Category Archives: Blog

A Few More Tweaks

★ Posted on at 09:39 pm ★

lighthouse

The lighthouse at Cape Otway. Heh, managed to wait for no people to be around and took a snapshot of the lighthouse. Might have overdone the vignette in post processing but I kind of like it that way. This is a picture of symmetry where the sea level is straight and the lighthouse sits right in the middle, with the path to the lighthouse drawing your eye towards it.

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Added a few more tweaks to the web design. Tweaked the navigation bar so that one can wander around the site and still get back to the main page (have always ignored to put a home link as the usual idea has been to use the header logo as the link back to the main page). Added CSS3 text shadows to the post titles, and made some subtle colour changes all around. Heh, didn’t mention Internet Explorer support as they aren’t really standards compliant so I’m not going to bother. I guess most of the visitors to this blog will be using a more sophisticated browser to begin with.

Want to go back to linking websites that I frequent. Not sure what format I’d put it in but the web has so many useful areas to provide information on various topics and I think sharing is the best way to let others know what I tend to read.

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Seem to have lost track of time. Tweaking the code for this website is a good exercise in forgetting about other things and it can keep me occupied for quite some time. There’s a few things I could continue doing when I have time, including getting the search box back into the layout, as well as finding a more elegant solution to the archives.

I set about being minimalistic about the current theme, and rather than tear it up and start fresh, it’s easier for me to slowly evolve it and I’m liking it more and more each time I tweak it, which is better suited to the time I have now that I’m working, compared to when I had all the time in the world as a student. Heh, more to come soon.

Little Tweaks

★ Posted on at 08:47 pm ★

wreck beach anchor

One of Vyanne’s favourite photos from the trip through the Great Ocean Road. This was taken at Wreck Beach, one of the less traveled areas along the coast. The anchor you see here is one of a few, left by a sunken ship that got wrecked along this beach. The anchor is stuck in a pothole along the beach. You get some strange formations as it’s mainly hard rock near the coastline with eroded pockets of water filled with shells and other things.

It’s slightly less accessible and you need to drive on a gravel road just to get there. I cringed everytime the car wobbled over the uneven surface, kicking up and covering itself in dust.

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Did some tweaks to the website. Changed the font from italic Georgia to regular Times New Roman. Also testing out the new CSS3 spec with @font-face, and grabbed some license free fonts over at FontSquirrel. If you are using Firefox 3.5+, Chrome version 4.0+ and Safari (no idea when support for it started) you will see a different font for the post titles.

Will be slowly adding some side content to the website as I’m happy with the current layout.

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Trying to organise my thoughts these days. Have been looking into various wiki programs since I started using TiddlyWiki way back in March last year. Looked at Tomboy and Zim, both of which run native in Linux due to the existence of GTK and Python on the Linux platform. I would have needed to install extras on Windows just to get them working and the .NET framework is only available on Vista and Windows 7, so using it at work where XP machines are still the norm would have been painful.

So I decided to go back to TiddlyWiki for jotting down notes and linking ideas. The only difference this time was that I separated out the content into specific topics. HTML and Javascript is pretty standard and can be rendered by most modern web browsers, so migrating and editing the information between platforms (I frequently use Windows and Linux these days) is easy. Also starting to appreciate tagging for referencing posts and stuff, although I still don’t do it for this website, which uses 2004 idealogy for organising information. Heh, not the best way to lookup stuff, but there’s so far only 6 years worth of ramblings, so it’s not too important for me at the moment.

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Geek stuff aside, tried to get back to running after a week and the half off. Managed probably 3 or 4 km before suffering to the heat. It was 34 degrees when I went out at 6pm and I was feeling mighty lethargic halfway through and had to drag myself home. Heh, progress is slow and I have a little more than a month left to run so I’ll need to push myself along somehow.

Epic Failure

★ Posted on at 08:02 pm ★

the row of trees

A cropped photo from my trip to Hanging Rock not too long ago. I’m wondering if I’d be able to get a Hasselblad and dabble with film one day, taking square photos. I just can’t seem to frame photos in a square as I get distracted by whatever else is in the frame and trying to position everything in an aesthetically pleasing way.

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[geek babble, you can skip to the next block of text if you are not interested in a rant on trying to install an operating system]

It’s the end of another week. Spent the last 5 hours trying to install Arch Linux on my Eee PC. I already have Ubuntu installed on a SD card so I got another just to test it out. It was hiccup after hiccup along the way. Firstly I downloaded the installation image and tried to copy it onto my USB stick using Unetbootin. That was an epic failure as the program didn’t do it properly so the Arch Linux Live CD got stuck trying to boot. Looked through the installation guides on the wiki on the Arch Linux website and found another program to do the job.

Finally got a working boot disk and then it was another few hours of epic failure. The Arch Linux installer is pretty unforgiving and I have decent enough experience to know what I’m doing but make a mistake, and all the steps you went through before can be chucked out the window as you restart the process. Did that a few times until I finally got it right and got the installation all the way through to the end. I thought finally I’d be able to get a bootscreen all the way through to a command prompt. It wasn’t to be as the Arch Linux installer is not quite smart enough to do that. 130am and work in the morning, so I turned in and left it at that.

Next day (which is today) after work, came back and fixed up the boot loader to point to the write drives and partitions. Yay, it’s booting. Then another epic failure. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I tweaked and read through forum posts, instruction guides but to no avail. I could not get the darn thing to boot to a beautiful command prompt. Yes, I’m trying to install an operating system that has no GUI and greets you with a command prompt, am I insane? Not quite, it’s just a learning process for me and I’m quite familiar with the different folders where all the configuration files are kept.

I currently suspect that the kernel that comes with the installation image does not play nice with my Eee PC and I am convoluting things by installing it on a SD card instead of the primary SSD. I chose to install Arch Linux in the first place was to get a highly optimised operating system that I could customise with programs that I’d actually use. Better to add stuff than to remove stuff from the operating system.

So there I have 7 or so hours committed and nothing to show for it other than being a little bit more familiar with configuring Linux. It’s a welcome challenge, to commit to trying to solve something and eventhough I failed, it’s invigorating to have at least tried.

And tomorrow I might try the alternative Ubuntu install, building the system up from scratch. Hehehe.

[/end geek babble]

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Found this relatively inexpensive website from the UK that sells book and provides free shipping the world round. The good thing about buying stuff from overseas is that the merchant doesn’t pay tax on the goods sold as it is leaving the country, and the importer doesn’t pay tax on the goods because it’s a small amount and sort of under the radar, instead of getting it at the local bookstore, where all manner of costs (shipping, storage, handling) and taxes have been slapped onto it, driving the price up! The bookstore is called the Book Depository and for the price I paid for shipping a whole lot of books, it would cost me as much as 60% more to buy it off a shelf locally.

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The weather is still icky and work is like a sanctuary from the heat as the air conditioning keeps it all away. 45 degree temperatures are becoming the norm here and they stay for a few days, bringing some sleepless nights to many who do not have air conditioning at home. I have a fan and can sleep under most conditions, so I fared alright this last week when the mercury jumped up high.

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Last of all, this domain name is in transition, as I’m finally moving it after 6 years. It’s easier to manage as I can pay Australian dollars here as opposed to getting mom to bank in a cheque in KL (which I’m thankful for each year). Much to do once the domain name moves as I have to reset the site up on a new server. It’s good to be a geek, where at least you know you can handle these changes. There will be stumbling blocks along the way, but it’s all good for the learning process.