Blue Sparks

The Princess Bride is one of my all time favourite movies. It’s just a great movie altogether. Imagine my delight when I found the following comic this morning! I laughed my ass off!!!

Westley's a Dick - Click for full size version

I’ve finally broken down and purchased a media server. Just a little guy though… It’s a Shuttle XPC K45. I am putting an Intel Celeron E1400 (2GHz, dual processor) into it, with 2 1TB drives. It should be a fun little box to work with. The pieces should all arrive today… So I’m looking forward to putting it together!

I’ve packaged my 4 million digits of pi script and placed it on the main products page for anyone to download if they so feel like it. I also added a download link for the Pi Picture script that was available for download previously only from the picture page itself.

I’ve written various tools over the years to help me out with tasks that take a long time, or are very boring/repetitive. I have uploaded one of these to my website. It is a small PHP script that I wrote in order to rip album art from ID3 tags (embedded in the MP3) and store the file as a BMP (windows bitmap) that rockbox will be able to read and display. I’m not sure it will be useful to everyone, but it’s there for the world.

The download is located here if you are interested.

And here’s the description from the ‘product’ page on my website:

“When I installed the Rockbox firmware on my iPod I was left with a dilemma. I had spent hours (days even!) downloading album art for my MP3 collection and tagging every file with it. Unfortunately Rockbox only supports album art as a BMP file, and not embedded art. I didn’t want to spend more days pulling art out so I could see it, and what would happen if I changed what I had on there?
Enter this little script that I hacked together one night. It will read ID3 tags for your MP3 collection, and dump BMP files into the album folders on your iPod. Woo!”

And there it is! If you want to check out more stuff, there’s a bunch located on the products portion of the main site (although products is misleading… I don’t actually sell anything but my time).

I’m going to make the switch… from Gnome to KDE. In my Linux Distro of choice this means I will be swapping from Ubuntu to Kubuntu. I gave the live CD a try the other day and I really think it should be a nice change. Hopefully I can figure out all the applications that will be necessary to run things from day to day. Most of the time I’m running a web browser, email, or an Instant Messenger… and those are all included by default. The difficulty will more likely come when I’m trying to fill those niche apps that I’ve found use for with Gnome. I can’t really name anything off the top of my head, but I’m sure there’s something I will miss.

That’s life I guess… No pain, no gain!

New job is great! I’m liking it a lot. Things are slow right now, but that’s Christmas time for you. New University courses are starting in a couple days. Two months off has been nice, but I’m starting to get bored with all my free time.

That’s it for now I guess. Will try to update again soon!

Only one more day with Rogers, and then I move on to a nice little company in Waterloo. Too bad the new job hit me with surprise paperwork today. Of course, it’s the sort that you need to fill it out or you don’t get paid. I guess I should actually take care of it…

Southern Ontario Voting

Well, I’m amazed that almost all of Ontario, Southern Ontario in particular, has voted in the Conservative party. For as long as I can remember paying attention to politics Ontario has been a Liberal party stronghold. Something has changed this time, and whether for good or bad…. we’ll see down the road.

If you look at the picture on the right, you’ll see that it is dominated by conservative voted ridings. Up north we get into some NDP (orange), and Liberal (red) ridings, but the blue is overwhelming. If you go to the interactive map ( clicking on the image should get you there ) you can zoom in and see that Toronto is still a Liberal stronghold, but that seems like all of it.

I’m always a political swing vote. I refuse to give my vote to one party from now until eternity. I will give my vote to the party whom I believe will best suit us for the next four years. I’m not really sure if Stephen Harper is our man this time around, but he was a better choice than Stephane Dion… And sadly Jack Layton won’t hold a majority in my life time. I’ve stated my opinion elsewhere that I believe Jack Layton is a good leader. On the other hand, I am not certain that the NDP are a good solution for the country at the moment.

Lastly… there’s the “Green” party. While I’m all for helping the environment, I’m not dazzled by that being their strongest issue. I would rather have a party that was strong on all fronts, and didn’t base their platform on ONE significant issue. It’s sort of like the “Bloc” being a party just for Quebec. But, that’s just my personal opinion (And, we’ll conveniently ignore the fact that the current economy was the one ‘big issue’ for most this election.)

I guess we’ll see how things turn out in the months ahead, won’t we?

Well, I’ve officially taken a new job. My (almost) six years at Rogers will be done on October 17th. It’s on to a new adventure!

I just wanted to mention some of the Firefox extension which I use to make life so much easier while developing for the web. These are tools that I make use of every day, and want to make sure that everyone knows about!

First and foremost, there is FireBug. I am so glad that Mozilla threw this in with Firefox version 2. I would have had no idea about it, at least not until someone else sang it’s praises, otherwise. This is the single most used tool that makes my job that much easier! Javascript debugging, Ajax callbacks, examining HTML, benchmarking network bottlenecks…. the list goes on! My only gripe thus far is that in Firefox version 3 there are certain HTML elements, such as buttons, which I can’t right click on and use the ‘Inspect Element’ tool. On the whole, it’s wonderful!

Next come the Firebug plugins… FirePHP is the first. This allows me to send debugging information in a HTTP header, and then view the result in the FireBug console. While I could just dump exceptions and errors straight to the screen this little gem allows me to show the same screen the user would experience in such a situation, but at the same time see detailed debugging information! It is great for use on my local development system, as well as our testing server!

After FirePHP, there is FireCookie! While, this extension isn’t as used as the above two it is still a wonderful addition to my toolset. With it I am able to see any changes to cookies in the FireBug console. Very useful while testing Ajax scripts which may or may not make changes.

Lastly… this isn’t a development tool, but interesting nonetheless. FireGPG is a tool which will encrypt/decrypt GPG blocks right in your browser window! Not highly useful, but it works and you can run into the odd encrypted block out there. It’s not a key store though, so you have to have GPG already installed and point FireGPG to it.

Hope someone finds these useful as well!