January 1, 2010
Here’s my last photo for the year decade! It’s the 9:30pm fireworks at Wollongong harbour, as seen from Bulli tops, like my other steel works photo (my camera can zoom in a long way!).
You can download a larger version:
Wollongong NYE 2009 (3.8MB)
It’s a panorama made up from a couple of 15 second exposures. The RAW files were batch processed in Photoshop, then stitched in Autostitch.
July 18, 2009
If you’ve been following HTML 5, then you’ve seen the new doctype:
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
…compared to the old HTML 4.01 one…
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
It starts out the same… but doesn’t have any of the version information. It’s also much easier to remember (has anyone memorised the old one?)
July 17, 2009
In the last couple of days, I’ve upgraded 4 different WordPress installations — across local and production servers, including 2 WordPress µ. Local servers are ok to upgrade, production servers are a pain.
Everything went pretty smoothly, except this blog…
The FTP connection kept on failing, and not uploading all the files. Some files got half uploaded, and things just didn’t work out nicely. The whole process took forever, because of the huge number of files (it takes longer to upload a lot of small files than one big file). When I thought it was finished, I later found out that not all the wp-admin files got uploaded properly.
By then, I was really frustrated with the whole thing, so I just deleted all the wordpress files (except wp-content of course) to start all over again. I was going to just upload the whole archive file together, and un-compress it on the server, but uploading that failed half-way as well.
In the end, I just uploaded all the files almost one-by-one, which wasn’t fun (it was more like 5 at a time, because that turned out to be reliable as well). Maybe I should stop being such a cheapskate, and use a paid web host instead… with reliable FTP.
That’s not all…
Another issue I had was I found that if you tried to visit my blog during all this, you were served a page with a bunch of random WordPress PHP code printed out. Imagine if it printed out your hard-coded database password or an API key or something similar. That could turn out badly. How should you upgrade websites securely? Maybe next time I will change the .htaccess file to block all requests and show an “upgrading…” page. Is there a better way of doing this?
July 6, 2009
They’re finally here! You can download my first pack of photoshop brushes:
Spraypaint Brushes Set 1 (18 MB)
(Sorry — I don’t have a nice beautiful download button. I could make you wait longer, but I think it would be better if I just give you the brushes!)
UPDATE: You can now get them along with some other goodies from my stock resources page too.
Here’s a little demo picture. It’s not the nicest looking thing ever, but it demonstrates the kind of textures you can create with the brushes:
April 25, 2009
Today I was playing around with some black spray paint (don’t worry, I didn’t do anything bad). I painted some white paper so I can make some Photoshop brushes! Here’s a quick preview:
April 22, 2009
Google has developed a new plugin to run 3D graphics in web browsers! It’s called O3D and the aim is that sometime it will be standards and built into all browsers.
Once you’ve installed it, you can run the demos, including a platform game!
December 17, 2008
Almost a year after it was started, my Lego Star Wars stop-motion video is complete. I had actually finished the animation quite a while ago, it just needed a sound-track, which I finished on the weekend.
November 8, 2008
After using iChat and Adium on my mac for so long, I decided to try the real Windows Live Messenger…
You may want to see the large size to get a closer look at its ugliness.
October 28, 2008
My photo of an alarm clock finally got over 1000 views on Flickr!
It’s been there for just over 1 year and gradually increasing, but I recently found a very good way of getting lots of people to see you: Try joining lots of groups that give out awards to each other. These groups’ rules say you have to view and comment other people.
September 28, 2008
Text editors annoy me. Microsoft Word is too slow and is usually overkill. Apple’s TextEdit and other RTF editors are good, but usually a little too basic.
That’s why I have decided to create my own text editor. It uses Adobe Air, so I can create it in a similar way to creating a website (with HTML/CSS/Javascript). Adobe Air also means it will be cross platform — Mac, Windows (and Linux coming soon). It is based on TinyMCE with a totally custom interface, with much less clutter.
