Sunday, 1 November 2009

#305 - It's amazing/interesting to think about what you have learnt during the day and find one thing that you feel is worthy to share.

This obviously comes from the post from last week as it was the first time I really sat down at the end of each day and thought about what to write about. In the past I have probably casually just thought about the day that has just passed, but never in much depth. It definitely takes some time to pick out the thing to write about, but I feel it is worth it - especially at the end of the week when I read through my notes I've jotted down for each day. Admittedly at the end of some days it felt like nothing special enough happened that day to write about - after all I can't expect all days to be exciting - just have to make sure there aren't too many of them

Monday, 2 November 2009

#306 - Rule of thumb: Red wine doesn't go with seafood - Wine and seafood: Red rags

For those that know me, I hardly drink wine (in fact I hardly drink alcohol). So the random fact of my day is drinking red wine while having seafood can leave a strong and unpleasant fishy taste in your mouth. Iron levels in wine is the cause for the fishy after-taste since iron reacts with the healthy unsaturated fat in fish to form unstable chemical compounds that cause the unpleasant fishy odours. So it seems like it as long as the wine has low iron levels, you can enjoy your seafood dinner - though white wine in general have lower iron levels than red, so probably still a safer choice.

Tuesday, 3 November 2009

#307 - Sweeps is gambling for dummies.

Today was Melbourne Cup and when I came into work today saw an email about entering the "Sweeps". There were multiple $2 and $5 sweeps and I had no idea how sweeps worked, other than you had to put money in and you *might* get some back if you won. It was only after lunch that I found out how sweeps worked - everyone who entered gets assigned a random horse and then at the end of the race, the winnings are paid out in some sort of proportion to the winners (the payout split seems to differs slightly depending on the sweeps organiser).

Guess sweeps works for people like me who don't know much about the horses so getting assigned a random horse is just about the same as picking a horse myself. Maybe I should've tried my luck in the Melbourne Cup sweeps - though it would've helped if I knew how sweeps worked in the first place.

Wednesday, 4 November 2009

#308 - A high IQ doesn't mean much, being able to make rational decisions is just as important. - Clever fools

I've always thought that IQ tests are quite pointless and silly - a person isn't "smart" because they can figure out what pattern comes next in the series. Being able to analyse, think logically and connect the dots are definitely important, but in my opinion what makes a person "smart" is how they interact with people, how they make decisions and how they justify their actions.

This is obviously very vague but that is because being "smart" means so many different things in different contexts. The New Scientist article "Clever fools: Why a high IQ doesn't mean you're smart" talks about rational decision making as being an important aspect of an individual's intelligence which I feel is very true. It's a pretty good read and one of the things that I like are some of the analogies used to illustrate how purely measuring IQ is quite limited: "A high IQ is like height in a basketball player...There's a lot more to being a good basketball player than being tall, and there's a lot more to being a good thinker than having a high IQ." -David Perkins

Thursday, 5 November 2009

#309 - Time flies!

Today was a bit of a strange day, a series of events made me realise how time flies! In the morning news today they mentioned it has been a year since Obama was elected as President - to me it definitely didn't seem like a whole year has passed since all the US election frenzy. Then at work, a colleague mentioned that in a few short weeks we will have reached the end of another decade and will be starting a new one: 2010. Ten years ago it was "Year 2000" with all the Y2K worries. Ten years ago I had just started high school. Finally, while filling out some forms I realised that I had been working full time for nearly 9 months now - it might not sound long to some people, but to me it feels like I'm still new and just started not long ago.

Friday, 6 November 2009

#310 - An extra little bit of attention can go a long way.

Not quite sure how this popped into my mind today, but it just did. Simply put, I believe that an extra bit of thought and attention when we do things can make a big difference. Not quite sure how to express it nicely, but basically, spending an extra second or two every now and then to think about what you are doing and if you can do anything different to make things better pays off. It might be beneficial to yourself (eg. noticing the dark clouds outside and packing the umbrella) or others (eg. suggesting that other idea that they might just find helpful). Many times the extra attention will probably go unnoticed, but sometimes you'll be happy you packed the umbrella and the other person might just find that extra little idea to be perfect.

Saturday, 7 November 2009

#311 - The humble mouse movement is controlled by the "Mouse Acceleration Curve"

When you are using a computer, more often than not you'll also be using the mouse to point, click, drag etc. But have you ever thought of how the physical movement of the mouse is translated into the movement of the cursor on your screen? I haven't, until today. For the past few months been using my MacBook Pro and every now and then I will be using the mouse instead of the track-pad and the mouse movement just felt wrong. It'll move fine but then as I am approaching the target (eg. a button) the cursor seems to slow down and become rather unresponsive - very very annoying when playing World of Goo!

Getting rather annoyed at the "broken" mouse movement, I decided to see if there was a fix for it and after a bit of googling I realised neither my mouse nor laptop was broken, instead Apple just had a different (read crappier) "Mouse Acceleration Curve" compared to Windows.

This article I found explains the whole thing quite well - basically, it's obvious that the movement translation can't be a 1:1 ratio - needing to move 1cm physically to move the cursor 1cm on the screen is not practical (this is about as much though as I gave to the mouse movement prior to today...but there is so much more!). The simplest possible solution is to change the ratio to say 3:1 - but that causes another problem: "you'd have to move your mouse about [2.1 mm], no more, no less, to move from the center of the close button to get to the center of the minimize button".

The solution? Use both. When the mouse is moving fast use a X:1 ratio to move a far distance with little motion; while when the mouse is moving slow use a 1:1 ration to get the precision needed. As the article explains "For mouse motion to feel natural (at least for most people), the curve has to start by moving upward fairly moderately, then gradually flattening out as the value of X increases...A comfortable and useful curve is shaped like a curve. Mac OS X's curve, however, is shaped more like a cliff". This explained the "broken" feel I got when using my mouse - general movement across the screen was all ok, but because of the abrupt flattening at the top of the cliff, when I slowed down to click on the target, my mouse practically slowed down to a halt.

Luckily, it can be easily fixed. There are some 3rd party applications (shareware) that can give you a more control over the acceleration curve. USB Overdrive and SteerMouse seem to be two most popular. However, I went with the free option and downloaded drivers for my mouse off the Microsoft website. Now back to playing World of Goo - unfortunately this means I can no longer blame my lack of co-ordination on bad mouse movement!

i challenge you to write a weekly entry to your blog on 7 new things you learned about this world, 1 new item for each day. not too difficult hey?

There was no reason I could think of to decline this challenge, so I have decided to take the challenge! Though I'm going to cheat a tiny little bit, instead of "7 new things I have learned" it will be things I have learnt, found interesting, would like to share. So here we go - my first weekly post and hopefully the first of many more to come!

Sunday, 25 October 2009

Thought of the day: www.example.com, www.example.org, www.example.net are reserved domains that are not available for registration!

In the past couple of months, I've written and done a fair bit of testing and as expected there are always going to be "dummy" email addresses, web-links etc. The most common being ones like: admin@example.com, www.example.com. One random day I thought to myself "Hey, what if someone registered 'example.com' as their domain name, wouldn't they get a tonne of random traffic?"

Well, to my surprise, the domain names: www.example.com, www.example.net and www.example.org are actually all reserved and not available for registration. If you want to read all the details you can have a look at RFC 2606 (warning: I've found RFCs have the tendency to be sleep inducing).

ps. didn't quite discover this on Sunday, but discovered it relatively recently - and trying to remember something that happened on Sunday when it's Tuesday is surprisingly hard!

Monday, 26 October 2009

Thought of the day: Incentives/rewards that are offered to us to motivate us can actually make things worse as it restricts our ability to think creatively. Intrinsic motivators work heaps better than extrinsic motivators.

Watched the TED talk: Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation and indeed it was surprising. From experience our society tends to use incentives such as money to motivate us to do something. However, in Dan Pink's talk he shows us that there is scientific evidence that this extrinsic motivator is probably doing more harm that good in the majority of cases.

He highlights that scientific studies have shown that for basic mechanical tasks extrinsic motivators work really well, but for any tasks that require "rudimentary cognitive skills" these extrinsic rewards actually make things worse. The reasoning behind this is that "Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus, concentrate the mind. … That reward actually narrows our focus and restricts our possibility." The problem with this is that most companies/businesses operate using the reward-based system even though a good majority of the jobs require employees to think outside the square to solve problems. It's definitely a good watch!

Tuesday, 27 October 2009

Thought of the day: Friends are a great source of motivation - whether it be working together, giving you ideas, or even just 'triggering' ideas

I think this one is quite self explanatory…simply talking to friends often gives me this extra energy to go and do something. Sometimes it's just the conversation itself, other times it's something I've always wanted to do, but didn't know how to approach it, and friends are awesome at giving you ideas. Talking to friends doesn't always trigger the motivation inside me, but talking to friends is always nice

Wednesday, 28 October 2009

Thought of the day: Sitting in front of a computer is really bad for your posture - should be wary of your posture and do stretches regularly!

Ok, I admit that I am in front of a computer a good majority of the day - pretty much all day at work, then all night when I get back home. After a rather bad fall during on Tuesday during soccer asked a friend who is practicing physio and luckily she said all seemed good. Though she did also tell me that since I spend so long in front of a computer I really need to watch my posture - straight back, shoulders back and no poking my head forward to look at the monitor. In addition should also be regularly doing stretches to relax the muscles around the neck/shoulder area.

Been told time and time again about the posture (though it is so hard to sit upright!) but didn't realise that we should also stretch on a regular basis to relax/strengthen the muscles around the shoulders/neck. Guess that is one extra thing to do in the breaks I try to take every 30 minutes when using a computer.

Thursday, 29 October 2009

Thought of the day: Passion, focus and vision are all vital to achieving a goal.

In my many random readings, came across this article: 10 things Google has taught us, and I thought the first three points were quite good. You need passion to move forward and be willing to put in the hard work. You also need focus otherwise all your passion may be spread out amongst too many of your ideas. Lastly, you need a vision to tie together the "focussed passion" to work to an ultimate goal.

One of the quotes I quite liked from the article was to do with focus: "People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the 100 other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully". I have probably suffered from this fault myself - too many ideas and I seem to want to try them all out - will need to learn to pick carefully and say 'no' to the other ideas!

Friday, 30 October 2009

Thought of the day: All domain names consist of letters from the English alphabet, numbers, dots, dashes, underscores right? Well, actually no, meet: Internationalised Domain Names!

Was watching the morning news when I saw that the ICANN had approved domain names that contain non-Latin characters. My initial reaction was something along the lines of: Wow, that is awesome. Would be cool for non-English speaking people! Though it would mean getting to these non-Latin domains may prove tricky - you can't expect everyone to know how to type Chinese, Greek, Arabic etc! I wonder how this will work…

I had thought that Internationalised Domain Names were new and just introduced today, but a quick google later in the day revealed that I was very very wrong. In fact it was proposed in December 1996 and implemented in 1998 and a protocol to handle non-Latin domains had been agreed on, adopted and supported by many top level domains!

Today's announcement seems to be just an extension from IDNs as existing non-Latin domains still ended with .com, .kr, .tw etc but now with the announcement from ICANN these restrictions no longer apply. It shall be interesting to see how this unfolds and if the allowance of non-Latin extensions will mean greater use of IDNs on the Internet.

Saturday, 31 October 2009

Thought of the day: Auctions feel very much like gambling, and "3rd and final call" don't seem to be very "final" at all!

Attended an auction today (was only there to observe, didn't bid) but what I can say is it felt like the bidders were gambling that that extra $1000 or $500 in their bid will make their bid the winning bid. For at least 3 bids before the winning bid, I was able to sense the winning bidder felt like he had won, but was then out bid, so he tried his luck and put in another bid.

It was also very interesting to see how the auctioneer dragged the auction on when he saw that there was potential interest from one of the competing parties. In my opinion it was a bit unfair, since several times at the "3rd and final call" the auctioneer actually stopped and asked uncertain bidder "are you sure etc etc" and because of that it increased the price by at least $1000. Maybe all auctions are like that where "3rd and final call" isn't really final until the auctioneer is 100% certain that he has squeezed every last bid out of everyone.

ps. Not convinced that "Thought of the day" is a great name...been trying to think of another name all of today but couldn't come up with anything! Any suggestions…?
pps. This is my first stab at something like this - any comments, suggestions, feedback will be awesome!

Sydney Opera House

For those that are unaware, I have an interest in photography and love to just take random shots when I see something that appears interesting. But unlike many avid photographers, I don't have a fancy digital SLR Camera, instead I have a normal point-and-shoot camera (Fuji Finepix J110w).

As with most point-and-shoot cameras you are quite limited to the number of settings you can play around with even if it is in manual mode. Unfortunately this means many "How to take an awesome photo" tutorials out there are quite useless since you can't follow their suggestions of increasing or decreasing the ISO, aperture, shutter speed, exposure etc.

However, all is not lost as you can definitely still take awesome photos with your humble camera. Here are five tips that I find work quite well for me, if you have your own technique/tips I would be very interested to hear them

1. No Flash!

This might be a personal preference, but I find when you use flash when taking the photo in a dark/dim place, the light from the flash is usually too strong which makes the whole photo look artificial. The simplest solution is to try and brighten up the place - turn on a light, open the curtains etc. Lighting is quite important in taking a good photo, so the more flexible you can be with your lighting the better.

Another  alternative is to cover your camera's flash with a piece of paper/tissue. This somewhat subdues the flash while still providing a source of light. I've only tried this a couple of times and overall it worked quite well. Of course, you can always take two photos, one with the flash and one without - that way you will have both alternatives and you can pick the best one.

Having said all that, there are always exceptions when using flash and as weird as it may sound, using flash outdoors (where it is nice and bright) can often give you better photos - it lights up your subject just enough to make them clear, but since the surrounding is bright as well the flash doesn't stand out like a sore thumb.

2. Use the timer
This may seem like a weird tip, but the timer on your camera is truly your friend. One problem I find with my camera is it is very easy to accidently take blurred photos, if there isn't enough lighting any slight movement will cause the photo to be blurred. This is where the timer comes to your rescue!

If possible find somewhere to place your camera: desk, chair, bench, ledge, ground, anything...just don't drop your camera! Put the timer on, press the shutter-release button (the button to take the photo), wait to see the countdown start and move your hands away from the camera. This way, you are not touching the camera at all when it takes the photo. The reason for timer+moving hands away is you know for sure when the camera takes the photo there is no motion at all, not even the slightest of nudges from you pressing the button.

If you can't put the camera on a stable surface, this trick can still semi-work. Same drill, except after you press the shutter-release button, wait till the countdown gets to about 1 second or so left and hold your breath while the camera takes the photo. I find holding your breath helps a tiny bit in not moving - don't ask me why...

The Museum of Contemporary Art

3. Night photos
Probably one of the hardest times to take a nice photo with a normal point-and-shoot camera is at night, especially outdoors since you can't just flick the light on. I've found to take decent photos at night you really need to just place your camera on a stable surface, use the timer (see Tip 2) and have a longer exposure.

How do you change the exposure I hear you ask. Well, most modern point-and-shoot cameras have preset Scenes or Modes (eg. portrait, night, fireworks etc). Anything that is for night/dark conditions will generally have slower shutter speeds, which means longer exposure time,  which means your camera will "soak up" more surrounding light and give you a sharper/clearer photo. Since your camera will sit there for a couple of seconds "soaking up" the surrounding light you need to make sure that your camera does not move at all - thus the timer trick. You may have to play around with the different night modes on your camera to get something nice. The photo of the Sydney Opera House (above) and The Museum of Contemporary Art (right) were both taken using my point-and-shoot camera set on "Fireworks" mode with the slowest shutter speed possible (The normal night mode just didn't let in enough light resulting the photos being quite dark).

4. Focus and trick your camera
Every now and then you might want to trick your camera into letting in more or less light than what it would automatically do. For all digital camera's I've seen/used, when you half press the shutter-release button the camera will focus on the frame you have chosen - generally there will be some sort of feedback that it has found the focus (maybe something displayed on the screen or a beep).

Once the camera has found the focus, it will calculate all the required settings for that particular frame. Relying on this, if you want your camera to soak up more light, first focus (half press the button) on something darker than your subject (preferably similar distance away), then move your camera back to what you really want to take, then take the shot.

This works because when you initially focus on something darker, your camera will think it will need bit more light to take a clear shot, so when you go back to your intended subject (which is brighter than the initially focused subject) your camera will let in more light than usual since it still has the "let in more light for dark object" setting from your initial focus.

5. Lower your megapixel
This may sound like an odd tip, but lowering the number of megapixels you use to take the photo may help in giving you clearer photos. The technical details behind this is quite confusing, but generally a point-and-shoot camera won't have a great sensor (one of the important components in the camera needed to take clear photos), so the higher the megapixels, the more noise you'll get. You probably don't need anything more than 5MP as that will be more than enough to print out the standard 4"x6" photos (in fact you only need 3MP to do that).

Edit: Came across this post by David Pogue about Photography Tips and Tricks - I'm keen to give Tip #2 a go!

I must admit that after finishing the initial release of the plugin I never really got back to add more to it (though I do think it has enough 'features' as is, don't want feature creep!). In fact, I don't think I've touched it ever since submitting the first version (shame on me ).

However, in the past few weeks I was contacted by Georg Adamsen who had very kindly translated the admin settings into Danish - thanks Georg So now armed with the files edited by Georg that enabled the Danish translation, I looked at code that I had written some two years ago (yay for comments) and reviewed the comments on More Link Modifier download page to see if any changes were needed. Surprisingly I didn't make any drastic changes, only a few small cosmetic changes. Having said all that, there are some possibilities of a few small additions to the plugin, in particular use of 'the_content_more_link' filter available from WordPress 2.8 that allows adding extra attributes to the more link.

So, thesis is all done (yeah!), holiday was awesome (see below) and starting to work full time is definitely a different experience but a good one

Won't go too much into my holiday, but there is one thing I have to point out - Japan has heaps of cool and wonderful things. One which I thought was very cool is in some stations, the platform numbers start at zero! Probably looked like a silly tourist taking a photo of the inside of the station, but definitely worth it - how often do you see Platform 0?

In more 'blog-related' news, I am planning to make some major changes to the blog, the most significant being completely re-skinning it. Due to the changes the blog will most likely look very bare and default-y for a period of time - hoping that it won't be too long! Also, aiming to blog on a slightly more regular basis!