Archive for March, 2006
Re-touching photos to the max!
Thursday, March 30th, 2006Don’t think I’ll ever look at magazine photo shoots in the same light again. I’ve seen fairly basic changes applied, or little things like changing the background setting of even the colour shirt someone was wearing, but the amount of time + effort it must have taken to re-touch some of these photos is unreal!
links for 2006-03-30
Thursday, March 30th, 2006Googlebot destroys website
Wednesday, March 29th, 2006Found this pretty funny. I guess the site owners didn’t find too clever, but then I’d like to know what CMS they’re using that didn’t provide even basic authentication checks and would allow something like Googlebot run through and remove all the content simply by following a hyperlink to a page editing screen 
Resolving problems with iMac Intel Core-Duo
Wednesday, March 29th, 2006
So we pays all this money for a cool new iMac, get a few niggly problems which don’t quite fit the bill of Mac’s being all-seeing-all-dancing-work-straight-outta-the-box, and wonder what the problem could be. Simple – run the online updater. This will pull a few updates for things such as iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, etc. which is all well and good, but then has about 40Mb of updates for ‘Intel Optimisations’. Erm, excuse me, but haven’t I just spend £1100 on a new Intel Core-Duo which is already running the revised OS X for Intel chipset? Although everything is now working as expected and what I was initially hoping for on Monday in terms of usability, Front Row is still pretty buggy, but at least is playing nicely with the firewall now.
I can appreciate the need for updates to fix security problems, and that the Intel-based systems are still very new for Apple, but when you need to update your system to get some core functionality going it doesn’t fill you with much confidence!
Scanning For Viruses Using Knoppix
Tuesday, March 28th, 2006
Am surprised I hadn’t thought of this, or at least read about it before. Maybe I had and just completely forgot about it, which sounds more like the kind of thing I would do! There’s quite a lot of times I fall back onto a Knoppix Live CD for carrying out system admin tasks, though have found a lighter friend in Gparted for re-sizing hard drives.
Still, suppose when all else fails and you don’t fancy booting into safe-mode to run your Windows virus scanner, or when it won’t even get into safe-mode, this is a good solution. Funny how many times Knoppix, or some other Linux live CD, is being touted as simple fixes for resolving Windows problems…
Lovely union strikes!
Tuesday, March 28th, 2006Thanks to a couple of the public sector unions calling for strike action over in the England today, school’s closed! Terrible, I know. Have just rocked out of bed an hour or so ago (10a.m) and could get used to this Have a few jobs to be getting on with via our remote connection to keep me busy mind, but at least I’ll be able to carry out updates without waiting until an evening when all the users are logged off.
links for 2006-03-28
Tuesday, March 28th, 2006iMac finally delivered
Monday, March 27th, 2006
Well, after much excitement, our iMac finally arrived earlier this afternoon. Expecting great things from the 2Ghz Intel Core-Duo, with an upgrade to 1Gb RAM and 256Mb graphics, I’ve been a little disappointed to be honest.
The 20″ screen really is sharp. Streaming down 1080p HD movie trailers (the work experience tech’s idea…) it was very impressive! Certainly very nippy shall we say, though as I have only really played with iBook’s I don’t really know how much of an improvement the Intel Core-Duo chip makes.
However, FrontRow has been a let down. Unable to access the movie trailers even though I’m guessing it runs through the same system as the trailers were pulling down from the Apple site wasn’t too good, nor was the continual hanging for 2-3 minutes whilst accessing the menus. Sometimes, FrontRow simply wouldn’t load from the desktop, then would magically appear in the middle of browsing the net. Whether the magnetic remote on the side of the system is a good idea is debatable as my understanding was magnets and your drives weren’t a good combination. I could be missing something here.
Need to do some hunting to adjust the user permissions, as again, when choosing to restart or shutdown it does nothing. Or so it seems. Sometimes it would then spring into life, or rather not, and shut itself down. Or restart itself rather than shutdown. Firing off the sudo commands from the console does the job, but annoying the none-the-less.
That said, the automatic wireless detection and configuration was nice. Contacting the Apple registration servers after telling it not to register my details or sign-up for a .Mac account was not.
Wouldn’t accept logon details for our proxy which seemed to be down to Safari not sending the credentials properly as the proxy wasn’t receiving the same data as being entered. Installing Firefox did the trick, but shouldn’t have been necessary.
Am sure these are just teething problems and probably down to a lack of OS X experience on my behalf, but although I’m confident sticking one of our Canon Mini-DV cameras into the firewire port or hooking up on the Sony digital cameras will keep our media studies teacher happy, the stability of it whilst sat in a classroom with kids randomly clicking buttons and with less patience than I have is a little concerning!
Blog all pwetty lookin’!
Sunday, March 26th, 2006Well, it’s taken a while, but I’m just about finished playing, I think! Bound to find something else to tinker with (like re-theming the photo gallery in-line with the blog again…), but am pretty happy with the layout now. It was a more a design challenge since I’ve never been overly design’y, prefering to tinker with the code to run stuff rather than how pretty it looks. Have certainly learnt more about CSS than I thought existed and I considered myself no slouch before-hand!
The inspiration for this came from the tutorials on designing WordPress themes from Urban Giraffe. Some cool feaures integrated into the blog now include the collapse sidebar menus, taken from the fancy archives plugin by Andy, heavily modified to then take the rest of my menu structure!
Clever playing with RSS feeds now imports my last 10 del.icio.us bookmarks, most recent articles I’ve Digged, top 10 artists listened to via last.fm, etc.
Although I’ve managed to avoid a lot of the hype around AJAX, in-line viewing of comments is now available – whenever a post has been commented on, a link from the front page allows the comments to automatically expand for viewing if desired rather than loading the individual page. When posting comments, this process is now AJAX enabled as well, inserting + displaying your comment without the whole page reloading. Pretty neat and makes things a little more slick.
I’ve also managed to make the whole thing XHTML + CSS valid as well as providing XFN-friendly links wherever possible!
Anyone that finds any problems wins a prize (well, not quite, but at least a virtual thank-you!) and if you like/dislike anything, let me know
Iain Foulds, 29 years old. Originally from England, now living in St Louis after 4 years in Alaska. I currently work as a technology support specialist at St Louis University High. Very passionate about photography.