in da houuuuse

Yes, that time has finally come. After looking around at different properties one finally fulfilled all the requirements of a 'great place'. The search criteria begun with trying to get a house in the CBD. Not an easy task, but still a doable one. So looking around realestate.com.au, the only viable real estate website, few places came up within our price range. Going to the inspections revealed that many others thought the same thing we did. Overwhelming crowds can dampen one's hopes for getting the property in question.
Not swayed by this, we kept looking for a place in the CBD, with wild possibilities of cherry farms sprinkled throughout. The story just kept getting repeated. Shabby, small, too expensive, too much interest. Meh. Meh indeed.
But the day came when the browse for properties in and around the CBD came up with this little gem.
Yep, a two storey freestanding townhouse on a sizeable piece of land in the suburb of Ovingham.

It looked very inviting, so we contacted the agent who was able to let us in there in an evening inspection. Not sure if the cover of darkness was an attempt to hide imperfections or dampen the view, but it didn't work. We fell in love with the place. So to buy it, we had to make an offer. This can be unfair and akward as you don't know what the other interested parties are offering. So we shot a price. Lo and behold, we ended up winning the bidding war against about 15 people by $2k. Awesome. I would have felt like money was lost if we won by $20k or some ridiculous amount. So yay!.
Now off to get a mortgage. Boy do the fees stack up! we ended up paying about $30k in fees!
But after the dust settled, moving into the new house was one of the most exciting things ever. To know that you own it. To think of improvements, changes, possibilities, knowing that you will be the one to benefit is just so empowering. And no freakin 3 monthly inspections from the agent either!
Long live the house!

das is a telee vision

Who says that spontaneous purchases are a waste of money? Well I usually do. I'd like to think of a product, look around, research the web for reviews, get a bunch of prices. This time however, it was different. Going to the local 'Retravision' store on the weekend to lurk around was an accidental event. "Let's just have a quick look", were the famous last words. Well the look was quick indeed. A new model 'W' series of Sony's Bravia TVs has hit the store. "how much is it?", "boy, it looks nice", "what are the specs?" were the in-store comments at the time. Oh yea, whatever, thanks buddy, yep TV is nice but so are the other 20 on the shelves. But this TV in particular stirred something up. It was simple, feature packed and a new model. The price wasn't too bad either.
But what of it, it's just a TV that I've been dreaming of having for a long time, but the tech has never been up to scratch or the looks were way off. I didn't want some 1366x768 "HD ready" or compatible LCD that pretended to be. But this was the real deal. Full 1080x1024, digital receiver, 3 HDMI ins, VGA in, and the design was clean and simple. After inquiring about the 'best price', we went looking around. No other store had these in stock yet as it was so new and the other prices were about $500 more than the one on offer.
So We thought 'stuff it' let's get spontaneous on this baby. Bought it, it fit in the car.. just. Got it home, turned it on. Dream-like. Everything was perfect. Nice bright, sharp image, and the HD programs looked awesome. After doing some research on the web about this model, I found that the reviews were very favorable, so that made me happy.
Long live the new telly!

Ukert crater mystery

As far as weird things on the moon go, Ukert crater is right up there. It forms an equilateral triangle and has been dismissed by experts as being a naturally formed landmark. All in all that's all interesting and might have passed by me as another anomaly to have a think about and reflect on why NASA does not investigate these things further or release their findings more. But when I was browsing around google's moon maps to the Ukert crater, I discovered that a small area to the northeast of it was blurred out. Why? what's hiding under this blur? Strange landmarks? Signs of intelligent construction or activity? None of these questions can be answered because this area is blurred out! Now that just makes me more intent on finding what's there.
Some scraped pics:
moon.google.com:

map-a-planet.com:

























Roads and castles:
































funnily enough gone from the same spot on the lunar orbiter mosaic

Infrared lens filtering

Recently I became fascinated with taking images in the infrared range. This is mainly because the usually non-obvious detail of usually ordinary things. Especially in nature. It's fascinating to notice that this range of light is being emitted from various objects. Sometimes this may be accidental, for example in fire. Other times it might be on purpose, as in flowers emitting their attractive attention grabbing patterns to various insects that can only view objects in the infrared color range.
I'm also interested in infrared because it's how best photos and videos of UFOs are taken. You never know, one might get in the range of the lens.
Besides that, it's fun!

Ok So here it is.
I got a Hoya 72R IR filter from eBay for about $50. This one came highly recommended, so that's the kick. On my Canon S3IS I used Manual mode with F2.7 and ISO set to 200 or 400.
First of all: use a tripod. Even with the automatic stabilisation, if the exposure time is so high, you're gonna get some blur. This is an image done by holding the camera in my hands.
One thing is that you should point around the sun. Sunrises or sunsets are awesome.

So now what to do with an image like this?
















I'd say Auto Levels and Greyscale would bring out more detail.















And this is a color version of this example. Check out the difference between the leaves!
















Oh and fire looked really interesting. Check out these two photos of the same fire. Interestingly enough, the IR version (first one) has not been altered.

Everything is new again

Yup, my lease expired. As it rose by AU$10 per week, and a new place happened to be literally 'down the street' at AU$120 less per week, the Tao flowed towards the 'up and move' . All went swimmingly well with the help of my dear girl and couple of my mates. Oh except for the 'fridge falling off the ute' incident. Yup at a major intersection, while turning to the right gradually, the fridge flew off the left side of the ute, smashing all over the road. Cars swerved, frantic scramble began to pick up the fridge pieces off the major intersection. Lucky the fridge didn't fall into a car or a cyclist. Other than that it's a bonus because the fridge was going to be replaced anyway, so I didn't really want it that much.
Oh brought a new car too after selling the mini. Back to the world of buttons. After much consideration between the Golf, Volvo, Renault, Honda, BMW, the beamer won for value for money/brand/feel hands down. A silver 2000 318i executive, at 74000km. Leather seats. Great price, great drive. It's something like the one in this picture. Some tinting and a set of wheels wouldn't go astray.
All is now in place with the new house feeling welcoming and comfortable. Ace!

Something on Mars

I've been browsing around moon.google.com and mars.google.com because they are there and to check out other planets for yourself is great fun. More than it sounds. It's like exploring a planet. When looking at the map of Mars, there are gray strips where the satellite missed areas of the ground. That's fine. Looking between those reveals a landscape with hills, valleys, riverbeds. It's quite astounding actually. Having a further scan around I found this. Now why is this rectangle grey? it's as if this bit of data has been removed. It's obviously very high because it casts an enormous shadow to the north. But the center of it looks like the gray that the satellite camera passes missed. Why gray it out? What is it? The mind boggles.

Mini is gone

My little mini is gone. Yes that's right, sold it up for a extra AU$1200 for 9 months usage. It's like the money I've spent on the services, rego, fuel, and the clutch arm fix has come back plus some.
After putting it on carsales.com.au and ausmini.com many people called, few came in and had a look.
The lucky buyer was a grey old fox. With too much money and expectations for tricky questions, he came over, had a look and a reminisce about his young mini days, he was keen. He said he will leave a deposit, then pay the rest later. After depositing $500, he called and will pick it up by Sunday.
So there it is. Everyone, a minute of silence please.

Minis are great and I would recommend one to anyone. I know I will sometime in the future. Until then, a push bike will be great. Or a car with buttons!

Has it been a minute yet?

2012 - Apocalypse or not?

Well, not according to these Tibetan monks who have used their powers of Remote Viewing to see what's going to happen.
Their vision does sound spot on though, and to think that it's only 5 years away that this is going to happen. 2012 has been a year that has been predicted by many independent texts as being the year of 'Apocalypse'. This however, does not mean the physical destruction of the world. But a change on a massive scale in the way that humanity behaves and thinks. I would also hope that it spells the end of organised religion. Most evil institution in the world, preaching spirituality and salvation by threats, costing many wars and countless lives. And the logic of religion, don't even get me started on THAT. It holds as much water as believing that Unicorns created the world amongst rainbows and pots of gold.

Touchy Feely

Getting excited about the future of computers has been a passion of mine for a while now. With a few duds along the way, few things stand out. One of those is the multi-touch interface sweeping the world. Perceptive Pixel look like a stand out bunch of guys, and have been doing this for some time now.
Microsoft has now kicked in and together they combined to create the Microsoft Surface which looks like a modded version of Windows Vista. This kiosk like device works with infrared sensors to detect objects on the tabletop. In the demo videos, file transfer between a camera and the filesystem is done upon placing the camera on the desk surface. Dang!

Programmer and being one

It's been a while since I've blogged. Hectic times at work and life make for a slow blogger. At least I don't cheat and hire someone to do this for me!
Anyway, this article from Robert R Read is a really good read if you want to know what's going on in a programmer's mind on a day to day basis. Besides being comprehensive, it is also full of really good advice based on day to day challenges faced when engineering a software product. His strong emphasis on the personal and team aspect of software engineering is a good refresher from the cold facts of the formal processes involved in this activity. This stipulates that logically evolved ideas and processes using software development products have implications on the formal structure of the software processes.
Even though it's a big read, it's kept light and relevant. Great read!

Mystery amongst chaos

It's been a couple of weeks of the most intense development at work. The wayfinder is becoming a very popular product, so everyone wants it. And as it happens this is a product that I'm responsible for developing, so day to day I'm backed up with frantic development. Also when deadlines approach way too quickly, the stress levels increase. All is well so far though as expectations are being met and the software is becoming a configurable 'product' at a good pace.
Amidst this frantic work pace I've been refreshing myself with news stories from sources such as this and this. At first look it might seem that these news sources are all about conspiracy theories and silly delusions. But really they are just aggregators of news stories about topics that fascinate me: Archaeology and science's inability to explain all that has happened in the past in terms of available technologies and people's knowledge.
While dwelling on some of these fascinating topics, I thought I'd have a look on google maps where Tikal stood and how it looked on these maps. Meh, nothing fancy really. I'd rather be there in person (one day). But then scrolling about 70km to the south-west of Tikal shows an 'L' shaped cut out of the Jungle with squares on either end. It's about 5km by 5km, which is massive. I've never heard of the place so I though I'd do some research. Nothing. This really stumped me. All the tourist archaeological locations are everywhere else but this place. What's this about? This really freaked me out. Why is nobody mentioning this massive area? Zooming out of this map reveals that this area is dead in the center of the triangular area of south Mexico and western Guatemala. And surprisingly this 'L' shape can be seen from a large distance away. There are no town around it. and the ones that are, don't mention anything about this area. Archaeological maps reveal nothing. I am really freaked out at this point.
The other thing I thought this could be is an area of deforestation. This is possible, but why would any one leave two tree-laden square ends on either end of the 'L' shape? Also each of the square areas within this area are made of triangular areas that meet in the middle. This is reminiscent of the way that pyramids look from above. This is still freaking me out and now I really want to find out more information about it and if none comes along, A trip to this area will certainly be in my future travel agenda.
If anyone has any information about this area, I would be more than greatful, so please let me know.

Touchscreen navigation: touch or scratch?

With the encroachment of the self glorifying iPhone, it shows that touchscreens are starting to break trough the mainstream barrier. What is really interesting here though is the innovation of navigation methods using a touchscreen on a small device. Apple seem to be pushing the fact that we already have hand fulls of stylus', namely our fingers. So we should use those, and throw out the old stylus.

The idea of using a finger on a small device touchscreen is not new. My old iPaq would accept finger touches, albeit very difficult to register a press and inaccurate, but it did work for things like the media player. However this raises two main points that pop up when the stylus is thrown all together in favour of the finger.
Accuracy and Visibility - when you're touching a button, you obscure it. This may reduce the accuracy of the button and it definitely removes its visibility. Issues that can be huge on a small-screen device. Apple, being the kooky bunch that they are came up with a reverse-touch approach. I think this one fails too because when you're going to touch a button, you want to go and touch it directly, not have to wind your hand around the back of the device. The awkward feeling of this would actually shift my preference towards obscuring the button on order to press it.
A simple stylus would solve both of these issues. It is both accurate and does not obscure what it's pressing, making for a usefull little stick. C'mon Apple, dropping this? Really?
This should not, however, detract from the viability of using fingers as a navigation device on small device touchscreens. Indeed it doesn't look that bad on the iPhone. But what also impressed me is that in parallel, a Taiwanese company HTC have released their version of how some of this navigation can work. Also I'm glad that they stole some of iPhone's thunder by releasing this device before the iPhone.

Flash CS3 , pleasure to meet you

Finally I got a go ahead to use Flash CS3 as a day-to-day worktool. And what a pleasure it has been so far. It seems that more then merging Flash into Adobe Suite family, Adobe really listened to the developers and included some great features in the IDE. It's mostly the little things not to detract from the established workflow routine, but it somehow feels enhanced and smooth.
The way that the different control panels can be folded into a sidebar that not only makes the task of saving realestate, but it gives a visually appealing medium-size icon side tray with easy one click reference to that panel. The tool bar itself is interesting. you can click the top of the toolbar to squeeze the tools thinner along the screen, one column instead of two. Then when you're doing something else the tool bar hides, and a click on it's head bar brings it back. Small things like this make it good. Similar thing happens if you have your library open from the sidebar for example, then you click on an empty frame, and the library folds up. This I found to be a bit annoying becuse I wanted to open the library, target a frame by clicking it then dragging the library item onto the stage. Couldn't do it without opening the library again because it just closed. The other criticism that I have is that the contents of a library can take a while to load.
Other than that, it seems really fast. Adobe have done a great job merging Flash into it's product range.
I've only been working with FlashCS3 using AS2 at the moment, which seems like a waste, but I'm looking forward to diving into AS3 already having the tool in front of me.

My work is getting blogged with positive feedback

Doing a quick search on "iDirectory westfield" in Google, brings up a few blogs that people actually went to trouble to to write about my software. This is the wayfinding kiosk in the San Franciso Westfield shopping center. This one seems to be positive on the software interface part, which makes me happy. The couple of points that were pointed out were about putting more of these kiosks around the place so that people didn't have to wait to use them. There is a good discussion going on here about the viability of this type of interface in shopping centers. Always good to discuss these things. This one went to the trouble of putting the interface usage on digg and youtube.
Great feeling.

Sony's stepping up in the display race

With it's bendable thin screen. This screen is paper thin piece of plastic (well plastic thin then), so it won't break if dropped. And it is reminiscent of sci-fi movies such as minority report where the screens are transparent. This one however has the added bonus of being bendable. This means that all sorts of shapes can now be surrounded by pixelated real estate. Going beyond the clothing applications of such technology, with the introduction of a touchscreen panel this could go very far. Any surface becomes a tactile, interactive interface that can fulfil a purpose.
The technology involved in making these screens has been around for a while. I've heard of it about 5 years back when the Kodak labs were researching the capacity to emit luminescent colour from a chemical reaction generated by insects such as the firefly. It's only now that we are seeing some actual results. In fact it looks like these screens are brighter and more detailed then the conventional LCD. Because the technology here is chemical and organic in nature, researches have been having trouble increasing the size if these screens for a while, but it seems to be finally happening. The OLED screens that are emerging now should see that all our screens in the future are just a piece of plastic. Awesome.
Devices could range from patient health monitors to gaming industry's newest controller revolution: the hand. If there was a console (let's bank for PlayStation 5) that comes with 2 pieces of transparent plastic. This moulds to any surface, your forearm, leg, the couch, and it displays touchable controls that conform to a standard of course, but may be altered by the software to have additional buttons, sliders and controllers. This does take away from the whole 'button' experience, but I think it is adaptable. Hope it's better for the gaming RSI too.

var myWickedCrib = new HunterCherryFarm();

Looking around realestate.com.au, we came across a cherry farm at the outskirts of Adelaide's north-eastern urban sprawl in a cute town called Montacute. The property is here and it's just amazing from the photos. This weekend is a definite drive up there to check it out closer.
Owning a cherry farm with walnut trees and raspberry bushes would be a dream come true! The possibilities! 80 hectares with other 2 houses on the property, it s a dream! One of the houses could be a cafe, making all sorts of delicious morsels. Taking the cherries to the grower's markets, selling produce to the local bakeries. The possibilities are endless! The other property could be a guest house. And the main house is just amazing, with it's pantry being made up of 5 rooms! And the cherries! Love 'em!
At over a million though, the price range is way out of my pocket, but if it's a business on site, it might be good to go. Maybe if it's declared as a farm, I'll be a primary producer getting all the help I can get from the government. Also it is an established business, so it would be generating income, hopefully enough to make up the mortgage payments! Oh and did I mention the cherries?

Or maybe Oprah will get it for me. Oprah, are you reading this?

Free internet for thee

If you ever find yourself at Sydney airport with a laptop that has a wireless network card, connect to the "Cisco" network. It gives you access to the internet for free for some reason. In fact I am making this post from the airport right now. I wonder if this is a permanent service or whether Cisco have made a security blunder here. It doesn't seem right because there is a 'sydneyairport.com' wireless network floating around here, and when connecting to it, you are asked to pay money to connect to the web at ridiculous rates. Well, well, surf's up!

M$ Vista - don't do it if you can help it

The issue of copying files at a snail's pace in the latest and greatest Microsoft OS, Vista, seems to be turning into a serious nuisance. I can't believe that the OS even escaped the Q&A phase when this issue of some basic functionality like deleting and copying files is causing such an fuss amongst users. What makes it worse is that Microsoft are dragging their feet and not releasing an official fix or offering anyone any explanations. This issue alone has stopped me from going anywhere near Vista until everyone is happy with it and there are unavoidable advantages of switching to another OS - the basic reason why I don't wanna move to MAC OSX. If it ain't broken, don't fix it.

SWF -> XAML one for the Flashers in the tech wars

This looks promising. Electric rain have released a SWF to XAML converter! This means that things like Silverlight and other XAML authoring tools could be redundant. Developers could leverage their knowledge of flash to create SWF files and then convert them to XAML, the crappy MS bound vector format for Vista.
Go Flash! One for the home team!

tech wars

It seems that the last few weeks have seen a blitz of new technologies emerging, major players releasing products, and the UI wars are well and truly on. It has been a whirlwind. Not much of it will have major influences immediately and once the dust settles, it will be interesting who ends up standing. Nevertheless the recent events will have some sort of impact on the way that we work and the industry moves.
So, Adobe released their next iteration of their product suite. This includes the swallowed Macromedia's product suite, including the new Flash CS3 of course. Getting stuck into AS3 has been just around the corner for a while, so having a copy of an IDE AS3 compiler will be a wicked learning boost. The framework at work and the general trend is that everything we make will soon be AS3 based. This release of the Adobe suite has also moved the international design and developer community into line. This is ofcourse for those wo can afford it. But indeed if you haven't got the client who is going to pay for the suite and still profit, then you should keep learning with their demos or sell yourself to someone with money or a CS3 sitting on their book shelf. CS3 promises to work well on mac and windows computers and unify the way things are created. It's pretty much got the monopoly there as none can compete realistically anymore.
This will be boosted with the move of the Flex platform into the open source arena. This will be a major boost in how many people use Flex and now that it's open source, the emergence of Flex communities will be huge. At work we are moving onto the Flex platform so that'll bring me across into that arena, bit more importantly it will be a great learning experience, not to mention huge fun.
In the UI wars, Microsoft is flexing its muscle with Silverlight. Java is having a go with JavaFX. Seeing that JavaFX is considered as being a response to Microsoft's Silverlight, it looks like the battle will be fought out amongst those two for the number two position after flash. Both technologies have a long way to go in order to mature and even attempt to bite at Flash's ankles. But you gotta start somewhere, right?
In the dust, you'll see a lot of hype about Silverlight. Heck there'll be well paying jobs to develop Silverlight content. But that's only because Microsoft has wads of cash, but like most Microsoft technologies, it will become segregated to the Microsoft world. It will be interesting where JavaFX ends up, but my prediction is that it will go in the way of its Swing technology. Dead as.
But that's not to say that these technologies will not have any effect on us Flash devotees out there. The repercussions will be in learning what those technologies are able to accomplish and how. Then it's time for Flash to take the good things and discard the useless.

You could never be too careful, the tech wars are'a'brewin.