Musings of a psycho
My second instalment of my daily thoughts/random discoveries. If you're wondering, the reason for starting at #305 is because November 1st is the 305th day of the year.
Sunday, 1 November 2009
#305 - It's amazing/interesting to think about what you have learnt during the day and find one thing that you feel is worthy to share.
This obviously comes from the post from last week as it was the first time I really sat down at the end of each day and thought about what to write about. In the past I have probably casually just thought about the day that has just passed, but never in much depth. It definitely takes some time to pick out the thing to write about, but I feel it is worth it - especially at the end of the week when I read through my notes I've jotted down for each day. Admittedly at the end of some days it felt like nothing special enough happened that day to write about - after all I can't expect all days to be exciting - just have to make sure there aren't too many of them 
Thought of the day…
It is no secret that I rarely update my blog - so much in fact that I feel a bit guilty myself, and also I've had "complaints" from friends that my blog is dead. On Tuesday one of my friends challenged me to write a weekly post:
i challenge you to write a weekly entry to your blog on 7 new things you learned about this world, 1 new item for each day. not too difficult hey?
There was no reason I could think of to decline this challenge, so I have decided to take the challenge! Though I'm going to cheat a tiny little bit, instead of "7 new things I have learned" it will be things I have learnt, found interesting, would like to share. So here we go - my first weekly post and hopefully the first of many more to come!
Sunday, 25 October 2009
Thought of the day: www.example.com, www.example.org, www.example.net are reserved domains that are not available for registration!
In the past couple of months, I've written and done a fair bit of testing and as expected there are always going to be "dummy" email addresses, web-links etc. The most common being ones like: admin@example.com, www.example.com. One random day I thought to myself "Hey, what if someone registered 'example.com' as their domain name, wouldn't they get a tonne of random traffic?"
Well, to my surprise, the domain names: www.example.com, www.example.net and www.example.org are actually all reserved and not available for registration. If you want to read all the details you can have a look at RFC 2606 (warning: I've found RFCs have the tendency to be sleep inducing).
ps. didn't quite discover this on Sunday, but discovered it relatively recently - and trying to remember something that happened on Sunday when it's Tuesday is surprisingly hard!
Point-and-shoot cameras: 5 useful tips
Sydney Opera House
For those that are unaware, I have an interest in photography and love to just take random shots when I see something that appears interesting. But unlike many avid photographers, I don't have a fancy digital SLR Camera, instead I have a normal point-and-shoot camera (Fuji Finepix J110w).
As with most point-and-shoot cameras you are quite limited to the number of settings you can play around with even if it is in manual mode. Unfortunately this means many "How to take an awesome photo" tutorials out there are quite useless since you can't follow their suggestions of increasing or decreasing the ISO, aperture, shutter speed, exposure etc.
However, all is not lost as you can definitely still take awesome photos with your humble camera. Here are five tips that I find work quite well for me, if you have your own technique/tips I would be very interested to hear them
1. No Flash!
This might be a personal preference, but I find when you use flash when taking the photo in a dark/dim place, the light from the flash is usually too strong which makes the whole photo look artificial. The simplest solution is to try and brighten up the place - turn on a light, open the curtains etc. Lighting is quite important in taking a good photo, so the more flexible you can be with your lighting the better.
Another alternative is to cover your camera's flash with a piece of paper/tissue. This somewhat subdues the flash while still providing a source of light. I've only tried this a couple of times and overall it worked quite well. Of course, you can always take two photos, one with the flash and one without - that way you will have both alternatives and you can pick the best one.
Having said all that, there are always exceptions when using flash and as weird as it may sound, using flash outdoors (where it is nice and bright) can often give you better photos - it lights up your subject just enough to make them clear, but since the surrounding is bright as well the flash doesn't stand out like a sore thumb.
More Link Modifier…now in Danish!
It has been about two years ago when I decided to give php a go and write a WordPress plugin. This plugin was what I called "More Link Modifier" and it came about because I didn't like the behaviour of the default 'more' link, which basically was fixed text and jumped to the section where the more link was within that post (usually somewhere in the middle). It seems like many people also don't quite like the default more link since there has been over 1400 downloads as of today!
I must admit that after finishing the initial release of the plugin I never really got back to add more to it (though I do think it has enough 'features' as is, don't want feature creep!). In fact, I don't think I've touched it ever since submitting the first version (shame on me 
).
However, in the past few weeks I was contacted by Georg Adamsen who had very kindly translated the admin settings into Danish - thanks Georg So now armed with the files edited by Georg that enabled the Danish translation, I looked at code that I had written some two years ago (yay for comments) and reviewed the comments on More Link Modifier download page to see if any changes were needed. Surprisingly I didn't make any drastic changes, only a few small cosmetic changes. Having said all that, there are some possibilities of a few small additions to the plugin, in particular use of 'the_content_more_link' filter available from WordPress 2.8 that allows adding extra attributes to the more link.
Hello world!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
A very belated post…
It seems like between thesis, holidays and starting workthe previous blog post was more than half a year ago!
So, thesis is all done (yeah!), holiday was awesome (see below) and starting to work full time is definitely a different experience but a good one
Won't go too much into my holiday, but there is one thing I have to point out - Japan has heaps of cool and wonderful things. One which I thought was very cool is in some stations, the platform numbers start at zero! Probably looked like a silly tourist taking a photo of the inside of the station, but definitely worth it - how often do you see Platform 0?
In more 'blog-related' news, I am planning to make some major changes to the blog, the most significant being completely re-skinning it. Due to the changes the blog will most likely look very bare and default-y for a period of time - hoping that it won't be too long! Also, aiming to blog on a slightly more regular basis!
Email Addiction in the Workplace
Earlier this year I had to choose a topic for my honours/thesis. Of the few ideas I had floating around many of them would have been implausible (or maybe even impossible) to do as part of honours, so I settled on one of my more do-able ideas – Email Addiction.
The main reason I chose email addiction was because I felt to a certain degree I was “addicted” to email. The first thing I did when upon getting online was check my email – regardless if I was expecting an email or not. My email was set to refresh every minute and display a message box if any new emails came in so I would be notified when a new email arrived. Anyone else in the same boat as me?
Interestingly enough, there is heaps discussion related to email addiction online – Googling “email addiction” gives you a whole heap of results, all mainly on how to cure/deal with email addiction. However, running the same search in Google Scholar gives you close to nothing; the majority of research focuses on Internet addiction and not email addiction.
So, after many months of reading a lot of literature, changing my topic to "Email Addiction in the Workplace" so it is more focussed, writing up Thesis A, creating a survey and conducting a pilot study I’ve finally reached the next milestone – conducting my actual survey! You may be wondering why I’m telling you this, well it’s because it is an online survey and I would greatly appreciate it if you could help me out and fill out the survey - it should take you no more than 10 minutes. Thanks in advance
Unfortunately, there is no incentive to fill out the survey other than the warm fuzzy feeling that you've helped me in my thesis For those who are interested, I plan on posting up a summary of my results/findings after finishing my thesis which should be around late October/early November.
How to use Google Charts API with 6 examples
Few months ago I had a good look into Google Charts API and it was great! If you are not aware, Google Charts API basically allows you to create pretty graphs simply by using an URL with correct parameters specified. It is fairly flexible, with many things you can change and customise - which is where it becomes bit complicated. It is quite easy to generate a chart, but it wasn't as easy to generate the exact chart I needed. So below are 6 examples charts with explanations and tips that will hopefully help you understand Google Charts better.
A few notes before I start
- The data/labels for all the graphs here have no meaning at all - just examples that I have come up with.
- I'll explain each parameter probably only once (since they are generally the same across all graphs). If something is different or special I'll explain it again.
- If you have any other tips/hints please share
Google Maps – Street View…in Australia!
When Google Maps was released in early 2005 it was quite cool to be able to see a birds-eye view of various places (even if you could only zoom in so far). Since then, there has been many improvements - more view types, clearer pictures, closer zoom etc.
In mid 2007, a new view type: Street View was made available. I must say, it is quite cool - Street View allows you to actually see the street as if you were there at the place. This view was only available to a selection of cities in the USA and Australia (the 'birth' place of Google Maps) was left out...until today!
Yes, as of today (5th August 2008) there is Street View in Google Maps for pretty much all of Australia! At first I was quite excited, as I've had a look at Street View in USA before (1 Infinite Loop ) and thought "Wouldn't it be cool if this was in Australia?". Now that it is in Australia I must say it is cool, but definitely also scary! In my opinion, being able to see your own house on Google Maps and with the correct (or a very close) address feels scary!
creating a time capsule
Quite some time ago (about late 2007) I saw this documentary called "21 Up Japan" which is similar to the "Up Series". The idea of the documentary is the follow a group of children from when they were 7 years old, and then every 7 years they go back to them and see how they are going. The interviewers had a set of semi-structured questions which they asked, and it was very interesting to see how everyone's answers changed from when they were 7, 14, and 21.
After seeing this documentary I decided I wanted to do something similar - make my own time capsule However it wasn't until a few months later in early 2008 when I found an old exercise book which had some short stories that I had written in 1995 that really got me started. Reading those stories made me realise how much can change in a few years (and how much we can forget!). My time capsule is bit different to 21 Up Japan - it does have a set of questions which I plan on answering once every year or so, but the majority of entries are more diary-like entries of times when I feel like something important has happened.