IComeFromTheNet.net

Title says it all, I wanted to enjoy some lounge room gaming and the DS was the right price and I love the use of a stylus.

I have always had a dream of playing Civilization on the DS ever since the consoles release many years ago. With the release of Civ Revolutions I can finally realise that dream.

Initially after purchasing it I decided to let that dream wait a while longer and purchased another port of an old favourite  Simicity Creator.  I think revolutions will have to be a Xmas present to myself later on.

I also received the ‘Sight Training’ game and have managed to keep at it for 3 weeks, not that I see a difference the games are fun and like to see how I can improve my score over the coming months. 

After putting the job off for a few months I have have a new phone (Nokia 6500 Slide), it was really an impulse buy at $400 from my local Vodafone store.

I was looking for a phone with Bluetooth (very common now) and a camera above 3 megapixel , both of which this had. It is also a 3G phone, which helps with the future proof. It also looks cool to.

The coolest feature is not actually related to the phone, I purchased a new mp3 player some weeks ago the Samsung  YP-T10, this player also contains a Bluetooth option.

This Bluetooth option allows the phone to connect to the mp3 player as a remote headset. The T10 can then be used to make and answer incoming calls using its own inbuilt microphone.

I did have a problem previously of missing calls when listening to mp3's, not any more :-) 

Interesting Links

HTML or XHTML: Does It Really Matter?

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/html-or-xhtml-does-it-matter

I found this article an interesting read , however I disagree with James Edwards option on XHTML's legacy, simply forcing cleaner syntax on the Internet is an achievement in itself, it really does not matter that the content type is normal html, using xhtml valuators can help to overcome issues with testing and the benefits that clean markup provide in improving  browser page rendering-consistency is worth learning a few new syntax rules.

Handling Flash Crowds from your Garage

http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix08/tech/full_papers/elson/elson_html/index.html

This is a research article on developing web-sites to handle large surges in traffic, what the author called Flash Crowds, I am only part way through, the main content of the article is short analysis of current content distribution networks, a good read so far.

I got a little bored today, so I decided to give a new theme a chance. As a base theme I download a theme called Envision. I found it in the list of themes on the blogengine.net homepage. The theme seemed to have the potential to be mine with a little tweaking of course. An example of the original is below.

Why did I like this theme, well it is based on a light colour scheme, that would go well with my new colours. It's a 2 column page , my previous was a two column fluid layout, so I wanted something different. I love grey background and after examining the image files, I determined that I could re-colour the header, footer ,menu and the the main content frame background.

Out a pull Gimp and 2 hours of 'trial and error' I arrive at what you see now.

Conditional Style Sheets

This is the first time that I used a conditional Style-sheet. A quick explanation is necessary. HTML conditional comments are an IE propriety ability, they are used to target different versions of Internet Explorer. Other browsers will ignore the comments and using conditionals is considered a safe Hack.

   1: <!--[if IE]>

   2:   <link href="/blog/themes/Envision.1.0/css.axd?name=IE.css" 

   3:                         rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

   4: <![endif]-->

IE  interprets this conditional and if true will print the html inside as normal content, other browsers will treat the conditional as a comment only and will not evaluate the expression.

By using a link statement I was able to create and IE only CSS style sheet to override settings in the master Style-Sheet that would not render correctly in versions of IE.

Current I am using rendered content using cssclass:after attribute selector, which IE7 and below do not support, IE will ignore that declaration but will miss out on necessary css settings, by using and IE only Sheet I can override the cssClass and add back the missing details (if you supply cssclass:after it will only apply css you declare to the attribute value of 'content:').

Having bought a very large LCD monitor last December a 26 inch LCD monitor that is and just regretting it a little upon finding that it was really a television not  an up close and personal computer screen but it was cheap and very appealing at the time. Well I just could not let such a large screen go to waste.

The project build a Jukebox for my bedroom,  its got use my existing components , have a remote of sorts and be quiet and low energy as possible.

Existing Components

Vewsonic 26inch LCD Monitor

VIA Mini-ITX ML 1000 

Lian Li PC-9100

New Items

Logitech diNovo Mini

1GB PC2100 Memory

Pioneer Slime Line DVD-Burner

ATA 320Gb HDD

The Software

There were 2 choices:

MediaPortal

My-HTPC

Media Portal, is large well featured and very pretty but it is build for faster machines, on my setup all menus were un-responsive and this kills the application for a jukebox. I chose to use my-HTPC, its a shareware application that ceased in 2003 however it is an excellent front end for media and since I use media player classic for movies and DVD's I don't need these integrated features anyway.  The drawbacks are no support for play-lists and some odd control behaviour and the big one its no-longer in development.

I have just finished some CSS mockups of the interfaces that I previously mentioned here.

Images

I found the Chapter 5 Forms in "The Art & Science of CSS, to be very helpful and I recommend the book to any designer and especially to code developers like me who need that extra help in designing nice looking forms.

I have been doing some design work for a university class. Creating a web application code is the fun part, well for me anyway, but I know from past expereince the value of a story-board and CSS mockups before starting to build dynamic code. (especially in ASP).

I have to that end being doing some design work, I last year used http://www.mockupscreens.com/ to story board a project web site and had positive response to the models so, here we go again. The software has some easy to use interfaces for creating models and already after a quick paper job transferring them rendered the following:

Images

I am very happy with the result, and still have a few more to do but it is looking good.

Update 06/05/08:

I have finished the remainder of the interfaces now just have to do the CSS mockups now

Work Books

Since I have needed more reference materials for my OOP (object oriented programming) class which uses C++ as the language I have taken out my credit card for some exercise.

[C++/CLI: The Visual C++ Language for .NET] 

http://www.apress.com/book/view/9781590597057

As I mentioned previously in another post. 

[ Ivor Horton's Beginning Visual C++ 2005 ]

http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/
WroxTitle/productCd-0764571974.html

I have also Purchased another code-notes book for my XML Class, they are very concise books easy to read, perfect for a quick read in conjunction with class textbooks.

[CodeNotes for XML]

http://www.codenotes.com/books/bookAction.aspx?bookID=2

Leisure Books

Just some easy fiction here.

[Ex Machina (Star Trek: the Original Series) Author : Christopher L. Bennett]

http://www.amazon.com/Ex-Machina-Star-Trek-Original/dp/0743492854

[Hammerjack Author: Giller, Marc]

http://www.hammerjack.net/

[Daedalus's Children Author: Dave Stern ]

http://www.mobipocket.com/en/eBooks/eBookDetails.asp?BookID=16632

[ Taking Wing (Star-Trek : Titan , Book One) Author:  Martin, Michael A; Mangels, Andy]

http://www.amazon.com/Taking-Wing-Star-Trek-Titan/dp/0743496272