write your code to the World Wide Web Consortium's standards. Standards compliant code is NOT hard to write, especially if you just use one of the Transitional standards. There's a whole stack of free information and tutorials on it at the W3 Schools website too.

Learn it, do it.

Perhaps I'm the only one that finds this annoying, but as good as PHP is, it seems to me that he is using if excessively and all he is really managing to do is slow the loading time down.

For example, we have had a problem with 100% heights specified in the style sheet where all browsers read that correctly, except for Internet Explorer which didn't read it at all, so the height has to be manually specified for it. I figured out that if you specify the height in the HTML it works in Internet Explorer, so we just have to manually specify the height for each page (yay). So he is using PHP to write an if else statement in the HTML document that says if the browser is Internet Explorer, make the height this much, else make it 100%.

This is completely unnecessary though as all the other browsers ignore the height="" tag anyway and use the height specified in the style sheet. You can set the height to 10 in the HTML and the other browsers will still do it as 100%, as they should. So really, this PHP statement is a waste of his time, my time, the server's CPU time, and ultimately, the user's loading time.

This particular statement is not big I know and should still be executed quite fast, but there are statements like this all over the place that just waste time, and time always adds up.

Labels: code, internet, rants, special interest

For the past 5 days or so I have been wrestling with creating floating backgrounds for a clients website. None of the options I could think of wanted to work. Now it was a little different to your usual floating background.

Usually you'll have a background that you just don't want to change throughout the course of the website so you would use something like:

<style type="text/css">
body {
background-color: #ffffff;
background-attachment: fixed;
background-image: url(background.jpg);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
}
</style>

But I needed something a little different to this, I not only needed the background image to stay put as I scroll, but I needed it to adjust to fit different screen resolutions and remain central so as to suit the website content.

I just could not get this to work how I wanted though as I had to have the content of the website aligned with the centre of the background, so that it would fit with the white spacing.

I eventually ended up just creating a div and putting the background in the div and aligning the content centrally in the div. Of course this just didn't work on anything below 1280x960 as there would be a scroll bar due to the size of the background, so back to the style sheet drawing board for me.

Now, as I was hunting for information regarding this, I came across very little. Eventually I found something on the W3 Schools website that looked like it would do the trick, the background-position element. I'm not sure why I've never come across this particular element before, but it was there so I gave it a try, exactly as they demonstrated it.

<style type="text/css">
body {
background-color: #ffffff;
background-attachment: fixed;
background-image: url(background.jpg);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-position: right top;
}
</style>

Again, this did not work exactly as I had intended. It worked as long as the window was the right size to put the content in the centre, when the background was right aligned. I now had an idea of where to go though, if I could align to right top, why not just top?

So I changed my code slightly to reflect this idea:

<style type="text/css">
body {
background-color: #ffffff;
background-attachment: fixed;
background-image: url(background.jpg);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-position: top;
}
</style>

And there you go. By just aligning the background to the top, it was automatically centred as well, so regardless of how big the screen resolution is, the background floats to the centre along with the content.

I believe most CSS is fairly self explanatory and easy to use, so I don't see why some developers are so reluctant to utilize it, but in case there is anything you aren't sure about in this snippet, here is an explanation of each piece of code:

First off I have created an inline style (usually I would put this in an external style sheet, but for the sake of demonstration I'm using inline styling):

<style type="text/css">

Following this I have told the browser that the HTML tag I am applying the style to is the body tag with:

body {

I have then specified the background colour. This is not necessary, but is good practice in case the background image can't be found for whatever reason or if a user has images disabled etc:

background-color: #ffffff;

Next I told the browser not to scroll the background but to keep it in the one spot:

background-attachment: fixed;

I then specified the path to the image I wanted for my background:

background-image: url(background.jpg);

Since I don't want the background to repeat at all, horizontally or vertically, I specified as such:

background-repeat: no-repeat;

The last CSS element I have defined is where I want the background to be positioned in relation to the browser window:

background-position: top;

Finally, I closed the style sheet, and then closed the inline style tag:

}
</style>

Of course, all of these elements have a variety of values that could be used in them instead of the ones I have used, but in order to make the background really float the way I wanted these are the tags I had to use.

I hope this makes your job easier somewhere along the way.

Labels: code, internet, special interest, technology

John Williamson is a great guy, don't get me wrong, I like his songs (unusual for me, I know), he portrays the Aussie way so well, but you can only here the same albumof his so many times.

My boss has had one album of his playing at work for the past 2 weeks. The same album, over and over. It has some great songs on it,but you can only hear it so many times without starting to go slightly crazy.

Even if it was rotating with a couple of other CD's it would be fine, but in a 5 hour shift, you hear the same songs at least 5 times! That's a little much if you ask me. Especially after an ITB006 (Networking) exam at 8:30 this morning!

The exam went pretty well I think, there were a few things I couldn't remember, like how to do the working on a cyclic redundancy check, and a couple of other questions that I no longer remember, but aside from that it was pretty good.

Again it surprised me how much of it was exactly the same as from the two practice exams, but hey, who's complaining right? Even better, there was nothing from the practical tutorials, it was completely based on the lectures and the theory from tutorial's. Which is particularly good since I didn't actually go to all of the practicals.

I followed most of the lecture material fairly well so I didn't think the question's based on them were very hard, and 30 of them were multiple choice anyway, with the other 5 being short answer questions split into 3-5 questions each.

The most any individual question was worth from memory was 4 marks, with 1 and 2 each being the average marks per question so I think it should be a pretty easy exam to do well in.

I also donated blood after the exam. It's the first time since I moved up to Brisbane that I've been able to donate when I've been near one of the blood banks or the mobile donor centre's. Every other time, I've had to be somewhere in the next 5 minutes or so, or I've been sick or had a headache or something like that. I almost walked past it this time without thinking but they had a big sign up saying they particularly need O blood types at the moment, so since I'm an O positive that caught my eye and lo and behold they took my blood. Filled a bag in 12 minutes, that's a personal best!

Now everyone that's able, go donate blood! It's good, I promise. It doesn't hurt much at all and whatever pain you do get usually goes away within a few minutes anyway, so do it!

Labels: music, rants, university, work

Today I discovered, that MSN for Mac does not have webcam support. At all. Surely Microsoft have to realise that despite the fact that OS X is a competitor, not writing a compatible version for Mac that works completely is a very big downer for their reputation that already struggles anyway.

I did some searching though and came across a little program called Mercury. It has a few glitches every now and again, but I think they may in part have been due to the battery running low

I also uncovered aMSN, or Alvaro's MSN, which is virtually a clone of the Windows version of MSN and seems to have all of the features as well. Like Mercury, it has a few minor glitches now and then, but it mostly seems to be fine. It has its own set of emoticons which are slightly different to the original (Mercury uses the original MSN emoticons), but I don't think this is much of an issue. Just don't try and change the font colour, it crashes every time I try.

There are other options available that I found, such as Fire, which is now Adium I believe, though Fire is still available, neither of these two options are as fully featured as Mercury, and neither of them have webcam support that I could find.

The only other solution I located was Mac Messenger, however I didn't test this one out as the latest files are from 2005 so they will be quite out of date anyway, so whether or not they have webcam support, they will be missing some of the newer features of MSN anyway.

Aside from the webcam not being available through MSN for Mac, I hadn't realised how much more it was missing until I started using Mercury. Mercury and aMSN are much easier to use and are packed full of more features than MSN for Mac. Winks, nudges, all of the emoticons, everything is there. Mercury also supports multiple chat protocols which could be useful. So if you're like me and you can't stand Microsoft's weak attempt to make their software cross platform, I have to recommend Mercury or aMSN! They are great options.

Labels: software, technology

I was just stumbling around on the net, and I came across this really interesting site, Musicovery.

It's a pretty nifty idea really. It's an online radio, but it plays music based on things like your mood, by dance tempo, or by music similar to your favourites and so on. You can further restrict the music based on genre and time periods.

I found it also seemed to load and buffer music a lot more efficiently than a lot of online radio's, which is a big plus for me who is quite regularly capped.

It is available in four languages which is pretty cool, so hopefully you'll be able to find something thats right for you at any time! Enjoy.

Labels: internet, music, software

Isn't it pretty?

I have spent the last couple of hours working on setting up my new baby the way I like and have come across a few things that may be of use for anyone else in a similar situation to me.

First off, my new Macbook came with Mac OS X Tiger (10.4), not Leopard (10.5). Slightly annoying as I was hoping to not have to worry about that. Luckily though, it came with an upgrade disk, so I got to upgrade to OS X Leopard for no extra charge. This took about an hour and a half to do, why so long I have no idea but it did everything itself so that was a definite plus.

Now that finished and it's running great. To anyone who has bought a Mac with Tiger installed but with Leopard upgrade disk's, do not install anything until after upgrading to Tiger. I'm not sure why this is, but for some reason the upgrade does not perform well whilst there is other software present. So make sure you upgrade first.

I also found, locating MSN for Mac was quite a pain, it is not available on the regular MSN website. Unsurprisingly, it is subtly located on Microsoft's website in an area called "Mactopia". So for anyone else looking for MSN for a Mac, it's located here.

I had also been hoping to find a Winamp port for OS X as I'm really not a fan of iTunes, alas this is not to be. However, I discovered CrossOver Mac which looks promising. I shall have to give this a go at some stage and see how it turns out. I was planning on running an emulated version of Windows anyway for a few things though so this will probably be doubling up on some things.

My only real whim though, is that the screen doesn't go back very far. This is generally okay, but because of the variety of different places my laptop has to be usable, I quite often end up with the screen tilted back a fair way. I'm sure I'll get used to this soon enough though.

Random link: Reaction Tester

Tranquilize sheep to test your reaction times!

Labels: hardware, software, technology

Ha! So I hear Prince is threatening to sue fan sites, that sounds logical to me, don't you? Fan's get more people to listen to my music, therefore, sue them. Ah wells, that's his problem I suppose. Knew there had to be a reason I never liked him.

In more interesting news, I just received my shiny new MacBook Pro. All I can say is. SWEET! I got the basic 15" 2.2ghz version with 2gb of RAM, 120gb hard drive, etc. and yet it is still more powerful than my desktop. I think that means I need to upgrade the desktop. Actually I need to anyway, but this just gives me another excuse.

It would seem that yet again, one of my current web design client's has changed their mind. Their website was meant to be live almost two weeks ago now to coincide with the start of an advertising campaign, yet they keep changing their mind. I have just received today, a redesigned layout. New colours, extended navigation, almost every image has been changed and so on.

Thankfully the majority of the changes can be done in CSS, but due to some...creative differences...between myself and my boss, parts of the layout, particularly the navigation, have been coded largely in HTML instead of using CSS to control them so they could be a bit of a pain to modify across the entire site. Oh well though, I'm getting paid extra so it's alright.

On another note, why is it so hard to find information about what laws there are in regards to workplace bullying?! (Different workplace to the web design one)

Labels: hardware, politics, technology, work

I don't get it. What is with people? EVERY resume that we have gotten today has had spelling errors, or grammatical errors, or just doesn't show anything useful. There is one, it's two pages long and looks fancy and fairly professional, but the information provided is exactly like the one I posted yesterday! It conveys absolutely nothing useful at all!

There is another, the prospective interviewee has written their resume in Seek and has just linked us to their Seek resume page rather than taking the time to bother doing up a professional looking one himself. His content is reasonable, and I will admit it does look fairly professional, but then you start to read it, and there are lower case headings, comma's at the end of sentences and so on. It would be nice to get a decent looking resume for once. I thought this job of knocking back people would be hard since I don't like to hurt peoples feelings or anything, but some of these resume's make it pretty easy, he hasn't even capitalized the first letters of his first and last name!

On an interesting and slightly less...annoying...note, one in three of the applicants live within a five minute walk of my place.

Labels: rants, work

At work at the moment we are looking for more staff and there are job advertisements on places like Seek, University of Queensland Student Union Employment, Queensland University of Technology Student Guild Employment and so on. Now there have been a lot of resume's come through and since I do most of the email work, I have the job of going over each resume and deciding which one's are worth printing and forwarding to my boss, and which ones will get a lovely little email in response that reads:

"Dear Jeremy,

Thankyou very much for your application, however at this stage all of the interview places have been filled. Should any of these fall through, we will be in contact again.

Best regards,

Management"

Isn't that nice?

Anyway, here I am going through these resume's, and only a couple of them I would even consider interviewing, but the majority met my boss's criteria, so theres 8 or so got printed out and forwarded onto her. Then there was this one:

Name: Billy K

Address: 85 Bad St

Phone: 0400 000 000

Email Address: billy.k1989@hotmail.com

Drivers Licence: No

Personal Qualities: Friendly, Fun, keen, patient

Interest & Hobbies: Hanging out with friends, going to

movies, talking to peple

Schooling: ********** State High School 1998

Objective: To get a job to save some money and get

Work experience

Availability: Casual

References: Will give when you call.

Of course, this isn't the actual resume, but this is exactly how it was formatted and the exact same way it was written, spelling mistakes, poor grammar, some things not formatted the same as the rest, and so on.

Now, I'm not the employer, but just reading that, why would I want to work with them? So why would an employer want to consider employing them? The resume doesn't even take up a page.

So apart from that, what's wrong with it? Where have they worked before? There's no employment history, there aren't even any references, he says he will only supply them on request, so how do we know anything about him prior to speaking to him? He hasn't even given his last name, just an initial!

Additionally, he only has one school listed, which he left in 1998, so either he is in his late 20's (which is fine), or he dropped out of school. Either way he's been out of school for 9 years and doesn't have an employment history, has he even worked at all in that time? He hasn't said he's doing anything else at the moment, such as tertiary education, nor does he have a drivers license, so how do we know he's even motivated to do anything but the absolute minimum?

His interests are fine, but they show nothing and are basically wasted space. Everything likes those things. They don't stand out. So again this works against him as it builds on what I said before, it shows he isn't motivated. In addition to this he doesn't have any skills listed aside from his "Personal qualities", so how do we know what he can do?

Even his "Objective" is shocking. It confirms our belief that he most likely has not had a job before, despite being out of school for almost 10 years and that he isn't motivated!

This in turn leads us to wonder if he is even being honest in his "Personal qualities" as he clearly is not "keen", not about working anyway.

So please, someone tell me, why oh why would someone want to employ him?

It leads one to wonder about the effectiveness of Centrelink and their job diaries. People have to apply for jobs to keep getting paid by Centrelink, of course they don't have to get one...

I cannot stand these people who seem to think they shouldn't have to work and should get everything for free.

Seriously, this place is so easy to get a job if you show any interest or initiative at all, I mean, its a surf shop, I'm not even interested in surfing or anything surfing related, yet I got a job here!

Labels: politics,