John Blackmore

According to Neilsen ratings, Women spend more time than Men...

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 14:02:05 +0000

According to Neilsen ratings, Women spend more time than Men watching television, watching online videos and visiting social networking sites!

Neilsen has recently rebranded those previous referred to as “Generation Y” as “Generation C”, with the C standing for “connected”. In the same report it appears Men only outnumber Women in one digital category, the number of people who are tablet owners.

On the basis that I am within the ages of 18 and 34, own a tablet and spend little time watching online videos or visiting social networks it would definitely seem that I fit the criteria of Generation C Male!

This is Moo, the unloved kitty who found a new home on...

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 14:02:05 +0000

This is Moo, the unloved kitty who found a new home on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
This is my cat. I’ve deliberately not posted too many photos of her on Flickr, partly because she’s so cute that I fear someone may steal her, but mainly because on the Internet if you continually post pictures of your cat some people may think you are weird.
We call her many names but at the moment she is Nana Moo. We rescued Moo from the RSPCA centre local to where we live, her previous owners had recently divorced and neither one wanted to keep her, so she was abandoned. She was 16 months old at the time and had already had a litter of kittens. We were told that she would find it hard to settle in a new home and that we shouldn’t expect too much physical attention as she was not used to human contact.
That was 4 years ago last month. Now Moo is the most caring and inquisitive cat you could ask for, in her new home she has everything she could want and more, including her new baby brother, our son Tom.

PDO vs. MySQLi: Which Should You Use?

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 14:02:06 +0000

PDO vs. MySQLi: Which Should You Use?:

Thinking about moving away from the native mysql wrappers in PHP? There are many reasons why you should, security being one of the top ones, but which alternative should you choose?

This article shows you code examples of PDO and mysqli (in both procedural and OO modes) and once you get the gist of it transitioning from mysql doesn’t seem daunting at all.

Now all I need to do is convince our technical director to move from mysqli to PDO and my work here is done!

Lily Dream on Flickr.Via Flickr: In between taking shots of my...

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 14:02:05 +0000

Lily Dream on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
In between taking shots of my son at feeding time I was able to take a few photos of some lilies that I had bought my wife for Valentine’s day. I started off with my “nifty fifty” but then swapped over to a Helios-44M with a 20mm macro tube between the lens and the body. Wide open at f2 it was too shallow to get anything in focus at this range, so this was stopped down to f2.8 and it landed me the effect I was trying to achieve.
Back on the computer very little post processing was required, just a slight adjustment to the white balance and tiny increase in definition was all it required. This is my favourite macro shot of the day, although if you take a quick glance through my photostream you will see a few more, including the first lily shot taken on the Canon lens.

There’s no kill switch on awesome!

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 15:05:14 +0000

There’s no kill switch on awesome!

Need a Job? Learn Linux Scott Merrill, techcrunch.com The Linux...

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 18:36:30 +0000

Need a Job? Learn Linux
Scott Merrill, techcrunch.com

The Linux Foundation today posted their first ever Linux Jobs Report, created in conjunction with tech job site Dice.com. The report examines the current demand for Linux talent, and identifies a few interesting trends.
Of the 2,30…

Linux sysadmins rejoice! your talents are finally being appreciated. This survey by dice.com states 81% of companies polled are looking for more Linux experience. This is great news for open source, may I hope it continues.

Sunburst through the trees on Flickr.Out on a walk recently I...

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:02:05 +0000

Sunburst through the trees on Flickr.

Out on a walk recently I noticed the sun had dropped well under the tree line. I had read recently that you could acheive a “sunburst” type effect by stopping the aperture right down so I decided to give it a try.
The end result was a little diffcult to guage at first, as reviewing the shot on camera it looked very underexposed. When I got back home though I managed to recover some of the detail in iPhoto and the end result seems to work out.
Definitely not one of my best, but it’s all a learning curve and trying something new definitely seems to be the way forward.

The hollow emptiness in social media numbers - most accounts are fake or empty

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 07:59:23 +0000

The hollow emptiness in social media numbers - most accounts are fake or empty:

zdnet.com

The numbers of users reported by Facebook, Twitter, Google, and many other sites, are closely watched. They reveal trends in adoption and they are one of the few public metrics available to analysts trying to assign value to companies…

With up to 50% of all Twitter accounts being either spam or fake, should we still be measuring the success of social networks based on the number of new accounts?

It’s been a while since I shared one of my photos so today...

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 14:02:06 +0000

It’s been a while since I shared one of my photos so today we have one I took recently at the Christening of my first niece.

The day was unusually bright for a cold January afternoon and the light felt extremely harsh at the time. The original straight off the camera looked incredibly flat and the quality of the lens (18-55mm IS kit lens) was very apparent with very harsh edges of the building against the sky beyond.

Luckily iPhoto stepped in to save the day and I managed to recover a lot more detail than I expected, bringing back some of the shadows and highlighting the detail in the stonework.

It’s been a couple months now since I’ve had my SLR and I’m still finding my feet. I’ve yet to work out where my photography niche will be, and so recently I’ve been franticly trying everything I can think of including long exposure, macro, landscapes and portraits. I’ve still got a lot to try and I’m looking forward to trying out high-speed when the weather warms a little and I can get hold of some water bombs!

Combe Martin Parish Church on Flickr.

Patience is a Virtue, for Losers Ashkan Karbasfrooshan,...

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 18:34:57 +0000

Patience is a Virtue, for Losers
Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, techcrunch.com

Editor’s note: Contributor Ashkan Karbasfrooshan is the founder and CEO of WatchMojo. Follow him @ashkan.
Patience is one of the seven virtues, the lesser-known cousins of the seven sins. And indeed,…

Patience is a Virtue, for Losers

Wonderful capture of some kind of dog howling at a street lamp...

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:02:05 +0000

Wonderful capture of some kind of dog howling at a street lamp in the snow. Found via StumbleUpon

New Programming Jargon

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:02:06 +0000

New Programming Jargon:

Funny post of commonly used terms to describe those programming moments where things aren’t exactly right.

"The only real valuable thing is intuition."

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 14:02:06 +0000

“The only real valuable thing is intuition.”

- Albert Einstein

Have you ever wondered what exactly is inside your digital SLR...

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:02:06 +0000

Have you ever wondered what exactly is inside your digital SLR camera? Head over to the Popular Mechanics website and you can see for yourself.

Speed up page loads with head.js

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:02:05 +0000

Speed up page loads with head.js:

Last year Google made some changes to it’s algorithm that meant that page load speed was becoming a contributing factor in it’s search engine ranking algorithm. This means that if your website loads slowly you could be suffering in the SERPs.

One way to streamline the loading of your site is to parallel load your JS files, and you can further improve load time by placing those JavaScript links at the bottom of your page.

Head.js aims to make this all easy for you, by allowing parallel downloads of JS files as well as a whole bunch of other nice features such as a CSS moderniser, HTML5 enabler, browser detection, feature detection and screen size detector.

In short it does the job of about 5 or more other scripts and it weighs in at just 6.4kb in minified form, so it’s small as well. Give it a go in your next project and see what it can do for you.

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 14:02:05 +0000

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

- Albert Einstein

"The more you know, the more you realise you know nothing."

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 14:02:05 +0000

“The more you know, the more you realise you know nothing.”

- Socrates

Brilliantly funny video showing what would happen if we only had...

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:02:05 +0000

Brilliantly funny video showing what would happen if we only had 140 characters in real life conversations. Twitter addicts will enjoy :)

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:02:05 +0000

“The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.”

- Albert Einstein

It's OK to cheat with CSS3 Generator

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:02:05 +0000

It's OK to cheat with CSS3 Generator:

As a web developer some people think that you need to know everything off the top of your head and that knowing it makes you good at your job. This isn’t the case, you don’t need to know it all, you just need to know where to find the information when you need it.

I haven’t learnt all the possible combinations of features for CSS3, why should I need to? In most cases when you are working on websites or applications you have the Internet on tap, so as long as there are websites such as CSS3generator.com I don’t need to learn those bits that I only use maybe 2-3% of my time.

In short, it’s OK to cheat sometimes. Just make sure you know the bits you use all the time, which in my case is PHP and MySQL and not CSS3.