I’ve got mine, have you?
by leon on October 16, 2007
I purchased my spanking new copy of Leopard today.I say purchased its more of a pre-order, and i’ll get it when i get it. This is pretty clever by Apple, build lots of hype, get everybody to pre-order and then leave them gagging for it. As if thats not bad enough the postal strike in the U.K could see me waiting well into November to install Leopard. I checked out a few American sites (including Amazon) and they all seem to think Leopard is out on the 31st, while the officicial Apple site is saying the 26th. Either way I can’t wait. My Windows machine is also no more as of Thursday as I am about to install the new Ubuntu Release. Finally Windows is out of my life (well almost, I still have to put up with it at work). Forget browsing the web for porn, sorry art, and instead head over here. I have had many hours of ‘joy’ reading up about Leopard. My appetite is well and truly wet soaked now! Just for info these are the minimum requirements for Leopard:
- Intel, G5, or 867MHz+ G4 processor
- 512MB of RAM
- DVD drive
- 9GB of free disk space
In addition some features have further requirements:
- Time Machine requires a hard drive in addition to your boot disk (external or internal is fine)
- Photo Booth requires a camera and a processor better than a G4.
- Screensharing requires a speeding net connection (300 Kbps is Apple’s recommendation)
- DVD player requires a 1.6GHz or better for de-interlacing
Probably the best feature is that I don’t need any fancy graphics card updates, extra RAM or anything to run Leopard on my machine (cough cough Vista)!
Coda – the new Dreamweaver?
by leon on October 15, 2007
I have started using a new tool when coding my sites – Coda. This tool in my opinion beats Dreamweaver on a number of points, amongst which the simple but useful tool bar that features:
- A proper preview – Unlike Dreamweaver, Coda uses your favourite browser to render a preview of your page (if you use Dreamweaver you will understand what I mean, a site never looks the same in the ‘Designer’ tab. Its easy to switch to preview as you don’t even need to leave the application.
- A good file browser – That allows you to view remote and local files and offers syncronisation between them. A nice feature is that if you are within a sub-folder on the local site you can publish directly to its equivalent on the root with one click.
- Editor – does exactly what it says. Colour coded for various types of code.
- CSS editor – allows you to easily edit your css files
- Terminal – Allows an SSH connection so you can remotely edit your server
- Books – features full books for quick reference to web related topics.
- Cover flow – A graphical representation of all your sites. Simply click the preview to launch the site.
Coda isn’t free, its about £40 for a single license. Try it out and give it a go, i’m sure you will agree its a bit easier than Dreamweaver to use. Head over to the Coda site for a better review.
Probably the best open source list – ever
by leon on October 15, 2007
While trawling the web I came across a brilliant site, which lists what is probably the best open source collection for the Mac. Distribute the link and let as many people know about some of the great alternative open source apps.
Un-Plugged – plugin for Growl
by leon on October 15, 2007
Un-Plugged is a nice little app that works in conjunction with Growl to give you a graphical notification of both your battery level and whether or not you external power lead is connected. This is one of those seemingly pointless yet useful apps for your Mac.
If you haven’t heard of Growl or used it yet, check it out. Its basically a global notification tool that alerts you about application changes (such as when a cd is burnt in Toast). It allows you to apply various themes for each application thats associated with it. For a list of compatible apps, click here.
reCAPTCHA – spam detection
by leon on October 11, 2007
I have recently added some further spam protection to the blog. Users don’t need to register to leave comments, instead they can now authenticate their comment by using reCAPTCHA.
A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You’ve probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from “bots,” or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then, to make them searchable, transformed into text using “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Flash 9 Motion Detection – Minority Report Style (source code)
by leon on October 11, 2007
I have finally managed to get together the source files for the Motion Detection script. The script allows you to control an interface simply by waving your hands in the air infront of a camera. This is pretty cool if you want to add some extra interactivity to your site. The original post can be found here. This original code was taken from Web Designer Mag. They hold all the copyrights etc
The code is below, I wish I had more time to go through it fully and comment it out but I don’t. If you need any help, add a comment to this post.
import flash.display.*;
import flash.geom.*;
var cam:Camera = Camera.get();
sizeX = cam.width;
sizeY = cam.height;
cam.setMode(544,396,25);
vid.attachVideo(cam);
vid._width = cam.width;
vid._height = cam.height;
mov_pos_array = new Array(“0″, “0″, “-544″, “-1088″, “-1632″);
newX = 0;
Xspeed = 0;
content_mc.onEnterFrame = function() {
Xspeed = ((this._x-newX)/2+Xspeed)/5;
this._x -= Xspeed;
};
active = false;
aCount = 0;
start_btn.onPress = function() {
active = true;
start_btn._visible = false;
start_btn.enabled = false;
};
now = new BitmapData(160, 120);
before = new BitmapData(160, 120);
rect = new Rectangle(0, 0, 160, 120);
pt = new Point(0, 0);
sizeDif = 160/cam.width;
thisFrame1=0;
thisFrame2=0;
thisFrame3=0;
thisFrame4=0;
over1=false;
over2=false;
over3=false;
over4=false;
onEnterFrame = function () {
if (!cam.muted && active == true) {
now.draw(vid);
now.draw(before,new Matrix(),new ColorTransform(),’difference’);
now.threshold(now,rect,pt,’>’,0xff111111,0xffffffff);
before.draw(vid);
for (i=1; i<5; i++) {
_root["ballNew"+i+"Y"] = (_root["impact"+i]._y/cam.height)*120;
_root["ballNew"+i+"X"] = _root["impact"+i]._width/2+_root["impact"+i]._x;
_root["ballNew"+i+"X"] = 160-(_root["ballNew"+i+"X"]*sizeDif);
_root["val"+i] = now.getPixel(_root["ballNew"+i+"X"], _root["ballNew"+i+"Y"]);
if (_root["val"+i]>16700000) {
_root["thisFrame"+i] +=1;
_root["over"+i]=true;
}
if (_root["thisFrame"+i] == 2){
_root["impact"+i]._alpha = 40;
newX = mov_pos_array[i];
_root["thisFrame"+i] = 0;
_root["over"+i]=false;
} else {
_root["impact"+i]._alpha = 100;
}
}
rotated = Xspeed/4;
disk_mc._rotation+=rotated;
}
};
checkglitch = function(){
for (i=1; i<5; i++) {
if (_root["over"+i]==true){
_root["thisFrame"+i] = 0;
_root["over"+i] = false;
}
}
};
inter = setInterval(this, “checkglitch”, 1200);
To see an example, click here.
Finally, what you have been waiting for: the source code.
Here is a PDF of the tutorial. Sorry for the low image quality. Hope it helps
Remember the Mr Men?
by leon on October 10, 2007
This is pure genius. While listening to Galaxy 102.2 (no advertising intended) last week I came across a feature they were playing, that was based on modern day Mr Men characters.
The included stories are:
- Mr Asbo
- Little Miss Facebook
- Little Miss Hardcore Emo
Here is the zip of the audio files.
SWF/Flash Embed code via JavaScript (with alternative content option)
by leon on October 10, 2007
Bit of a big title there, needed to summarise exactly everything that this script does. Here is a more detailed run down:
- Embeds Flash into a html page using JavaScript – this gets around the fact that you have to ‘click to activate’ in IE7.
- Caters for users that don’t have the correct player version – will prompt them to upgrade
- Caters for users that don’t even have Flash – will display alternative content. e.g. a static image or alternative navigation – or anything at all that you want.
- Is clean and easy to implement – the code is fully commented within the example.
Implementation
This code makes it easy to implement Flash into your site, while still catering for users that do not have Flash.
It makes use of JavaScript to embed the flash, via the included SWF object script. If the user has neither Java enabled or the Flash player
then they will see whatever is within the designated tags. You can change this to integreate into your site.
If you do change the ‘content’ div tag, ensure that the so.write variable is changed accordingly. (this will make sense when you see the file)
To include your Flash file, add the correct variables to code below noting that:
file_path.swf – must be the full path, including the .swf at the end
file_name – is only the name of the file, do not add the path, or the .swf at the end
width – the width of your flash movie
height – the height of your flash movie
player_version – the flash player your are targeting, e.g. 8. enter the lowest number you are targeting
background_colour – the background colour of your flash movie
If you need to add and FlashVars, these can be added like so:
so.addVariable(“variable_name”, “variable_value”);
If your need to add a parameter such as wmode, this can be added like so:
so.addParam(“wmode”, “transparent”);
These values should be added before the ‘so.write’ line.
The source files can be downloaded from here.
Hope you find this useful
I’m sorry Windows guy!!
by leon on October 9, 2007
So, it looks like I have upset a few Windows fans out there. I recently wrote two post’s as a bit of a rant towards Windows, and some of the comments back made me laugh. This isn’t an official blog, just merely one for my own thoughts and opinions. If people choose to read it, thats great, if not I enjoy learning about WordPress and its array of plugins. However what does amuse me is the fact that people will use their time to come onto my blog and try and abuse me, for stating the obvious – Windows is rubbish!
A few comments were about my lack of grammar and spelling. Forgive me if i’m wrong but the post title wasn’t: “Piss of Windows, oh and leave a comment if you think the grammar is bad”.
I’m not simply having a go at Windows for the sake of it. I used to be an avid Windows user and until about a year ago, would never have touched a Mac, however I switched because I simply had enough of trying to fix the mountain of errors that is Windows.
I spend a lot of money on a new PC, i don’t expect to have to spend hours, un-installing the useless freeware and installing the hundreds (no exaggeration, I recently did a clean install of XP and there was 134 updates straight away. Fair enough the OS is now old, but to me thats 134 reasons that XP fails on). I expect that an OS works, and that as a PC user I should spend my time being productive and not trawling the net looking for fixes, patches and hacks just so that my PC works.
Anyway, the point I was trying to make was that Windows fails miserably out of the box. Here is a quick example of what I mean. I have owned numerous PC’s in my time, so trust me, I do know what I’m talking about. Lets compare how easy it is to start up a Video chat with somebody with two brand new machines; one Mac and one Windows based:
Windows:
- Turn my machine on, and fill in the questions that are asked.
- Wait for the updates to install (may take a while)
- Start up the IM software. Oh, I don’t seem to have any.
- Download the IM software and install. I may need to re-start
- Configure the IM software and sign in. Configure my web-cam.
- Oh, I don’t seem to have one. I best go buy one.
- Make sure that the web cam is compatible with Vista.
- Plug it in – oh it doesn’t work. Install the software and re-start – again.
- Configure the camera so that it will work with the IM software.
- Finally start a video call.
- Enjoy – kind of!
Mac
- Turn on Mac and answer start up questions.
- Launch iChat (its already installed). You could use another app if you like.
- Start a video chat, using the built in iSight.
- Enjoy.
The story might sound a bit biased, but the point is that I can start using a Mac hassle free, straight out of the box. I don’t need to be a computer whiz to be able to use it. To me thats the most important thing; ensuring that the majority of people can use a machine with ease and not just the people who enjoy tweaking their machines for a hobby. Mac’s are not perfect but they do beat Windows on the user interface, and that cannot be questioned
Looks like I upset somebody!!
by leon on October 8, 2007
After my recent rant about how good shit Windows is, it looks like I upset somebody – oh well. If you haven’t read my post yet, click here.
This is his reply:
So did you write your lame blog entry on a PC or Mac? You have misspellings and grammar problems all over the place.
1. You’re (notice the apostrophe) an idiot. I open files all day and never get an illegal operation error. Sounds like a stupid user error.
2. If it takes 10 minutes, you must be trying to run XP on a 386SX with 4mb RAM. As for Windows screens, you have the “loading” screen and the login screen. If you’re (again, notice the apostrophe) a real lame ass that doesn’t care about security, you can do away with the login screen – your choice.
3. Not a Windows problem. If you have an app that is lingering after uninstall, then the uninstall routine for that APP is the problem, not the Windows OS.
4. Uh… what?
5. Of != Off – grammar, read about it. And this one is stupid anyway – you click start to access a menu of items – one of which happens to be the log OFF item.
6. Again – an APP issue. It’s totally within your rights as a Windows user to DITCH IE and use something that is better to your (no apostrophe needed!) liking – like Firefox!
7. Turn off UAC and STFU. Actually, UAC was made for lame users such as yourself, who “accidentally delete system files” … so leave it on.
8. Again – an APP complaint having nothing to do with the OS. And if you think Expression = Frontpage, you’re an idiot (but I guess that’s already been established).
9. Maybe all the spyware you inadvertently installed is grinding your machine to a halt. Stop trying to click the monkey to win a prize you jackass, and while you’re at it, install Anti-spyware software AND anti-virus software.
10. Again, if you really did get an error like that, you should consider yourself lucky … Windows just probably saved you from turning your computer into a toaster.
11. Stupid user error. I install printers all the time – on XP and Vista… no problems here.Don’t get me wrong – I’m no huge MS fanboy… I just hate asshats like you that jump on the “I hate Windows” bandwagon for no good reason. You can’t even write an intelligent article.
How rude!! I was most upset by this nasty man!! So upset I stayed up to write this post. There are a few things to note about his reply:
- He comments on the grammar and spelling – Looks like I touched a nerve about how bad Windows is.
- He keeps mentioning security – Funny, I don’t seem to get virus’s on my Mac, for that matter how many useless Mac security apps are there? Don’t mis-quote me, i’m not saying that Mac’s can’t get virus’s.
- He assumes that I don’t have a Firewall or Internet Security – I used the very trusty Windows Defender (great job defending me there Bill – note the sarcasm. Windows is as good at defending my PC as the US Army is at finding Weapons of Mass Destruction).
- No I don’t have 4MB of RAM, i have 2GB of which Vista likes to take every byte, for its stupid ‘graphical’ interface!
- I obviously wrote this on my Mac. If this was written on IE it wouldn’t be here. IE probably would have crashed three times for no reason. (on the point of crashing, what does Microsoft do when you send an error report. Fixing the problem sure isn’t the answer)!
- He mentions the little tweaks I need to make (most of which I have done). What sort of OS needs so much user interaction to get it to work at a basic level.
- The most obvious thing is: If i’m such an (quote) ‘asshat’ and the post is so rubbish, why the hell did he write a response, that so obviously took him a while to do?
All I can say in response is:
“If its childish banter you want, bring it on – asshat”