Journal entries in the "Computing" category
Exams finished; Lemmings too!
On this day, the sixteenth of January of the year 2009, I bear great news for the unwashed few: the Lemmings have been vanquished. It took me well over a decade, but I finally mastered the art of construction and forward-thinking well enough to beat them.
And finally, the exam period has come to a full stop. At least, temporarily. Though that’s hardly news compared to beating Lemmings!
Clueless spam
Every now and again, I take the time to glance at spam messages. And once in a while, there’s a jewel of ignorance that shines forth.
Case in point: “we have been authorised by the newly appointed UN Secretary General [...] to officially inform you that your pending inheritance sum of $3.6M [...] ready to be sent to you as to avoid all the omplications you may be passing your attempt to claim your funds from the African banks [...]“.
The omitted “c” in “…omplications” and the lack of sense “omplications you may be passing your attempt to claim” aside, I have to say I love the idea.
The UN Secretary General deals with inheritance (UNO = “ur nan OD’ed”, i.e. your grandma overdosed).
And there is such a thing as “the African banks” (yes, Africa is one single united country).
I love spam.
A few statistics
I was looking at my website’s statistics, and thought I might share some of them here. It’s nothing phenomenal, given that this is still very much a “low-profile” website, but it might be interesting tidbits of knowledge for some.
I must admit I’ve been somewhat startled by some of these statistics.
Google’s new favicon, again
Well, here we are, folks: Google have decided to update their favicon, again.
Last time they did that, back in May ’08, it spurred a whole lot of reactions all over the web, and if you take a look at the poll results in that older post, you’ll see lots of the reactions were negative.
With time, however, I’m sure everyone got used to it, whether they initially liked it or not.
So, now that the new one has come, I’m starting to regret the previous one. Despite the fact that it wasn’t as good as the one before, I still prefer it to this current one.
Out with the old, in with the new…
We Mac users who iWork
On Tuesday (the 6th), Philip Schiller set out to deliver the last Apple keynote at MacWorld. Internet coverage was more than ample, from AppleInsider to Gizmodo, though some problems occurred (the live feed by MacRumors was hijacked by 4chan hackers, for example).
I had an exam the following day, and a power cut right when Phil Schiller was on stage, so I was unable to follow it immediately. However, when I did read up about it, I was surprised by the reaction of some of those large websites who covered the event.
Office suites and user interface
I decided to re-download OpenOffice and NeoOffice to see if anything had changed. After all, OpenOffice 3 came out in October, and I hadn’t taken the time to try it out.
However, there is a huge problem with these productivity suites: the interface. No matter what features they add, they still haven’t changed the GUI (graphical user interface), and that pains me.
Speeding things up
I decided to take a look at possible optimisations for this website, in order to make it load faster, and so on. I’d already done a bunch of this some time ago, but I rediscovered the Firebug plug-in for Firefox, and in particular its YSlow extension.
YSlow is a set of guidelines that Yahoo! published a while ago to help web-designers in their quest for the optimal code, and WordPress hasn’t ever been very YSlow-friendly.
On typography
Typography is art. The proof is simple: try to design a font. No matter what you do, you’ll always end up with something that looks ugly. Unless you spend lots of time making in perfect.
Now, I’m no artist in the visual sense. But over a year ago, I discovered typography. Rather, I started looking at fonts differently.
Note: a font is a member of a typeface, much like Times New Roman Italic is a font whereas Times New Roman is a typeface.
iTunesque: small Aquaffic update
iTunes 8.0.2 came out, and as I guessed with 8.0.1, Apple is changing data within the iTunes resources at every update.
As such, if you apply one of the iTunesque variants with the “Aquaffic” traffic lights, stuff will go wrong.
Here is a small updater for these resources, and sorry for forgetting about it the other day when the update came out.
Agents of globalisation
Hello, citizens of the world.
As a casual poster of my thoughts on the world wide web, I am an agent of globalisation.
This is according to Lord Anthony Giddens, who gave us a very nice keynote on Tuesday on the three crises which plague our times: the globalisation crisis, the climate crisis and the financial crisis.