Posterific
Wednesday, November 29, 2006

And so my 35 hour eye-popping 700dpi 6ft by 3ft retina scratching marathon to complete my 4th year poster project presentation has finally ended. It is entitled "CapSense" and thusly covers a "non destructive electrostatic imaging technique for the evaluation of concrete". I am now awaiting it's final print and I hesitantly look forward to seeing its laminated physicality before I and six other group members are quizzed on the content. I would link you to the PDF that took 90 minutes to generate and 10 to open but it is 1.1GB large; sad thing is, I had to create 3 separate PDFs as the first two came out wrong. Purchasing that 512mb of RAM the weekend before was certainly a subliminally good choice as editing kept up a surly 1.9GB of pagefile that would previously have sent my AMD into catatonia.


(The full version is 12960 pixels across and its scalable vectors give my processor its long desired workout, it was beginning to put on some pounds after all those mp3s and spreadsheets.)

Labels: Life, Uni, Work

The Issues with Blogger in Beta
Thursday, November 09, 2006

Last night I finally had the opportunity to change over to the new blogger system and it's associated improvements. My main reason for shifting was the inclusion of labels - finally I can categorize my posts and provide easy access to certain topics. The lack of labeling or categorization had tempted me to migrate to Wordpress but alas I have stuck with Blogger and I may make it through this difficult transition period also. My first process lead me to check templates loaded OK and blogs could be fully published as usual. This lead me to a few discoveries:

• Upon migration the URL for archives was reset so all updated archives linked to a 404. I quickly fixed this once my server, that has been up and down a bit lately, allowed me back into the FTP.
• Previous Post links have stopped working, the conventional tag instead of providing a list of the 10 posts prior to the post being viewed now shows only the ten most recent posts. This makes navigation of the older pages less fluid and to find old posts you need to visit label pages or archive pages with the aim of finding a specific post.
• The uploading dialogue for blogger has also been tweaked, it now shows the successfully uploaded files in a list and when errors occurs it tells you them. A nice addition to this would be a suggestion on whether or not to perform a republish based upon the severity of FTP errors. When I see the errors I ask myself whether or not all the files uploaded ok - the last thing I need is a corrupted page that I don't know about. One caveat of this new system is the removal of the percentage uploaded indicator, I like to know how far through the process is and whether or not connectivity is good or bad, taking away the only indication seems wrong to me. Hopefully it is just part of the inevitable blogger beta ftp teething stages.

Moving onwards, once I had confirmed files could be uploaded and my template would not be utterly destroyed I chose to add labels to my posts before publishing the blog again. It is now that I discovered the new template system blogger has developed and is implementing, one in which blog style editing is made easy for those that do not know code, html or css etc. Simple colour picking schemes etc. However in doing this they seem to have completely abandoned the template tag technique which I like to use to fully customize my template design. Backwards compatibility remains yet under my existing html templates I cannot add the new shiny features. Blogger also provides no template tags for these features, instead opting for defined widgets and sections. After publishing I also noticed that labels were automatically appended to the post body in a separate div with the name "blogger-labels". The text "Labels:" cannot be altered in anyway and I have had to use absolutely positioned CSS to shift the labels into the comments bar where I want them and alter the hyperlink format. Here are a few other problems I noted:

• Labels with a gap in there name e.g. "My Life" would link to a labels page: "labels/My Life.php" without substituting the space for a '-' character or removing capitalization (e.g. labels/my- life.php)
• The labels directory is not customizable and is fixed to the "/labels/" default.
• No pagination occurs on the label pages, despite the number of posts - one of my labels has 33 posts and they all load to create a mammoth scrolling fiasco.
• When labels have a gap in their name they do not show up in the labels section on the individual post page - I noticed this and tested it to check it had uploaded correctly. All pages that I had applied the label "My Life" to did not show any labels, though others did. I have since changed the label title but it is an issue that needs fixing.

Finally I decided to post something new. The inclusion of a quick switch between html and rich formatting is an excellent addition that is very handy. Posting via a 1280x resolution the blogger post box seems very small. I like a large area to play with and it would be nice if the box could expand to fill the whole screen, much like in Gmail.

The interface is all very fluid and fast, quickly pulling up 160 posts and labeling them was not a daunting task as I had expected. The dashboard makeover also improves usability, I now only need one click to reach certain regularly visited sections.

I now have one plea: Please do not abandon the template tags scheme. I love it and use it successfully to create my blog exactly how I want it. Please maintain these tags and add respective ones so that us power users can continue using blogger and its new features in the same way we always have done. We do not need to utilize simplified template editing techniques and whilst two separate schemes never seem wise I don't know why they cant run side by side - leaving the templates tag as an advanced yet maintained option for those with a little more knowhow.

This is still in beta so I can remain hopeful for changes, it is nice to finally see some changes and I do feel that Blogger is moving in the right direction.

Labels: Technical, Website

One month to Wii
Thursday, November 09, 2006

The wait has only just begun, yesterday I had confirmation that the pre-order I made on August 18th (approximately two hours after the announcement of the Wii UK price) would be available at launch, despite "European shortages". My friend who I had hope to play multiplayer with sadly got the opposite letter stating the retailer could not guarantee the console would arrive on time. I also put in an order for Zelda (of course) and I'll likely get a third game before Christmas. Come next week I will be most jealous with the flood of American reviews here there and everywhere whilst I wait another 20 days or so. "It's like Christmas times a thousand".

Labels: Gaming

Video Game Sequels - Let's Remove Features
Saturday, November 04, 2006

This is just a little rant; I and my house/hall-mate enjoy a good multiplayer game-fest, usually on Friday evenings. We've played through Halo, Halo 2, Serious Sam and Time Splitters on co-op modes and have taken turns on Burnout 3 world tour until we have completed all but a few burning laps (which are boring). Having enjoyed these we decided to pick up Burnout Revenge and Serious Sam II from the local Game station (that's the name of the retailer).

We often commented about the replay modes in Burnout 3 and how fun it was to watch spectacular crashes over and over again and we countlessly wished for the opportunity to save these replays. Come Burnout Revenge, a new take on the old series and a version that is just as fun, exhilarating and enjoyable to play - traffic checking and trick-shotting in particular. First thing we decided to do was open up ye-old crash junction and see if they had added the feature we so dearly wanted. No, they hadn't (see:xbox version) - in fact instead of adding save-able replays they removed the replay function altogether much to our continual and utter dismay (EDIT:In reference to the original xbox version).

We were faced with another disappointment when we loaded up Serious Sam II (which states on the back: 2-6 players) - both multiplayer death match and more importantly two player co-op modes had been removed and all multiplayer had been shifted to xbox live and system link. The game was promptly put back on the shelf and has not been touched since. We do have two Xboxes and system link cables but its rare we ever have multiple copies of one game - and why should we buy a second copy when the first has already disappointed us so?

Now all I ask of Halo 3 is up to 8 player team co-op modes on xbox live, system link and locally (for at least 2 players) and the ability to save replays for everything. I still have faith in you Bungie, even after that appalling end to the one player story mode in Halo 2. Having a group of friends storm a flood riddled covenant guarded base on multiple warthogs and ghosts á la death match would be a video-game dream come true.

Labels: Gaming, Life

Foobar Component Update
Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Terrestrial has made another great update to his single column playlist module for Foobar2000 v0.9. This latest change adds the following functionality:

+ some tweaks to multiple window / multiple playlists
+ added "Playing" playlist selection
+ $fileexists()
+ added NOKEEPASPECT option for images
+ added wildcard support for images
+ added alignment options for images VALIGN-T (vertical align-TOP), VALIGN-B, HALIGN-L, HALIGN-R

I have highlighted the key improvements that I am now making use of. With these new additions images can be stretched to fit a give frame, for example:

$imageabs2(100,100,,,100,100,5,,$replace(%path%,%filename_ext%,*.jpg),NOKEEPASPECT)

This will display an image (finds any .jpg in the song's directory thanks to the new wildcard function - * is the wildcard) and stretch it to fit a 100x100 frame. Expanding upon this using the new fileexists function:

$if($fileexists($replace(%path%,%filename_ext%,*.jpg)),
$puts(albumMarg,110)
$puts(datax,160)
$imageabs2(100,100,,,100,100,5,,$replace(%path%,%filename_ext%,*.jpg),NOKEEPASPECT)
$imageabs(5,,images/artoverlay-1.png ,)
$drawrect(5,0,100,100,brushcolor-null pencolor-0-0-0)
$drawrect(6,1,98,98,brushcolor-null pencolor-150-150-150)
,
$puts(albumMarg,10)
$puts(datax,60))

This checks that the images is there, if it is it defines a specific margin for later use in positioning of artist, album and trackinfo. It then draws the image, a PNG overlay and some surrounding borders. If the image doesn't exist it defines a different margin so that the song data does not surround an empty space and instead is closer to the left, for example:

Labels: Foobar, Technical

Fighting XP's hatred of black themes
Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Finding the elusive perfect black theme for windows XP is nigh impossible. The thwarted erroneous or inconsistent use of SYSCOLORs throughout applications inevitably leads to a mix mash of black on grey (Firefox says grey can only be spelled gray, silly thing), black on black, url-blue on black or many other unavoidable clashes that make using that particular program impossible or painful. Whether it be unchangeable background whites with white text or the fixed black font on the new dark-grey 3D windows there's always a reason to switch back to the eye-ball penetrating white themes. Even Microsoft applications lay foul to this problem - you'd expect proper SYSCOLOR usage here at least:


No matter what you do, that black text cannot be fixed, no matter what you do that blue header and frame in MSN cannot be fixed - no tweak will suffice. All black themes face these problems. The only way of fixing such issues I imagine is to apply a custom visual style to each problematic application and the only program that allows this, as far as I am aware is WindowBlinds, which I shudder to use as I like my system resources. This problem extends to browsers wherein web-pages adopt the default color schemes; browsing under the guise of blackness you become aware of the sites that assume everyone uses a black on white setup and the problems in creating an incomplete or ill-defined CSS stylesheet. For example, defining the backgrounds as white but leaving the default text, defining text-color within an input box but not its background color, visa versa, etc. In IE this cannot be fixed remotely and your theme becomes absolutely impossible to tolerate:


But in Firefox this problem can be fixed by overriding default theme values via the UserContent.css file, found here:
C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\PROFILE\chrome
for a standard installation. I added these settings:


Which changes the page (and others that rely on default schemes) to look like this:


A significant and usable improvement that allows for an improved and enjoyable browser experience. Note: It seems Firefox defines text-colour default to black and ignores the themes value, so no changes have to be made here. To have a browser working within a black theme becomes a significant benefit and the problems and woes of the few assorted clashes elsewhere become tolerable. Now a beautiful black theme such as Inverso-Reborn-Balanced can be used functionally in day to day life without just looking pretty (screenshot showing Foobar, Explorer and Notepad):



If only more applications allowed complete CSS re-styling of their user interface.

Labels: Technical