Valhalla Island

Next year will be my first year of university. I can’t wait to be there. I’m proud of myself for working hard through the stuff that I didn’t want to do and wasn’t interested in. It’s over now and it paid off. The next 4 years or more will be spent learning everything that I’d otherwise be trying to teach myself. I’ll be surrounded by great professors and people with the same interests which I’ve never been around before. So here are my personal goals for 2006.

Have money saved at the end of the year. Ever since I’ve had a job I’ve never had any money put away ever. If I did accumulate anything it would be to pay back a debt or pay for car registration or schoolies or something like that. I just want money away that’s not meant for anything. Money that’s just there in case I need it.

Do a lot of work. I’m finally working in an industry where I can do the work that I’d be doing for free late at night anyway. I’m at the start of a stage that I want to be on for a long time.

Complete every job I start to the best level I possibly can. This is kind of two things. I have the problem of starting jobs with good intentions and then either not finishing it at all or getting to a point where I want it to be finished so badly that I’ll rush it, taking short-cuts and leaving out finer details that I planned to include from the start. I have to learn to calm down and not get impatient with projects. Warpspire has a good article on this, the last 10 percent. There will be no such thing as ‘good enough’ in 2006.

Write higher quality articles. I told myself I would do this a while ago and I slipped. I have to be more strict with what I publish. The above goal also affects this one.

Learn Ruby (on Rails), Javascript, XML and XSLT. This is a big one. Around the same time last year I said I wanted to learn PHP and I did. This is pretty large task and I’d be happy if I mastered just one of these next year. With the help of university I might have a better chance of learning more.

Contribute at least one item to the open source community. Whether this is in the form of a Wordpress Plug-in or Theme or whether it’s my own project that I send open source it doesn’t matter. As long as I have something with my name on it that’s availible for free and is helpful. With this will hopefully come some better knowledge about open source development, things like subversions and API’s.

Buy some/heaps of outdoor funiture. Underneath my verandah there is this great space that I would love to fill with furniture and have some gatherings of friends. Here is what I would like:

• An outdoor table setting. With the kind of chairs that have lots of soft padding and high backs.
• A swinging chair.
• A chair that hangs from the roof, those oval shape ones.
• A sun bed, I know the exact one I saw at Myer while I was Christmas shopping.
• A bar and some stools, not the built type.
• And an outdoor fridge, this can just be crappy and old as long as it works.

It’s unrealistic to think I could buy all these things but if I could buy one of the cheaper ones I’d be happy. I have this picture in my head of exactly how I want it to be.

Have a successful first year at university. This is just another part of doing every job as best as I possibly can. If university is everything I hope it will be it shouldn’t be a problem.

Spend a lot of time with friends. This was going to happen whether I had it written down or not. My friends are great and I want to keep them as long as I can. I have a wonderful girlfriend that makes me very happy and I want things to be the same next year.

Well I think that’s all. I could have put something to do with my health but that’s been going really well for a while now. I don’t like the word goal at all, it reminds me of those motivational speakers that I hate. I don’t know what else to call them though? Targets? That doesn’t seem right. I’m not the kind of person that will make a plan of how I’m going to reach a point. Things change too often to be able to plan like that. I like to make loose goals like these over a long time and then just work at them as they come along.

I’m not the kind of person to say “Ok, Monday’s I’m going to learn Javascript, Tuesday’s I’ll see friends, Every second Wednesday I’ll write an article on UI”. Things just don’t work out like that.

Isn’t it crazy how politicians and celebrities are being shot down for talking too much about Christmas? I didn’t realise being multicultural meant never talking about individual cultures. As if Christmas is even that much of a religious thing anymore anyway. It’d be interesting to find out when the focus shifted from a celebration of Jesus’s birth to a day for giving everyone you know a gift with fear of forgetting someone.

I like Christmas though. I like Christmas carols and I like decorating a tree and having things just a little bit different for a month. I don’t like website theme changes though, even little things like putting snow on your logo. I don’t know why I don’t like that, but I just don’t.

Oh that’s another thing. Kids aren’t allowed to sit on Santa’s lap anymore. I’m not sure if there was an incident that triggered the rule. It’s crazy, what oppurtunity does Santa have to do anything to a child? He’s sitting there in front of the child’s parents, a photographer, any waiting in line, general shoppers and usually some Santa’s helpers with all eyes on him. It seems everyone’s got a little too uptight.

Merry Christmas! I don’t care what religion you’re from or whether you celebrate it or not.

There are Google ads on Fightingfriends. I don’t know if it’s a good idea or whether it will make me any money at all. It won’t bother me if it doesn’t. I get paid on a per click basis. It’s strange, you click and I get money. I don’t even know how much you get per click. It’s probably something tiny.

I was against ads on personal sites but now they’re here and it’s hard to be against them when they’re on your own site. It’d be nice if you could click on them every once in a while, even if you exit the site it takes you to straight away (I hope Google didn’t hear that). It’s just there to make me feel better about quitting my job.

For a while Mum wasn’t happy with her 19 inch Samsung LCD. She said that it was blurry and just way too big for her. Yesterday she bought a new BENQ 17″ LCD that she’s very happy with. That means that I got the 19″.

The first store we went to when looking was Harvey Norman. I knew it would be way too expensive but we were close so we thought we may as well look. The cheapest 17″ was $599 and it only went up from there. I thought it was crazy so we left pretty quickly. Then we went to where we planned to buy one from, Harris Technology in the Valley. I really like Harris, I like how the store is set out. At Harris there were about six or seven 17″ LCD’s to choose from all below $370. Some even as low as $350. So we bought one.

Anyway, I thought since I was getting a new screen I should clean up my desk and try and create a decent workspace. So I did, Here’s a picture.

The way it used to be set up I had this fat CRT monitor and I could barely fit the keyboard on the desk. The box was on the right side of the desk top too so I had no desk space at all. Now I’ve moved the box underneath and have all this space to rest my arms in front of the keyboard. There’s also less glare on the screen because I can push it right back. I have to push it right back. Even as far back as it is now I can’t look at the entire screen at once, I like it though. I can now lay out a book and have a space to put my drink bottle.

They say that bigger screens can improve productivity by up to 45% too. I don’t know where I heard that but it must be true. The only problem is that the highest resolution I can set is 1280 x 1024, I think that’s too small for 19 inches. I’d like 1600 x 1200 or even something in between those two.

Does anyone know the technical reason to why LCDs can’t display really high resolution?

I’m happy. What did you get?

I always wonder how much of a teaching degree is focused on learning what you have to teach and how much is focused on learning how to teach what you’ve learnt.

What gets me thinking is the majority of music students who end up as music teachers. My inside sources tell me that only about 1% will get paid enough to be full-time performing musicians. So what happens to the rest? They become teachers and teach the next generation so that another 1% can jump out of the cycle.

Two kind of unrelated thoughts.

Every second day I come across a new site, service or company with numbers before a work as it’s name. Here is a list:

• 37 Signals
• 9 Rules
• 43 Things
• 24 Ways
• 43 Folders (thanks Drew)

Haha, I thought there was more than that?

At First I had trouble with Scriptaculous when following the 24 Ways Introduction. I copied it character for character and it just didn’t work. So I moved on and saw the first article on 24 Ways was named Easy AJAX with Prototype.

Prototype is yet another javascript library and actually comes bundled with Scriptaculous. I ran through that article and it worked! I couldn’t believe it worked! I now see how database calls are ran through in real time without refreshing and it’s exciting. You can see my example here:

• Live form processing with AJAX

After that I tried Scriptaculous again, wanting to do some motion stuff, without following the tutorial. I just went through copying and adapting from some of their examples. The example code was very nice and easy to follow and after a short time I made that work too! Here’s my example:

• The Scriptaculous blind down effect

But there was a problem with this. I wanted a show and hide style thing. I wanted the title to change from showing and hiding depending on whether it already was showing or hiding. There was a script for precisely this in the Introduction on 24 ways. This script wasn’t working though, and still isn’t so I needed something different. There was another problem, one that I found a lot of people had with javascript libraries in general, adding an extra 80kb to every page gives a noticable second or two of load time when the huge majority of the code isn’t getting used.

That’s when I came accross Moo.fx. They pride themselves on their library being only 3kb. They provide basic, elegant effects. There’s no form processing or server-side with no reloading stuff, it’s only effects. It also can come bundled with prototype lite.

What I like most about the Moo.fx library is that most of it’s effects are toggle effects (eg. blind.toggle(); ). This eliminates the need to write extra scripts to gain the toggle functionallity. You can see my Moo.fx in action here:

• Moo.fx toggle blind effect

How this was working is exactly how I wanted it to work here on Fightingfriends within my sidebar. Then I ran into more problems. Becuase I want the menus to start closed I had been setting height: 0; as the default and that was working perfectly in my tests. In my sidebar when I set height: 0; it shows the text anyway, floating on top of everything else. I don’t know why it would do that.

I think it is a problem with my mark-up, I’m going to redo the sidebar today and see if I can get it to work. All this AJAX stuff is exciting!

Daringfireball linked to a Google Answer on “How much did Yahoo pay for Del.icio.us?“. I’ve never seen an answer work before and it’s pretty cool. It gives a deeply researched well written answer. It cost the guy that asked $15 and he placed a further $3 tip. I think it’s great that Google displays the answer for free after it’s been asked.

Finally, CNN’s Money page reported it to have been:

“…in the range of $15 million to $30 million.”
http://money.cnn.com/rssclick/2005/12/10/technology/delicious_biz20_120905/?eref=yahoo

This seems to be the figure people are finding believable.

They also said that based on those figures, Yahoo was paying around $100 per list of bookmarks. But I doubt that’s how Yahoo saw it, as if they were buying lists of bookmarks.

I’ve only read the Introduction to Script.aculo.us effects by Michael Heilemann and I’m really excited about it. Script.aculo.us is a wonderful free library of javascript for you to download and use.

The article that Michael wrote is so good for a library that apparently doesn’t come with much documentation. The things that the article goes through works with an extremely cut down version of the library only dealing with effects. There’s also a demo of the very cool javascript effects it can produce.

I’m slowly getting into all this web 2.0 stuff and slowly beginning to understand javascript. It seems that Script.aculo.us is run by the same people at 37 signals and Ruby on Rails. I’m really impressed with the sites design too. It’s great to see a product dedicated to programming that is also nice to look at.

I haven’t actually got the library and looked at it yet. I want to set a little time aside before I delve into it. Just thinking about working with it is exciting. The more javascript I see the more it grows on me. I think this in just the thing I have been looking for to update this site.

I’ve run into a little free time and I’ve been stuck without anything to do for a while. I’ve wanted to do something with fightingfriends. I don’t want to do anything drastic like a complete redesign because I’m very happy with the general look. I just want to change or add some small things.

I could go through the plug-in directory and try to find something I like but I’ve come to hate plugins. I don’t know if I’ve changed the core code too much for anything to work or whether I just don’t implement them the right way. When I was trying to implement asides, the asides plug-in was a massive bit of code and I just couldn’t make it work how I wanted it. In the end 3 lines thrown into the loop did it perfectly. I’ve found that with all the plug-ins I’ve tried to use.

I really like the way binary bonsai has been changing with each upgrade to his invader theme. There have been very subtle changes each time but it always looked good. I can’t get enough of his comment form, the float option is so cool and the black looks slick.

Maybe just a change of font or font size. Maybe I’ll try do something as cool as Michael’s comment form. Maybe I’ll throw in some wierd toolbar or some new colours. Anyone have any ideas?

Yahoo has now bought out three very interesting companies. Flickr, Konfabulator and now Del.icio.us. All provide different services but there’s so much that relates these three.

They’re all part of the revolution, they are all very popular and very talked about parts of the revolution. Flickr and Del.icio.us are the epitomy of tag utilising websites. When someone says tags (as they often do these days) Flickr and Del.icio.us are what you think of. Personally I’ve never seen why tags have been considered such a revolution. It’s just a different way to categorise.

Konfabulator is part of the revolution for it’s wonderful use of RSS. It’s the most useful use of RSS I’ve seen.

I think it’s cool that a company that’s been around since the start of the dot cot boom can still be savvy (I hate that word) enough to purchase these companies that are on the cutting edge of web technology. It makes me admire Yahoo and I’d probably use Yahoo over Google if I didn’t get slapped with a ton of colourful information when I go to their front page.

You can read more about the acquisition at Search Engine News.

At what point does a product breach copyright laws? I know it’s hardly identical but it’s very similar, same colour, same size and shape, buttons in the same places and same position in relation to eachother. It even looks like they used the same little cap on the USB adapter.

Today I turn 18. Mum wanted me to go to the electrol office today and register but I’m not that keen.

I’ve got some amazing presents. My aunty bought me these logitech 5.1 channel computer speakers and they are so great. It’s the most clear sound I have ever heard. I’m only running 2.1 channels at the moment though, I don’t have a 5.1 card. I’m wondering if there is a difference in buying a cheap one or something like a Soundblaster.

The most exciting present is the one my Mum bought me. It was such a great suprise. I now own a HP iPAQ hx2100 palm computer. I couldn’t believe it when I opened it. It’s still charging and has three hours left so I haven’t been able to play with it yet but it has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. We have Wi-Fi here at home so it’s going to be perfect. I love it.

Dad got me a $100 Sanity voucher which is going to be great, I haven’t been able to buy a CD in ages and I’ve already talked to Chris about ordering in some hard to find stuff.

So now I’m 18 and I’m legally considered an adult. I’ve been trying to think of things I can do today that I couldn’t do before but that won’t cost too much. I’ll probably just go buy a scratchy or something like that.

Rails is the framework and Ruby is the language. I watchted the 15 minute intro video and it was very good. I think that videos like that have so much value. Every open source project should have a 15 minute demontration video. Apple tends to do this a lot. They had a really good one for Aperture, it was good because no one knew exactly how it would be different from something like Photoshop. After they watched the video, they knew and they knew it was good and hadn’t been done before. There’s no other way they could have shown people that.

Anyway, back from that tangent. Ruby is some sort of XML derivative much like RSS from what I’ve seen. It’s promoted as being very fast, cutting development time. If you know the language and the flow of information from file to file then it is very quick. In the demo the guy knocks up a decently styled blog, including writing the database structure, in about 10 minutes. But the guy in the demo is the guy that actually wrote the framework, he’d want to be able to do it quickly.

What seems so new wave about Ruby on Rails is it’s ability to write code according to database structure. It looks like it will connect to the database, crawl it and decide how to output the information based on the fields. I don’t know if it has to do with what you name the fields or the properties of the fields but if it goes on naming then naming within the database would have to be strict. Also, often there are cases where you’ll have fields that you don’t want shown. Do these fields still get displayed? This is a problem I see with all these new languages that promise less code and less time. How can you possibly cut back the already lean code of something like PHP while still keeping full functionallity and versatillity.

I don’t even know why these languages keep getting written. Are there really that many programmers out there unhappy with how much code they are writing? Do they ever write a line and think that the line is unecessary?

It’ll be interesting to see how Ruby is picked up in the few years. The main use for it so far has been in writing the suite of online applications from 37 signals. They have been very popular so far and also talked about a lot, especially within 9 rules.

What I’m struggling to understand is the gap between XML and xHTML. Where exactly does the XML turn into outputable xHTML? It could never change and it could run as XML within the browser but IE doesn’t support XML encoding yet so that’s not realistic. I don’t know if they just expect you to know how a line of Ruby turns into displayed information in a browser or whether they want you to know. Maybe they just don’t think people want to know or even care how it happens. Keeping inline with this whole simplicity philosophy maybe they think people are happy with something just working. Maybe I’m the only one that has this need to know exactly how it works.

The Ruby on Rails site is very good looking and I’m grateful for another open-source project that also has good design sense. It’s a shame about the Offical Ruby Language site though. Many sites with very good and valuable information seem to be designed like this (W3C, for example) and it scares people from the first second. Intro videos don’t.

I’m going to read (and watch) more about the Ruby phenomenon before I write any more about it.

It’s the first of December and it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. It’s also the first day of Summer and Anno’s 18th Birthday. Happy Birthday Anno. Me and Courtney spent all day today putting up all our Christmas decorations while listening to Bing Crosby sing Christmas carols.

My camera is crap but here’s a picture of the finished tree:

You can’t see all the other decorations we put up all around like these cool things on the lights but it’s still pretty.

Christmas is my favourite time of year.