Still As Life

With newspapers Australia wide running near identical articles on the latest announcement today from the Australian Labor Party, and blogs worldwide abuzz, I can't help but be astounded.

How is mandatory ISP level internet filtering a smart idea? Whether it causes a speed difference or not, which I believe it will, it makes me wonder how they can see this as viable at all.

What advice are they given? Do they not realise how rapidly content changes? How are they planning on maintaining the black list?

Will they ban IP's or IP ranges? Will they just waste my tax money paying people to trawl the ever changing, constantly evolving, millions of websites out there and individually choose what they think is appropriate for me to see?

Will my blog be inappropriate because I'm voicing my opinion about KRudd's failure to represent the people of Australia only a month into his leadership?

What a way to end 2007, but to announce a system that requires the citizens of Australia to opt out of a system that is not wanted in the first place.

I see the reason for it, there is the belief in some groups that the government should do their parenting for them but filtering content so that they don't have to actively monitor the activities of their children.

Okay, so maybe I'm being overly cynical, and sure, I can understand the desire for content filters for children, as exposure to unsuitable material is increasing in virtually every media, from television and radio, through to the internet. The difference with the internet is that it doesn't have a content rating on everything.

Really, in an unfiltered connection to the internet, a child could stumble upon virtually anything. A point in regards to this though is that the public school system already has filters in place for the internet connections through schools, or NSW does anyway, I am not 100% certain on other states. If NSW state education system can do it though, why couldn't they use a similar system in other states and throughout the various private schooling systems?

Then there are the public libraries, why can't they use this system as well? What other places can children access the internet? This just leaves the home. Who is responsible for the connection at home? Parents.

There are plenty of software filters available that can do this, but with the school kid that got around the system there's all that kerfuffle, but really, a kid could get around the ISP level if they wanted to. There are plenty of proxy servers out there that are relatively simple to use, though they can be slow and annoying.

So, if parents aren't taking the responsibility to actively educate their kids about what is suitable and what isn't, such as they would (one would hope), teach them when it is suitable and safe to cross a road. If the government has to take responsibility for this, then is it not telling parents that it's okay to not worry about what their children do on the internet, because there is a filter in place?

A filter cannot and will not block everything without effectively allowing only government approved websites and nothing else. So where does this leave us, well, for me, I see it as a waste of my taxes. Why on earth would I want to pay for something I don't want, then be required to opt out of it if I don't want it, then continue to pay for it anyway?

Should I choose to opt out, will that mark me as someone that should have my internet usage monitored? If i decide not to opt out, where is the line drawn on content filtering?

It is intended to be a porn filter, this is all well and good and I have to agree is a great idea, because even when actively monitoring a childs internet usage, there will no doubt still be some form of unwanted exposure. However, does it stop at that? Or once this method of control is in place, does it get taken further? Filtering out anything deemed inappropriate by those in power?

There are idea's thrown around all over the web, but something the springs to my mind is, regardless of whatever pressure is on the government for this filter, from whatever source, can they not see that if they put a filter like this in place, when it fails, it will come back on them? They are offering a sense of security. If, and I believe when, something that should be filtered isn't, who is to blame? The people maintaining the blacklist.

Duncan Riley makes an interesting point in his blog on TechCrunch, "Australia Joins China In Censoring The Internet" where he points out:

Notably Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was a former Australian Diplomat in China, and speaks fluent Mandarin; given Australia’s boom is fueled by mineral exports to China, it would seem that Australian Government policies are now by China in return.

An interesting thought, and is well and truly believable. Whether it is or not, who knows, regardless though, the day a filtering system such as this comes into effect is the day that the government is effectively given complete censorship control.

More information can be found on the Labor website.

Labels: internet, politics, rants

As you may recall, on the 4th of December, I joined up to the Vodafone 5GB wireless modem package. This has been working out quite well, it has kept me sane these past couple of days where I would not normally have had the internet and would have been stuck with a certain person who I really cannot stand. Yay for technology and it's associated magic.

Anyway, I received my bill earlier in the month. If you read my earlier post, or have been looking at this plan yourself, you would know it is $39 a month for 5gb of data usage, regardless of whether you are on the 3G network or the GSM network. The $39 a month includes the USB modem or PCMCIA card (I suggest the USB modem) for free.

Now I received my bill and it was not for $39. It was for $40.29. This amount made no sense at all, my bill made no sense as it looked like I had been charged twice for the month, and neither of the numbers made sense.

I have just spent half an hour plus on the phone to customer care about this and was transferred backwards and forwards between 2 different departments 3 times! The first 2 had no idea at all, even though the first was billing enquiries and the second was data billing enquiries.

Neither of them had any idea.

Finally, I got transferred back to general billing enquiries and got a different customer service representative who seemed to know what she was talking about.

It seems that unlike the other providers I have experience with, Vodafone don't have billing cycles everyday, so when you join up to Vodafone, you are put into whatever the next billing cycle is. In my case, the next one was on the 5th, and then you are billed twice to make up the extra time before the billing cycle.

I had a feeling it was just something like this, but when you are billed for more than you are expecting it's nice to know why. It definitely should not have taken half an hour to find out though. Surely anyone in any of their billing departments should know something like this and could have told me straight up in less than 5 minutes.

The thing that makes it really annoying, is that I never had to wait for someone to answer when I rang and when I was transferred. They always picked up straight away, so the half an hour spent trying to find out was almost all spent speaking directly to someone, there was no waiting time at all in that.

Labels: rants

Joe Wilcox from Microsoft Watch has some really great advice in his top 10 recommendations for 2008. It's just a pity that chances are, Microsoft won't take much of it on board.

I particularly like number 2, and I think this is something that would be really beneficial. There is nowhere that properly showcases Microsoft products, and while I'm not a big Microsoft supporter myself, I can see how this is a big problem. Look at any of the Apple stores, or even Myers and David Jones, they all have big Apple showcases, with Apple products setup so that customers can try them out.

Sure, at say Harvey Norman, there are heaps of Windows computers setup and on display, but often times the sales people don't really know that much about the computers. If Microsoft could properly showcase all of their products together and show off how well they work together when they are setup properly, as Apple does, it would no doubt benefit their sales, as well as customer satisfaction, as they would actually be able to see how things should work together and setup their own purchases the same way.

There is a lot of operating system functionality and software functionality in Windows and other Microsoft products that people don't know exists or just don't understand, so it never gets used, or when it does, it doesn't get used properly.

In addition, the Microsoft website can sometimes be difficult to navigate when you are looking for help on specific things unless you know where to look. For many people this is discouraging and so they give up on things because they don't understand them.

If Microsoft were to open some retail outlets and improve help and support through their website and other retail stores, it would really help out their customer satisfaction and overall sales. If people are happy with a product or service, they will recommend it, and often a recommendation from a trusted person will be worth much more than any advertising campaign will be.

Perhaps I'm completely wrong here, but I don't believe I am. Go to Myers or David Jones, and the Apple section always has far more people around trying out the Mac's than the Windows section that has everything locked in display cases.

Last time I was at Myers, I counted over 20 people surrounding 3 iMac's, 2 MacBook's and 2 MacBook Pro's, the Windows section was completely empty. That's a big difference.

As Joe says, "Think simple. Be social."

Labels: rants, software, technology

I don't know what the name of the artist is that does these, but these chalk drawings are absolutely amazing!

Have a look!

neue 3D Strassenzeichnungen

Labels: art

There's been a lot of hype surrounding The Golden Compass in the past couple of months, I know Rhi has been very excited about it and looking forward to seeing it.

Last night I went to see it with my brother and sister, a bit unsure of what to expect, given that I have not read the book, so I only knew what I had seen in the trailer and what Rhi had told me about it.

Anyway, off I went to see it, and while the animation and acting were both great, and all of the actors were well cast, I think the movie could have been far better. When it finished, I couldn't help but feel like it had been a waste of two hours.

If you don't mind a little spoiler, here is the trailer. If you aren't sure if you want to go see it or not, watch the trailer, almost everything that happens of interest in the movie is in the trailer:



The only thing that isn't in the trailer that is of significant interest is the fight between the armoured bears.

I am sure that its a good story, but the film didn't do it justice. There is a comment on the movie on IMDB by Simon Parker where he says

" If you haven't read the book you'll love it, if you have you'll be a bit disappointed."

This I believe is far from the truth as I definitely did not love it, and I think anyone else who has a similar lack of knowledge of the story won't like it greatly either. The only reason I can see to like it is if you already understand the story and can make sense of what is in the movie.

The story did make sense yes, but it was not well explained, and left a lot of questions. I have to agree with the Triple J movie review that gave it a 2.5/5 which is mysteriously no longer on the Triple J movie review website, I don't think it can really get any higher than this without knowledge of the book. The voters on IMDB have given it an average rating of 6.6/10 at the time of writing this. For every age group, the average is between 6.3 and 7.5.

A contrast to my perspective is that my sister thoroughly enjoyed the movie.

Simon Parker also mentions that the film would benefit from an extra half an hour. While this may be the case, I don't think I could sit through an extra half hour, unless it was filling in more detail near the start of the film.

The reason I say this is that I was in the cinema for half an hour and felt like I had been sitting there for over an hour and nothing had really happened yet. It got to an hour and it felt like I had been there for near two hours and still, nothing much had happened. So if there were to be an extra half hour, I think it would need to be used to make the first half hour of the film more interesting and fill in more details.

I understand that the ending of the book was left off the ending of the movie and is to be included in the start of the second movie instead. Perhaps this would have helped the movie overall, perhaps not. I really hope that the second movie is going to be done better though and not rush the story so much that details are left out and the story loses its appeal.

Labels: movies

It's very unusual that I import the photo's from my digital camera (Olympus FE-210) and get a surprise.

As one would expect, as it is my camera, I generally know what photo's will be on it, seeing as how I took them.

Last night though, I was importing the photo's from throughout Christmas day, and find myself surprised with a photo of my contorted sister.

I soon found out she had taken it with a friend of hers, so she isn't really contorted. Nonetheless, it was quite a surprise.

I hope you all had a very merry Christmas!

Catch ya.

Labels: art, other

Ah Christmas, this year, I received one of these Tattoo Bluetooth Headsets by Bluetrek because my parents always seem to call me when I'm driving, so they decided this would be a great idea.

It has been quite the mission though. I spent all day yesterday trying to get it to work. Once it had completed it's first full charge and I began attempting to set it up on my phone, I was unable to get it to work. My phone, a Panasonic x700 would pair with the headset with no problems, and the controls on the headset would work with the phone, but it would not send audio to, or receive audio from the headset.

Since this was being problematic, I paired it with my MacBook Pro and it worked perfectly fine!

So I spent the rest of the day fiddling with my phone settings and trying to get it to rout the audio correctly, but for some reason the battery finally died, far sooner than it should have. According to the box and manual, the Bluetrek Tattoo Headset has a 4 day standby life or 4.5hr talk time. It died after about 6 hours, mostly in standby.

After this I was unable to get it to charge again, the charge light would come on when it was plugged in, but it would only stay on for a few minutes, and as soon as I took it off the charger it would refuse to turn on.

So today, we took it back to the store and they replaced it with another thankfully. This new one would pair off with my laptop fine, but it still had the same problem with the phone. I tried it with mums phone though and it worked perfectly, which leads me to believe that for whatever reason, my phone does not fully support it. So if anyone else has had this experience with the Panasonic x700 that can offer some advice, that would be great. In the meantime though, I'm looking at a new phone anyway, have been for a while, so perhaps it will just have to come sooner than I had been planning. Good enough excuse for me.

The headset is a great little thing though. I can't stand some of the big bulky ones that are floating around. The Bluetrek Tattoo is tiny though and while it comes with hook type things to put around your ear, they are optional, and it is small enough, that it will stay in my ear on its own without needing the hooks. This is great cause it makes it much easier to cart it around with me than those big things. It is only 8.1g, so its tiny!

For anyone thats interested in these types of things, it also comes with 8 different "skins" so you can chance the look of it, hence the name "tattoo", but they are nothing overly special in my opinion. I'm quite happy with the standard black casing.

The ear piece is very comfortable to wear and has 3 different sizings that come with it, so it will fit most people with no hassles.

The audio is a little bit dodgy at times, if you move it around in your ear it fuzzes, but it doesnt have any trouble if you are walking around and so on until you get around 10m from it. The fuzziness when you move it around isn't a very big deal though because once you've got it there it's comfortable enough that you don't need to move it around.

It has a pretty decent range, as I mentioned, it does around 10m, including through a couple of walls. Nothing special, but it's about average in my experience with Bluetooth devices and it is more than enough for it's purpose. 10m is also the distance stated on the box as being the operation range, so it stands true to that.

If you are like me and need something very small and easy to cart around, the Bluetrek Tattoo Bluetooth Headset is a great little device.

Labels: hardware, technology

What a cool Christmas eve! Not only is it not sweltering hot like the past few years have been, but there is a full moon and everything.

To make things even better, it's very bright and I'm down in Lismore visiting the family, and I have a perfectly clear view of the moon out over a dark hill.

Wishing you all a merry Christmas, I hope you all enjoy whatever you are doing and have a great one!

Labels: other

If anyone is interested, the TerraMedia website has a brand new News page! If you want to keep up with the latest TerraMedia News, when you visit www.terramedia.com.au simply browse to the News page which is second from the left, between "Home" and "Design", or head directly to news.terramedia.com.au.

Have a great weekend!

Labels: internet, work

If you've ever been looking for free and interesting fonts that are actually of a fairly decent quality, I have to suggest you have a look at TypeNow.net. They have a great database of over 6,000 free fonts, as well as commercial fonts.

There are plenty of other places around with free fonts, but I find TypeNow particularly easy to use, and though it hasn't been marked as updated for near a year now, it contains a lot of good, useful fonts.

Check them out.

Labels: design

One of the things I have found the most difficult getting used to on my MacBook Pro is the lack of a Notepad alternative on OS X. Sure you have TextEdit, and VIM, but neither of them are really what I'm after.

I basically use Notepad on Windows as a form of post-it note taking. If I have to copy a few things from various places, they all go into Notepad temporarily and so on. It's quick to open, quick to save, and takes up almost no RAM.

TextEdit, while it is fairly quick, it just feels too bulky for my liking, maybe I'm just too picky. It does a lot more than Notepad though, perhaps that has something to do with it, I'm not sure.

VIM is hardly worth mentioning since you have to access the command line to run it and it's slightly painful to use the way I want to use it.

However, I have found the most useful invention since post-it notes and computers. Post-it notes on my OS X desktop!

I have no idea how I overlooked them so many times as they are quite obvious in the applications folder. They are widgets labeled as "Stickies" and their icon is clearly yellow post-it notes.

This is an awesome idea, there is probably something similar available for Windows, though I have never had reason to look so I couldn't say for certain. On OS X though, they greatly complement the "Spaces", based on the multiple desktops idea in X11. I can have as many post-it notes as I want on my desktop and they take up virtually no RAM and thus having a virtually negligible effect on system performance, they don't get in the way, and they can contain code without it affecting anything or attempting to render it.

Or, as I mentioned, they complement the Spaces in OS X, so I can have a second desktop screen and use it entirely for post-it notes. How awesome is that? If I feel the need, I can change the formatting of the text and so on, but there are no bulky controls like in some other things.

I love it.

Labels: software

I'm not sure how long iPrimus have been running their green broadband program, but it is a very interesting idea.

I came across an ad for this earlier today whilst reading an article on the Sydney Morning Herald website. The ad is very simple and when you click on it it takes you straight to a semi-cliche page, that is also very evocative. Straight up you are confronted with a Windows save prompt with the cursor hovering over yes in the foreground. In the background is a satellite image of the earth.

Almost the entire page is a link that leads you to more information on iPrimus' green broadband program.

There is nothing overly special about any of iPrimus' plans, none of them have unusually high bandwidth limits for the money, they are all very average priced plans, and are definitely not in the expensive end of the market, nor the cheap end. I don't have any personal experience with their service, or even with them in general, but neither would the majority of people they are marketing to.

Are the facilities used by iPrimus any more environmentally friendly, or green, than any other ISP's? Probably not. Do they use any less power? I doubt it.

What they are advertising is that for less than a dollar a month on each contract, they are partnering with Landcare Australia to plant an average of 5 trees a year per contract.

Is this making their services any cleaner? No. It is providing a solution though that is helping the environment, and this is a big selling point these days. With global warming and attempting to reduce greenhouse emissions and so on, people like to be able to perceive that they are doing something to help the environment. After all, this is what Blackle is selling using their custom black front to Google Search.

As I mentioned earlier, there is nothing overly special about any of the iPrimus plan's, but their green broadband plan gives them something unique to offer as a selling point over other ISP's. They appeal to people's emotion's and fear of global warming. In this day and age, this is a great selling point. The majority of people want to do their part, and in the I.T. industry, everything uses electricity, so other things have to be done to attempt to offset greenhouse emissions. Not every company has the budget to use solar or other alternative green friendly energy schemes to power their systems, so offsetting the cost of planting tree's is really a great idea.

For anyone that is unsure about what they are actually doing, they also provide a facts sheet that also covers statistics on water runoff and the effect that trees have on rain water and where it goes. This is a great way to build on their point and idea.

It doesn't cost much more per month, and people can perceive that they are making a difference. What a great way to sell an internet connection!

Labels: internet

Watch it, you know you want to.

"Even the Star Wars Death Star needed a cafeteria. Where else could Darth Vader go and just chill out with the guys in between battles? Well if it did, this is a hilarious re-enactment in Lego style of what you might expect when Vader goes down there for lunch." - Maniac World

Labels: movies

Yay a step forward for Internet Explorer finally. According to the Internet Explorer development blog, IE8 now correctly renders the Acid 2 face!

This is great to see! For anyone that doesn't know what the Acid 2 test is, it is a web standards test that was designed by the Web Standards Project that is intended to pick up rendering flaws in browsers.

It uses HTML and CSS to test certain features and how they are displayed by the browser. Any browser that correctly supports the W3C HTML and CSS 2.0 specifications should render the test correctly. If a browser doesn't completely/correctly support the features that Acid 2 uses won't render the page properly.

Interestingly, the test itself doesn't actually use valid CSS. This is because it was also designed to test how a browser will deal with faulty code.

Labels: code, internet, software

A year old now I know, but I just came across this article on the Northern Rivers Echo website from the end of 2006 when I found my best mate Rhi, another of my class mates, and myself, selected for the NSW state-wide Art Express Exhibitions for 2007.

As I said, it's a year old, but hey, it was exciting for me to find my art being exhibited all over the state including places like Albury, Orange, Grafton, Newcastle, and Sydney.

I did a fractal animation to a song by a friend of the family, Dennis Nattrass (or Wah Wah Willie). Wah Wah Willie has done some really great music. It is guitar based ambient and shows off much of his skill on the guitar. I highly recommend his album entitled "Cinema". It adds a very unique twist on more common ambient music and is very complimentary to fractals.

I created the fractals using Apophysis and rendered them in Flam3. It was really quite an interesting experience, as I had created many fractal's in Apophysis and had a fairly good understanding of how the software functions, the effects of different triangles and so on, however I had not done any animations before, so it was all new. I have since done another animation as a birthday present for Rhi, for which I have also created the audio.

The theory behind my animation was much deeper than what is outlined in the article in the Echo, as I explained in my film and write up, it was based on the chaos theory. My thinking behind it is as follows:

The Chaos Theory
The study of phenomena which appear random, but in fact have an element of regularity which can be described mathematically.

"Trust me...There is order here, very faint, very human."
-Michael Ondaatje

"There can only be one right answer in mathematics. Fractals are an art form, based entirely on maths. Like anything though, when the human element is added to math, it becomes imprecise, there can be mistakes, errors, many right answers.

Variation becomes limitless, but order remains.

From the chaos theory, fractals are born.
Trust me, there is order here."
-Matthew Brown

To my knowledge, neither of my video clips thus far are available anywhere on the internet. The first one probably never will be unless agreed to by Wah Wah Willie, but my new one just might be one of these days. Just have to wait and see.

Labels: art

I came across this nifty open-source piece of web-based software last night that is really quite an interesting and useful idea.

Created by Johann C. Rocholl, Browsershots allows you to submit a website for any of the available browsers on any of the available operating systems. You can also specify things such as with or without Flash, Java, JavaScript, screen resolutions and colour depths.

The website is then added to the job queue and allocated to a particular factory. The factory (computer) then takes the web address and loads it up in your specified browser with your specified settings. A screenshot is taken of the browser window with your loaded website and it is then uploaded onto the central Browsershots server for you to view.

I've used it to test a couple of websites now in various scenario's and it works great, it's helped me pick up a few things I would've completely missed otherwise.

Of course since it is all automated, you don't see things such as any mouse over effects, so you still need to test them manually, however for everything else, this is an excellent idea!

The factories used for it are all voluntary and anyone is able to add a factory to the ones used for work. As factories are provided voluntarily though, often there are some unavailable. Such as when I was doing some testing last night, only one of the Linux factories was online, so I was not able to test all of the different Linux browsers.

This is a bit of a downside, but I think, the more widely known it becomes the more factories people will volunteer. After all, if people want to continue using a free service like this, people have to be willing to help out.

There is a paid priority system. So if you pay 10 Euros, you will receive a month of priority processing which effectively means you don't wait in the standard queue to have your screenshots processed, you are put at the front of the queue.

Alternatively, if you don't want to pay for priority processing, if you have a factory or factories setup to help out with the load, when all your factories combined are uploading 1000 screenshots in the 24 hours before the time you are submitting a screenshot, you will get priority processing as well.

On their wiki they have all the setup instructions you need to get a factory up and running on Windows, Linux or Mac. It's all very straight forward and easy to follow. So if you are interested in helping out with the processing load, or anything at all, it will no doubt be greatly appreciated.

Apparently the bandwidth load for uploading these shots can range up to around 20gb a month. Downloads would be much the same as browsing to all of the sites. So there is quite a lot of bandwidth involved, but if you can spare it and have a spare computer lying around, I really think this is a worthwhile idea. After all, anyone that regularly has to check browser compatibility will know how much time it can take to test websites in a wide variety of browsers and this really speeds up that time and let's you test in even more browsers than most people would.

I don't doubt that you will find it as useful as I am continuing to find it.

Labels: internet, software, technology

If you are like me and have trouble studying with regular music, but like to have something in the background, then you will like ambient music. If you are even more like me then you are very, very picky about the ambient music you listen to and find it quite difficult to find decent ambient music.

I just came across this great netlabel called Ansiform. They have a great selection of ambient music available for download under the creative commons license, along with streaming music from their website and podcasts.

The music is all very much to my liking for ambient music and is really great for studying to.

They accept music submissions as well, however it should be within their area of ambient music which they describe as:

"The ansiform flavor of ambient is unobtrusive, beatless, finely textured, and stable. Many tracks in our collection demonstrate inspiration drawn from disparate genres such as noise, dub or pop music. It's ideal for sleeping, meditating, and cleansing the aural palate."

This is so true and this is exactly why I like it so much. If you like ambient music I really recommend having a listen to some of the music on Ansiform.

Labels: internet, music

As you may recall from my blog last month about the new Skype phone on 3's mobile network, I was quite excited about it and looking forward to it's being available in Australia.

However, it seems my excitement was somewhat misplaced.

As great as the idea is and while it would no doubt save a lot of money for me where half of my calls could be made on Skype instead of via a regular phone call, it has come to my attention that it is only half as good as it sounds.

I have been looking into getting a new phone as my current Panasonic X700 which has been an excellent phone for the past two years, despite it's dying after the first year (though it was still under warranty so that was alright). It is now getting to the stage though where it is well and truly getting worn out.

I had been planning on getting a mobile phone that I could use as a modem, however as I covered in my blog about my new Vodafone 3G modem, this is no longer necessary. This put the Skype phone up at the top of my list.

However, as I have been doing a little more looking into it now that it is available here, I have found out, Skype can only be used in 3G coverage areas, and anyone that knows what 3's coverage in Australia is like knows that they have probably got the smallest 3G network of the top Australian mobile networks. This means that Skype is effectively only usable if you are in a capital city.

This poses a problem for me. I know that Skype can be used on dialup speeds. GSM networks can provide dialup speeds. So why can't Skype be used in GSM area's?

I can use Skype on my laptop with my 3G modem in a GSM area since Vodafone allow the modem to be used in GSM area's for no additional charge on top of the base 3G charges.

This means that I can still use Skype, even if it is only at dialup speeds. So this is a better option for me.

It looks like I'm back to looking at other phones. Sony Ericsson look very promising.

Labels: hardware, technology

This stuff is great. I'd never heard of it before, but on Saturday night Rhi and I went and got fish and chips at a place we had never been to before, and they had this "QF Energy" drink there. I had paid for the food so Rhi was paying for the drink, and of course, she got the biggest option, the bottle instead of the can, so that if I didn't like it, I'd have to drink more of it anyway. Nice hey?

Luckily though, it was awesome!

It has exactly the same stuff in it as V, Red Bull, Mother and so on, and has no more effect than any of them, but it tastes a lot better!

I've never seen it anywhere else, but if you drink a lot of V or Red Bull or anything else like that, if you get a chance, try QF Energy, it's great!

Labels: special interest

I've just been visiting the Feng-GUI website after reading about it briefly in SitePoint's Design View Newsletter #40.

This is really quite an interesting tool. The idea behind it is that using the algorithm they have developed, it can work out what points of the website are the main points that would draw a user's vision towards them. It then works creates a salience heat map to determine which parts of the page are effectively the "hottest" areas. Or as described on their webpage it:

"...is an artificial intelligence service which simulates human visual attention and creates an attention heatmap."

How cool is that? As you can see in the little image above showing this blog, the hottest points are not even on the content. While I don't think this is 100% accurate as of yet, I would say it is actually getting reasonably close and is definitely still a very useful tool for a web and/or graphic designer.

If you use the tool found on their home page, you can upload any image that is a max of 5mb and it will run the algorithm over it and produce a heat map for you. Alternatively, you can use bookmarklets or there is a Firefox extension available. These two options produce a larger image than the tool on their home page and so these might be more useful for some people, however I did notice that their is a slightly different result using these options. I don't know if it is because they are larger images or if it is something else.

Personally I think the heat maps produced by the home page tool are a bit more accurate, however the larger images are definitely more useful, especially in area's that have a lot of detail. I noticed that the Firefox extension and bookmarklets seemed to time out less than trying to create a heat map through the main page as well.

The Feng-GUI Firefox extension is very simple to use and is my favourite of the options. Once it is installed, it just ads a little flame icon to the bottom right of the Firefox status bar. Simply browse to the page you wish to see a heat map of and then click the flame. You will then be taken to the Feng-GUI website with a completed heat map in front of you. Easy as that.

The bookmarklet code can be found on the tools page of the Feng-GUI website and I have setup a little example below so you can see how it works:

Make a heat map of www.stillaslife.com.

I know I've already found this useful, so hopefully you will too.

Enjoy.

Labels: design, internet, software, special interest, technology

I ordered the SitePoint PHP Anthology 2nd Edition last Monday just in time to get the special $10 discount and today, it finally arrived just under two weeks after ordering it. Definitely not bad from the USA.

I had borrowed SitePoint's Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP & MySQL from a friend of mine and it is an absolutely great book. It's very easy to follow and understand, it even filled in the holes that were missed in ITB004 (Databases) at uni. I highly recommend it to anyone new to PHP and databases in web development. It really is the best book I've read on these topics.

The excellence of this book is why I decided to go ahead and get the PHP Anthology from SitePoint instead of purchasing a PHP book from elsewhere. As well as the $10 discount, it also came with a free PHP quick reference poster, which is pretty mad. So now I shall probably be busy going through my new book for the next couple of weeks.

Catch ya.

Labels: books, code

The screen shot to the left shows a post that was made on Tailored.com.au by Brendon Sinclair indicating that his blog post that I had mentioned previously had indeed been indexed by Google in less than 6 and a half hours.

As I mentioned in my previous post, it was indexed in 4 hours. However, following up out of curiousity, upon another search now, only just under 4 hours after his new post, it has also been indexed.

"posted by Brendon at 5:25 PM on Dec 11, 2007"

As you can see on the clock on my computer, it is just after 9. While I had performed the search at about 8:50 when I first saw it, I hadn't realised that it was in fact the second post until now, so my time is a little bit off. However I think it is fairly safe to say that Google is indexing frequently updated websites in 3 to 4 hours.

Interestingly enough though, Brendon's following post has not yet been indexed that I can see, though it was made only 10 minutes after the one in the screen shot.

Labels: internet

I have been noticing over the past few days that Google has been indexing my blog within a few hours of my posting. I just Googled for my last blog post and it's not there yet, so it clearly isn't quite instantaneous. However, for a website that is frequently being updated, an index update thats only an hour or two old is clearly quite beneficial for everyone involved.

I had noticed how quick it was updating a few days ago. It was just today that I saw a blog post by Brendon Sinclair on Tailored Consulting about Blogger posts getting indexed almost instantly.

While the circumstances are slightly different and Tailored.com.au clearly has a higher pagerank than Stillaslife.com as well as no doubt getting many more pageviews and so on. Brendon also keeps the blog updated even more frequently than I update mine, so automatically it should be getting crawled more frequently than mine. However I thought I would check this anyway just out of curiousity.

Tailored.com.au has been crawled since his post 4 hours ago. I would like to watch this more closely and see if his website is in fact being crawled as quickly as it seems. As Brendon mentioned in his blog, even if it is only Blogger that is being indexed so quickly at the moment, if Google has found a way to effectively index websites, even within a couple of hours, this really puts them even further out in front of all the other search engines.

I have noticed it has been over the past couple of weeks that the speed has really increased so I wonder if it is something to do with Google's last major algorithm change. I am interested to see if the same thing is occurring on Wordpress and other blogging systems.

As I write this, I have also done a quick search, and now at 3:22, the blog post that was used as a test for this purpose by Brendon is number one when you search Google for "Raymond F. Sinclair".

Labels: internet

Last night I went and saw "Into The Wild" with Rhi. The turn out at the cinema was quite appalling considering it was premiere night. Aside from Rhi and myself, there were 5 other people, and 2 of them left 15 minutes into the movie. So all up, there were only 5 of us remained for the entire 2 and a half hour movie.

I don't know if it was a poorly publicised movie or if it was just that it was the last showing of the day, but I think this movie has gotten a lot less credit than it deserves.It makes me glad to see that the IMDB average user rating at the time of writing this is 8.2 because this movie really deserved 8+ to say the least.

It is definately not suitable for kids as there are a few scenes with nudity in them, including one scene at the "OMG Hot Springs" which is actually a nudist camp.

However, the movie was superb. It is based on the story of Christopher McCandless who after graduating, effectively throws everything away to go to Alaska and live in the wilderness. His travels lead him all over the United States and even down to Mexico before he finally reaches Alaska, and he does this all by effectively bumming.

He starts going be the name of "Alexander Supertramp" and makes his way all over North America by any means possible, hitchhiking, jumping on freight train cars, working occasionally when he has to and so on. It takes him 2 years to finally reach Alaska, but when he does it's in Winter.

It's obvious he is loving it all, until Spring when he attempts to leave and discovers the river has been drastically swollen by the melting snow and ice. This is when his journey starts to really sour and he discovers he is effectively stuck on what he has named the "Magic Bus", a bus he found and lived in during his time in Alaska, in the middle of nowhere.

The movie is definately not an all happy movie. Part of the reason for his trip is the constant anger at his parents, particularly his father and the treatment he gave his son.

Many times Alex comes across new people and makes friends with them and it is clear that as much as he would like to remain with some of these people, nothing can keep him from making it to Alaska.

I could tell you how the movie ends, but I won't because I really think you should see it for yourself. I highly recommend it. If you still aren't sure, watch the trailer, and I promise you won't be disappointed with the movie if you see it.

Labels: movies

Upon reading an article on Google.org recently related to an Associated Press story about a rise in infectious diseases due to climate change, I couldn't help but chuckle to myself.

The article outlines how rising temperatures are increasing the worldwide spread of infectous diseases. Particularly the increase in cases of chikungunya fever in Italy and spreading throughout Europe where it was previously only common in Africa and Asia.

I know this doesn't really seem like a funny thing, but the reason I couldn't help but chuckle is because this is only logical. When the humidity in a room increases, a loaf of bread in the room will get mouldy much quicker. So it makes sense that when the atmosphere in general is maintaining heat and the humidity is building, that diseases, viruses and other fungi would also start to spread quicker. Yet it took an Associated Press article for this to even become widely realised.

Labels: special interest

This chocolate is officially my new favourite chocolate.

Nestle Club Classic Cappuccino chocolate is great. Combination of both dark chocolate and a soft cappuccino centre. How good is that?

Just in case you are unsure about just how good it is, it even has a nice big label on the front of it pointing out that it is "A rich source of antioxidants".

There you go, you can even feel a little bit healthy about it.

So what reason would you have not to try it? It comes in a 200g block and is no more expensive than any other block of chocolate of the same size. Went halves in a block with Rhi a few nights ago and we both agree, it doesn't get much better than this.

To put it simply, this chocolate is made completely of win and awesome!

Labels: special interest