Stimul8d

I Am NOT 1337 h4×0r

admin — Thu, 29 May 2008 10:19:43 +0000

I’ve just realised i have exactly 1337 (leet) emails in my personal GMail account. I suppose it had to happen eventually, I just thought it was funny!

Twitter Down Again!

admin — Fri, 23 May 2008 22:17:20 +0000

For god’s sake Twitter,..get it sorted!

I have only recently become a twitterer and this is the third time the service has been unavailable in as many weeks! I know there will be growing pains but it’s starting to take the piss.

Getting Your Favourite Extensions to Work in Firefox 3 RC1

admin — Thu, 22 May 2008 09:48:07 +0000

It’s no secret that Firefox 2 is a memory whore!?? Leave it running for any real amount of time will put even the most capable machines into memory swapping turmoil but what else is there, really, that draws comparison??? There are none.?? Not really (Mac users & Safari aside of course!).?? You may get the odd person who swears by Opera or Flock or maybe even, heaven forbid, IE, but most ‘power-users’ and web workers will have Firefox as their default browser,…and so they should,…it’s great.

The awesome news is that, although Firefox 3 RC1 still consumes a lot of memory if you have it spare, it does a?? much?? better job of releasing that memory when it’s done with it and lets’ face it, there’s a whole heap of other great features i know we’re dying to get our hands on; yet more speed improvements and that cool new address/location bar.?? The only trouble is hardly any of your favourite extensions will work ‘out-of-the-box’, which is a damn shame;?? so let’s remedy that!

First things first though,..i’m not taking any responsibility for any misfortunes you might happen upon by following this method okay??? Good.

How to,..

It’s a quick trick really.?? There’s only 7 simple steps to it. Check the images if you get stuck.

In the address/location bar type “about:config” (without the quotes) and hit enter.
You’ll get a quirky warning about dragons,..just click ‘I Promise I’ll be Careful’.
Right-click anywhere in the whitespace and select New>Boolean.
In the pop-up-box enter the value “extensions.checkCompatibility” and click OK.
Choose ‘False’ from the next pop-up-box.
Repeat steps 3-5 using the value “extensions.checkUpdateSecurity” for step 4.
Restart Firefox.

Awesome,..you should have all the extensions you’re used to and couldn’t live/browse without anymore back up and running sweet as ever.

If anyone does have any problems with this or any extensions that screw up then please let me know or drop a comment in to warn others.

Enjoy.

Excellent Free Font Resource

admin — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 12:57:39 +0000

Image by geishaboy500 via FlickrI’ve all but given up on AbstractFonts.com. It’s become so heavy with Ajax that, for the most part, i can barely navigate the interface,..maybe that’s down to incompatible DOMs but it’s certainly not my first port of call anymore, despite the large collection of free typefaces they have to offer. Today, I’m here to tell you about DaFont.com! They have a few less fonts that abstractfonts but I’d hesitate to call over 7000 typefaces a small collection!

For starters, you don’t need to register to get access to the fonts, only to add and manage new fonts. All the fonts are categorised and browse-able through a number of means; by theme (fancy, gothic, simple etc…), alphabetically, new fonts or top 100. You can customise the preview of each font by size and text so you can see exactly (specific formatting aside, like line spacing or kerning) what you’re gonna get from a given phrase.

It’s worth mentioning that there are some licencing issues with some of the fonts but they clearly state ‘for personal use only’ if that is the case.

Hopefully you’ll get some use out of them

A Generic Queue-Frame Class in C#

admin — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 11:07:55 +0000

A little while ago i had a requirement for a simple, single dimensional, generic collection with a fixed capacity. Now my definition of fixed here is that when the capacity is reached, the oldest item would be pushed off the end of the queue and forgotten. This class would be used to store the last 10 timings to calculate ETAs for downloads in a download manager application but I’m certain there are many more uses for exactly this kind of object!

As you might expect, i thought that the generic Queue would almost certainly do the job but it turns out that despite explicitly setting the collection’s capacity in it’s overloaded constructor, when this capacity is breached, the collection simply doubles in size! IMHO, ‘initialCapacity’ would have made a much more descriptive parameter name given this functionality. Anywho, it turns out that the FCL just doesn’t have anything resembling this functionality (If I’ve missed something, please do tell!) so i set out to write my own.

The class is listed below. There is obviously some delegate functionality (Sort, Find, FindAll etc…) missing that many people would want to implement but I’ve left that up to you since it does all i needed to do at the time. Hopefully this will be of use to someone.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.Collections;
 
    class QueueFrame<t> : IEnumerable<t>
    {
        private T[] values;
        private int topIx = 0;
        private int capacity;
 
        public int Count
        {
            get
            {
                return topIx;
            }
        }
 
        public QueueFrame(int frameCapacity)
        {
            values = new T[frameCapacity];
            capacity = frameCapacity;
        }
 
        public void Enqueue(T t)
        {
            if (topIx &gt; values.Length - 1)
            {
                //shift array elements back one
                ShiftBackOne(ref values);
                values[topIx - 1] = t;
            }
            else
            {
                values[topIx++] = t;
            }
        }
 
        public T this[int Ix]
        {
            get
            {
                return values[Ix];
            }
            set
            {
                values[Ix] = value;
            }
        }
 
        private void ShiftBackOne(ref T[] t)
        {
            T[] temp = new T[capacity];
 
            for (int i = 1; i &lt;= t.Length - 1; i++)
            {
                temp[i - 1] = t[i];
            }
            t = temp;
        }
 
        public T Dequeue()
        {
            return values[--topIx];
        }
 
        public IEnumerator<t> GetEnumerator()
        {
            for (int i = 0; --i &gt;= 0; )
            {
                yield return values[i];
            }
        }
 
        IEnumerator IEnumerable.GetEnumerator()
        {
            return GetEnumerator();
        }
    }

Happy Coding!

26 Top Resources For Stock Imagery!

admin — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 13:41:57 +0000

One of the most important factors in the design of any website or application is the imagery that you use. It helps you to convey just the right message to your audience and can turn an otherwise dull interface in to something much more special; though not necessarily more usable. It can, however, be very expensive to buy these resources in but you don’t need to pay every time!

I’ve collected a reasonable list of links to free icon and image sites over the years which i thought i’d share with you. So here you go, hopefully you’ll get some use from them.

Stock Icons

Stock Icon Search Engines

I have to admit, these three are usually my first port of call when i need a particular icon.