kjp

Part of a bunch of my housemate's flowers.

There's a naughty boy who is misbehaving again. (Canberra).

Worrying. Hopefully there is a "good" explanation... (fingers crossed, hopefully find out later this afternoon...)

/:-(

A little while back (when I did my patching to win xp2) put Windows Media Player 10 (WMP10 from now on) on my system. I've been using WMP8 (? not sure that this was the official version) for a while. With WMP10 the default setting for the drop down box for a lot of the skins (including my old skin that I used) is to show all user generated playlists, "All Media" and automatically generated lists such as "Favorites", "Fresh Tracks" - it doesn't show a list of albums / artists. This is a bit of a pain, as it makes it hard to select just the one album to listen to. Instead of switching to winamp, I updated my old skin of mine and continued to use WMP.

So the WMP10 skin I use:
In the music dropdown box selector, as well as the things above it shows all albums / artists. Unlike a lot of skins it is very simple, minimal and cut down. Heaps of skins out there take up heaps of the screen space, have heaps of useless features (eg: equaliser - which I set at "flat" and change it on my stereo if required; visualisations: if I watch a video file / DVD, I'll use the normal (non skin) view - I don't want to see "particles" or "chemicalnova", etc, etc). Also, I prefer to look at the work that I'm doing on my computer - the colour scheme of any skin should be neutral, simple, and not stand out: nothing fancy. I don't want to look at it - I just want to use it to change tracks occasionally. Ie: I'm all for simple functionality, against bloated visually fancy skins. The other thing in favour of having a simple skin is my pretty average graphics editing skills :).

In action it looks like:

(yay Radiohead!)

If you're insane, you can download it here. Please note: It works fine on my machine using Windows Media Player 10. Your machine isn't mine, so I suggest you look at the code before using it to check that there's no bugs / things that will break on your machine, etc. I did some units of IT at uni, but I'm not in IT - so please don't complain if you think the code is bad / messy. You've been warned.

Anyhow, a few things about the skin / annoyances of WMP10 / skin creation / links:

• All the buttons are fairly obvious, just hover the mouse over it to bring up the tooltip description.


• The only exception is the open / close playlist button (bottom right). To open - single click; to close - double click. In my original version of this skin the button was a toggle (click once each time) button. It had a boolean variable that retained the state (open or closed) of the playlist. However this could get broken (and annoying) if you closed the playlist from the close box on the playlist itself. For this version of the skin I was trying to get around it, but couldn't. For some reason I was having trouble determining the state of the playlist (open / closed or visible / invisible). So I got rid of that functionality - made it a whole lot simpler. The only downside to this approach is the non standard interface to the user (double click to close). That's life.


• In WMP10 the "stay on top" mode for the window is the same for the skin mode as the normal mode. I used to have skin mode = stay on top; normal mode = not stay on top. In the new version this isn't the case, so it gets a bit annoying when you're in normal mode. All the more reason for a decent skin :)


• WMP10 seems to (occasionally) take heaps of CPU time for no apparent reason. Annoying. Need to sort this out sometime.


• If you don't know anything about skins in WMP10, note a couple of basics: skin files have the extension of wmz. wmz files have the same content as zip files; so you can rename the extension and extract the contents of the skin. In those extracted files, there should be a whole bunch of graphics files, a *.wms file that defines the skin and possibly some javascript to handle the interactive / moving parts of the skin.


• Skin creation links for WMP10: Skin Programming Reference (very useful); Creating the Skin Definition File.

Heard about these: pictures of a beach directly under the approach path of airplanes (very near the ground):
here,
here, and:
here

Yikes!

Interesting article about how French women are thinner than their UK / US counterparts. Apparently taking the time to enjoy your food (slowly) and not snacking has a lot to do with it.

(I've only just discovered this). With Firefox, there is the ability to get all sorts of information about how the program is running. What you get is pretty obvious, if you type the following in the address bar:

about:
about:blank   Why would you bother?
about:plugins
about:config   Probably the most useful of this list. There's a guide to it here

If you need to kill some time on the web, then there's a pile of logic problems available at Conceptis Puzzles

There's an interesting article about the people of North Korea and the protests / plots / assassination attempts that have occurred.

There's just been a slight restructure: I've changed the path of the blog (and more importantly archives) to be more appropriate. Ie: got rid of a long word "jus..." out of the path. Why? Why not, I suppose. It was useless and stupid and wrong (from the very old days of this site). So it's gone. I'm going to leave all the old files for a while, but all of the new links will point to the new files. The old files will be deleted someday (after google picks up the new files, I think).

If you get the rss feed you'll need to change to either:
RSS Feed - Full Posts
RSS Feed - Excerpts
(This will be the last entry in the old xml files).

I'm thinking about moving (some time in the future) to dynamically generated archive pages (ie: the current version of mt), but the reviews for it have been mixed, to say the least...

(2nd attempt at this post)

Theres a new version (well, Release Canidate 2) of w.bloggar out. Will be very useful. For Movable Type the major things that have been added are the ability to assign multiple categories and assigning excerpts / extended entries / keywords.

The multiple categories will be useful in this blog; the excerpts will be useful in my Photos (I use the exceprt field to specify the name of the image to use...).

I've just found out about Celestia, a space simulation program. It's very nifty - especially if you have an interest in astronomy. There's a good collection of addons here.

I've been listening to Kid A and Amnesiac (both by Radiohead) today - a guy at work lent them to me (yesterday). They're both pretty cool, very good albums: although I prefer OK Computer. They're really good to listen to, but for my tastes they are probably a bit too experimental / atmospheric / instrumental...

I should listen to The Bends - it is probably a bit more in line with my tastes (alt instead of experimental rock).

There's a report put out as part of the Australian Infrastructure Report Cards for Queensland - 2004 Queensland Infrastructure Report Card (1.3 MB). It's pretty interesting (if you like this kind of stuff) - in particular the industry I'm in.

It seems that this has been going around for a little while now. Makes you go "what???!!" or laugh. Funny funny.

I did a big patchup of my computer a week or so ago: amongst it all was Windows service pack 2. I was a bit surprised to find that the system slowed down a fair bit (initially). It seems to have picked up a bit now, but I:
* Stopped windows firewall / updates / virus scanner monitor (from the new fan-dangled "security centre")
* Disabled the security centre monitoring / reporting - I do it all myself.
* Deleted the contents from the windows\prefetch and window\temp folders. Apparently this helps.
* Stopped (and disabled) a lot lot of useless (for me anyway) services
* Removed several items from the control panel
* Got rid of heaps of old programs that were just taking up space / memory.

It's running pretty smoothly now. Yay.

Big storm this afternoon around this neck of the woods.

Rain is good - keeps things from becoming really dry, keeps things cool, makes things grow, etc. But storms are annoying - they make you turn off your computer, stop you from going on runs, keep you indoors...

As mentioned on slashdot there's an article by The Economist - Music's brighter future about the sources of revenue for the music industry - why CD sales have been declining and the resulting consequences and options. Interesting.

I've just read this article on how much money was spent on the recent US presidential elections: more than $1 billion (USD). I didn't realize that democracy should be bought...

I ended up going to the beach this morning. Yay - first for the summer. It ended up just being me :(. I went north. The waves were small, so no board - just went swimming (at Kings Beach). There were plenty of small waves to catch, so it was pretty good fun. Weather wasn't bad - but there were some dark clouds around on the trip home. My wrists are sore (when I put pressure on them) for some reason - I (presumably) jarred them - the water was quite shallow.

Just so you know, all of the posts since NSW, etc went to daylight saving have been out by an hour. I think that this is because MT takes the server time, which is set to NSW time, ie: incorrect for QLD at the moment.

I've changed the timezone specified in the MT configuration and rebuilt. This hasn't changed the times on existing posts - presumably the info is stored using UTC or something. This post should have the correct time?

Today I bought OK Computer by Radiohead - of course. Yet another mark of keeping up with the times - just 7 years late :).

Anyhow, I don't know why I didn't get it earlier - very good music, easy and enjoyable to listen to. I've heard bits and pieces of it on the radio in the past, and I listened to it when I borrowed the album several months ago - just before things got stupid due to the unpleasantness down in Canberra.

At the moment (for me at least) there isn't much good music on the radio - this disc is a good change. Happy me.

I've finally seen Matrix Revolutions - the last part of the matrix trilogy. Or rather the second half of part 2. Yup, I'm keeping up with the times. Anyhow - it wasn't bad - the other two were better. If you want a review, don't read this. Anyhow, I'm a member of the local video hire place - just at the shops. Weee.

Some surfing links. These are for tomorrow morning - is it worth going?
Southeast Coast Forecast Header
s w e l l n e t :: Gold Coast and Queensland Surf Forecast
Brownie's Coastwatch - Surf and Beach Report
128km Brisbane (Marburg) Radar - 256km Brisbane (Marburg) Radar
Tide Predictions for Queensland Ports

Want to watch:
Spy Game. It's on the TV at the moment - but have only seen bits of it tonight - too many incoming calls...
Star Wars 2 - Attack of the Clones. Might hire the DVD tomorrow. Need to join a video place around here...
Star Wars 3 - Revenge of the Sith. The trailer looks cool. Well, sort of: it will probably be like episodes 1 and 2 - cool battle scenes, dodgy acting. Supposed to come out 19/05/2005.

It's been raining - sometimes very heavily - for a fair part of this afternoon and evening. This is bad - I want to go to the beach tomorrow - and want it to be nice and bright and sunny... Last Saturday's trip to the waves got canned because of the cold, hopefully not this one as well....

Last night I was talking to my big sis all the way over in Canada. The hotel she was staying at had expensive internet (so no talking and video via yahoo messenger). So, I've started using Firefly a voice over internet (VoIP) program. It's pretty cool - it cost 6.9 c per minute to call the landline in Canada. ie: 25 minutes or so = $1.74. Same as the cost for landlines back in Oz. Sweet.

Upsides - cheap calls. Free calls for purely internet connections (ie: replacement for yahoo messenger chat). It seems to be better audio than the audio chat on yahoo messenger. For video / voice - I think that the best is yahoo = video, firefly = audio. But having two programs is harder to use for non computer people at the other end.

Downsides - requires an existing fastish internet connection and headset. The signal dropped a couple of times (but the connection was not lost). The quality isn't quite as good as your old school phone line.

Iffyside - my microphone settings aren't set up correctly for it. The receptionist at the hotel had a bit of trouble hearing me (initially). This is just a thing for me to do at my end.

Oh, if you are making international calls, a good place to check out for time zone related things is: timeanddate.com - useful.

Last Thursday (who said a blog is supposed to be up to date?) I got a whole batch of photos printed. It was the first time I have had any of the pictures printed off from my camera. I'm happy with the results. Almost all of them are up on my wall / the fridge. Heaps better background than "cream" or whatever the colour of the paint is called... A few things on the process:

Cost.
I went to Kmart in Chermside to get them done. It was 44c per 6" x 4" image to get them printed. You could pay 75c (I think) to print them using the machine yourself (ie: get them instantly). I got the people behind the counter to print the images at 44c and paid an extra $1 to get them done within the hour - probably the cheapest option (especially as I had other things to do at the shops) - better than going back to the shops the next day. They charge a fair bit for big images. It cost $4.42 for the 8" x 6" image (not sure what this compares like for traditional film enlargements). A4 sized images were charged at $15 (too expensive, I thought). At a camera shop just down the hallway they were doing A4 images for $10, I think. So you want to have a good image for enlargement.

Image Quality.
I've looked at the pictures from a distance of 1m and 10 cm (for a couple of them) - I can't pick out any differences from the images that are on my screen. 3.2 MPixels is good.

Image Size.
I forgot that my images were going to be printed out at 6" x 4" (the normal photo size). All of my images were at 4:3 aspect ratio. ie: I had the choice of a while border at the sides or chop the top and bottom off. And for some stupid reason I chopped off the top and bottom of all of them. In all but one case this didn't matter. Actually, chopping off was probably the better choice. But in future, I'll prepare the images to have the correct aspect ratio before I take them to be printed. The only thing that I have to be careful about here is that I don't reduce the quality of the image (ie: multiple saving of a jpg potentially looses detail). So, I'd probably convert it to a png first, do my cropping, then convert back. Or - convert it to a png, do the cropping, and burn the png to a cdrom. This would require that the machine accepts png files - but is probably the best in terms of editting images.

Transfering Images.
I used my 32MB compact flash card to get the images there (a bit less risky then taking them on my 256MB card). For my camera (Canon Powershot A75), it can upload images that were taken by the camera and that haven't been since modified. The program does not allow you to upload images that have been modified since the downloading of the image to your computer. However, there is a way around this (this was required for one image that was a photo I had taken but that had had horns and a pitchfork paintbrushed to it...). I think that the upload program (ZoomBrowser) looks at the EXIF information contained in the image file. Presumably, it looks at the Camera Make / Model information, and possibly the "Makernotes" section of the EXIF information. I used a very nifty program Exifer to copy the EXIF information from the original photo to the modified image. After that the file uploaded to my camera (to the flash card) fine. However, after disconnecting the camera from the computer and viewing the images on the camera, I got an "Incompatible JPEG format" error when viewing the modified image. I suppose this is the camera's way of saying that the image doesn't match the EXIF thumbnail / was of a different aspect ratio.

Another way around this camera / program limitation would be to get a flash card reader that would stick into the back of my computer (and avoid my camera all together). But this would seem to be an extra bit of money that doesn't need to be spent.

One thing that I didn't realise is that there is an EXIF thumbnail contained within the EXIF information. Makes sense, really. In my case, the EXIF thumbnail and a thumbnail generated from the file didn't match - which was a bit weird, but it didn't cause any problems at any stage.