Work was insane for me between the end of WordCamp Malaysia and the end of last week. I didn’t take a day off in that time. I feel a lot better now for a weekend off and normal working hours during this week.

Check out the computer usage below, taken from my Wakoopa account which tracks individual application usage.

Too many hours

It’s quite the bulge

Legend

• Blue: Internet
• Green: Audio/Video
• Red: Development
• Orange: Utilities
• Purple: Office
• Grey/Olive: Design

And before anyone says that clearly I just spend all my time browsing the internet, well, in some ways that’s true – but it’s me either making CMS modifications on a customer website, browsing forums for solutions to Magento (that was a lot of time spent in the last month, I’ll have a wee rant about Magento in a future post), and of course some general net browsing and maybe the occasional writing of a post on this site!

The only thing it doesn’t include is time spent writing emails to clients on my phone, which should be a relatively small percentage – still it’s definitely visually describes the reasons for my current exhausted state!

No more 70 hour weeks for a while thanks.

A post on Download Squad, shared by Vlad (an old Jaiku contact), reminded me that I’ve been meaning to sort out a new alternative to the stupidly bloated Adobe Reader.

I’ve been a long time user of Foxit Reader, but over the last while this piece of software has increased in size, gotten much slower on load time, and worst of all, started to use dubious practices in tricking you to install crapware – the worst of all being as displayed in the screenshot below.

Foxit Crapware Trick (courtesy of Download Squad)

This nasty tactic makes you think you’re deselecting items you don’t want and then, if you aren’t paying attention, your default reaction is to click “I accept” assuming that you’re accepting the installation of Foxit Reader without the unwanted crapware. No no. This means you’re accepting the install of yet-another-useless-browser-toolbar but not using Ask as your homepage/default search.

This nearly caught me out, and I’m a seasoned computer user wary of such things.

As a result I will no longer be suggesting Foxit software as an alternative to Adobe.

Now I need recommendations on new alternatives. I’ve tried Sumatra, but it’s missing out on text selection. In fact, pretty much the only feature I need in a PDF reader is being able to read the document and text selection – I need no other features.

Anyone got a recommendation? If so I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

With some upcoming business address changes in the works, I thought I’d investigate PO Box services from An Post, as changing your business address is an incredibly time-consuming process. You have to change bank addresses (multiple ones, and it requires form filling out and signing of stuff), phone accounts, CRO, documents, contracts, email signatures and on and on and on.

So I thought: given that we’re a business run by two people, now on different continents (and another relocation could be not too far away) it would make sense to have  a PO box. Change address again? No problem, just change the redirection of the PO box. Not a single document change required.

I looked at An Post’s PO Box service information page.

As an individual or a company, you can rent a PO Box or Vanity PO Box, and either collect your mail from your local Delivery Services Unit, or arrange for it to be delivered to your home or office.

Ok, so far so good. That makes sense and is easy to understand. Then I looked at their pricing table.

Nonsensical Pricing Table

What? What the hell is this even saying?

We, in theory, would be interested in the PO Box Delivery option. From what I can deduce if we ordered this service and read the table in a logical manner, the cost would be as follows:

• in January we’d pay €940.00;
• for the month of June we’d pay €548.33; and
• December would cost us €78.33.

I’ve looked at this over and over and it just doesn’t make any sense to me. I can’t even work out what I could be missing, or any method by which you could read this table and have it make sense. The only thing I’ve spotted is that the “December” price for PO Box Deliver and PO Box Forward Delivery, when multiplied by twelve, equals the January price. However that doesn’t explain the first two cost columns. Have a look for yourself: An Post PO Box Services information page.

There’s no other information on their page that helps to clarify this; the oddest pricing structure table I’ve ever seen. If anyone at An Post reads this, you definitely need to change that table. Perhaps have a look at how modern sites offer easy to understand pricing structures.

If you’ve got an idea how to interpret this I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

I’m not usually one to chastise an open source product compared to a proprietary one, but it’s hard not to notice the aesthetic differences when looking at Open Office beside Microsoft Office (2007 version).

Side by side: Open Office / Microsoft Office

Don’t judge a book by its cover

Absolutely, it’s more important to consider the functionality, compatibility, and ease of use of any piece of software; but at the same time if you’re spending long amounts of time using something, it can help if it looks nice at the same time.

OpenOffice definitely loses in the looks department at the moment. Whilst there is some functionality for changing colour schemes through Tools > Options >Appearance, trying to find pre-made colour schemes on the net proved futile after ten minutes searching, and these colour scheme won’t address some more fundamental aspects of the look of the software.

If you think it’s broken, you can contribute!

Yes I know, but I just don’t have the time – I’m sure that’s the most common defence used by people making excuses about not contributing, but well it’s just the case. If I’m not going to contribute then maybe I shouldn’t be complaining.

However when you see open-source projects like Ubuntu massively increasing their GUI and UX with dedicated people working on improving overall aesthetics, you realise that it’s actually a very important factor in driving increased adoption of open-source systems by a wider audience.

More details on Ubuntu’s Ayatana Project can be found here.

Perhaps OpenOffice has a similar project of which I’m not aware, but if they don’t I think they should consider starting one.

I was just posting on a forum which uses reCaptcha for reducing spam posts. The text it presented incorporates the name of the area of Dublin in which I lived for about three or four years.

Does it make me homesick? I’m sure my mother would love to hear me say yes, but no it didn’t. However, it was a nice reminder of the place! I wonder in what book or newspaper article it found that word. Apparently they’re currently digitising old editions of the New York Times.

reCaptcha

If you haven’t heard of it, here’s a spiel from their website:

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.

It’s quite an incredible approach to crowd-sourcing in order to solve problems.

About 200 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.

So if you’ve come across and correctly solved one of these reCaptcha’s before (which no doubt you have), just remember that you’re helping to digitise old books in the process.

This morning I woke up and had a notification on my Motorola Milestone stating that there was an update package ready for download. Could this be a quiet rollout of Android 2.2 (Froyo)?

Pre-Update

• Firmware Version: 2.1-update1
• Baseband version: 3GSMEPU91A_U91.07.4EI
• Kernel version: 2.6.29-ompa1 a21146@ca25rhe74 #1
• Build number: SHOLS_U2_02.31.0

The update package it’s currently downloading is 28Mb. Which makes me think it’s unlikely to be 2.2 as I think the 2.1 update came in at 80Mb or something, but can’t remember for sure.

Post-Update

• Firmware Version: 2.1-update1
• Baseband version: 3gsmepu91a_u91.07.55i
• Kernel version: 2.6.29-ompa1 wxnk36@ca25rhe53 #1
• Build number: SHOLS_U2_02.34.3

So looks like it wasn’t Froyo, but an internal Motorola update. I’ve no idea what the update has done, but assume it’s a bug fix of some sort. Can’t find any in-depth information about it.

Just bought some birthday presents on Amazon and noticed that you can create a profile there. During the profile setup process you’re asked to fill in two boxes: “Interests” and “Describe yourself”. In the describe yourself box I wrote my usual blurb:

I’m an electronic music producer. All my music is released under a Creative Commons license. Feel free to download my album, EP’s or live sets from my website www.ebauche.net.

If you’re looking for a web designer, well that’s my day job. Check out our company website at www.pixelapes.com

Finally, there’s my own personal blog over at http://alex.leonard.ie

I was told that I couldn’t proceed as the above “text entered may not contain profanity”. I’m struggling to work out what that profanity is.

I did some tests, deleting various phrases and eventually narrowed “profanity” down to:

• ebauche.net
• pixelapes.com

You could have made my life easier by telling me that I couldn’t place a URL in my ‘about me’. My final profile says:

I’m an electronic music producer. Feel free to download my music from my ebauche dot net If you’re looking for a web designer, well that’s my day job, we’re over at pixelapes dot com Finally, there’s alex.leonard.ie Apparently Amazon finds web addresses to be profane, so the only way I could get around it was to write ebauche dot com etc.

Photo by Kuobo on Flickr

Firefox Logo

This is just going to be a super quick post as I’m busy with a bunch of things at the moment (although I got the film completed on which I was working overtime the last while).

If you’re a power user, you may be the type of person that ends up with 70 tabs open in your browser(s). Right now between Firefox, Chrome, and IE8, I have 41 tabs going, with 35 in Firefox. More tabs open results in higher memory usage. I used to think that Firefox was a terrible memory hog, but it’s actually just my usage of Firefox that makes it a terrible memory hog. I’ve done basic comparison tests, opening the same tabs in different browsers and they all come out around the same (very unscientific so don’t harangue me on that point).

Thanks to the TabMix Plus firefox extension I have multiple rows of tabs and I tend to jump around them a lot, especially when developing.

This can result in Firefox jumping up to 600+ Mb RAM usage (I’ve actually seen it hit 1.3Gb RAM on my old desktop). I’m currently on a borrowed laptop which only has 2Gb available so in order to reduce memory usage I’ve started using BarTab.

It rocks. It unloads tabs from memory after a specified duration which means the tab is still there if you need it, but when you switch to that unloaded tab, the page will load. The time lost in waiting for a page to load is definitely worth the benefit in memory savings, and you can also set a whitelist of domains that should never be unloaded.

Perfect.

Hat tip to The How-To Geek for putting me onto this one.

I feel a bit like this

I’ve got a few blog posts lined up in my head, but I know they’re long ones and each one will take at least an hour to write (if I do them properly, which is something to which I aspire with most posts).

Unfortunately things are such that right now I don’t have the time to allow for even an hour to write a blog post. The overdue and it’s-taken-much-longer-than-it-should-have short film on which I’m working now has a final mix down date set for the 3rd of June. I’m not delighted about the fact that I’m not mixing it, but at this stage of proceedings I’ve happily resigned to the fact. Another large project is due on the 7th June, and then there’s a bunch of other small things in the works.

So, everything is on hold: playing with my fancy new camera; going out; watching movies (I can justify watching a couple of 30 minute shows every once in a while); doing nothing.

If you hear from me on here over the next two weeks, you should probably point out that I should really be working.

Image by slworking on Flickr

Fresh from subscribing to a few WordPress related blogs by some of the people I met at WordCamp Malaysia, I decided I wanted to change the folder name into which I had added these feeds, a small change from “word-press-related” to a more straight-forward “WordPress”.

After a few minutes of looking at the options in the folder settings dropdown, “Settings > Folders and Tags”, and “Settings > Subscriptions”, I realised that there didn’t appear to be any way to actually rename a folder in Google Reader. Something which is a little odd, especially seeing as it’s a piece of cake to rename a subscription. You would think this functionality would be a simple thing to implement.

Anyway, after giving up on being able to rename the folder, I worked out what is probably the fastest way to reach the same result.

1. Pick one of your subscriptions in the folder which you wish to rename, and add it to a ‘new folder’. Give the new folder the name you desire.
2. Go to Settings > Subscriptions, and in the “Filter by name, folder, or URL” box type the name of the old folder. This will filter your results to show only subscriptions from the old folder.
3. Click the “Select all X subscriptions” link in the top left and the in the “More actions” drop down, select the new folder you just created.
4. Finally, head over to “Settings >Folders and Tags”, select the old folder and click “Delete selected”.

It’s a quite a few steps for such a simple task, and it’s made even more roundabout by being unable to create a new folder from the “more actions” dropdown in “Settings > Subscriptions”, but still, now I have a folder displaying the WordPress name with its proper capitalisation, along with a whole set of new feeds for my viewing pleasure.

Those feeds, in case you’re interested:

• Blog Junkie (David Wang)http://blogjunkie.net/feed
• Naoko McCracken – http://blog.detlog.org/feed/
• Terminal Junkie (Thomas Chai) – http://www.terminaljunkie.com/wp/feed/
• Aizatto – http://feeds.feedburner.com/StrangeSymphonies

Google Reader Icon created by jvstin on DeviantArt

Update

It looks like this post is now redundant! The Google Reader team just announced that you can now rename subscriptions.

http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2010/06/folder-and-tag-renaming.html