History Defiled

I know pain. A few years back I walked a sixteen-kilometre hike, fourteen with a busted knee. Less than two kilometres into the walk I slid down an embankment to walk around massive boulders, see the ocean upclose and photograph a MASSIVE bee-swarm. I slid down what I thought was a solid soil cliff to get to the rocks below.
One hand grabbed a tussle of plantlife and pulled it straight out of the ground. It came with me the following three metres. Upon impact, my right kneecap changed position dramatically.
After cringing at what I considered a small bit of pain upon a knee that knee has seen surgery more times than I care to remember, I sat for a while before carefully manipulating my kneecap to the front of the leg. Standing up was not fun, but had to be done.
I was unaware at that time how little I had traveled and how much further I had. The remaining fourteen kilometres were through bushes, along thin cliff-edges, in the dark and across a rock outcrop where we knew not what to expect.
One day I’ll show you the track we took along the South coast of Kangaroo Island. I always have pain, but only when I touch it!

The boat sheds at Second Valley are gone.

That’s right, those rustic sheds that looked like they’d been there forever have been demolished by local council.

I don’t like this fact, I think it’s an awful atrocity and a great loss of a part of history that we will never get back. Apparently it has do with indemnity insurance and potential injuries.

Yet people (particularly us photographers looking for something varied and interesting) had been visiting these sheds for many years. Maybe a few photographers got a few grazed knees negotiating the walk across to the sheds, a sore wrist slipping on wet rocks, or maybe twist an ankle turning to see a shark or dolphin! It happens, we do it, get over it.

Let’s be adults here:

Anyone who hurts themselves whilst attempting to get to a location worth-photographing only has themselves to blame. Anyone who wants to trespass past signs that declare ‘potential danger ahead‘, does so at their own risk. So when you scratch, bruise, or cut your skin, suck it up. Yeah, you got a bit of pain. HTFU.

Now the boat sheds are gone. It’s a crying shame, but thankfully a group of flickr friends did visit them a few years back. We honored the remains of this small but significant piece of history with interesting, diverse, unique images that display the way this location effected the way we see our environment.
Here are my photographs from that day:

Go back to the original thread to see the many differing styles of photography from artists whom were there on the same day as me, plus many other photographs shot either before or after that date, including shots taken within the last few days of the destruction of the local council of this important piece of history.

Yes, it is a loss. Let’s hope the council will see the folly of their idea and stop before they change history any further. Whilst the future should never be the past, the future should have something to reveal its origin.

Fitting In

Quoted from this succinct article at Flying Solo.

It is hard having to share your workplace with other people and the noise they make, the silly ideas they have, the different pace and priorities they have.

It is hard going to meetings you didn’t organise and are not running.

It is hard being new and trying to fit into an organisation’s culture and ways of doing things.

It is hard to impose your own ideas on an organisation that has survived for ages without them.

It is hard being exposed to unionist and anti-management philosophies when you have been a boss your whole working life.

It is hard fronting up everyday when you don’t feel like it.

It is hard not having your expertise recognised by your employer.

I couldn’t agree more.

The Browser Wars

I have decided to purchase a second computer, probably a desktop, that won’t connect to the internet but will enable a web-browser to run upon it. Just two: IE6 and Mozilla Firefox.

Let me explain why.

I like to test the validity and web compliance of both HTML and CSS of web sites (particularly my own designs) in multiple browsers – including Mozilla Firefox, Flock, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer v.7, and because so many people are still using it, Internet Explorer v.6.

I started comparing sites on different browsers a few years ago when I discovered the amazing disparities that occurred when opening the homepage for particular Computer-Security company sites.

On Firefox, no problem, everything was easily viewed. But when attempting to open the same page with any version of IE, little areas of the page either did not appear, or tiny blocks of data were stuck in the top left corner.

Through analysis of the CSS, I was soon able to determine where, why, how to fix, and how I could use the information to my advantage. Amusingly it never occurred to me to offer the advice in exchange for chocolate. Eh, I mean for money. (I get paid in chocolate for some work. It’s a deal I quite like!)

Now I mostly do this out of fun, and to learn from the error of others, and to utilise CSS-tricks for my own designs. It’s been most beneficial if not financial.

What’s So Bad about IE6?

Ryan Farley says it best:

1. Lack of support for current standards for HTML markup, CSS, etc
2. Support for non-standard features not compatible with other browsers
3. No PNG transparency support
4. Released in 2001, we’ve completely moved beyond everything about IE6. This is a browser that PC World rated one of the worst tech products of all time.

Yet, as we all know, there are still a multitude of people out there who are yet to upgrade. Mostly because of costs, but I am sure there are few out of ignorance.

How does anyone not know that IE7 exists? There are still a number of people who have computers, but not the internet. Therefore they are still running their 3-month DEMO-version of IE6 that they managed to acquire back in 1999 … and their computer says it is still 1938.

But the main culprits for still using this antiquated browser are larger business’s where the network has a membership of 500+ users. This includes government departments. I find this weird as you’d think that the biggest employer of staff in Australia would want and need to have a clear vision of their online resources. Their web staff must continue to dumb-down their websites with content-filled table configurations because of IE6’s inability to understand and display CSS-formatted websites. Rather than adopting newer methods, they continue to create websites using <tables> to wrap around the content. As the web standards people continue to develop better ways of showing how text, images and other content is displayed, the better the browser is required.

Where can I Download IE6?

DISCLAIMER, FYI, NOTE, PLEASE_READ.

Before you take any further action: My research tells me that whilst it is possible to install, hack and configure your computer to run multiple versions of Internet Explorer … it becomes a nightmare beyond that point.

The proof is in the questions and answers supplied on the TredoSoft forums.

I, for one, won’t be hacking my computer’s back-end to ensure multi-browser usage. Nobody pays a few thousand for a PC only to have to play with its internal code for the sake of a browser.

READ ON IF YOU WILL

Yes, it is possible to download a standalone version of IE6 from evolt.org. But check out the work that is required to make it work alongside IE7! No thanks. I like my computer the way it runs now, even with its few idiosyncratic oddities, I really don’t need nor want any unfixable crashes happening.

IE6 may well be fast to use, have less rear-end clutter and restrict users on websites they can access. Yet it continues to prove itself both inadequate and antiquated, and because of this web site designers have to allow for these factors.

The future looks brighter whenever history teaches us something new.

So I am getting a second computer that will act much like the computer I had twelve years ago: It won’t connect to the internet.

This is because I cannot let IE6 automatically upgrade itself to IE7 and, most importantly, I’ll be able to see how the other half the population sees my ’sites. Then I will be able to amend or redesign BEFORE I upload the final version.

There is an alternative that I also like: We stop designing sites that allow for IE6. Interesting idea you might ask, but the concept is to encourage everyone to upgrade their browser regularly.

While I won’t be resorting to this just yet, it appears a few other designers have already proclaimed they will not support IE6.
Both deanmarshall.co.uk and ryanfarley.com have great articles outlining their reasoning, both of which I enjoy reading.

How Can I Get Rid of IE6 in my World?

Visit savethedevelopers.org for more information.

Apple iPod Touch Wish List

Without a doubt, the latest range of Apple products on the market have given us two lightweight yet graphic-filled devices. I am talking ’bout the iPhone and Touch. The popularity of both totally amazes me, though not because I don’t like them, far from it — I know of many people who have either purchased one, been given one, or still have one on back-order. That’s commitment and fanaticism!

Having purchased the Touch earlier this year, I prefer its options. If I could afford the monthly bill of a iPhone, I’d have gotten one. But being a stingy bastard, that’s hardly likely.

Yesterday I discovered Brian Caulfield out in California gave us a list of the seven biggest iPhone disappointments. I have discovered that the Apple Touch also has a half-dozen problems that need further development.

Whilst the Touch has the best features of the iPhone – which we all know is primarily web surfing wherever you can find and connect an unsecured/free network (Wifi) — all with minimal cost because we paid up front for the device — it does lack a few similar features to the Apple iPhone that I know we’d also wished for:

No Flash

Considering how many sites out there rely on Flash for components or entire pages of their sites (including navigation-tabs, the sidebar advertisements and those heinous ‘introduction’ page we’ve all learnt to hate), you’d think this would have been first on the drawing board.

But not, we miss out on so much because the Apple tech’ crew somehow figured this was an unnecessary component. Considering the internal technology required to enable jiggling icons on its high-res’ screen with a finger-touch, wouldn’t the capability to see and interact with SWF imagery been a simple yet integral program to include? As Brian says, “While Adobe is working hard to make its technology iPhone-friendly, don’t hold your breath.”

Can’t Replace Batteries

Their are two issues to this, but the inability to remove and insert batteries is the bane of this device.

Being an avid listener of music whilst I work or read, it’s vital to have full batteries at any time of the day. We are not always able to be at a location that enables charging at a wall or via the pc (which I freely admit is a great feature), and whilst the great white plug is the best thing since dual-powerpoints it’s not ‘polite etiquette’ to simply plug in wherever you are.

So if the device had a slide-cover similar to many cameras have, the battery component could have designed to be easily remove and replace the internal battery. I’m guessing the device would need an internal definitely-unremovable battery to continue core-functions whilst the power was off. Now that I think about that, it must already do: What happens when battery runs out? It doesn’t lose date and saved data.

Apple tech, the power is in your hands.

Why no Cut’n'Paste functions?

As every coder, writer and DOM-hacker knows, having the ability to copy/cut and paste is vital when reading any text of interest. Whether it be a cool piece of CSS that would fit in well with the latest personal site incarnation or quoting from Steve Job’s latest report on the Apple, it is vital to have this feature.

But alas, Apple didn’t think that far down the track. They probably never imagined that their users would be using this device to send articles to their blogs, to recite tracts from Shakespeare to send as e-cards, nor to crack the DOM of every ‘mobile.css’ now appearing across the WWW.

So we suffer in silence, waiting for the next magor upgrade. Maybe this time they’ll include it? Even if I have to use two fingers (like enlarging an image), I’d be first to install this update!

Voice Activated Login

Oooh Aaah, who would like this feature:

(Lifts Apple to face, looks directly at it.) Me: Login

Apple: Password required (Now this would be nice either as the voice of HAL, Marvin the Paranoid Android, the alert computers from “Starship Troopers”, or something similar to those elevator voices that tell you what floor you’ve arrived. Please.)
Me: _removed despite wife working it out_
Apple: Thank you. Welcome Stephen. You have 47 emails, 125 spam. Twitter has 31 responses, Plurk has 42 responses, Upcoming has 2 events, Meetup __ has 2 attendees, Apple has 2 updates. Your blog has 22 replies on 3 articles. Enjoy.

Ok, a guy can dream.

Difficult Music and Image Syncing with iTunes.

Am I the only person to discover that iTunes deletes not only from its inbuilt library, but also from your PC-directory when removing music no longer of interest? Or is there some backwater of the instruction manual I’m missing? I initially allowed my 12GIG of music to be ’synced’ by iTunes … which promptly resorted into an arrangement that made no visible sense to me.

Suddenly my combination of songs by the same artist were broken up according to the album they were upon. Not all bad, yeah, considering it then added the album cover to the directory icon, but my directory-structure suddenly looked like 9-11: All structure disintegrated and the contents spilled everywhere.

Worse still, iTunes creates an additional directory on PC that has same content as device, but in icon’s totally unreadable to anything but the Apple products …and constitutes the same KILOBYTE size.

My advice: Keep your music on a 500GIG external drive. Back up regularly. My previous MP3 player had a USB connection, and simply allowed me to drag and drop entire directories onto/out of the device. Why didn’t Apple go with this idea?

So there is my opinion and review of the Apple Touch.

There will be more reviews to follow: I want my wife to also get one, so I really need to sell the GOOD features. She’s already happy she can have her Shopping List on easy display. What she really wants is a way to view and interact with existing spreadsheets. So, for now, we keep testing and trialling ideas.

Update : 5/Sept/2008

Thanks to everyone who has found this article via Boxxet.com!