Still As Life

We had visitors over this evening for dad's birthday (he's 45 now), and logically, as happens with such a cool plant, the bat plant came up in conversation so off we went to show it in flower. Being dark and all meant it was an interesting mission down to the back garden through multiple spider webs to find it.

I grabbed some more photo's while we were down there as the second flower is open now. The third one isn't out yet, but it should be soon. Sadly I will probably be back up in Brisbane when it does come out, but that's alright.

For whatever reason, I'm not entirely sure anymore, a conversation came up about snakes during the night. Now as we were seeing off our guests, mum yells out that there is a snake, and we all (or me anyway) think she is joking, given the recent talk about all the snakes, and I couldn't see one in the direction she was looking. Lo and behold though, there is this sizable carpet snake sitting up on the drainpipe.

When I say sizable, I mean, reasonable, compared to some of the carpet snakes we've had here, this one is tiny. As far as I know, this is the first snake that we've seen around here in a while as well, so it was quite a surprise to see one at all, especially so close to the house that it was almost in it.

It ended up finding its way up over the gutter and going down the drainpipe which would take it down to the back of the house where it could get out again. I guess with all the wet lately, the frogs are out and about and would make a perfect meal for a growing young carpet snake like this one.

Whenever I see carpet snakes, I can't help but think of the gigantic one we had down the backyard once. It was easily long enough to get close to going from one side of a road to the other, and thick enough to eat a small dog without making much of a lump. Luckily they are non venomous or it would make such big ones all the more frightening to behold.

Labels: special interest

I just heard Nazareth speaking on JCTV in his new special "Free To Laugh". He is a really funny guy and is really a great preacher.

In the JCTV programming guide the description on his programs is:

"Nazareth is the funniest man this side of the Pyramids."

You'll think so too when you see Nazareth in his new special, "Free to Laugh," right here on JCTV!! Get ready for side-splitting fun and laughter as world-class comedian, Nazareth pulls out all the stops in this 40 minute special, right here on JCTV!! Forget about all that potty mouth junk on regular TV, this stuff is way funnier AND family friendly. No need to compromise and turn a blind eye to crude jokes here, this is clean comedy at it's finest!! So tune in to JCTV January 4th and 5th and don't miss it!!!

Born in Israel and growing up in Kuwait before moving to the USA, Nazareth has some very interesting experiences to share and presents them along with the important message of salvation in such a unique and funny way. It's refreshing to hear his unique style of humour that you don't have to turn a blind ear to, none of his humour is crude and it is down right hilarious.

If you can, have a listen to some of his sermons, he really is very uplifting to hear preach.

Yay its raining again!

Labels: special interest

Okay, so perhaps my prediction/hope for a big flood was slightly off as it has pretty much stopped raining and there are patches of blue sky here and there. The weather forecast is much the same through to Tuesday. So unless we are really lucky, it isn't going to flood. Oh well.

Dad has this really obscure plant in his yard called a Giant Bat Plant. They are from Malaysia, and dad's one seems to be really thriving, it's leaves are huge, the full 750mm by 350mm with no trouble at all.

With all the rain and humidity over the past couple of week's, it's not only come to flower, but it is going to have three flowers at once!

It has one fully open now, another will be near fully open tomorrow, and a third one that will be fully open within the next few days as well. These flowers last over a week each, so it will be quite stunning to see once it has all three of them out. The most I've seen it with at once was two and they only just overlapped by a day or two before the first one died.

As you can see in the photo's the flowers are very obscure. They have like a big white and purple leaf over the top of them which opens to reveal these obscure purple flowers and long whisker type fronds.

This flower comes out on a long stem above all of the large leaves.

I think part of the reason it does so well here is because it is a very tropical climate, and where it is located is well in the shade almost all day by a combination of larger tree's and in particular, reasonable sized fern fronds that allow some light through, but not in large quantities. It is also quite humid here most of the year round which to my understanding, Bat Plant's really like. Lismore is also generally quite wet compared to places even only two hours away from here, such as Brisbane, which also no doubt encourages it.

I'll get some more photo's over the next few days when the other two flowers are out. It should be really stunning, as you can probably imagine seeing just one flower.

Labels: special interest

How much does this place look like it's been pulled straight from the Lord of the Rings?

It's an actual house in Wales, owned and built by Simon Dale. It is intended to be a low environmental impact home.

The design and idea behind it is really quite cool.

Simon has set up a website that goes over the process of building the house and the purpose of it. There are also some tips and idea's for anyone who is wanting their own piece of the Shire.

There is also an interesting idea growing off of this house that is known as Lammas, or Lammas Low Impact Initiatives Ltd. The idea behind this is to create an entire self-sustainable village. The idea is great. Whether it will work successfully or not beyond the initial generations involved is a good question.

As far as I can see, the houses themselves are not really any more or less environmentally friendly than any other house except that they become part of the hills and are built using all natural materials rather than anything treated or fired, such as bricks, treated pine etc.

I may be mistaken, I didn't see anything about it in what I read, but it looks like they still use power, and possibly natural gas for all of the same things they are used for in any other house.

The way I understand it, they are aiming to be self sustainable, particularly in the Lammas commune. However, the way I see it, virtually any house with a yard can do this, to a degree, anyway. Just about anyone can grow enough vegetables to sustain their vegetable needs, or keep chickens for eggs, and so on.

It looks like they are using or planning to use solar panels for power, again these can really be setup on just about any house.

If everyone were to be producing a large portion of their own food it would not have the greatest effect on a capitalist economy as it would affect the jobs of a lot of people, farmers, butchers, bakers etc. However, if things like solar panels were much more commonplace on houses everywhere, could this not significantly reduce carbon emissions and reduce the need for coal and gas fired power stations?

There is a massive amount of surface area on the houses all over the world, even just in the developed countries there is a vast wealth of space on the roofs of houses and other buildings, it would be ideal to use as much of it as possible would it not?

I understand that not all houses and buildings are ideally situated for maximum exposure to the sun and are often planned to avoid getting the full intensity of it, but surely their roofs could still be used. Even if they are not producing enough electricity to be self sufficient, it would still help to reduce the heavy reliance on other dirtier sources of power.

I digress though, the original point of the blog is how much this house looks like the Hobbit houses in the Shire famous from the Lord of the Rings. Just in case you forgot.

Labels: design, special interest

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

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

Labels: rants, special interest

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

From - Wikipedia

I have been looking into the whole taurine thing some more, on Wikipedia, isn't that a cool molecule?

Anyway, from what I found on Wikipedia, it would seem that while taurine doesn't have evergy giving properties, it reduces muscle fatigue. It's naturally found in the human body as well as many animals.

It is also an amino acid, technically an amino sulfonic acid. It would seem there is the possibility it can reduce blood pressure as well, but I couldn't see anything on Wikipedia supporting this. It seems that it is pretty much as the Choice website said, exactly what and how it does things is largely unkown. At the same time though, it seems it is needed by the body and is naturally occuring.

And here's a fun filled fact from Wikipedia regarding Taurine usage "In 1993, approximately 5,000–6,000 t of taurine (synthetic and natural) were produced; 50% for pet food manufacture, 50% in pharmaceutical applications." So...I guess it's good for something right?

So why the hair pulling? Well, I have done more today then look up Taurine. As I mentioned yesterday, I had an exam at 8:30 this morning on databases. Well...The exam is over, not without much hair loss though.

I set my alarm for 6:30am, but lo and behold, I woke up at 7:57 with my phone (my alarm) in my hand and my hand under my pillow and the alarm turned off. Seeing as how it takes some 40+ minutes to get into uni this came as quite a shock and posed a series of problems.

1. Do I take the bus like I was planning or should I drive instead.
2. I'm hungry but don't have time to eat.
3. The next bus leaves in 8 minutes.

So, I think that is the quickest I've gotten dressed and gone to the bus stop, ever. Still got there 20 minute's late, but at least I got there that soon.

I have a word of advice for anyone at QUT who is doing ITB004 in the near future, when they give you the practice exam, it might be almost a decade old, but the exam structure hasn't changed at all!

Seriously, I went over the practice exam a few times over the weekend, and the actual final exam that I did this morning was identical to it bar slight variation in the content of the questions, such as slightly different SELECT statements, slightly different criteria for Access database questions etc. Things like the "Lost Update Problem" were also updated with the most recent version of the diagram from the lecture notes, but apart from that its virtually identical, so pay attention!

So I think I went alright, maybe. There was a question on VBA which I don't remember doing and thus didn't study anything about, so it probably wouldn't hurt to take note of that.

Now I have a website to go work on...Or I do whenever my boss gets back from his meeting with the client so I can get an update on what I have to do. It's meant to be launching tomorrow, so when it's done, guess what! You'll get a link to it! How awesome is that?

Labels: special interest, university

Well, I decided to come into uni on a Saturday night, that's right, a Saturday night, like the good little student I am, and of course, the one thing I need in order to be able to work on this assignment for KIB104 (Media Technology 2), is not available. I have 16gb of raw video, which I cannot transport between computers from the one I originally recorded it onto for a couple of reasons:

1. Mac's won't write to NTFS (extremely useful...not!)
2. FAT32 doesn't support more than 4gb in a single file.
3. My external hard drive is formatted as FAT32 because I need to use it on both Mac OS and Windows.
4. For the reason stated above, I cannot reformat the hard drive to a reasonable Mac readable file system so I can copy the video onto it.
5. I can't afford to buy another external hard drive, nor should I have to just for one assignment.

So, this leaves me at uni, on a Mac, at 9:22pm on a Saturday night, with nothing to do and my internet here is capped to 7kb/s. Excellent.

By the way, I hear excess quantities of V can cause heart damage! I think this is something that is worth finding out about. Guess what I'll be doing instead of my assignment until I decide to go home!

Labels: hardware, software, special interest, university