1. June 9, 2008

      Another one bites the dust.

      Alrighty, so another uni semester is almost done and gone. Two more exams, neither of which I’m looking forward to, and i’m done. Looking back, it was one really great semester.

      So, in lieu of a Nerdery post this week, here is a list of things I’ll be up to during the break “break” (if you can really call it that)

      • Beverley. Gotta start with the best item, of course.
      • xLAN; Gotta keep fine-tuning the port-blockings!
      • A totally awesome but totally disturbing Nexus article. Just wait.
      • Alca-Lu; Gotta build me some server system now.
      • Codename Zapper; Secret plan to get students collaborating.
      • Codename f0rce; Don’t you just hate not having a decent notes-taker for PocketPC?
      • Coming up with proper names for these codenames.
      • My site’s photo gallery. Yes, it’s coming. Yes, it’ll be AAJAX. The extra A is for Awesome.
      • And last but not least, the person who I most want to spend time with, Beverley.

      And on that bombshell, I’ll leave you with a quote about my idea for an ordered linked-list for the final 203 project (of which 1/11 test cases had to deal with 100,000 nodes). Yes, still got an A+ on it.

      Given the horrible performance on big sets (yours was slowest of all submissions!) some more justification required as to why a Linked List is still a good choice (as opposed to another option)

      Woohoo, I’m #1!

    2. May 29, 2008

      Plaxo + Mac == Fail

      I love Plaxo. Mainly because there is no other decent way to sync contacts and calendars between a Mac, Windows Mobile and Vista box. But it seems as though Plaxo, while keeping the Windows and Plaxo site correct, made my mac contact’s with a birthday get a day younger. (it shifted to a day later)

      This actually happened a while ago, but I’ve been too lazy to post about it till now. Has anyone else had this problem? This started around the time of moving from NZDT to NZST, could this do it?

    3. May 22, 2008

      And there was cake.

      Now that my head has stopped spinning and I can’t sleep, I have an apology to make. My 19th was the best birthday I’ve had. Beverley is an absolutely amazing girl, and I had the best 36 hours I can ever recall (apart from a slight snag called a COMP219 test). Not to mention, she really went to a lot of effort with this incredible cake!

      Ok… Peppermint tea gone, let’s try sleeping again…

    4. May 20, 2008

      19 eh…

      (I cheated. I’m falling asleep, so I posted this when I was still 18 and just added 3600 to the epoch)

      19 is just such an unimportant year. Think about it; 15, 16, 17, 18, 20 and 21 are all landmark years, while 19 is just kinda… there. Well, thats enough database/algebra test study for one night.

    5. April 20, 2008

      Comments!

      Thats right, thanks to a good 3 hour effort, comments now work! You can now tell me directly how much dribble and crap my site is! All I have left to do now is a photo gallery and admin page (I’m currently doing most tasks via phpMyAdmin), and I can finally call this… ‘thing’ decent.

      Now, if only those bloody people in town would stop making so much noise, I could actually get to sleep…

    6. April 13, 2008

      Image Maps and Mootools Tooltips

      Oh, BTW, I learnt how to make XHTML-compliant Mootools Tooltip enabled image maps a post back. Its actually simpler than I thought;

      <img src="http://" mce_src="http://" usemap="#mapname" alt="My Image" />
<map name="mapname" id="mapname"><area alt="" title="Your text here"  	class="imgtip" shape="rect" coords="0,0,100,100" /></map>

      (You can browse the page source if you are still stuck)

    7. April 7, 2008

      Yeah!

      So, Team Waikato is going to the Imagine Cup NZ finals in Auckland!

      Having 4 teams instead of 3 will make it interesting though, more of a challenge.

      Once I get these damned tests out of the way… and practice the presentation all over again…. and finish these assignments…. It’ll be awesome!

    8. April 4, 2008

      Web Services, ArrayLists and Structs, oh my!

      4th post of the day… this is what happens when you’re anxiously waiting for news

      So, when writing code for the Imagine Cup entry, I hit a brick wall trying to serialise an ArrayList of Structs over a Web Service. Here is the way that I found works best:

      using System.Xml.Serialization;

public struct Device
{
	public int id;
	public string fname, room, type;
	public bool is_controllable, status;
}

[WebMethod]
[XmlInclude(typeof(Device))]
public ArrayList GetDevices()
{
	ArrayList devices = new ArrayList();

	//Logic here

	return devices;
}

    9. Get the unix epoch from BASH…

      Although I constantly need it, I can never remember this. Maybe I’ll remember it now that I’ve posted it:

      date +%s

    10. Lightroom vs Aperture, take 2

      So, although I should be studying for the 4 tests next week, I’ve decided I’ve had enough Karnaugh maps for one day. So, I’m going to don my reviewing hat and try the new Aperture and Lightroom.

      I first got started in this war back when Lightroom went public beta, and on my iBook G4 I absolutely loved it, whipping it out for any excuse. It was fast, light, and most importantly was free. But, after retiring my MacBook, just before spending money, over a long weekend I tried using Aperture to mock edit a set of ball photos. Nothing hard, just cropping, colour correction and the occasional dust spots. But, on my MacBook (a then 2ghz C2D 1gb superdrive), it was so painfully slow that I gave it up and went back to Lightroom, and have remained with my first love since.

      So, on with the review of the two. My test library is 57 images; 300mb of mostly CR2+JPEG but with a few standalone CR2 and JPEGs mixed in for good measure. Night shots, day shots, the works. My laptop is a MacBook, 2gb, 2Ghz, with upgraded 200gb drive, running Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.11.

      Lightroom 2 Beta

      Lightroom is like a rocket these days, thanks to the developers realising that the required quality of your previews is inversely proportional to the speed at which you’re flicking through images.. Another welcome addition is dual-head support, something I missed from my brief Aperture introduction.

      But, this is still a beta and has a while to go yet. Although my MacBook now has 2gb, having Lightroom use 400mb for 57 images is a tad worrying. And, I’m not sure I like having the crop, clone and redeye buttons on the Develop side panel, but I guess it’ll teach me to become more reliant on hotkeys.

      Aperture 2.1

      Its good to see Aperture has been on a diet, although like Lightroom I’m not sure about its over-enthusiasm for using system resources. Doing a quick scroll up and down the images resulted in my CPU being hogged for about a minute after landing on the first image, and the RAM usage fluctuating between 400 and 600mb. However, after a resting for a bit, the garbage collector kicked in and reduced it to 150mb. Its still a lot faster than the last time I tried to use Aperture 1, and is still quite reactive on my pitiful MacBook.

      The one thing I don’t get is why they killed the old Loupe. I personally loved being able to hold tilde, move my mouse about the image to have it follow, have it bounce on the sides of my screen a few times before releasing it. It was of excellent design, and I really don’t see the same in the new loupe. It could take some getting used to, and maybe I’m just sour.

      Also, it seems to be that Aperture can’t resize images and preserve shape, as look what happens to this preview compared to the Lightroom one below it:

      Verdict

      For now, I plan on sticking to Lightroom 1.3, as its still the most resource efficient, quickest and provides all I need. But, LR2 is still in Beta, and I don’t expect production quality from it yet. It just doesn’t seem as strong a release as the first Lightroom beta though, and I’m quite disappointed in Adobe.

      Now, back to that study… After some Splinter Cell……

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