Not too long ago I posted a photo from last weekend’s Midland Motor Club Rally, and here’s another one from that day. Some neighbours of ours had the clever idea of getting a better view of the approaching cars. Now if only they had been selling ice cream as well.

Aughadowry Skylift

I’m hoping I haven’t over processed this shot but the original was completely cocked. I accidentally took it without checking my camera settings and didn’t realise that I still had a tungsten colour balance filter set. Hence the original shot was extremely blue.

Oops - Tungsten

In fact, just to show you how cocked that shot was, I’ll post the original here as well. I figured going black and white was the only option as I’d never get the original colour tone back (well, I might have if I had shot in RAW, but no, this one was already compressed).

Anyway, hope you like it. Hopefully I’ll get a good shot out of some of the pictures I took down in Galway last weekend and get them up soon.

I’m working through the weekend on the Reel Festivals website, which is obviously a great laugh and just what you want to do on a bank holiday weekend.

However my gripe isn’t really with working at the weekend (the price I have to pay for taking a holiday in just under 2 weeks), it’s the awful feeling of having a site which is still being developed actually being live.

So there’s loads of things that I’m not happy with and are clearly half way through being updated, and there’s loads of little glitches, but still it’s live. Bleh.

Also makes it harder to work on things – I have to make sure I’m not going to completely break things by accident.

Still, the festival is shaping up to be really good. This year its focus is on Iraq, and they’ve got a tonne of events on including films, music, art exhibitions, lectures, writing events, a symposium, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Check out the Reel Iraq events page for more information.

The festival is on from the 16th to the 22nd of May in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Over the last while I’ve felt my computer system has been creaking a little under the load of everything I’ve been getting it to do. A recent application upgrade resulted in massive frustration with the speed the application refreshed when accessing different elements, opening new files and so on.

As a result I started to consider an computer upgrade, which has been in the back of my mind for a little while. Currently I’m running an AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+, which clocks in at 2.0Ghz per core and I have 2 x 2Gb of DDR2 RAM, although due to 32bit OS limitations I’m only actually addressing just over 3Gb of that RAM.

So my intention with the next system upgrade will include moving to a 64bit OS and opening up the possibility of running 8-16Gb of RAM. This will make it possible for me to run a much larger number of sample libraries in Cubase (such as the large but excellent Vienna Symphonic Library). This will necessitate finally dropping WindowsXP and moving on. I’d like to be able to wait for Windows7 to come out – from the sounds of things it’s already running much better than Vista, and I was quite ticked off with Vista any times I’ve tried it (which resulted in a post over on my web design company website about the performance difference between Vista and XP).

However with these recent speed issues, I was seriously considering making the upgrade sooner rather than later, and this would of course necessitate Vista fun and games, not to mention some expense which I really can’t afford right now.

Enter The Obvious

At this point I have to say many thanks to Warren Daly of Invisible Agent for pointing the following out. I’d been chatting to Warren about different upgrade options, the differences between the new core i7 chips and AMD’s latest Phenom II range (which has finally gotten them clawing back a bit of CPU respect), and then Warren made the suggestion that I should just overclock my current chip to get a bit more running time from it.

I went off doing a bit of research and found a good overclocking introduction guide on Tom’s Hardware Guide and got to work.

Increasing my reference clock speed to 220Mhz seems about as far as I can go and has resulted in my cores going from 2.0Ghz to 2.2Ghz. It’s a small increase, and I’m sure if I tweaked things more I could get a bit more clock speed out of the system (although unfortunately I’m already at my maximum CPU Multiplier), but I’d probably need to look at tweaking RAM timings and voltage settings, which is a little above my realm of experience.

Still, things are definitely feeling a little snappier on this system, and hopefully it will be enough to tide me over for the next 6 months.

So shouts out to Warren!

I should point out that this is actually his computer as well. Warren’s been away for a while now and left a bunch of stuff in our house. One day I was looking at his computer box wondering what was in it when I realised that it was way better than my old computer and was just sitting there doing nothing. So I recommissioned it. Thanks again Warren..

Whoa, what’s going on here. Yep, it’s annual CSS Naked Day and I’ve decided to join in the fun by stripping off and running around naked as the day I was born.

Ok, not really, I’ve just taken my style sheets off, so I’m only naked in a purely geeky sense of the word.

What’s it all about?

It’s all a bit of fun really, but the idea behind it is to promote the importance of web standards and demonstrate the proper use of semantic markup (the content of the site, being what you are viewing now), and how important it is to keep this separate from the presentation of your site.

This day of nakedness actually lasts for 48 hours, being that it is April 9th somewhere in the world for that long.

So join in the fun and get naked.

This weekend we had the pleasure of having the Midlands Motor Club ‘Stages Rally 2009′ zoom around our locality here in Longford. It’s hard to get a decent shot when the cars just fly by in an instant and I’ve never really tried this type of photography. This was the only shot that came any way near being interesting.

Taking the turn a fraction wide

It’s the first time I’ve taken stuff in RAW mode having actually read up a bit on what RAW actually means. I can definitely see the potential advantage on import though, but still found it hard to get a decent balance of brightness thanks to the glaring sun on the clouds in the distance.

The Guardian newspaper surprised me on Sunday by publishing a remarkable piece of journalism which pretty much equated nothing more than paranoid ranting and reactionary drivel.

Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time. On the back of the labour of others it makes vast advertising revenues – in the final quarter of last year its revenues were $5.7bn, and it currently sits on a cash pile of $8.6bn.

via The Guardian: Google is just an amoral menace

Let us take a case in point. Above is some text from the article that the Guardian created and published. Have I stolen this content or am I quoting it? I think we all know the answer to that question.

Obviously I have quoted part of an article. I have referred back to the original source of the article so that you, if you so wished, could put this quote within its original context. Unless I’m missing something, this is no more than what Google or Yahoo do with their news portals. Am I breaking any laws doing this?

I was so irritated by this article that I decided to leave a comment expressing my annoyance. I may as well reprint that here (unless that means I’m stealing from the Guardian?).

This strikes me as an extremely reactionary article which doesn’t fit with my impression of The Guardian at all. Feels much more like something that the Daily Mail would write.

I can only assume that the second half of the article complaining about Google using newspaper’s content refers to the Google News portal. Am I missing something in my interpretation that it’s completely retarded for newspapers to be complaining about this portal. All it does is link through to the original story. Just like search results it displays the meta description of the story, if one is provided in the original HTML source, and then a link to the site where the full story can be found.

Um, what the hell is wrong with this?

You may as well sue all search engines for “stealing content” then, as every single search result works in the same way.

I think it’s perfectly understandable that content providers should have to choose to opt-out of having their content listed in search results. It’s a simple thing to do and if it worked the other way around you might as well not have search engines for all the good they’d be.

I think newspapers should look very carefully at how the attitudes held by the music industry have caused them nothing but woe and should consider adopting a more forward-thinking approach to how to distribute and receive remuneration in this new media landscape.

Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land has similarly felt spurred on to write about this, and he does so much more knowledgeably than I.

Newspapers get special treatment, both with First Click Free and with the extraordinary amount of traffic they get from Google. And while their top managers go off on renewed Google rampages, they still continue to work to get even more traffic. It is stunning hypocrisy, and certainly not what you’d expect from smart business people.

I can only agree with Danny Sullivan, and I recommend reading his article as it gives a very good background to what is going on.

You would think that buying things would be easy. I have money, with which I wish to part, you have a product, which you wish to sell. A match made in heaven right?

Apparently not. Last week, having scrimped and saved for a long time, we initiated an order for Adobe’s Creative Suite 4 Design Premium. As CS4 is so hugely expensive (€1999 ex vat), it exceeded the limit on our business credit card so I rang to place the order having found out that they do accept wire transfer. Much confusion ensued with the sales person assuming that I wanted to place a volume license order, and me having to explain that we only needed a single license, followed by her saying “Oh, if you can just give me your credit card details” and me then having to once again explain why we couldn’t order with credit card. This went on for a while until eventually it all became clear.

Finally, after a bit more confusion about what country we were resident in, the order was placed and we received a wire transfer payment request for €1923 inclusive of vat. I was somewhat baffled. This seems to have been some magical number that doesn’t equate to their advertised price for CS4 design premium, no matter what way I look at it. It’s not the US$ price (which equates to roughly €1300 – a disparity that causes me much irritation), and it’s not the ‘design standard’ price (as we initially feared). It’s just somewhere in between.

Still, I’m not going to complain if I actually get it cheaper than it’s meant to be.

Anyway, the fun really started when 4 days had passed since we made the wire transfer payment and absolutely no word was forthcoming from Adobe. We rang our bank to make sure the payment had definitely left. We rang their bank to make sure the payment had definitely been received (which it had), and then proceeded with phone calls to Adobe to find out the status of the order. This is where things started going wrong. Every person we spoke to had a conflicting version of what was going on. Most said either “that order number isn’t on our system”, or “that’s not even the correct format for an order number”, which didn’t exactly fill us with confidence. There then followed a multitude of phone calls trying to find out what the hell was going on with various customer service people stating we clearly didn’t make an order or telling us it was impossible because our email address is registered in the US. This, coupled with an annoying frequency of dropped calls whilst on hold, got me quite close to becoming seriously annoyed – with me needing to point out to the customer service agent that we’ve paid for something as instructed by Adobe with an Adobe order ID andno one can actually tell me what the hell is going on?!

Finally I managed to get back through to the original sales rep that I placed the order with, who, thankfully actually had the order details (why no one else could bring this information up I don’t know) and once I had explained the situation to her managed to handle everything quickly and calmly and we had our receipt of payment within 6 hours.

There’s still a few things I’m confused about, but at least the order seems to have gone through and we should receive a download link soon and then all will be well with the world (actually, I am assuming the worst and clearly we’re going to have all sorts of hassle with this in the future – I daren’t even imagine what confusion could occur with an upgrade process).

Bad Address Bar

I’ve recently noticed a worrying trend (if two things is a trend) in web browser user interface design. The latest versions of Internet Explorer and Google’s recently launched Chrome browser have both decided grey out everything in the address bar except the top level domain name (TLD). For example, when browsing this page Google Chrome would grey out everything except “alex.leonard.ie”, and IE would grey out everything except “leonard.ie”.

Is this progress or change for the sake of it? I find it extremely frustrating to not be able to clearly make out the URL of my current location. I really hope other browsers don’t go down this road, of if they do, they ensure that the greying out of the “less important” parts of the URL is much less drastic.

It could of course just be bad colour and contrast settings on my screens, but in theory I’m fully colour corrected with the Datacolor Spyder3.

Chromeless

Of course I’m not against new developments and things moving forward. However, for my own purposes this UI change doesn’t work. I can see that for the general user, they probably don’t care what the full URL is, but as a web designer I find that it is important for me to be able to quickly garner information from the URL with one glance at the address bar.

There was recently an interesting discussion between Alex Faaborg and Aza Raskin over on Vimeo regarding the question of designing of chromeless browsing. It’s fairly nerdy now, but I will admit I found it to be good listening. Lots of good things mentioned such as the difference between ‘Usability’ and ‘Discoverability’, which shows how easy it is to not even think about what goes into good user interface design.

Aza Raskin is Head of User Experience for Mozilla Labs and Alex Faaborg is a User Experience Specialist at the Mozilla Corporation.

I know I just shouldn’t read things like this – it’s not going to help anything, but it just highlights the appalling state of things here in Ireland.

Pretty much the fastest consumer broadband in the world is the 160-megabit-per-second service offered by J:Com, the largest cable company in Japan. Here’s how much the company had to invest to upgrade its network to provide that speed: $20 per home passed.

via World’s Fastest Broadband at $20 Per Home – New York Times

The article is primarily concerned with the cost of setting up these networks, so in the case of Japan they’re spending $20 to sort out each customer’s upgrade. The consumer end is obviously a little different and here’s some sample prices:

In Japan, its 160 Mbps service costs 6,000 yen ($60) per month. That’s only $5 a month more than the price of its basic 30 Mbps service. In the Netherlands, meanwhile, it charges 80 euros ($107) for 120 Mbps service and 60 euros ($81) for 60 Mbps.

We pay around €90 a month for a 2Mbps synchronous DSL connection with Arden Brisknet. Their service has been good, their engineers are responsive and friendly, and it seems like a delight after a miserable stint with the incomparably shit Last Mile Broadband.

Still, I remember when I lived in Toronto back in 2001, I had a 1Mbps DSL line. Now, 8 years on, I’ve got twice that speed for probably 3 times the price. How retarded is that. Of course over those 8 years, whilst the rest of the developed world has been slowly ramping up it’s broadband speeds and Ireland appears to be completely dragging its heels, web sites are increasingly being designed to take advantage of these high speed connections. Why give the vast majority of your customers a lesser experience just to make things bearable for those poorly connected paddies? Websites have much improved functionality relying on more complicated scripting and flash interactivity, and when it comes to video sharing sites, that’s where you really start to feel the pinch.

Whilst a connection such as ours performs fine on low-resolution YouTube videos, there is a limit to how many super-compressed videos your eyes can accept. Also, many video sites (such as vimeo.com) are now offering “High Definition” video streaming, and buffering a HD video on a 2Mb connection brings back memories of loading a website on dial up – you may as well go and make a cup of tea.

Ah yeah, but you’re a hermit

That’s right, I live in the middle of nowhere in Longford, surrounded by bog and rocky fields – sure what right do I have to complain? I’d like to point out that the situation in Dublin really isn’t that much better. Our nation’s capital has a much wider range of service providers, but if you look at the average connections, prices, and speeds, the story doesn’t really get any better.

Looking over pricing comparisons for broadband in Ranelagh, Dublin, GetBroadband reports that your basic starter package with Eircom comes in at €25 per month and gives you a whopping 1Mbps/128Kbps. Move to Holland, pay 3 times that amount and you would get 120 times the speed. Um, is it just me or is something not adding up.

Interested in a more similar price comparison? Sure, get Digiweb’s “DSL-Pro” which costs €96 per month and you get the incredible 4Mbps/384Kbps. Nice. Holland anyone?

Asynchronism and it’s relationship with retardation

The absolute worst thing is the prevalence of “Asynchronous DSL”, the inventor of which should be battered round the head with a frying pan. On average the connections in Dublin come in with a download/upload ratio of 10:1, although in some cases it gets much worse, such as Imagine’s package which offers 7.6Mbps/384Kbps – a ratio of 20:1.

Service providers prey on the fact that people don’t realise that the internet is a two-way street. Those people with shitty 128Kbps upload speeds have so little bandwidth available that any increased activity involving their upstream is going to destroy their ability to responsively browse the net. Seriously, who needs their experience crippled because their data upload seems as though it would be faster being transported on a cart by a 3-legged donkey guided by a blind man who’s in a bad mood because his wife ran away with the milkman.

Running a web design company, I obviously have slightly higher requirements that the normal consumer and frequently need to upload large quantities of data, but this is the thing: businesses around Ireland are suffering and losing valuable time by having to deal with the poor connectivity that exists around the country.

So, whilst there are slightly faster net connections available in Dublin, they come at a price, and invariably with an awful upload speed. Coupled with this you get the fact that service providers pack their lines with too many customers resulting in awful contention ratios and, well I can’t put it any better than my good friend Unkie Dave, who I believe is on Eircom’s 7Mbps connection (unless they downgraded due to the complete shittiness of said “7Mbps” connection):

..which on a good day can puff its way up with a full head of steam to almost 1.5Mbps, before collapsing from the effort by 4pm and hovering around 450kbps for the rest of the day, wheezing like an emphysemic seventy-year old that still insists on taking a last drag on their John Player Blue before collapsing on the couch for a bit of a lie down in front of the telly..

What the fuck is the story? Can someone please sort this shit out before we get left behind in a world increasingly reliant on the internet for all forms of business.

No this has nothing to do with the recent Cowengate, although definitely I should take a photo of a cow and gate which shouldn’t be a problem round here. This is a photo of ice melting on a gate in silhouette and was actually taken just over a year ago on the 3rd of March 2008.

Snow and gate

I’m not sure exactly what I think of the quality of this photo. I like it, but there’s something about it which makes me feel as though I could have taken a better shot or brought it out better in post production.

Any advice welcome!