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…
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)
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!
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;
}
Although I constantly need it, I can never remember this. Maybe I’ll remember it now that I’ve posted it:
date +%s
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……
Sorry for the delay, just pretend this was posted a day earlier
So, despite us getting the device working in the hotel room, when we went to present it simply wouldn’t work. The judges seemed sympathetic, but it just sucks how we spend so much time into something which in the end didn’t go.
Paul said he’ll announce the winners in a week…. I wish a week would hurry up…
Note: This applied to my old, CodeIgniter based blog, and so is no longer valid…
As I edit my site, I’ll be posting little code snippets that helped me, and might help you as well. If it seems a bit vege, tough, deal with it 
So,as I’ll be often posting code snippets, I’m adding SyntaxHighlighter, a small, free JavaScript tool to stylise my code. But, I want to be able to post this in easily, using FCKeditor. So, I added this to my fckstyles.xml file:
<attribute name="name" value="code" /> <attribute name="class" value="c-sharp" /> <attribute name="name" value="code" /> <attribute name="class" value="php" /> <attribute name="name" value="code" /> <attribute name="class" value="sql" />
Nothing fancy, but it works well. And, as an added bonus, FCKeditor will automatically convert the <’s to < for me, as required by SyntaxHighliter.
If you’re reading this, its because I’ve finally pushed my second revision of my site out the door, and had a bit of fun doing it.
I really don’t know why I didn’t starting using CI earlier on. Its a dream to work with and would have solved a lot of my earlier problems, and only a slight performance hit over my own custom framework. MVC FTW!
So, now that I’ve had a bit of time to get things settled at work, let me explain a few things as to why its taken me so long to get this site running again.
First thing you should know is that this is an experiment. Its completely 100% hand-written from scratch. This site marks my first adventure into a bunch of neat things that I just haven’t had time to research and play with, like mysqli, FreeBSD tweaking, hand-editing PNG files, etc. I’ve also gone through about five layout designs, before finally getting bored looking at colour schemes. I currently like the orange/grey/white scheme, although I could very well turn around in five mins and re-do it blue. Which is the great thing about a roll-your-own site, I’m able to just turn around and change the colour scheme without digging through a colossal amount of CSS.
So, things will break, and this could very well go un-touched for months, but thats what I expected. Any actual content for my content management system is just an added bonus 
.
