One of the overwhelming horrors of designing for the web (or so it would appear from a lot of the mockups I've seen) is that designers (and people who are just bored of Arial and Times New roman) want to make their titles on web pages using non-standard fonts. "But that's shockingly non-accessible and uses more bandwidth", I hear you cry; well, there's a reason the alt tag is around, and why broadband is much more common.
I've put the slides up from my Lightning Talk about LastGraph I did last week for Oxford CompSoc. They're almost the same as the ones from Barcamp Brighton, but with a few small changes, since I, er, kinda rewrote it since then.
As some people know, and many don't, I got accepted into Nokia's N810 device program, which means I get this wonderful piece of technology* for a wonderful price.
After comments mysteriously stopped working on my old site, I've migrated www.aeracode.org to the Aeracode Network™ from my old host. Hopefully things should be nicer now.
Now, it's not very often that I write long posts on random internet topics, but this is today's exception, because there's something that's really been annoying me lately.
Yes, people of the internet, LastGraph has returned. After over two weeks of beta testing and bugfixing, it's finally in a useable state, and so I'm pushing it out to lastgraph.aeracode.org as I type this. If it doesn't work for you yet, wait for the DNS change to propagate.
LastGraph is still undergoing rewriting after the beta showed up some lovely bugs (including inverted labels and labels everywhere they shouldn't be). I'm working on it over the weekend, after my week was overtaken by the sheer mass of activity involved with university and Fresher's Week (I find it strangely ironic that it's actually more timeconsuming this year, when I'm <u>not</u> a fresher).
Update: A beta version is now up at aegis.aeracode.org - it has BUGS, like bad label placement (and inverted labels on some Acrobat installs), as well as rendering VERY SLOWLY while I try new optimisations. Bear with me, please.
LastGraph will be down for a few days while I sort out somewhere better for it to run. It's been using this servers' resources massively, and there's about 35GB of data now (over a gig of which is raw XML). The other sites on the server are suffering from the load, and we're down to Not Very Much diskspace.
The download queue is back in the hundreds for the first time since the initial launch, and to make things worse the poor Last.fm API server is being a bit unreliable again today.
My headphones broke last Tuesday, and so I naturally went to buy some more. However, my eye caught this post, and since I actually had some spare cash just begging to be used, I decided to go ahead and buy some Jabra BT620s headphones.
The slides from my talk at Barcamp Brighton 2007 are at aeracode.org/files/lastgraph.pdf; for some reason slide 4's PDF weighed in at 9MB, so I apologise for the large download size (I am suspicious that Inkscape rendered the raster image in that slide to a pdf pixel-by-pixel).
As good as OpenOffice is getting these days, I have a personal issue with Impress (and, indeed, presentation software in general, such as the ever-popular Powerpoint).
After my first attempt at providing some way for people to style graphs in Graphication, which ended up being a rather ugly system with an odd set of nested dictionaries, a thought struck me; we already have a language for specifying presentation, and which has inheritance and other nifty time-saving shortcuts: CSS.
The start of the LastGraph rewrite is well underway; the backend has been moved to Django (probably out of familiarity, since I've been using it quite a bit recently), and is already fetching week lists and track lists, much to my delight.
In the vain hope of making this slightly more blog-like, you people get a dose of my daily life for a change.
The n800 has quite a few media players already, and they all have their good points. None, however, seemed to be very useful, or indeed easy to use, while walking; if you want to change song, they all need you to get the n800 out of your pocket, unlock the screen, tap a button, lock the screen again, and put it back.
Over the years, many project ideas have sprung into (and out of) my head, but some persist for a worryingly long time. The latest contender in this category is the MMOG, or Massively Multiplayer Online Game.
Well, it's been a few weeks since I released LastGraph upon the world, and around a week and a half since I posted it to the Stats group on last.fm in an attempt to get some users.
Yes, upgrades are continuing, and somewhat sporadic thanks to exams and a visit back home, but going nonetheless. Colouring now actually works quite well, and more as it does in Lee Byron's original idea, and the backend system is getting upgrades to support custom colour schemes and proper distributed rendering where nodes can specialise in tasks (because PDF conversion is very specialised, for example).
I'll be upgrading the LastGraph renderer today, which will involve some render node downtime (I'll attempt to keep the main site up, however).
After a day's work, I have an experimental web interface for lastgraph (my last.fm graph creator; see the previous post) up at lastgraph.aeracode.org.
<img id="image41" src="http://aeracode.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/lastgraph_3.png" alt="Ooooh, pretty." title="Ooooh, pretty." />
I've given aeracode another makeover, this time to an interesting shade of blue and white. Comments are, of course, welcome, although please bear in mind that this is more an attempt to have my sites have themes that are at least slightly different from each other.
Occasionally, I'll think of something so good I have to rush and implement it on the spot. Last week I had one of those moments; Martin had mentioned to me that he'd bought a Wireless PC Lock, which is a little thing you plug into the USB port, and which locks your computer when you walk away with its 'key' transmitter.
I've literally just finished implementing thumbnail support in ByteHoard/e. Unlike previous versions, they're not generated on the fly, but rather whenever the file changes - the same goes for all the file metadata ByteHoard uses, like mimetypes (which now work, too) and file sizes.
Well, the ByteHoard/e first alpha seems to have gone quite well. There were, as I expected, a few bugs - thanks to the people who found them, and I encourage anyone who finds anything slightly off to go and make full use of the new bugtracker at bugs.bytehoard.org.
So, the first ByteHoard/e alpha is out, and is the result of quite a bit of hard graft. There are still some compatability issues, as there are with all scripts this complex, but I think it's a good first try.
The alpha release of ByteHoard/e is oh so nearly ready; all that is left is pretty much one function, the "add user" function, and possibly registration if I think it's necessary (it probably is).
Time to announce my latest diversion from real life: RMaze. It's a puzzle game, involving a maze (yes, really), marbles (good <em>and</em> bad), pits, lasers, mines, and some annoying hills and dimples. It's based on an old game called MegaMaze that had nearly exactly the same principle, albeit without 'good' graphics or expandability (like an open maze file format).