Category Archives: Blog

Mini Workstation

★ Posted on at 11:18 pm ★

20110219-0009

Alfie at the park. Love how the sun at the edge of the picture gives Alfie a sort of hair light. Still trying to find new ways to be creative with how I frame and shoot photos.

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WordPress 3.1 finally came out and I decided to upgrade it. Doing it through WordPress broke the installation itself. Tried some suggestions I googled, and ended doing it the old fashion way using an FTP client to upload the files one by one. Heh, typing this post out means I fixed it.

The new version of WordPress has some improvements, like an admin bar at the top of your site when you are logged in to have quick access to creating new content and managing comments. I’ve seen this implemented on other blogging software before, so this is sort of a catchup for WordPress.

Other than that, I haven’t really noticed any new features, so I will take some time to go through the new admin interface. Upgrading the website to be HTML5 and CSS3 compliant will be something I will work on for the next few weeks.

* * *

Vyanne’s cousins are staying over at our place, so access to my desktop has been restricted, as the study has also been converted into a guest room, so I’ve converted the Eee PC (which I’m typing on now) to be a more useful tool.

It dawned on me that Dropbox can be used to sync simple applications like a basic text editor and an FTP client, allowing me to work across all the computers I have without worrying about syncing between machines or worrying about file locations. Dropbox is very transparent and does this for you. The 2GB they provide for free is adequate for most of the things I need to sync so it keeps things simple for me. Next stop is setting up a basic web server on Dropbox and I already have some ideas on how to do that.

* * *

Just some comments on the Eee PC, as I’m always keen to find out what’s the most productive equipment I can use for doing my work. I’ve had it for a couple of years now and the stuff I have used it for has definitely justified the cost for it.

I like that it is really portable at 1.1kg, it really gives me a computing device with many options while on the go or just around the house. The battery has degraded from 6 hours to about 2 and a 1/2 but even with the weakened battery, it still has enough juice to allow me to be productive on the go. I also like that replacement parts are easily accessible from eBay as I have replaced the keyboard before and could also get a new battery if I wanted to.

The 8.9″ screen was adequate before, but as I try to be more productive with the Eee PC, the screen becomes more of a hindrance. Heh, the Atom processor is ok for almost everything I need it to do except for the occasional high definition web video or editing photos.

* * *

So for me the ideal laptop starts off with the weight. Anything above 1.3kg would be a dealbreaker for me. There are currently laptops with 11.6″ screens and a high enough resolution to be productive on and this is the largest I would go as anything more probably wouldn’t fit in my camera bag. Anything faster than an Atom processor would fit my usage requirements for a portable laptop.

The above criteria narrowed it down to a couple of choices, the Apple Macbook Air and the Lenovo X120e. The form factor of the Macbook Air is ideal and the Core 2 Duo is still a decent performer. $1,199 for the form factor isn’t half bad considering laptops of this class a few years ago were above $2,000. The proprietary nature of Apple hardware meant I wasn’t going to be able to do any repairs of my own. The alternative would be the Lenovo X120e, which unfortunately, isn’t currently sold in Australia (global businesses with regional market targetting) has a processor that’s close to the C2D’s performance, a nice matte screen (dislike the glossy screens of current laptops) and lots of I/O options. Even specced out, the price is pretty decent but the weight balloons to about 1.5kg.

So still in search of that ultra portable computing device (an iPad doesn’t quite count) that would help me do stuff away from my desktop.

Heh, this post has got a bit too wordy for my liking.

New Web Spec

★ Posted on at 07:46 pm ★

20110119-1-4

Not sure what they are called, even if they resemble roses a little. I have become quite familiar with what I can do with the GF1 and while manual focusing is still a challenge, it’s much easier now compared to using the D300 viewfinder to determine focus. You could use Live View to get the same effect but having no mirror flapping during the exposure is one of the key advantages of the GF1 when using manual lenses.

* * *

Spent the last couple of nights reading stuff regarding the relatively new HTML5 and CSS3 specifications. The last time I was so enthusiastic about any of this was in 2003, when I was still in uni and doing web applications. I was the one on the team that made our webpages look good. If you think the following paragraphs are going to be about geek talk, you are definitely correct and should tune your browser to another channel.

Heh, while my Photoshop and Illustrator skills have declined over the past few years from lack of use, my understanding of using markup to render webpages has stuck to me like how my other Chinese dialects have. I can read and understand it, even if I can’t write it properly but that’s what Google is for, and when you have a reference guide, you could probably hack something together relatively quickly.

Looking at the new spec for both toolsets above required to design web pages, I like that things have been simplified over the years, and I no longer have to worry too much about browser wars and supporting standards. Back then I switched from Internet Explorer 6 (which blew Netscape out of the water with its startup efficiency and more support for features) to the first renditions of Firefox. Firefox was the first to properly support the CSS2 spec and they advertised it as such, so designing web pages for it was a joy and one often had to hack around the code to get it to display the same with Internet Explorer.

As I stopped updating the design of my website (I just checked last night and the current format was last updated in August 2009), I stopped caring about which browsers I had installed to test web page renders. I currently use Chrome as my default browser only because it is the fastest of the lot and displays most pages these days properly. I have Firefox as a backup for some websites as Chrome does crash on occasion. Internet Explorer has been relegated to downloading an alternative browser when I have a fresh install of Windows.

Anyhow, back to the present, the new spec allows for a lot of extra layout and design options. I recall the early days when I tried dabbling with Flash and Actionscript for dynamic, animated websites. CSS and Javascript killed that for me as they did much of what I wanted, without a bulky Shockwave download to your website (that plus how Apple iOS devices don’t support Flash and even the current mobile handsets that do get a big performance hit from it and reduced battery life, which on its own is a discussion for another day). HTML5 and CSS3 offer a lot more and a lot of what I used to do with background images like text shadows and rounded borders can now be implemented as code using CSS3.

It’s been a long time since I’ve sat in front of the computer writing code, but I’m excited at the new tools available and this is probably what I will occupy my evenings with over the next few weeks. An overhaul of the website was one of the initial list of things to do for 2011 and no better time to start it than now.

Steering Off

★ Posted on at 10:31 pm ★

yarra valley HDR

The photo on its own is uninspiring, but I liked the placement of the objects in the frame. This was after getting off the balloon. For a few posts in a row I’ve not focused on food photos. Heh.

Ran it through Photomatix to get the HDR look. Bits of the sky have been overexposed, but the scene was challenging with the dynamic range, so this is a pretty good attempt at retrieving the colours from the background.

Reviewing some of my post editing, and have issue with the colour balance of some of the images, so I’m likely to delve into it a little more to get the exact styling I want.

* * *

Decided to take a couple of days study leave for the exam. Suspected I was entitled to it, but never did ask until today. Heh, just need to let the brain loose for a night from studying. With the exam at the back of my mind, I can’t really think of much else. The house is settling soon and there was another flurry of documents being posted back and forth.

I just want a day when I don’t have to worry about what’s happening next.

* * *

Need to do a little housekeeping on this blog. The Flickr plugin to display the photos at the bottom is broken. Probably something to do with how Flickr allows access to their APIs. The older posts with links to photos hosted on the previous host are also broken as I never uploaded those photos back to their original location. There’s also the issue of continuity as I don’t want to rely on Flickr forever to host my photos (might look into WordPress’s default media handling, but I was never quite impressed with it back then). I’d like something where I can just copy the entire folder from the host and transplant it without too much configuration issues. I’ll probably need more space and an idea on how I’m going to store the photos in a logical manner.

I’m also going to trim off the posts I did in the earlier years, circa 2004. It will probably be some editing, to keep the essence of the post but in something more inline with my current style of writing. I’m pretty sure that I’d react in horror at the thought had I conceived it a year or so ago.

Heh, these ideas for change always come when I have to study for an exam, although this is probably the first time I’ve resisted acting on any of my ideas. I don’t really want to get sidetracked now, with just a few more days to go, I’d like to be able to concentrate on my paper.