Just how stupid do you have to be to buy low calorie water? How many calories do they think water has in the first place?!
Archive for the ‘Other’ Category
Adverts for idiots
Monday, August 10th, 2009Double negatives
Monday, July 13th, 2009One of many things that annoy me is when people say things like “not uncommon”. If it isn’t uncommon then it is common, isn’t it? It has to be either common or uncommon. If it is anywhere between those two, then how rare it is isn’t worth mentioning in the first place.
On a related note, people should stop saying “it’s not unheard of” and start saying “it’s heard of”.
Play me off, Tom Jones!
“It’s usual …”
High dynamic range photography
Saturday, June 20th, 2009I am no photographer but I have a Sony A200 camera – an entry level digital SLR. After seeing some examples of HDR photography, I gave it a go.
This consists of using several photographs of the same image at different exposures (in my case, by adjusting the shutter speed in manual mode) and passing them through software. The software I used was the free qtpfsgui.
Richard Starkey (Ringo Starr)
Monday, March 30th, 2009Can someone explain to me what Richard Starkey a.k.a Ringo Starr of Beatles fame was doing on an AVIVA advert one week saying that his name change was a good thing and another AVIVA advert the next week asking people not to call him by his stage name?
Whatever happened to Dell’s DisplayPort?
Friday, March 13th, 2009Years ago, Dell said that it was going to implement DisplayPort in all of its products (see a Dell white paper from 2006), removing the VGA port to make their notebooks much thinner, yet we are still to see any Dell notebooks that have made this change, even in top of the line models.
Notebooks, such as the MacBook Air, are getting thinner and thinner and Dell’s DisplayPort switch over promised to deliver this to even entry level notebooks. It was Fudzilla’s “first glance” review of the Dell Vostro 1310 that brought this back into my thoughts. Clearly this is a notebook that would benefit greatly from a DisplayPort connector in terms of thickness and yet, like all Dell notebooks, it doesn’t have one.
I bought a Dell 2408WPF monitor with a DisplayPort connector (it even came with a cable) when it was first released in the UK and have yet to have anything with DisplayPort that can connect to it. I briefly got an NVIDIA 9600GT from Gainward to connect to it but the card’s DisplayPort was seemingly untested and seriously flawed, as it would only even send a signal to the monitor once out of every few times I would try to turn the computer on (the solution being to plug DVI in, turn the computer on, turn the computer off and unplug DVI each time to get DisplayPort back on). Gainward have also brought out an ATI HD4870 with the port but as I already have a HD4870X2 from Sapphire and still have a bad taste in my mouth from Gainward’s 9600GT, it’s just not worth the switch.
TreePie is dead, long live TreePie
Monday, March 2nd, 2009OK, so TreePie isn’t quite dead, you can still use it perfectly well if you run Windows XP but there hasn’t been a release since 1.2 came out in April 2008 and even that doesn’t work on Vista.
I set about writing my own small version of TreePie in C#, using the System.IO namespace to index files as this should work on any version of Windows that can run the .net framework. Compatibility is the whole point in me making this in the first place.
The idea behind TreePie is simple. It shows a hierarchical pie chart of your file system based on file sizes. In Windows, there is no simple way of getting a directory’s size. The size of a directory is equal to the sum of the sizes of the files in that directory plus the sum of the sizes of its subdirectories. This is obviously a recursive operation so if you want to know the size of C:\ you need to know the size of C:\Users and C:\Windows and to know the size of C:\Windows you need to know the size of C:\Windows\System32, C:\Windows\System and so on. TreePie shows many levels of the directory structure in one pie chart but I am keeping this quick and simple.
My version of this colours pie segments randomly and highlights the segment you are hovering over with 50% opacity. Finding the segment you are hovering over is relatively simple. In C#, you catch the MouseMove event of the PictureBox. You find the centre coordinates of the pie (in case you have margins or whatever) then calculate the distance of the cursor from that point with Pythagoras (a2 + b2 = c2) and check if it is more than the radius of the pie. This is the same way that circular or spherical collisions are detected in games. Next, you get the angle with the atan2 function and can find which segment it corresponds to from there. For efficiency, the pie should only be redrawn when the hovering segment changes (if any highlighting is used). You can go into a directory by clicking on the segment and go up a directory by right clicking anywhere on the pie. The application caches sizes so when you enter a child segment it never has to re-load anything and when you go to a parent segment, it does not have to re-load the child you just came from at the very least.
TreePie is useful to find out where your hard drive space is being used. If you want to free up some space, it is excellent for finding the biggest directories so that you know what to move to a different hard drive or delete entirely.
The following shows my own user directory with the mouse cursor hovering over AppData (the teal segment that takes up nearly half of the pie). AppData should not really be this big in comparison to directories such as Documents (red) or Downloads (blue).
If we click on AppData, it shows us that 88.6% of it is used by the directory “Local” and if we click on “Local” we find the real culprit, the “Temp” directory. In theory, files should be removed from this directory when the application that created them closes but this isn’t always the case.
When I view this directory in Windows Explorer, I can see that there is one very large installer file in here that had been extracted, installed from and then not removed. It is a simple matter to run the Windows Disk Cleanup utility on my C: drive to clean this out safely.
So I finally got a blog.
Tuesday, January 6th, 2009The only other time I have used a blog in my life was in a first year University python module in which we used a very early and unstable elgg blog network to keep track of our progress. It wasn’t very popular and, despite it being a requirement of the module, many of the students either did not use it or attempted to post “foobar” entries in the hopes that it was the use of the software rather than the content of the entries that was assessed.
Though, in that instance I kept the blog updated every few days, I expect that this blog will be a barren and desolate place containing nothing but animal skeletons and tumble weed. Who knows, I may even throw in the odd bit of code or some personal thoughts.
There will probably be a few entries in here related to human interface device (HID) software as well as other small projects and things that I mess around with to keep myself busy.
I’m not expecting any readers but it’s nice to have a record 