Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

A tip to all lazy HTML pirates out there: if you’re going to nick the HTML off a website, remove the Google Analytics tracking code before uploading it to your own servers.

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Whipping Floyd SS08

Design by Magnus Heed of Whipping Floyd, website production by me. Fully deep-linkable, Google Analytics-integrated (automatically, thanks to SWFAddress).

Most screencasts are done with minimal resources, usually just a guy and his computer. This usually means crappy sound with lots of noise. Watching a screencast the other day I realized that I could remove the annoying noise I was hearing by routing the sound through AirFoil and setting the equalizer settings to kill high-frequencies.

In version 3 of AirFoil you can not only send sound to an Airport Express but also other computers, and of course, your own. To clean up any sound, just set the application to route all sound (look for “System Audio” at the bottom of the list of sources) to your own computer (by clicking on the speaker button next to the computer in the list, in most cases there will only be one, yours). You can also choose just the web browser you are watching the screencast in as the source. When you have started routing the sound open the equalizer and modify to your heart’s content.

It would be great if AirFoil had noise-cancellation built-in because you can’t always remove the noise with the equalizer, it’s a blunt instrument. I’m sure that someone more clever could come up with a way to route the sound through noise reduction filters before using a similar method.

The downside is that you get some delay in the audio, but it doesn’t seem to be the full 2.5 seconds as when you send to an Airport Express. I’ve not even noticed it most of the time when I’ve been watching programming screencasts, probably because you don’t see the speakers lips moving and that the “action” is quite slow.

They started coming yesterday around 23:00, and they keep coming still.

If you have installed Leopard and want to be able to upload files but at the same time debug your Flash and Flex applications you can find the debug versions of the prerelease player (that has the file upload fix) in the Flex 3 SDK nightly builds, just download, unzip and look in the “runtime” directory.

This wasn’t obvious to me, and I spent a long time hunting it down. I hope this comes to use the next time someone googles for leopard debug flash player.

Edit Since 10.5.1 came out, this became a little less useful. Go with the release version for development instead of using the nightlies.

Edit This page http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html lists the latest version of the release debug player.

/System/Library/Speech/Voices/Alex.SpeechVoice

Because I’ve never used the speech feature of Mac OS X for anything serious* and 669 Mb for one voice, one voice, is just silly. It can’t be that good.

Just look at the monster http://www.jonathansaggau.com/blog/2007/10/yeah_it_breathes.html.

* I have, however, used it. My favourite use is ssh’ing in to a server that is located under the sofa in a friend’s living room and running say "feed me!" a few times.

I once read a joke about the Swedish summer: “the Swedish summer is the hottest day of the year”. Sadly it’s quite true. 

Summer weather in Sweden isn’t always great, in fact it is usually quite bad, and Gothenburg, my home town, usually gets the worst of it.

Since midsummer (about four weeks ago), Gothenburg has had 110 hours of sun, the least of any city in the whole of Sweden, and probably the least of any city in Europe. 

This is what the weather forcast for the coming week looks like:

Temperatures in °C

Just wanted to let you know. 

I have just discovered that my broadband provider Comhem has ripped me off (Comhem lurade mig på pengar)*. Instead of lowering their prices, they invented a new service identical to the one I had, and made it possible to “upgrade” to that service for free. And then they didn’t tell me about it. I found out by randomly looking at their homepage, trying to find information about how to change my adress.

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Finally, someone said it. There is a huge problem in the IT industry today, namely businesses using open source frameworks and making huge revenues, without a cent going to the authors of those frameworks. Rich Green of Sun likens it to “Robin Hood backwards”.

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Take a look at this screencast of Adobe’s LiveDocs loading in FireBug’s network debugging panel, it’s completely priceless and explains why the LiveDocs suck so beyond anything else:

http://codesoup.org/adobe_livedocs/

60 requests before you can actually click on anything, and almost 700 requests before it tells you that a search for “adobesucks” didn’t yield any results – and searching for “MovieClip” aparently loads just as much. It’s over 2 Mb of data, and only 10 Kb of it is cacheable.

It’s a good thing the ActionScript 3.0 and Flex API docs are generated by ASDoc and are not accessed through LiveDocs, otherwise I would go mad.

Found via http://forums.worsethanfailure.com/forums/thread/116913.aspx, which actually contains a explanation and apology from a Adobe representative.