I knew it was coming, Apple Expo Europe in Paris was the popular guess and a correct one in this case. They had stopped shipping their last model of iMacs back in early July with the promise that a new model was on the way in September. That was met with mized reactions - no one could buy an iMac for a while, which was bad planning on the part of Apple. The positive side of things that I looked at was that the reason Apple stopped selling iMacs was because they ran out of parts. The demand was so great that they couldn't meet it. In general that sounds like a bad thing, but to me it simply means that Apple's computers are gaining popularity. Unfortunately they have to rely on other companies to produce elements like hard drives and processors which are reasons that there are delays on the Dual 2.5 GHz G5s.

However, that is not the point. The point is that the new iMac has been unveiled and should start shipping by mid-September. I must say however, that if I didn't just buy a G5 I would seriously take a look at these new machines. The entry level price is quite reasonable and it is a nice machine. I mean look at it. I'm not going to go into all the sexy details because I can say it quite as well as the fine copy writers at Apple can.

Although I probably haven't bitched about it on here — at least recently — but I'm generally opposed to the use of javascript on the web. At least I am opposed to the use that I see it in most of the time. Javascript should augment the user experience but not be the only way for something to function. One of the big offenders is Javascript menus. I've seen a few that Opera for Linux just doesn't render because the code is geared to IE. Avoiding dependance on the client only helps with your site. I would much rather see CSS based menus even if they aren't as supported yet.

However there are a couple of things that I don't mind. Setting focus on a form field when the page loads is fine, especially for login pages and search pages. If the clients doesn't support it then nothing is broken... they just have to click or tab to the field manually. I also don't mind simple authentication of form fields — the only caveat is that they must be used in conjunction with server-side authentication of fields. Of course all of this is simply an introduction to a nifty piece of javascript that I actually believe can considerably increase the ease of navigation on web pages.

All it does is allow you to double-click on the page anywhere (not on a link) and it will bring you to the top of the page. I haven't checked, but you might be able to perform this action with mouse gestures in the browsers that support them (pretty much anything but IE). However this is an example of value-added javascript. As long as you can still navigate without this, I think that it adds a valuable ability.

Javascript required are not words that any self-respecting site should need to say. But hey, screw up your site... better for me.

It is that time of year, and even if you are a neat freak - unlike myself - chances are still pretty good that you will have some fruit flies in your house. Likely in your kitchen - laying tiny fly eggs into anything they can get a hold of. As of four days ago, these little bastards took up their usual spot in my kitchen near my garbage and all of the food that would be left out. Sarah had mentioned to me that she had put out some traps in her apartment and caught quite a few of the flies with them so I thought that might not be a bad idea.

The idea was mostly spurred on by the fact that I found some old apple juice in the fridge and instead of throwing it out I simply poured most of it into a little glass dish. To that I added a little bit of vinegar and covered the whole shebang in saran wrap. I put very tiny holes in the wrap - a little too small at first, but then I over-compensated and made the holes too big. So Sarah fixed the 'lid' on Monday when she was over. It was her birthday then too, but I can leave that for another story.

So with an improved lid and apple juice that was definitely starting to ferment, my deadly trap was set. At the moment as you can see in the photo, there are about 10+ flies dead or trapped inside. The nice thing is there hasn't been any free roaming flies in the kitchen that I have noticed. So my hope is that I have cleansed my kitchen of the nuisance by effectively wiping out the entire fruit fly race in this region.

I went out last night with a friend, Martina, and saw Wicker Park. I must say that was one twisted movie. Taking a brief look at the opinions of the crew at iMDB tells me that is wasn't as popular with the "movie going elite" but I think that we all know how much I care about that. It was one of those movies that I probably wouldn't want to see again simply because most of the movie's energy comes from not knowing what will happen. And of course Matthew Lillard is in it so it gets a gold star from me for that.

The point of mentioning this is that after the movie, she was going to see her friend who was moving back into the city and so I went over to meet said friend and see if I could be of assistance. Well assistance was definitely rendered - this girl had a lot of stuff. Obviously this is a common occurrence right now as the new school year is rapidly approaching and people are moving back in to the city. This is an experience I have witnessed second hand a number of times as my friends are moving back in even today. On the way back to my place last night I noticed another student moving something dresser-like in a room with mom giving directions from the doorway. It made me smile thinking that this was probably happening - or will be happening in hundreds or even thousands of apartments and houses as mom and dad come to bring little Suzie or Jonny back to university. Tomorrow in fact my Mom and Dad will be in this apartment bringing little Adam back to university. Fortunately for them, Adam has been slowly moving stuff into the apartment all month and I imagine that it won't be so bad getting everything else up - more clothes and the computer - I mean, what more does a guy need?

Personally however, I haven't really experienced this much - I do recall moving into residence my first year and it being like that, but that is a unique experience altogether. Because after first year I never moved back home. I have lived in Halifax since I graduated from high school. And while I have had my family help me move from apartment to apartment in this same building, I haven't been able to experience 'moving back'. But that doesn't mean that I don't get excited this time of year. After all I am usually moving somewhere (in this building) plus all of my friends are returning from wherever they were for the summer. Now that I think about it... this past August was the first since starting that I haven't moved. But I do need to clean my apartment if my roommates are going to get in here without too much trouble. Cheers.

I have just returned from the mall where I went with Chris so that he could look at tents. And that is what we did. The real dilemma arose when we learned that the sale that they were having ended today. So Chris did end up with a nice tent for less that he was expecting which is always nice. Then we started looking at sleeping bags and I realized that I don't own a sleeping bag and I've only ever been using the ones that my family has had for a while which are crappy starting to show their age and those ones aren't that warm. So the sales person pitched me a nice Asolo sleeping bag called the Milano and like the tents it was on sale, but for today only. So I bought it. It is rated for -7°C and is a mummy style bag. The best thing about it is that when it is in it's bag it is about a quarter of the size of most other sleeping bags I've used. Yet it is over 7 feet long. And despite knowing the manufacturer and the model and the store at which I bought it, the best page I found on the sleeping bag was from some random 'outdoors' website.

After my last four month work term I am at last starting what should be my last term of university. It will be my last term of my Bachelor of Computer Science from Dalhousie University for sure, but as usual there is some uncertainty in the air with regards to whether this will be my last degree.

This past week has been busy, while I wasn't moving again, my brother and our other roommate Jeff moved on Monday (Sep. 6) and obviously that was chaotic. In due fairness my whole family came up which on one hand made lighter work, but on the other it was a lot of people in this apartment. However, I think that almost everything is in place now, for the first time in a long time, I have a real living room, one where people can actually sit and talk or watch TV and it isn't an obstacle course.

The other challenge was the day after my brother moved in, he had his wisdom teeth removed - all four and that has kind of laid him up for a few days, but he is doing well - recovering quite quickly. So I have to head to class now - Networking with Srini - should be good. Cheers.

Your body is warm. Your face is cold. There is a slight jabbing pain in your hip as you roll over in the dim light. The sound of water breaking over rocks is strangely close. Your first inclination is to just stay where you are and not disturb your illusion of comfort, but you have to use the bathroom and it is only a matter of time before the decision is made for you. Fighting with the zipper you eventually manage to free yourself from the cocoon of warmth and you are born into the morning. Fumbling awkwardly you get your shoes on only to find yet another poorly designed zipper stands between you and your liberation. Standing up outside you head off to take care of business. You stroll back and head to the river - the source of the sound you heard earlier. Jumping from rock to rock you find your way to the middle of the briskly moving current and behold your surroundings. The sun is just cresting the edge of the hills in the distance, the water is steaming up into the cold morning air and there is a stillness and a quiet that can only be found by being the only person around for miles. It is clear now why you carried your loaded canoe for over a kilometer, paddled it down the river in the blazing heat and slept on the cold ground in the middle of the woods. That is what camping is all about.

Mike, Chris, Martin and I went camping at Keji this past weekend, once we have our photos online, I will be sure to mention where you can see them.

I'd like to wish a happy birthday to Kieran (aka Krafty) and mention how full I am after the usual trip to East Side Mario's. It is always good to see people that I haven't seen in a while and it is also nice to meet a few new people.

Now to the proposal and workterm report that I have to write for tomorrow. Damn.

The background of this story could get pretty long and complicated if I wanted to explain it all out, so in the interest of getting back to my work term report as quickly as I can I will make this brief. Geoff was having some trouble with his Wiki involving submitting changes. As it turns out, if you have an form on a web page that POSTs to a script that returns a 401 - Authorization Required (ie. it is .htaccess protected) the posted data does not show up where it should. For some reason it ends up in the =REQUEST_METHOD= environment setting. So if you had a field named 'age' and the value was submitted 22, then the =$_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD']= would contain:

However, I can only get this problem to occur in IE for Windows - which I guess isn't surprising. The problem is due to the browser caching the POST request when it is prompting for authentication information. Opera, Safari and more stable versions of Firefox are fine. Geoff mentioned that the most recent Firefox (on windows) was giving him the same issues though. Apparently the issue can be resolved in IE when you also use the id attribute of the form tags.

I'm sure I wasn't the only one who watched the series premier of CSI:NY tonight, and I invite comments as usual. Personally I liked it better than CSI Miami, but not quite as much as the original. I guess that is to be expected at this point. I know the characters from the original so much better and I enjoy the comedy of their interaction. William Petersen really adds something to the show that would be hard to emulate and would likely fail if they tried.

The New York version I found to be a bit grittier and they used a green colour scheme as opposed to the blue and orange of the first two versions respectively. The preview of next week's episode made it look like a real good one that I look forward to watching. And make sure you catch the season premier of the original series tomorrow.

I just paid the bill for another year of sexy rhuvok.com action. Since I am going to be finished school at Christmas time, I should probably think about getting the site moved over to my brother's hosting server pretty soon. Ideally I would like to accompany that transition with a redesign, but I'm not so sure that will be happening as I have been promising that for too long now.

Meanwhile, Dal is having issues with DNS resolution for seemingly random sites. w3.org and eclipse.org are both unavailable. Fortunately, torch's DNS server appears fine and I have been able to use that for now.