Clearly even though I spend 14+ hours a day in front of a computer I still can't find time to post entries on here. An I had some worthy entries too. Obviously a belated Happy Canada Day is due. I actually had a really lazy Canada Day - I cleaned the kitchen (no small task let me tell you) and then I read. I did get down to see the fireworks which were better than last year, but it was something cold down on the waterfront. We had scoped a place on a relatively vacant Purdy's Wharf - but despite all the walking in sandals downtown, I had a great time. On the way home we passed a section of Morris street that had been taped off by the Police and surrounded by various law enforcement vehicles. We speculated on the reason, but in the end Sarah heard on the news that it had been a shooting there. That must have been some Canada Day celebration.

Back even before Canada Day we had June 30. And this year, that was the date which I could first register for classes for the fall term. I can't quite remember if I mentioned the whole Software Engineering debacle or not, but the long and the short of it is thus: The faculties of Computer Science and Engineering are offering a new degree programme that is accredited by both professional bodies. It is the Bachelor of Software Engineering - and like most or all engineering programs you basically have no choice as to the courses that you must take. I have a little under half of these classes already - the Computer Science half and I was trying to get some info on the possibility of doing that degree as well. Of course they designed the program with the idea that only first year students would be entering it staight out of high school and I guess they are - both of them. That's right, the inaugural class of the BSwE has two people in it thus far.

So as it turns out, no one knows what the hell is going on with this program, everyone is telling me that it would be too complicated to just enter into it sideways as I was thinking. Especially since there are about 5 or 6 courses in this programme that haven't even been created yet. and I have no idea whether or not they would be when I would need to take them. At this point I think that really all I'm looking for is a couple of the upper year industrial engineering courses like Project Management & Control and Decision & Risk Analysis - and of course the aforementioned yet-to-be-created software engineering classes. Useful information for entering the workforce which is really my true goal here. That being said... more school means less working, which may not be what I want either.

So in any case, I am going to be taking courses that will allow me to graduate with my CS degree. Which really could be any classes - but I'm taking CSCI 4134, CSCI 4171, CSCI 4192 and CSCI 6602 :P

I made a quick run home this past weekend to attend a party that my brother was having at home. It was quite something let me tell you that. It was initially intended to be a gathering of friends with lots of alcohol and good times and catching up. I guess you could say that was what happened. Only way more than that.

I think that the attendance peaked at around 40 people - but there may have been more, I didn't really get an accurate count. There were people out on the deck and at one point upwards of 12 people were in the pool at once. Of course, this was around 12:30 am and everyone was fully ripped. So I kept an eye on the pool making sure that no one drowned. No one did. There were a number of people there that my brother didn't even know, and for a while there I thought that things could get out of hand. I'd like to think that my presence as a bouncer helped keep things in control. I also was bussing the empty bottles which prevented anything from breaking - although there were numerous spills. By about 3:30am, most people were either asleep in their cars or were watching TV in the living room. I think it was around this time that my parents decided that it was calm enough for them to go to bed. I was up for another hour until most people had either passed out or fallen asleep somewhere.

One of the biggest problems with having a party in the country where I am from is that you can't just kick people out or tell them to go home, because they can't drive and there is no other way for them to get anywhere. That being said, a couple of people did manage to convince a cab to come and get them, but that was a long wait and unnecessarily complicated. More still had arranged to have their parents pick them up and a couple might have even called their parents in the middle of the night. In any case, the house was a lovely mess.

Fortunately some of my brothers closer friends who had stayed the night were more than happy to lend a hand in cleaning up. All told it was a crazy night, but luckily nothing untoward happened.

Last night Sarah and I went with a couple of Sarah's coworkers and saw the closing night of the Nova Scotia International Tattoo. The last time I saw it was two or three years ago, and I was hoping that it wasn't going to be exactly the same and I was quite surprised at how different a lot of it was. I was totally into it the whole time. Some of the acts were the same but those were the good ones like the Julian Bicycle Team from the Netherlands. And the best part of it all was the fact that we were able to go for only $10 each. Apparently the last show has a special student rate - $10 where the normal price is more like $30. Of course we had to sit in the 'cheaper' seats, but these were still nice seats in the lower bowl really close to the stage.

Anyone who hasn't been to the Tattoo in a while - it is too late this year, but I would recommend taking it in again - it is quite a show. And for those people who haven't seen it - you don't know what you are missing.

An interesting article from MacWorld's MacCentral came across one of my news feeds today. I had read about Sony unleashing their new 'Walkman' before and that it was hard drive based like the iPod and that it only supported ATRAC3 - one of Sony's own formats which has seriously strict DRM attached to it.

I might also have heard that they have a 20 GB version, but I believe that is their largest. What I hadn't heard was that they were claiming that it can hold more than the iPod's 10000 songs, saying that you can fit 13,000 songs on it. Obviously, being half of the iPod's 40 GB in size, this doesn't make a lot of sense, but that is what marketing is all about. Apparently where Apple uses 128kbps AAC encoding as its basis, Sony uses 48kbps ATRAC3. The article goes into more detail, but I think that this is absurd. I know no one who would encode their music like that. Before AAC, Apples used 160kbps MP3 as the comparison because they wanted to be realistic. Most people these days are encoding at 192kbps MP3 or 160kpbs AAC.

Normally I have no problem with Sony - they make some solid stuff, but I'd stay away from ATRAC3 and and false claims by Sony. :)

AB is an acronym for Aktie Bolog, or share company, in Swedish.

I'm not sure if anyone else has noticed, but a few companies - MySQL most notably - stick the letters AB after their company name. Not all do this in their advertisements, but many have it, like Volvo. As it turns out this is a thing for Swedish companies.

This seems to be the sentiment that is floating around on the web right now. I read about how the US-CERT - an American agency that exists to keep an eye on computer terrorism warned against using IE a couple weeks ago, but now I am seeing more and more articles about this subject matter. On such article by Vaughan-Nichols from eWeek basically says that this [already low quality] browser shouldn't be at all anymore.

Stephen H. Wildstrom from Business Week Online says that Internet Explorer is just too risky. I can only hope that this if nothing else will help convince web users that they need to get their heads out of the sand and take a look at reality.

Fortunately I believe that some people are coming around, Opera Software says that sales of their browser have tripled in the past two to three weeks and Mozilla reports up to 200,000 downloads a day now of their Firefox and Mozilla browsers.

If you want to switch to a new browser, but don't know how to get started, try this article about switching to Firefox. And while I have been a large supporter of Opera, I acknowledge that the browser is much more advanced than what people are used to - and as such they have responded with skins to 'dumb' it down to look and behave like other browsers.

This article was sent out on the CSExchange, so some of you may have already read it, but I will post it for the benefit of the rest of my readers.

There is not much that I can say about it other than, that really sucks.

I should have said something earlier, but I was too excited to express myself ;)

It's official now, PHP 5 was released on Tuesday. It will be interesting to see how it affects certain hosts and other companies. I know however, that I have been running PHP 5 beta 2 on my laptop for months now and I haven't noticed a problem with any of my php4 scripts. In fact, I thought that I had switched back to php 4 but it turns out that I didn't.

Whatever the reason - laziness, lack of anything exciting happening, no more novelty - I seem to be running a slow race behind mike as far as number of interesting posts being made. I think that his posting certainly picked up since he moved to Toronto and therefore had far more interesting things happening to him.

Personally I think it is great. It gives me something to read on a fairly regular basis and a motivation to improve not only my website, but my writing style. I have been making some subtle changes to my site that only a few of you will have noticed. Anyone reading my site from Firefox or Safari will notice that my external links now have cool little icons beside them - denoting the fact that they lead away from my site. Credit belongs where it is due - I shamelessly stole the graphic from the SubEthaEdit website. I want to see that I could get the technique working. I also learned a bit about attribute matching with CSS. Other small changes: my archive page now used PATH_INFO manipulation to get the archive date, and my weather is now being grabbed by a cron job so it isn't being fetched each page request - which should avoid any loading delays.

Doing a bit of research, I discovered that the attribute matching that I mentioned before is actually part of CSS selectors. I have read about selectors in various contexts and each one uses them differently, but essentially, it is a way of specifying which elements certain styles will match. For example, the most common use of selectors are the class attribute (using the .class notation for describing the style). They also include pseudo-elements such as :hover, :first-letter and others. As for the matching of attributes, this should give you an idea:

But you also don't want to catch any links that might start with http: but link to your own pages. So you can filter out a little further to reverse any internal links:

As it would turn out, this is an element of CSS3 - so I guess I can't blame IE and Opera for not supporting it. For more information on CSS3 selectors, read the W3C candidate recommendation. I must say that I am pretty excited about the type of thing that can be possible with this version of CSS.

I've had the opportunity to see a couple great movies in the past few days.

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy: This movie is a must see for anyone who likes random nonesense comedy à la Spaceghost and Aqua Teen. Will Ferrell lays out another classic performance that will have you laughing out loud. And if he doesn't do it, then I can almost guarentee that Steve Carell will in his role as Brick Tamland - so random yet so perfect. I don't want to give too much away, but suffice it to say you will be quoting this one for quite a while.

I, Robot: A total departure from Anchorman this movie is an action packed, special effects orgy. A very well played Matrix-esque story line based off of Isaac Asimov's books. There were even some parts where I was laughing out loud - but maybe that was just me, I do like Will Smith. Apparently they doctored the script a bit when Will signed on and you can tell that it was written for his style. However, I found that I was pleasently surprised with how good the movie actually was. A real sit back and enjoy type of movie.

In case you haven't heard, CBS recently fired George Eads and Jorja Fox from their number one rated TV series, CSI. The two actors who played Nick Stokes and Sarah Sidle respectively were apparently trying to get more money from the studio by not showing up to work when requested. I guess $100,000 per episode wasn't enough for those two. If you are a member of my site, the discussion is taking place in the forum and the mood is sombre. Initially I was horrified by the news, I refused to believe it, but now as the time wears on, I have come to accept it for what it is. I have heard that Eric Szmanda (who plays Greg Sanders) and Paul Guilfoyle (Jim Brass) will be playing bigger roles now. News sites are saying that it is possible the characters will be replaced, but no matter what happens I can only imagine that it will affect the ratings probably for the worse. But I'm going to stay open to new things.

Speaking of which, CSI: NY will be opening this fall and I am actually really looking forward to that one as well.

http://media.ebaumsworld.com/theinternet.wmv

My brother sent me this - kind of interesting looking back. :)

I have read in some forums about the concerns that PHP 5 might break old PHP 4 scripts. Like I said, I have been using PHP5 since Beta 2 and I haven't had a problem. There are some issues however which some more obscure things that could go wrong. So in case anyone is interested you can read Zend's Backwards Incompatible Changes.

Over the past month or so, Jon's chess board has been a focus at times in our office. So today, it went to the next level as we cracked out our cameras and took some cool close-up shots. One of them in particular I was really fond of and I decided to play with and eventually resized into wallpapers. I have two versions of the same photo available. They are available on my new wallpaper page.

I'm thinking that I might make some of my other cool photography into wallpaper at some point.

I know it isn't funny, but there is a car in front of my apartment that has a dead battery. When I was walking home last night around 1AM I noticed that the car in front of Glengary had its lights on. I didn't recognize the car and it was pretty late, so there really wasn't anything I could do about it except say, "damn, that sucks". As I was walking inside, I remembered that some newer cars have safety features which will turn off the lights before the battery is completely dead - giving you enough juice to start the car. Obviously this car doesn't have that.

However someone more capable of helping - ie. someone with a car, just gave her a jump and it seems that all is well.

I was investigating why the Dal Timetable was down by taking a quick look at the NOC status page. While I was there I noticed a few entries about some of the my.dal servers needing a reboot:

Subject: my1.dal.ca restarted Contact: portal@dal.ca

my1.dal.ca crashed with an internal java error (same issue as occurred on Monday July 19th). The system was restarted within a couple of minutes.

The recurring java errors are still under investigation.

Now, here I could say something about using Servlets for web applications or something about the risks of generic third party systems, but I think I will let the evidence speak for itself. :)

Well folks, that time has arrived, a time I have been forecasting for too long now. About 1 hour ago I paid my 10% deposit on my new Apple G5.

As far as specs on it, I got the new Dual 2.0 GHz model - the same as on the website, but with 1 GB of RAM, 250 GB HD and the ATI 9600 XT 128MB video card. Oh and I dropped the modem. According to PCPC, the G5s are a bit sluggish in shipping because of the high demand, but I imagine that it should be in by mid-August sometime. Considering that my last computer took like 90 days to get in after I ordered it (because they weren't shipping at the time I ordered) - this shouldn't be bad.

ClipboardSharing

Not withstanding that it is for the Mac. Like he says in the write up, I wouldn't think that I would use this until I heard about it.

I could talk for a while about usability on the web and what are some good ideas and what are some bad ones. More specifically I know a lot about what makes for good interfaces for web applications. Generally speaking, people have some expectations about the way things work on the 'Net. The days of breaking conventions in order to get some cosmetic appeal are slowly disappearing. All ranting aside, one of the things that I have long pondered is the use of buttons vs. links in my applications.

Buttons are form elements, people expect to see them after filling out a form, and I would be foolish to deny them that. I know of a few people who are a fan of using images and rollover effects, but in the days of CSS and graceful degradation, I would like to think that people would be moving away from that. However, when people see that sexy blue link with the underline, they half expect it to bring them to another page. Some page that is not the current page or at least somewhere different on the current page. However, as is popular with web applications, links sometimes link back to the same page as they originate - often with different parameters passed - perhaps for sorting or other display related purpose. The browser actually loads something new, but things haven't changed - much anyway. In cases like these it is often better to use buttons. Buttons... forms... clunky... the issues pile up.

All of this lead up to tell you there is a different way to make buttons - using CSS. Take the following button for example: (taken from a site I am working on now - colours were chosen by the designers, not me - I'm not so sure I'd put pink and orange together.)

Try it, it even clicks - although if you release the mouse on it you will reload the page. Some browsers (IE/Firefox) maintain the active (clicked) state if you click and drag the mouse off the button. Others (Opera/Safari) release the active state when you release the mouse button off the button.

That said, it is easier than forms and buttons, more flexible than static images and I don't have to mess around with the GD library if I was so determined to use dynamic images. Simple, very hand code-able, all-in-all a pretty handy technique.

Damn. There is a steadily intensifying rank odor taking over tech support. It started around 10 this morning I think. Since then it has killed 2 people and is holding a couple others hostage. We have experts in trying to quell the situation, but Jon and I have boarded ourselves in our office and are hoping to make it out of this with our lunch where it belongs. If you value your olfactory safety, then for the love of all that is holy, stay the hell away from the West end of the third floor of the CS building. You've been warned.

Before I was into PCPC to order my G5 on Tuesday, I had gone in on Monday with Jon just to scope things out. My primary objective on that visit was to see if they had any Aiport Express wireless units in yet. I had noticed on the website that they had been approved in Canada and they were cheaper than I originally expected they would be. I had kind of assumed that Apple would pull another iPod mini move and release a scaled down product that is only marginally cheaper than the full version. The price was reasonable and I just took a look and it seems that they have brought down the price of their full Airport Extreme Base Station, but it is still a fair bit more. The big restriction with the Express unit is that it only supports up to 10 clients connected at once - but if I'm even in a situation where that isn't enough... I can probably afford another wireless router.

All this being said, PCPC didn't have any in stock - they weren't going to until mid to late August. That kind of sucked so I didn't put in an order for one. I checked the possibility of ordering one off the Apple website - they were saying 2-3 weeks until it would ship. So I took my chances and ordered one. My confirmation email said that it would ship on or before August 18. That was kind of far away, but if that was what it took... there wasn't much I could do about it. Then last night when I checked my email, they had sent a notice that it had shipped and was on its way... now I'm really glad that I hadn't ordered it through PCPC like someone else I know who will likely be waiting until mid to late August.

Bottom line. I will have wireless access in my apartment by hopefully sometime next week. :)

Oh and the smell that invaded tech support on Wednesday was gone Thursday morning. I don't think that we have isolated the source yet, but theories involve a burnt capacitor in something.

I am in Durham now, but I am heading to Long Reach, New Brunswick shortly for the rest of the weekend. I am doubting that there will be more than dial-up available and that is assuming that I will get a chance to use it.

Cheers.