As more and more Android phones are coming out with high resolution displays, along the same line as Apple's iPhone's Retina Display, many tech journalists are comparing their screens to the iPhone. They're saying thingts like "it's lower than the iPhone, but still above the 'magic' 300 pixels per inch mark".

Now, let me consider the rumours of a retina display iPad. If the same pixel density were used for the iPad as the iPhone, 330 ppi, at the same size, the iPad's screen would be a massive 2558 x 1919 However, because the iPad would be held further away, it's probably safe to simply double the iPad's resolution to 2048 x 1536, and call that a retina display. That gives a pixel density of 264, according to this DPI calculator. This not only makes it much easier to achieve (a significantly lower resolution display, which is likely cheaper to manufacture, and would draw less power), but also makes it easier for developers. A simple doubling in size would provide them with the same assistance as they got when the iPhone 4 was released with its retina display.

If it’s embarrassing, just tell me a very very general answer. Be as vague (or as specific) as you like. Just leave your answer in the comments, or email me at jimcullenaus@gmail.com. Feel free to be anonymous.

I have a hypothesis, but I can’t reveal it for fear of contaminating the results.

This is my first blog post here, and effectively my first ever, so I thought it would be fitting to write a blog about blogging. Or, specifically, the effects that blogging can have on your ability to write.

Probably the most obvious effect it’s going to have is on your grammar—especially with regards to diction and punctuation. It stands to reason that if you are practicing using all those skills that you learnt in primary school, you’re going to get better at using them. If a writer is treating their blog in a formal or semi-formal manner, and doing their best to use correct grammar, then they will gradually, with the help of constructive feedback from their readers, improve in their writing skills.

Writing a blog may also help you with your ability to research and cite information. Another great tool for this purpose is Wikipedia. (I myself write for Wikipedia from time-to-time, and have even created a whole article.)

However, it is possible for blog writing to have a negative effect. This is particularly true if they rely too heavily on spell-check, and the ever-more accurate grammar-checks that modern word processors (such as Microsoft Office Word) have.

I think that it’s important for people to always treat their writing with pride, and no matter what they’re doing, they should try to produce a work of the best quality possible. The only exceptions I see for this are microblogs, where people need to keep the text as short as possible. If people follow this relatively simple rule, they can expect not only to see their writing abilities improve, but also they will likely get more positive reviews, and they will begin to see more traffic.

On the other side of the coin, reading other peoples’ blogs can also help to improve your writing ability in much the same way as listening to a wide variety of music will help a composer, or looking at a lot of artwork from various artists will prove beneficial to an artist.

As blogger and freelance writer Michael Kwan says in one of his blogs, about how to improve your writing:

If all you do is restrain yourself to your own little mental world, you probably won’t improve your writing. In addition to all the writing I do each day, I also do a fair bit of reading. I check out dozens of other blogs on the Internet, I read plenty of tech news through the usual sources, and I check up on the local paper to see what’s happening in the world beyond the blogosphere. Just through pure osmosis, you will start to collect certain ideas and styles that you can integrate into your own writing. This is particularly useful for people who have English as a second language, because it exposes you to the little nuances that they may not teach you in formal English training.

By going to http://youtube.com/html5 and joining the experiment, the right click menu on a video will give you the option to ‘Save Video As…’ If you click that option, it takes you to a video of Rick Astley’s song ‘Never Gonna Give You Up, better known as the Rick Roll video.

Why not use this as a clever way to Rick Roll your friends?

A quick side note, this will only work with videos that do not display ads. The HTML5 player can’t display ads, so YouTube reverts to the normal Flash player, even if you’re in HTML5 mode.

To switch back to the normal Flash mode permanently, just go to the same page, and click ‘Leave the HTML5 Trial’

If you liked this post, please consider sharing it with friends and leaving a comment.

My dad finished his Ironman in the amazing time of 10:52:12. That’s 10 hours, 52 minutes, 12 seconds.

Ben Turner got 10:26:10, and Wayne was around 10:05. All three of them got amazing times, and I’m sure all their families are extremely proud of them.

This Ironman saw the breaking of a world record. 34 year-old Marino Vanhoenacker of Belgium broke the record that has stood for 14 years to set a new record of 7:45:58. That’s nearly 4 minutes ahead of the old record.

All the photos that are going to be uploaded to that location are now at http://ge.tt/84HVxc5

It’s the middle of my dad’s IRONMAN, and I’m sitting here to upload some photos of the event.

http://ge.tt/84HVxc5 Click that link to see the photos as they upload. Ge.tt is an awesome website for uploading files and sharing them with people. Unfortunately it doesn’t recognise pictures that were taken sideways in the way my camera natively does, as well as the Mac OS, so I didn’t notice this problem until after I had set them uploading.

The IRONMAN organisers have a website where you can track people in the race.

http://ironmanlive.com/tracking.php?race=austria&year=2011

Then enter their last name or number (my dad is 2597), and it will give you their times for each check in they’ve gone through so far.

Good luck to all those still out in their race (that’s everyone at this point, I saw the first runner go past just half an hour or so ago), and I hope everyone has a relaxing holiday

Oh, just remembered. This café is awesome. They use iPads with iBooks as their menu, and they write orders on these little electronic pads. SO COOL!

When I came back to work on it again, I was working for a couple of hours, and I had pretty much finished. I decided it was best to save it, even though I know WordPress should autosave anyway. It was at this point that I experienced a problem…

After clicking Save Draft, instead of saving, the page went to some sort of error. I was a bit annoyed at this, but figured that everything would probably be there anyway. So, I reloaded the WordPress admin page, and saw in my posts that it was still there. What a relief!

But no! It wasn’t there. WordPress had completely ignored my work over the past few hours, and the draft that was saved was still that original one with the link. None of my content, tags, categories, anything, was still there. Desperately hoping to get my post back, I went in to edit the post, and check the revisions. Unfortunately, the only revisions that had been saved were also ones with nothing but the link. At this point, I’d pretty much given up hope of getting my post back, but I decided to try and see if I could get any help anyway. I Tweeted the following tweets:

was writing a blog post on @wordpressdotcom, and when I clicked save, it suddenly reverted to a version well before the one I had written…—
Jim Cullen (@Zagorath) June 12, 2011

…My @wordpressdotcom post for some reason had not autosaved at all, and clicking save caused it to go back to the previous manual save…—
Jim Cullen (@Zagorath) June 12, 2011

…which had just one link in its text. The @wordpressdotcom post I WANTED to save was hundreds of words…—
Jim Cullen (@Zagorath) June 12, 2011

From nowon Ill be writing my @wordpressdotcom posts out of the browser and pasting them in when Im done, like I alredy do with @youtube vids—
Jim Cullen (@Zagorath) June 12, 2011

While WordPress themselves never got back to me, some time between the first and last tweets, a very helpful user tweeted

@Zagorath @wordpressdotcom you may want to write in word, then copy it to wordpress.—
  (@newfoundpianos) June 12, 2011

Thanks partly to this helpful user, and partly to my experience with uploading videos to YouTube (where I frequently lose my description and tags), I’m now writing this in TextEdit, and will copy and paste when I’m done.

That post about Prey now sits in my drafts—just a link, no more. Hopefully I’ll get round eventually to finishing it, but for now, this will have to do.

I think it goes without saying that I’m really unhappy with the way WordPress support handled this, and with the way WordPress’s autosave has failed me.

Even so, it’s taught me a valuable lesson. Always make sure to save your work!

Has this ever happened to you? Let me know in the comments below!

I recently helped in making a film, and just a few days after the deadline for submission, the rainy season finally started. We had been waiting to try and film in the rain for weeks prior to that, and ended up doing the scene without the rain.

The day after the actual screening, my YouTubesubscriber box had a video titled “HOW TO MAKE FAKE BLOOD! – Special FX!“. The film had a scene with some fake blood in it, and although our props manager did a pretty good job of making the blood, it wasn’t perfect. On the plus side, the lower quality projectors actual made the blood seem better than it was on a high quality screen, by seeming darker and thicker.

Similar, but not quite identical, Final Cut Pro X was announced literally days after I finally finished downloading the older version of Final Cut Studio.

I’m sure if I went into it I could think of many more examples if I went into it. What examples of something like this can you think of that happened to you? I’m interested in seeing your feedback.

They played a really cool repertoire; consisting of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture and Violin Concerto in D Major; Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on the theme of Paganini; and Mussorgsky’s Dawn on the Moscow River. I’m not going to lie, I went there specifically to see the performance of the 1812 Overture and the Rhapsody on the theme of Paganini. The other two pieces were ones that I didn’t know quite so well.

I was very confused at their choice of the order of the pieces. They opened with Tchaikovsky’s 1812, and ended the first half with the Rachmaninov. The second half opened with Mussorgsky’s Dawn on the Moscow River. The concert ended with Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. I really don’t understand this. In their Spring Summer programme leaflet, they stated the order to start with the Mussorgsky, followed by the Violin Concerto. The second half opened with Rachmaninov, and then the whole concert was to close with the 1812. To me, this would have made much more sense. Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture is a fantastic, dramatic, powerful piece: perfectly suited to the grand finale. Why they chose to open with this is simply beyond me.

I noticed during the 1812 that the winds were not quite in time with the orchestra. There were other problems with the accuracy, including the entrance of the snare drum being a little off. However, on the whole, I really enjoyed the 1812 Overture, other than the aforementioned placement of it in the programme. During the brass fanfare close to the end, the entire row of brass players stood up, wearing full military uniforms. I thought it was a bit gimmicky, and yet it was a brilliant idea all the same. It really did make the performance truly unique. In performances I’ve heard online in the past, the balance of the bells is frequently too loud. In this performance, I thought they got it just right.

Following 1812, there was a short break while they brought out the piano for the Rachmaninov. The change was not smooth, but it wasn’t horrible either. The pianist was, in my opinion, fantastic. I didn’t notice any problems with the orchestra here either—perhaps because there was a pianist to cover up any mistakes. The one small issue was that the pianist’s pedalling could frequently be heard quite clearly. Not having been to a professional piano solo before, I don’t know if that’s normal or not, but it did ruin the experience slightly at the beginning.

After the interval they got into the music that I didn’t know so well. Dawn on the Moscow River was played very nicely. There weren’t any serious mistakes, although at times the wind section did seem just a tad out of sync.

The Violin Concerto was played very well. The violin soloist was simply amazing. The only negative thing to be said was that the cadenzas were sometimes extended a bit longer than they needed to be. Other than that they played superbly.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the concert. Each of the pieces was amazing, and if you could look past the order they played them in, the choice of repertoire was great. I definitely recommend music fans in Ho Chi Minh City check them out. I look forward to the next time they put on some repertoire that I’m interested in.

Have you been to any concerts recently? What was played, and did you enjoy it? Particularly if you’ve been to the HCMC Orchestra in the past, what did you think of them?

To continue the analogy of sport from the first post in the series, if the referee was to make a blatantly wrong decision, the players and coaches would have to accept it. Even the best people with authority make bad decisions. In some cases, they have time to think over their decision before hand, and this should decrease the likelihood of making a bad decision, but even then bad decisions will be made.

Now, that was a bit of a false analogy, because this decision was a deliberate one. It wasn’t made as an accident or misinterpretation of events. However, the result is still the same. An incorrect decision, but one by which you must stand. The teachers in charge made a bad decision, but for a good reason. They had to make the decision to promote the school, and more specifically their new prefect system. They chose the people they chose so that it would seem that they were giving equal and fair opportunities to everyone. Because of this, I’m going to respect the decisions that they made. I’ve moved on, and so has everyone else. I wouldn’t even be writing this if I hadn’t teased that I was going to in the last post, which was made shortly after the teachers made the decision, and before I had gotten over it.