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Graduation. The one day I had been looking forward to for most of my life, yet also the one day which I had also not been looking forward to because of the amount of friends I have made through my school life, not just my peers but also the teachers who have been very grateful to me.

The ceremony started at 1:00pm so before the commencement of the ceremony most of us year 12’s spent the morning signing each others shirts once again and just trying to have the most memorable “last day of school” (so to speak). At 11:00am we were supposed to be having a rehearsal for the graduation, but with the lack of people which were actually there at that time it just did not happen. Instead everyone bummed around in the auditorium until the majority of people had arrived.

Time flew right before our eyes, and before we knew it 1:00pm was knocking on our doorstep and we all made our way back up to the auditorium after taking a short break. It began; this gut feeling of it all being over endowed my body. It made me nervous, anxious, and this overall just funny feeling all at the same time. It was to be a sad farewell for a lot of us, but also the celebration of the opening of a new point in our lives, the real world.

Continue reading ‘Yesterday, it was over’

Today, I went to the school canteen for the last time ever. I went to my IPT room for the last time ever. Today, was the last time I would probably get to speak to alot of people face to face. Today was the second last day of my school career forever.

When I was younger my parents always used to try and tell me that school is one of the best parts of your life because you get to socialise with all of your friends and peers. Meet new people, have new experiences, and really show everyone who you were. Its a part of your character. I always used to shoot them down by saying how they were wrong. Maybe I was wrong. I know now, that as my whole schooling career pretty much draws to a close, that it has been one of the best times of my life. I’ve made so many friends, met so many people, and despite the whole learning process, I have had an unforgetable and fun experience. One to be treasured, not forgot. 12 years of my life in school – it feels like its gone so quick! Too quick for my liking actually.

I’m not going to try and name all of my friends here, for the list would go on and on. I want to do name a few however, really good friends of mine who I consider to be at the top of the list. Why don’t we start at the “cool” group.. Milla, Dean (Doc! I have a problem!), Happy, Joel Serena, Barry, Chivers and last but not least, Whitbread and Big O who followed with me through primary school, and I have known for most of my life. Moving on towards the more “nerd” (apparently, but in my mind we are indeed the cool group) group of people we have Matt D, Pradeep, Joel Warren, Wiley, Jeff, Carl, Shaggy, Lucas, Kirby, Rabs, Nick, Coxy, Fry, Jess J, Rafki, Ellie, Shereena, Tiz, Josh, Jenna, Ryan, Brad, Grigg. All of those I missed too. You’re all wonderful people and great friends. School would not have been half as good if you weren’t there, so thank you so much.

Continue reading ‘I can’t believe its almost over..’

As apart of our senior physics coarse we have studied two topics relating to space and the universe and galaxies around us. These two topics were “space” and “astrophysics”. Space is kind of the introduction topic, and then astrophysics is an elective which can be taken up. Astrophysics (well, astrophotography in particular) is a really strong interest of mine and last night (Tuesday, 21st September) I had the pleasure of attending an excursion with my classmates (our last excursion forever! ) to an observatory in Wentworth Falls (the Blue Mountains). They have an impressive setup for a small observatory and they have an amazing sky, so dark and so full of stars. We chose a really good night to go too. We arrived (after departing school at 4:30pm) at the observatory at around about 8pm (thanks to the peak hour traffic). The company on the bus was good too (Thanks Fry and all of the others! :p, although now she probably regrets sitting next to me ) and everyone had a great (unforgetable) time too.

We were split up in to two groups, each group being the two different classes. We first went to watch and learn about the night sky using a framous astronomy program called Starry Nights. I have the same program at home and contsantly track various stars, constallations and planets using it. Okay, back to the topic. After learning about the sky we swapped over with the other group and went to the small observatory. The scope was excellent in terms of resolution and sensitibity and our “hosts” knew exactly what they were looking for and where to find it. We looked at the moon, Alpha Centauri, and one of the more famous globular clusters (who’s name I forget right now). We decided to go back to the moon in the end as we had some time left over.

Want to see something cool? Below are four images (and one on the right) taken with my 5megapixel camera put up to the end of the scope. They returned some amazing pictures (we took four in total) and the guide/instructor made comment that my camera was setup perfectly for astrophotography in terms of exposure, f-stops, and other settings.

Check them out, they’re awesome! (Warning, they’re about 1.4mb in size and of a large resolution)

• First Photo (A bit over exposed)
• Second Photo (Not very well focused)
• Third Photo (Okay)
• Fourth Photo (The best one, the one on the right)

It was a great time, and these were some amazing shots. I do hope to get in to astrophotography a bit more now, as I have been motivated after seeing these images. I have the equipment, I just don’t have the time or enough experience right now..

As i am writing this entry i am sitting on a bus seat waiting for the bus to pick me up and take me to one place i don’t particularly want to go: school. School is fun at the moment though.. With only for days left forever nobody is really doing anything.. We sit around. You know one of the bad things though? We’ve been told that we aren’t allowed to have a muck up day . Like, what do they think this is?! Thank you to our awesome department of education. NOT!Anyway.. The bus has pulled up and its time for me to leave you for the day. I’m going to have to get Time to execute the mail pull though because i forget to put it in the cron system. Cya!

Well, its not officially over yet, but its probably drawing closer. Talk Like a Pirate day, celebrated on 19th September is well, uhhhm when you talk like a pirate for a day. You’ve probably noticed this on afew other sites and discussion systems already.

Inspired by Michael over at Binary Bonsi I too have installed the Pirate filter, from the Text filter suite for WordPress. Don’t worry though, it automagically switches itself off at the end of the day.

Okay, you’ve probably noticed it by now, that if you actually visit this site via your web browser and not an RSS reader that over on the right menu sometimes you will see a ‘Currently Playing’ section which looks similar to that in the screenshot on the right. If you were a previous visitor before the redesign, you would have also seen it was a lot more basic than it is now.

The current setup is actually quite complex (we’re talking about the process to show cover art for albums – for those who have missed it). I’ve seen this on one of the other blogs I frequent, asterisk*. I’m sure the currently playing function over there functions totally different to here. In fact, I know it does because the author of asterisk* uses iTunes on a Mac, and over here i’m using Winamp on a Windows PC.

The complex structure?

• Details of currently playing track (Title, Artist, Album, Length, Genre etc) are sent via a HTTP POST containing a special key to a script stored on this server.
• The script then generates a “friendly name” for both the artist and album. (Similar to that of the friendly post URL’s you see here.
• The artist and album are then compared to a ‘replacement list. The replacement list serves to replace artists or albums depending on their album. This allows us to ‘fake’ an album or artist so we can get an image for “Various Artist” albums where the ID3 artist tag differs for each track.
• The artist and album are then joined together in the format of artist_album and then a local cache here is checked to see if it contains the cover art.
• If the cover art exists, we don’t bother doing anything else in the script and we let it exist gracefully.
• If not, we have to go hunting! Currently the script uses the Amazon Web Services API to search by Artist and Album to find the first “medium album image” and it downloads it to the server.
• The image is then resized to a max of 75×75 pixels and stored in the cache directory.

Thats just the download part of images too, the process which is ran every time a song of mine changes in Winamp. The front end part of the script simply checks to see if Winamp is actually playing something (by calculating the last track length, when it should have finished, and the time now), then depending on the results of that it will either show the Currently Playing section or not. When shown the script simply checks the cache directory for a corresponding cover art image, then displays it.

Obviously there are some inperfections, but don’t worry – I’m working on them.

This could be one of my first WordPress plugins too!

Yes, thats right. I’ve finally got off my rear and and done something about it. You will notice this site is now powered by WordPress and in the process has also had a bit of a redesign to a more blue and cream look – away from that bright orange which at first I loved, but then became a distraction away from each article’s contents.

If you explore around the completed pages (particularly the about page) you will notice some new features on the site. I haven’t had the time to validate the site yet, but hopefully it passes the W3C XHTML and CSS compliance tests, which also means it _should_ render properly in all browsers. (With the exception of Internet Explorer which requires silly ‘workarounds’ to fix things).

The new site is far from complete. All of the old pages have to be added back and reworked in to the new design. I have to pretty much redo all of my gallery script so it will either intergrate with WordPress or will become a standalone application.

WordPress has the nitfy little feature I posted about a while ago. Blogging via email. Which means, using Multimedia Messaging services on my phone I can set it all up and will be able to blog via email using my phone. Just another way for me to annoy you I guess

So far I’m loving every bit of WordPress. Don’t get me wrong, bBlog is great, but it just doesn’t have those final touches and the large community base that WordPress does. I will still be going out of my way to helping bBlog succeed and offering support for the plugins I have created for it, as it has the potential to be a really successful blogging application.

Right, well.. I guess I better get back to it.

Make sure you comment with any errors or issues that you’re having with the new site.

Regards,
Chris

There’s an interesting article on CoolTechZone called “Debugging the Megahertz Myth“. Afew of my friends keep bringing up that its all about how many megahertz or gigahertz your computer is thats the deciding factor on speed. Whilst its partially true, its also one big.. fat… hairy (somehow) [b]LIE![/b].

Lets take a look at afew facts from the article..
[quote]Just before the dawn of the 21st century, Intel announced its release of the Pentium 4 processor. The initial processors were clocked at 1.4 and 1.5GHz. Similarly clocked Athlons still performed competitively with the Pentium 4 line, but it was obvious that Intel clearly didn’t want AMD to interfere with the scales. The Pentium 4 line grew as 2001 came along and Intel ramped up the processor clocks leaving AMD behind at 1.4GHz. AMD seemed to focus more on the value market as it released the 1.0GHz Duron processor instead of pursuing the quickly accelerating Pentium 4 processors which hit 2.0GHz in August of 2001. This wasn’t entirely true, as the 1.4GHz Athlon processor excelled in several benchmarks over the higher clocked Pentium 4 1.8GHz CPUs. With a 400MHz difference, it is obvious that the clock (CPU frequency) doesn’t always determine whether or not a microprocessor will perform better compared to another. This became even more noticeable as gigahertz differences between processors still showed comparable results in performance with the Athlon XP and the Pentium 4 CPUs.[/quote]

[quote]Realizing the negative image normal consumers would receive from seeing lower clocked processors, AMD switched the nomenclature system of its microprocessors to more of a comparison rating. Thus, 1.67GHz Athlon XP “2000+” processors were to perform similarly to 2.0GHz Pentium 4s, overall. As it turned out, Athlon XP processors of even lower ratings (e.g.: “2500+” vs. 2.8GHz P4) outperformed the competition in many benchmarks.[/quote]

[quote]You must never look only at the combined GHz and MHz ratings of a particular microprocessor, but instead, should compare the number of clock cycles per second (GHz/MHz) with the IPC and architecture in order to make a decision of purchase.[/quote]

So leave me and my AMD systems alone, because chances are they will outperform you and your little Intel processor any day, any time, and in any place. Hush boy, its life!

Well, I particularly got sick of seeing the post below this sitting on the top so I decided I would take to it and write you another “interesting” piece of writing. (If any of you still visit this place anyway.)

Apparently I was nominated to become a Microsoft MVP (Most Valued Professional) in the field of Windows/MSN Messenger. When I heard this, to say the least, I was very excited and happy that I had actually been nominated and considered for such a role. You can read more on what the MVP status entales here on the Microsoft MVP site..

Apparently the emails were sent out to those who were accepted last night (well, the night before I think). I did not receive an email. I know other people that were nominated have received an email. Some of the people who were accepted don’t do anything! Skinning MSN Messenger? – I thought this was illegal actually because its reverse engineering Messenger to modify the resources in it. Not helping anyone? – Yes, thats right, some of these people don’t have anything to do with helping people with Messenger.

Up until a while ago I was a bit of a regular at the Windows XP Messenger newsgroup. That privledge got taken away from me when I did not have time to continue accessing and helping on that resource. It feels to me that I did waste alot of my time actually helping people there, and it wasn’t picked up by those who voted on the nominees? Instead they probably looked at my long history with Messenger Plus! and because of my “association” of simply being a user as well as a forum administrator there just shrugged me off. I don’t think thats really fair.

I do know of someone who received the title who [b]really[/b] deserves it because of their really hardwork and dedication to helping people with Messenger problems, as well as Messenger Plus!. They frequent both the Messenger Plus! Forums as well as the Messenger Plus! IRC channel and are always willing to lend a hand to those having problems. I’m not going to mention them here, as I’m not sure if they have told anyone yet and do intend to tell anyone about it. Bit I think its people like him, which deserve it over these other people who barely do anything for the MSN Messenger communities.

Anyway, I’d like to end this “rant” by thanking the person who actually nominated me, they’ve shown me that they actually think i’m worth of such a position and for nominating me in the first place.

I hate loads of rubbish, like this in particular.

Why GMail is so popular? Why its the biggest thing on this side of the universe? Yes, it is because of the space it offers, and some of the unique features it has. Not to mention that it is also owned by the largest internet search engine company, Google.

Who is to say that GMail is not in beta testing stage? That changes are not continually being made to the service? (Such as backend and system things), that reported bugs are being fixed. Not him, not anyone else. Just because you can’t see any changes being made does not mean the system is no longer being developed, it may even be that the code running behind the public demonstration is not even the latest.

The idea of the whole invite system is to get as many users in to using GMail as much as possible to get as much testing on the system before it is actually released to the mainstream public. That’s exactly what happened, and how it happened was intentional.

So what about the compression? It doesn’t mean you don’t get your 1000 MB of email space, it just means its compressed down on the server. Hotmail and Yahoo already have similar things in place where existing/older messages are compressed on the server to save space. It seems logical to me.

People give away invites, out of their own generosity. They don’t have to. Who cares if they do?

You can’t use the argument about there being so many developed applications for GMail. What about Windows for example? TweakUI, TweakCPL, XSetup, Powertoys, and every other “extension” program there is for Microsoft Windows.

And the answer to whats next, yes, GMail will be able to cook your dinner soon too. :rolleyes:

It does appear that the author has posted a “counter article”. At first I was going to sit by and follow Lobster’s advice and not actually reply to it. I just wanted to point this out: Maddox’s website. Segosa’s website. Wow, they look pretty familiar to me. I wonder who copied who. These are the lame kind of tactics this author uses – he picked up on a spelling mistake and afew grammer mistakes in my article. Good work genious :rolleyes:

Now. When you develop beta software, do you put it all online for users to see whilst it’s still buggy or not properly tested? Sure, some companies do. Others have a commitment to their users to provide a stable service. Look at Google. Look how popular GMail is. If Google were to update to a buggy version, even though its still in beta, what would the look the users would cast against it?

In his updated article, his counter argument about the space was he was just saying that GMail don’t reserve you a whole 1 GB of space. That’s exactly the same as other email providers such as Hotmail and Yahoo. Don’t you think that when Hotmail ups its free accounts to 250 MB there is going to be a lot of accounts being moved around on servers? To minimise this they compress the emails, which also means you don’t get 250 MB of “actual” space.

You can visit his site all you want too, he needs the hits.

This is my last post regarding this matter, as I couldn’t really care about what this person posts, I was just picking an example.