Trying to clear out some of the mountain of partly-used video tapes and came across some footage from St. Andrews mid-2009. So I slapped together a quick edit. Sadly it wasn’t a particularly nice day weather-wise, and not being a huge golf fan we weren’t that impressed. The harbor is very pretty, but I think Sirin and I both prefer Crail or North Berwick (down the coast).
Musings of a frustrated designer read more »
I’m still not totally happy with our Kameko designs, but there are so many distractions (especially at this time of year!). Sadly our Christmas card project became a bit of a rush-job at the end, but finally we have something online!
It’s hard to ignore the hype when it comes to the usual rubbish from Hollywood, and if you fall for it expectations are rarely fulfilled. This has only happened twice to me: I hear everyone raving about a movie but manage to avoid seeing any spoilers, specials, previews, clips, magazine interviews… you name it. That first film was Terminator 2, and right until the moment Arnie saves John Conner I thought Arnie was Mr Evil Killing Robot. It made the movie for me! I felt so lucky because, I really had no idea what to expect.
Work and other commitments kept me out of the ‘film’ loop for the last month or so, so the vast majority of the Avatar hype passed me by. I knew it was 3D, and very expensive, and I had seen the trailer. That was it. Nothing could have prepared me for sitting down and watching this film. First off, the 3D is just outstanding. My inner nerd wanted to stand up in the middle of the screening and jump up and down excitedly like a 5 year old screaming “did you see that! did you see that!?”. You quikcly forget the pig-ugly glasses you have to wear, and the weird brain twisting that goes on as your reality is warped: the 3D is something really, really new. It was like watching Star Wars for the very first time.
The computer graphics were also quite superly executed. May Jar Jar rot in his cartoony pixelated grave! For the first time these CGI characters were 100% convincing. At no point was I pulled from the movie by shaking computer-game characters and dodgy wire-removal stunts. And the forests… you have to see this movie for the forests! Just beautiful.
The down side? Mediocre wannabe eco-friendly heroic storyline and paper-thin characters. But you’ll forget all that 
Yesterday we had the pleasure of meeting up with some of the local Japanese community for a “Bonenkai”, a sort of ‘forget the year party’ at Bonsai restaurant across town. We met some interesting folks, drank plenty of sake and had a rather good time! A Japanese singing group also entertained us with 3 rather lovely songs (sadly short!). I think Atsuko has posted the audio we recorded over at her blog.
I won’t bore anyone with pictures from the meal, but Bonsai’s toilets were worth a few photos (!):
Yesterday, film night at the Forest Cafe in Edinburgh with Atsuko and friends: the wonderful Studio Ghibli anime Nausicaa and the Valley of the Winds. This film continues to amaze me: so beautiful, and more relevant today than ever before. Following the film we had a discussion group. Is there really a sound ecological ‘green’ message to Nausicca? Just why does director Miyazaki focus on young female protagonists? Is the film a more abstract metaphor for the time in which it was created (the 80s)?
Well I for one would hate to be someone who reads to much into ‘art’: for me it was a beautiful (sometimes frightening) fairytale, and lets leave it at that…
You can see Atsuko’s notes from the viewing here.
A couple of first-passes of place-holder backgrounds for the BiteSizedJapan twitter account (@bitesizedjapan). I’m not happy with these yet, but it’s better than nothing… Featuring, as ever, our hostess Kameko and some of the branding carried across from the layouts.
While AJAX has its place, it’s good to learn when not to use it.
We discovered with our Intranet project significant speed penalties introduced by loading a lot of dynamic content in via AJAX at the same time. It’s very easy to get carried away and try load everything in with jQuery, but on an initial page draw this is clearly a Bad Thing:
Take our Intranet portal as an example. It consists of 9 widgets, each of which has fully dynamic content. After the portal is initially constructed by the server, loaded by the client, and jQuery has initialised, each Widget then goes and fetches its own content. This resulted in an average 35 seconds until the page was fully ready. Clearly this in unacceptable.
Going back and re-working the widgets so that they “pre-populate” the data server side reduced this time to 5 seconds. Subsequent updates are then performed by jQuery AJAX calls so the user experience is unaffected.
A lot of this is due to locking – only two connections can be made to a web server at once from a single client, so an application that generates many AJAX requests will end up having request queued. Also all those requests going back and forth from the server generate a lot of overhead, not to mention that once all the data has finally been received by the client poor jQuery has to do a lot of work!
So we learned the hard way: be careful how you use AJAX!
Another week, and Misa-misa (AKA Vixen) has modified Kameko for BiteSizedJapan. She’s looking cuter each version!
We use Persits excellent ASPEmail, ASPJpeg and ASPUpload components, however we found another gotcha with the installation of these components under Windows Server 2003 x64 with IIS running in 32bit mode (see previous post).
Despite uninstalling our previous x64 bit versions of these components, we had issues with the components simply doing “nothing” after a subsequent server restart. Loading pages that made use of any of these server side components simply returned blank values, without any sort of error.
After a bit of digging around, it seems that our uninstalling of the x64 components leaves some stuff in the registry, and in turn causes some sort of conflict with the 32bit versions. So the trick is:
- In RegEdit, Find the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Persits Software\ and remove it
- Uninstall all the components, even if they are 32bit
- Reboot the server
- Reinstall the components
- Reboot the server again
So far everything seems to be working again for us.