Duchamp meets Tim Burton in the fantastic illustrations of Jinyoung Shin.
Archive for the 'Classic' Category
In the somewhat divided view of Flickr’s recent addition of video, the concept of the Long Photograph has been born. The idea is that a short video, even of a (relatively) static subject says much more than just an image.
These are some really nice 3d renderings on a theme of SciFi/Fantasy PinUps by the 3D Cover Artist Fredy Wenzel.
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and I am just getting warmed up…
Outside the show.
Inside the show
At the private show.
First, make a room. A bunch of wooden boards with canvas stapled on will do fine.
Second, let there be light, or in this case, the electricity for light.
Finally, add some sculpture and position to taste.
Unfortunately, I don’t have images of steps 4 and 5 which are; adding a roof (after all of the sculpture has been placed) and affixing 30″ cinema screens to walls. These two steps were a little involving…
Installation of 12 tonnes of sculpture for the Art London Exhibition…in the pouring rain.
This is where I will be for the next week, a little island north-west of Africa called La Gomera.
He will be missed.
It is so rare that I actually find good and useful utilities for Windows XP, but these three I discovered today are something I wish Windows XP had been built with. Ever wonder what your machine was actually doing when the processor goes to 100% and the disk head is clunking left to right at a phenomenal rate? These recently re-branded applications from the Microsoft-enveloped Sysinternals site should shed some light on it…
Process Explorer
This is an extra detailed task manager, it shows everything about the processes currently running on your PC in a hierarchical view (to show what application opened the process). It has the functionality to not only show the current processor/memory usage, but also a neat little graph for each to show that usage over time and colour codes to show which applications are most active.
This is particularly useful to spot any rogue processes which may be sitting in the background using resources unnecessarily, which can then be killed, suspended or focussed. Unlike the standard task manager, this also has nice descriptions of the application’s vendor and the purpose of it, just a little nicety which makes all the difference.
Filemon
This is much simpler than Process Explorer, but still just as handy. It just lists all of the reads, writes and queries to your hard disks by each application you have running. Crucially it also states whether it was successful or not, perfect for those infinite loops when an application stops responding but there is no processor activity.
Regmon
Perhaps the least obviously useful application of the three, I still included it as it rounds them off nicely. This one shows all of the queries to the windows registry and which application is making them. Again, most importantly whether they were successful or not. If you are getting a whole bunch of requests which are not found perhaps it is time to do some registry cleaning, as this will inevitably slow down your machine.
Recently I have been having all sorts of fun with WDS, the Wireless Distribution System. Basically it is a method of linking two (or more) wireless access points together wirelessly and allowing them to share the same network (or internet connection). This means that you can have a network with strong signal, without needing ethernet cable to be run around the house…true wireless bliss!
Unfortunately, as I have come to realise…WDS is like WiFi was in it’s early days; a complete pain in the ass! WDS is a little different on every device that comes with it, this means setting one up with two devices made by different people can be a nightmare. This is mainly because the devices are usually rather cryptic in terms of what needs to be done to get it working. Im sure it is probably explained very well in the manual…but seriously, what techie R(s)TFM?
My previous experience was with an apple airport network. With airports you simply goto the admin console on the main base station and select the remote stations you want to connect…then it goes of and reconfigures them all for you, great stuff! Almost idiot proof, although I still vaguely recall breaking a wireless network for an hour or so the first time I did it…
So, setting up my home wireless network which consists of a couple of belkin’s, a thompson router and a single airport express wouldn’t be so bad I thought…bleugh, was I wrong!
After many hours of screwing around in various admin pages, loosing connectivity, reseting and finally factory reseting, I have come up with a bunch of things which anyone setting up a WDS network (especially with the Belkin routers) should know.
- Firstly, most obviously, write down the mac addresses for all the routers you are dealing with. These are the addresses which look like 00:11:F4:4E:22:A2, they identify the device on the network and are needed to tell each device where to find a connection. It is much easier to have them listed in once place than to go off and try to connect to the router every time you need it. They are also normally printed on the router casing itself.
- Most of the time the admin consoles will have a page to connect WDS devices which will ask you to input the mac addresses…remember, they wont configure it for you (like they should), they will simply enable it…there are other hoops that have to be jumped through to actually get it working.
- I found it was usually easiest to connect a laptop to the device directly, with a cable, I tried configuring wirelessly but got into all sorts of problems connecting after changing some values…I think it thought I was trying to hack it!
- The wireless network itself must:
- be on the same channel - it took me a looong time to realise this, also 11g apparently prefers channel 1, 6 or 11 (I can’t remember where I read this, or whether it is true or not). Try not to choose a channel which every other router in the area is using…like 11.
- have the same security - I would advise starting with no security, then WEP, then WPA…get it working first, then work on points for style. Of course you can leave it open if you don’t mind some techie-hobo using your connection for a bit, or if you want to get out of a filesharing legal case (make sure your computers are locked down though)
- have the same password - make sure it is always encoded the same too, ‘11111′ in ascii is different from ‘11111′ in hex. On an apple device, use “’s to show it is ascii or a $ in-front to show it is hex…most other devices have a dropdown.
- use 802.11g only - WDS will only work on the 11g standard…most routers default settings are using 11b & 11g. They wont reconfigure themselves after you enable WDS, or tell you that it needs to be done, they just wont work.
use the same wireless name (SSID)- you don’t have to call them the same thing, although if you want to be able to walk around the house with a laptop, seamlessly connecting to the strongest signal…you do!
- I found it was possible to connect the routers to two or more others at the same time, meaning a mesh network could be put together. Really good if you have people in the house who like unplugging or turning things off, however it did seem to increase the ping times by quite a bit for me.
- Finally, once it is setup be prepared for it to break at any given opportunity. Some of the admin consoles will even delete all of the details you put into the WDS section if you change other details in the system (argh!), thats when the mac addresses you noted earlier come in useful. Most devices come with a settings-backup feature too, this might not be a bad use of five minutes.
This is the information that I wish I had read about three weeks ago…
I am hoping that this info becomes obsolete soon, wireless mesh networks are pretty handy when they work right but the setup really isn’t for the feint hearted.
As with many things, the technology is here…we just aren’t sure how to best present it yet.
I have kinda been avoiding IE7 for the previous betas simply due to the tight integration with Windows Update and all the nasty WGA stuff. But since it is due to be released ‘this summer’, and after having read this post about the IE7 release…I figured it was probably time to see actually how much work it will cause me to do and how much stuff it will not work with.
So, I fired up virtual pc (hah! you think I would install it on my main box?) and downloaded a copy of IE7 beta3 from here and ran the installer. First impressions, mmm…windows blue installer, next, next, ok, next, ‘the installer wants to validate this copy of windows’…whatever!, next, next, install…ahh, it would seem microsoft have decided to do away with the pesky progress indicator and replace it with a meaningless xp-startup style knightrider effect. I assume to show windows hasn’t crashed yet, but deliberately not to show how much longer the process will take. Is this because they don’t know how much stuff is going to be installed? perhaps it is only because the software is beta, they will wrap it up at the end…I hope. After quite some time of ‘essential updates’, ‘installing core components’ and whatnot we are finally at the restart your computer screen…
After restarting, I open it up by clicking the spiffy new icon and am immediately taken of and bounced around microsoft.com, msn.com etc…finally ending up at a configuration page allowing me to enable phishing validation and all sorts of other ‘protect me from the internet’ style options. The phishing validation seems to be something IE7 is quite proud of, it sends a url to microsoft which decides whether it is safe or not…hmm, not a wholly bad plan…but I am not sure about microsoft making the decision for me, I think I will leave it disabled for now.
Looking at the screen in-front of me, something is wrong…something is missing, ahh…the ‘file’, ‘edit’, ‘view’…menus are missing…oh no…they have just moved them from the expected top-left, to bottom-right…how handy. I guess most IE users probably don’t use them anyway. Luckily in the (bottom-right) Tools menu, I found it can be turned back on, except it appears below the address bar, instead of above it…now I have 2 ‘tools’ menus, with slightly different menu items inside…although the first few options are the same just to add a little more confusion. Someone didn’t quite think that one through too well…
hey look…tabs, thank god for that…they are all chunky and rounded. The interface for them is quite nice though, a new tab is signified by just a little bit of a tab to the right…which I like. The close button is a little ‘x’ on the tab itself, safari style, (and an essential extension for firefox). My only gripes are the rather naff looking blue sonar loading icon, but that is pretty inconsequential and that none of my favicons seems to be appearing, I guess they must have changed something, bah!. After opening a new tab, there is a nice microsoft explanation about what tabs are and why they are worth using, which I dare say most users will never remove. Also appearing when I open more than one tab is a ‘thumbnail’ button, sort of an expose-style page showing the contents of all your tabs…nice.
Windows Live appears to be the default search engine…and…hey, what a surprise…they offer no other packaged options for searching. Although it was pretty easy to install Google from the installation site, it would have been nice to have the option from the start…I guess Live search will be taking a slightly bigger slice of the search market in the future…I don’t have a massive problem with that, as my sculpture site is ranked #1 for ‘sculpture‘ as a search 
The rss integration is quite nice, I certainly think it will begin to make rss a little more accessible to the non-techie…also it is now called ‘feeds’ rather than rss, probably a good thing to make it look a little less geeky. When you press the feed icon, you are whisked off to a safari style feed template, certainly better than raw xml…
There are now Internet Explorer ‘add-ons’ to rival firefox’s extensions…I doubt they will have the same range of innovation in the short-term (probably not in the long-term either), at the moment they are things like: auto-complete forms, offline browsers and flash players…the sikly-sweet stock photography on these pages made me want to wretch too.
There is also a ‘zoom-in’, ‘zoom-out’ button in the bottom-right to scale the page, (images and all) opera-style, this is something firefox has needed for sometime. It means that I can view big pages (even big pages with liquid layouts) on my little 800×600 virtual pc screen…again, thats kinda nice…
All in all, IE7 (or Windows Internet Explorer as it is now dubbed) seems like a pretty good update to IE6. They have clearly given it quite a bit of thought as to the interface and targeted it specifically at the non-tech who (most-likely)isn’t totally clear on what a browser is, let alone why they should get a new one. It doesn’t really offer anything especially new over the current competition, however it does wrap up some of the nicer features in opera (page-scaling), firefox (tabs, extensions) and safari (rss skinning) into one browser, considering it has been over half-a-decade since the last iteration of IE one would expect this.
It seems to run a little slower than IE6, which is not surprising although it is a difficult call for me to make as I am running it through a virtual pc. As well as the fact that speed refinement is usually last to be done in the software dev process.
Most importantly, So far there are only the most minor changes which need to be done with regards to it’s page rendering engine…it doesn’t drastically screw-up any of my pages, at least no more than IE6, which I am a little surprised about.
Would I switch from Firefox to IE7? No chance in hell…I don’t like to be talked-down to in a browser, I like the non-fisher-price buttons in firefox and there is no way IE7 could have the range of techie extensions which I currently use…oh, and I like having the same browser (with sync’ed bookmarks and similar functionality) on PC and Mac. Are we expecting a mac version of IE7?..doubt it…
Would I recommend IE7 to a non-tech user over Firefox? Now thats a difficult question…It would very much depend on whether it was a non-tech user who wanted to learn, or whether it was a non-tech user who gets angry at having to learn…the former I would probably suggest they enjoy the benefits of firefox, and join the movement to which it stands. The latter would probably prefer a little more cotton-wool between them and the web, so IE7 would be the best-bet. This is a pretty significant change from what I would have said yesterday…the new IE has impressed me…
After being online (without change) for almost five years, my side-scrolling edwilde.com site has finally been retired. Yes, it was full of dodgy links, Yes, it had the worst table structure known to man…and Yes, it broke the first rule of web-design…but hey, it did me proud for a number of years.
It will still be accessible from the link in the top left of this page, just incase I feel the need to get all nostalgic.
I recently partook in a big switch of digital work patterns. Actually, to tell the truth, I initiated the change in order to reduce the amount of time spent messing around with things I cannot fix.
For the past 4 years, the sculpture foundation has used iCal sync’ed between all of the machines to plan peoples whereabouts, tasks, meetings etc. This system worked fine, with only a few hiccups every so often. Recently, something has changed with isync, it was rewritten for tiger and has never been quite as good. We have three machines on tiger, three on panther as every new machine we buy comes preloaded with the new os (and I refuse to downgrade). Things are not synchronising properly, they say they are…but events are missing, notes get lost, and the situation seems to be getting worse.
The technical reason for this, as far as I can ascertain, is that the sync utility seems to require a secure connection. The hardly known fact about secure connections is that they are slow as hell on satellite internet, due to the time (latency) of the packets to travel to the satellite and back. They also seem to get corrupted far more than a cabled connection. So in the sculpture estate where adsl is still a dream rather than a possibility, the synchronisations often fail. Panther seemed to be able to deal with this…tiger cant!
The most important aspect of synchronised calendars is that the information must be reliable, otherwise we might as well use paper and a pen. People were generally noticing that more often than not, an event they added was not showing up on other peoples ical calendars. As yet this hadn’t created any really embarrassing conflicts, but it was only a matter of time. A change was needed…
Luckily an alternative arrived, Google Calendar, which I must say I am very impressed with, was released. It presents the information in a nice-ical’y way, however, in a direct comparison with ical it is stronger in some areas than others.
Obviously, speed is the biggest factor…no matter how fast a web-based calendar is, it will never be as fluid as a local application. Unusually, it also doesn’t seem to display changes made to the calendars in real time. As far as I know this can be achieved fairly easily using ajax, perhaps it is the load they are worried about. The final factor is planning for the situation where the internet connection fails, using google, all the calendars fail too. With these things and a strategy to overcome them in mind, the switch went ahead.
The first method of implementation I tried was to have one login for everyone to use. I then remembered that some people only like to view calendars directly related to them, the problem here is that if someone turns off a calendar on one computer it will be turned off when the calendar is refreshed on all of the other computers. This would most likely lead to frustration and rejection of the new system.
So multiple logins had to be created, the system I chose was one each for the office staff, arguably the power users (in a relative sense) and one generic login for computers used by floating staff, such as freelancers and grounds staff. Each login has its own base calendar, which as I found to my dismay cant be cleared without deleting the account completely…oof!
To perform the switch, all of the calendars were exported from ical, then imported into their respective logins…fairly simple and painless process, they have obviously spent time on this.
The generic calendar holds a few more than the rest, although this doesn’t seem to make much of a difference. Once the calendars were created and imported, they then had to be shared with the other calendar users. This was an incredibly easy process and simply involved adding the username to the list of users who could use the calendar. There was a small buggette during this though, the default share mode is read-only and I need read-write for everyone. Because each calendar has to be shared individually, I had to run through adding five different logins for eight calendars, it was pretty inevitable that during the addition of 40 bits of info, coupled with the speed increase possible with the nifty ajax auto-complete that I would add a couple of shares as read-only. Once they were added, and I had noticed my mistake, I simply had to change them to read-write…simple…except google calendars couldn’t seem to do it, each time I pressed save after editing the options I got an error message telling me to try again. I tried again, and again and again then eventually gave up trying to edit the records and chose to delete the login and started again from fresh, making sure I did it properly first time, it worked fine after that.
One well documented problem with google calendars is that it doesn’t work in safari, this problem is however presented in a nice way…first it tells you in an alert box it wont work, unlike most systems which would just stop you, leaving the contrary suspicion, gcal allows you to continue at your own risk…sure enough, they are right, it really doesn’t like safari. This had held me back from trying to implement it when it was first released, as all the machines use safari for all web-browsing.
After reading the Google Calendar Tips on Stopdesign, I decided to implement it in the delightfully sideways method suggested, using firefox as an exclusive gcal application, by removing it’s navigation, status and address toolbars.
It has been in use now for almost a week, and the feedback was so good that performed the final part of the switchover strategy. I added all of the google calendars as private subscriptions to ical, replacing the existing calendars. This means that if the internet connection goes down or if anyone needs really quick read-only access to the calendar information, perhaps while on the phone, the information is there and ready to use without having to refresh or wait for it to load.
Sweet…
If you look to others for fulfillment,
you will never be truly fulfilled.
If your happiness depends on money,
you will never be happy with yourself.