May 9th, 2008
photo: pietroizzo
One problem with many of my blog posts in the past has been that they aren’t particularly interesting to look at! In the many designs which have been used in the site, I’ve played around with different fonts, text and line spacing and different text sizes to try to make text as palatable as possible. However you style your text though, I still believe your pages will look bland when you have a lot of it!
I’ve recently been experimenting with using some images to spice up the look of the blog.
This posed a problem. Where do the photos come from?
My Own Photos
I do love photography but I’m by no means a good photographer! My photograph collection is also fairly small (by a small collection I mean 8,000 photos totally 9GB) and un-indexed! And I’m fairly sure some obscure and badly lit shots from many months ago wouldn’t add that much to the post…
Google Images
Every student in the world types terms into Google Images and plagiarises images to spice up their homework or class Powerpoint presentations! However, it’s slightly illegal and constitutes copyright infringement unless the image is public domain. And it’s not exactly easy to find public domain imagery on Google Images…
photo: chotda
Flickr
This is the third and the best option. I’ve used Flickr for quite a while but my photography is pretty lame. The best thing about Flickr though is being able to see photos taken by others. On Flickr you can search for Creative Commons licensed photos. Essentially, the Creative Commons license allows you to use the image on your webpage providing you credit the author and link back to the original.
I’m hoping that this will add a bit of colour to the blog and more pleasant reading. I’m discovering some fantastic new photos whilst searching for and adding photos to my blog posts and I hope you’ll see some photos you’ll love too!
As a bit of advice to anybody who wants to do the same thing on their blog… it’s often better to sort photos by “Most interesting” rather than “Most relevant”. That’ll mean the photos are sometimes less relevant but they’re often of a much higher quality!
May 8th, 2008
Almost two years ago, I experienced an persistent error in my Javascript development in one of my scripts. It was the case of the “Expected identifier, string or number” error from having an extra comma at the end of a function. I made a blog entry about it to share my experiences solving the problem.
Somehow my blog entry got indexed by Google and started turning up on a lot of search results. The post has received over 1,500 hits in just the last quarter (the higher number of visitors on weekdays indicates its genuine traffic) and I’ve been receiving quite a few comments and thank you messages! It’s really rewarding knowing that a blog post you made has saved others a bit of time!
I know that whenever I’ve had problems getting something to work - might that be Linux, Javascript or Windows I’ve always turned to Google and the rest of the internet for help. And I’m really glad that the archive of posts and “solutions to problems” that I’ve accumulated over the years on this blog has been useful and given something back to the community.
In other news, haven’t we just have the most wonderful weather in Britain lately?
April 27th, 2008
Next Saturday, you are challenged to live without your computer for 24 hours!
It is obvious that without computers we would find our life extremely difficult, maybe even impossible. If they disappeared for just one day, would we be able to cope?
Be part of one of the biggest global experiments ever to take place on the Internet. The idea behind Shutdown Day is to find out how many people can go without a computer for one whole day, and what will happen if we all participate!
If you can participate, enter your pledge on the Shutdown Day website and it’ll calculate how much energy is being saved. At the moment, the UK is saving 3000MJ - the equivalent of boiling 4500 kettles full of water. Worldwide the figure stands at 1.2million MJ which is about 200,000 kettles.
A fantastic chance to catch up on lost sleep or revision anyway.
The idea of Shutdown Day project is simple - just shutdown your computer for one whole day of the year and involve yourself in some other activities: outdoors, nature, sports, fun stuff with friends and family - whatever, just to remind yourself that there still exists a world outside your monitor screen.
April 24th, 2008
Stargate Continuum is out on DVD on July 29th. Here is the trailer:
Continue Reading »
April 20th, 2008
The third reincarnation of this blog has been going for two months! It was two months ago that I relaunched the blog using WordPress and since then there have been 75 posts on this blog (and slightly more depressingly 10,592 spam comments).
I think blogging is certainly a very rewarding experience, especially so when you write the posts which come more from your experience. A post I made earlier this month on the dilemmas of presenting climate change got linked to from some climate change skeptic websites and certainly received some very interesting comments. Certainly most of us don’t bother finding out both sides of a story before forming an opinion: and blog comments can be very insightful to a blog author in helping them to see both sides of a story.
One dilemma I’ve experienced when blogging is writing about something which is outside the strict confines of the blog. The expressed topic of this blog is science, technology and the internet but occasionally I have written about the environment, economics and politics. Journalists and bloggers always write for a target audience: the readers of their blog. For this blog, my primary audience consists of people interested in technology and web development so diversifying outside of this topic risks losing regular readers. But at the same time, I feel a blog is a personal space to express your thoughts and views: one advantage of blogs is that we’re not limited by story briefs, word counts and what we must write about.
Thanks for reading the blog over the past months and please keep reading! If you’ve got a blog of your own, leave me a note with the URL! And I’d really like to hear your thoughts and feedback on the blog.
April 12th, 2008
Technology analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald from Gartner said that Windows Vista will collapse unless big changes are made.
Among Microsoft’s problems, the pair said, is Windows’ rapidly-expanding code base, which makes it virtually impossible to quickly craft a new version with meaningful changes. That was proved by Vista, they said, when Microsoft — frustrated by lack of progress during the five-year development effort on the new operating — hit the “reset” button and dropped back to the more stable code of Windows Server 2003 as the foundation of Vista.
…
“Most users do not understand the benefits of Windows Vista or do not see Vista as being better enough than Windows XP to make incurring the cost and pain of migration worthwhile.”
I’ve said this in the past and I still stand by my statement. I use Windows XP because that is the operating system I’ve used for the last 5 years or so. My installation of XP is perfectly set up to how I use it and hence there is no reason to change.
Windows Vista offers absolutely zero improvement upon XP, certainly in the way that I use my operating system. The only “improvement” I can see is glass transparency which is not only superfluous, but ugly and resource-consuming. And UAC is total disaster. Many friends who have bought new computers with Windows Vista have asked me how to do very simple things such as installing applications which are not UAC-aware.
If I had to lose Windows XP (e.g. if support ended and it became insecure), I would switch to Ubuntu Linux. In fact, I feel Ubuntu is so much more secure and “fun” than Windows and virtually every single application I use is supported by Ubuntu (Microsoft Office being the obvious exception). Arguably, my sunk costs in the form of how I’ve customised my install of Windows XP is the only reason why I continue to use Windows.
As we move towards an interconnected “web 2.0″ age, the platforms that matter are not the low-level platforms such as what hardware and operating system we run. The important things are what web browser you run and the web applications that you use.
I’d argue that the three platforms which are the most important to me are Mozilla Firefox, Google and Facebook. And I’m not sure I’d have too much difficulty in finding somebody who would agree with me.
February 21st, 2008
Universal have purchased the rights to produce a movie based on the game Monopoly. Monopoly is iconic for sure; some people try to run the Monopoly board in London, visiting every place on the board. But how can you make a movie out of it?
February 19th, 2008
In the 24 hours this install of Wordpress has been running, the blog has received 147 pieces of spam. A few bits of spam were even made before I even finished installing the application. Thank the lord for Akismet.
February 18th, 2008
Well, hi! It’s been a long time…
Unfortunately on this blog the posting frequency really dropped off over the last year, work just got the better of me! Compounding this, I kind of lost interest in web development issues which was the main topic of the blog and it didn’t feel right to write about other topics on the blog whilst it was still primarily a web development blog.
So what I’ve done now is to relaunch the blog with a new design and software (we’re running WordPress now). I still haven’t worked out what this blog is really going to be about, but we’ll hopefully see as time progresses!
This is in fact the third reincarnation of Cow’s Blog. We started off in April 2004 using Postnuke before relaunching with Geneone in August 2005. And now in February 2008, I’m pleased to switch to Wordpress.
Continue Reading »
January 6th, 2007
The posting frequency on this blog over the last few months has been decreasing. In many ways, it’s a real shame. I love this blog and I’m so proud of the things it’s managed to achieve over the last few years, but recently my interests and priorities have changed.
Part of the reason for starting this blog was because I wanted to pursue a career in IT. This blog was a wonderful way of communicating some of my thoughts on technology and trying to gain a better foothold in the world of technology. It was also a really nice way of publicizing any scripts or projects I had and get ting feedback.
My interest in web development has waned over the last few months. I’ve barely touched a line of PHP or even HTML in the last three or four months. Web development doesn’t play any part in my future plans. I think it’s the idea of web development as a career; to me it sounds like a dead end and I’m really not sure how long the industry will be around.
I’ve spent six years or so doing web development and I certainly don’t plan to "forget" these skills overnight. I still keep an active interest in things such as Mozilla, JSON, "Web 2.0" and HTML5 but perhaps not to the extent where I can blog about it and provide analysis.
With technology it’s similar; I haven’t been keeping up to date with the latest processors, Windows Vista or Ubuntu although I still have a keen interest in technology and gadgets.
So this blog has become a lot quieter over the last few months and I don’t think this will change too much over the coming months. Although one of the rules of blogging is not to deviate too much from the core focus of your blog, I do want to experiment with blogging about some other things.
I’m really not sure about whether Geneone will be finished any more. I’m dead proud of it but it’s still got quite a lot of work to be done before it becomes production-ready. I’m not totally sure if I have the time or desire to finish it.
My del.icio.us bookmarks have taken the place of many blog entries. I’ve not added any analysis but the pages I’ve bookmarked I’ve found interesting and may be of interest to readers.
Cheers for your support and I hope that you’ll choose to keep reading through 2007 
