Many of the readers of this blog will know that I am a giant, giant Apple fanboy. In fact, whenever I’m in Birmingham it’s an absolute necessity is to visit the Bullring Apple Store (as Sarah will no doubt painstakingly tell you). Unfortunately for me — or rather, my bank balance — a couple of weeks ago, I got a first-hand chance to play with the new iPod Touch. And, at this point, I think that you may see where this blog entry is going.

Rather surprisingly, however, I didn’t purchase the Touch. Since it’s quite large and my pockets are reasonably small, I decided that I’d wait a week and combine both the lovelyness of the Touch with my phone by getting the amazingly-hyped iPhone.

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Continue reading “New Toy!”…

7:37 pm | Posted in Apple, Computing | No Comments »

The lack of activity from myself has been quite profound lately, but regretfully the thing that’s made me finally get around to writing is the closure of Sayonara’s blog. Unfortunately he feels that he can’t dedicate either time or money to maintaining the site and giving it the attention it needs, hence he’s shut up shop and called it a day.

I believe we’ve both been around for a similar amount of time, and personally I rather enjoyed reading the site so it is a big shame to see it go. So if you want some free hosting, then send me an e-mail me or something.

I can certainly relate to his position. I find that the main problem is finding the motivation to sit down, think about what needs to be said and then actually write the damn entry. The last two paragraphs, for instance, have taken approximately twenty minutes to write because I am only writing in-between simulation runs. Even then I’m not entirely satisfied with what’s been written, and unfortunately most of my posts come out either as rather dull or overly sarcastic – hopefully I am neither in real life!

Another, somewhat different problem is that half the reason for this blog existing is the photography side of things. With all that’s been going on at Warwick over the past few weeks, I just haven’t found enough motivation to get out there and take some shots. However this will change soon, as I have enough money and justification to get myself a shiny new 40D in the next few days!

But fear not – I will soldier on and continue to blog about useless, dull, and mostly meaningless things because I enjoy doing it. Watch this space.

7:07 pm | Posted in Site Development, Web Development | 1 Comment » | Show comment » | Hide comment » |

So, after nothing for almost two months, the first post is going to be about changing servers! How interesting? No. But read on for a review of my new hosts after two weeks.

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Continue reading “CheapVPS: a 2-week Review”…

11:15 pm | Posted in Site Development, Web Development | 5 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |

Thought I’d test out the latest Firefox 3 release (codenamed Gran Paradiso) to test out the apparent speed increases. Have to say that I’m bloody impressed – there is a very noticeable speed increase, especially with the JavaScript effects on the homepage. Apparently that’s all thanks to Gecko 1.9′s usage of Cairo as a new backend.

Funnily enough, I also downloaded and tried out Apple’s Safari for a few sites. I think it lasted about 20 seconds before it got closed and completely destroyed from my computer. Don’t know what it is about that browser, but I absolutely hate it.

Anyway, even though it’s currently at an alpha 7 release,  everything’s reasonably stable at this point so you might want to try it out.

9:32 pm | Posted in Apple, Computing, Web Development | No Comments »

Actually had a pretty productive day today, which makes a change. All of the photoblog photos are rejigged in a very exciting fashion so that they all contain the proper shooting information. You can take a look by clicking on the titles of each photo. Some more on that tomorrow, as I have some more code to post up.

Otherwise, did a lot of optimization of the MySQL/lighttpd/FastCGI setup that we have on the server today, and so I can finally get around to cancelling my DreamHost account after migrating the last bits and pieces over.

However right now, I’m going to get back to tidying up the blog and fixing things that have been on the cards for ages – like a complete lack of any decent archives. Brillo.

12:00 am | Posted in Site Development | No Comments »

After many, many days of painful procrastination, I’ve eventually got around to implementing some of the changes to the layout and improvements to the JavaScript running the site. Photos in the Photoblog (and indeed on the index page) are displayed much differently now, as a smaller thumbnail; partially it looks better, but mostly it improves the page load-times.

Other than this, I finally fixed some very nasty IE6 rendering bugs on the sidebar. As you can see, the advert has changed shape; this was the main cause of most of my woes. Eventually the sidebar could expand, but this requires me re-editing images that I don’t have access to at the moment. And the JavaScript tabby slidey thing now works on IE6.

Hurrah! Now back to checking my e-mail with the frequency of an OCD sufferer.

8:50 pm | Posted in Site Development, Web Development, XHTML/CSS | No Comments »

As some of you may or may not be aware, part of my fourth year project was to give a presentation of my work over the first two terms. Naturally I’d already written a lot of LaTeX code for the project and produced lots of lovely PostScript figures, so it seemed pretty natural to go ahead and use Beamer, with evince in presentation mode.

However, because I like to look a bit swish, I decided to do something to make my shiny Sony Ericsson W950i switch through the slides for me without having to touch the keyboard. Since nothing was apparent from much Google searching, I sat down and figured it all out. After a long time of sitting on this code I’ve finally found the time to sit down and package it all up in a neat bundle.

So, if you have a decent phone with Bluetooth enabled, visit the project page if you’re interested!

The project report and presentation slides will be going up tomorrow, I just need to get around to writing some CSS.

12:28 am | Posted in Computing, Hardware, Project | 2 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |

It’s taken pretty much all day, but finally the new layout is ready. It’s been changed a lot since the last time, since I wasn’t very happy with how it turned out. Let me know what you think!

Apart from layout changes, there’s a shiny new toolbar using mootools 1.1. Also, the AJAX search now actually works – shock horror. I’m planning some more exciting stuff tomorrow, as well as reverting to my old lightbox layout with the reflections.

Currently, IE6 support is crapped up, but I really can’t be bothered going through the CSS tonight trying to find the odd pixel jumps here and there which messes everything. I hate IE.

11:54 pm | Posted in Site Development, Web Development, XHTML/CSS | No Comments »

Given the recent hype about WWDC and the supposed Top Secret features of the upcoming Leopard release of OS X, I was quite looking forward to the keynote speech today. Unfortunately, it was rather dull and overall, pretty much disappointing.

Whilst the Finder has been given a well-needed overhaul and the Dock has been prettified, personally I just don’t see the huge changes that had been promised. The problem is not so much that Leopard isn’t an improvement over Tiger, it’s that the hype built up expectations to a ridiculous degree.

But even so, as far as keynotes go and given Jobs’ amazing keynote in January introducing the iPhone at Macworld, this was quite a letdown. I was personally hoping for an update to the Mac Pro, and really wanted a killer feature for Leopard that didn’t really materialize.

One highlight at the end: Safari for Windows! I’m posting this from it now, and it really is quite nippy. I might even try it for a couple of days over Firefox. Either way, it’s going to make web developers’ lives a lot easier if they don’t own a Mac. 

12:39 am | Posted in Apple | No Comments »

Back in the days of old, crap computers, I used to play Starcraft on my ace Performa 5300 (with uberfast 14.4k inbuilt modem) and loved it. Well, that was almost ten years ago now – apparently I’m getting old – and finally, Blizzard decided they were going to do something other than bloody World of Warcraft and get around to making Starcraft 2.

As Blizzard put on their website: Hell, it’s about time. Quite right.

I will be buying it on the release date. I adored Starcraft; it was the best RTS I ever played, far better than Command and Conquer even in its heyday. Can’t wait until the release, so hurry up and finish it Blizzard – especially since it looks completely great.

As an added bonus for me to buy a Mac, they’re also making an OS X native version. I get the feeling I’m going to be spending a lot of money in the next 6 months.

11:35 pm | Posted in Computing | 2 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |