Peterbe.com

Yesterday I went down to Nick Fielding's new Kung Fu club in Twickenham to train because this week I've been working for VSO in Putney (southwest London). His venue is a big church hall with a very nice floor and a nice atmosphere too.

Finding the place was easy because it was near the Twickenham train station but as always happens, when you actually get near the street and house number you're looking for you get a bit confused so even though I found the street quite quickly I did actually make a hell of a detour around the block the church hall was on.

Nick and I have been training under Dave Courtney Jones and Dennis Ngo in the City & Islington club since about 2001 I think and I genuinely believe Nick is going to do well as an instructor. The classes in Twickenham have only been going for about two months but he's already got plenty of people coming regularly.

If you're reading this kung-fu-students-of-Twickenham, hello, thanks for welcoming me on my visit to your club. I hope we meet again at competitions or camps at Dennis.

I've just finished Dylan Nichols book called "What Are You Doing Here" which is a funny little book about Australians in England (London especially), why they came, what they do here, what influences they bring with them and why they keep coming and last but not least what gets them to go back home.

Dylan is a good friend of mine and I book my signed copy at his book launch a couple of weeks ago. A lot of my friends here in London are aussies and reading this book will only help me understand them and possibly whats going on in their head. Reading this book has given me some profound understanding about Australians' feelings about coming here that I didn't understand before.

It started with this letter of apology on the corporate site of jetblue.com which was quite impressive. Discarding the content I liked the design and the simplicity of the navigation.

I then tried the flight booking interface and was even more impressed. It was intelligent and fast and since I was just goofing about to test rather than to book I accidently selected 30th of February as my return date and a Javascript alert box popped up and prompted me of a my misstake and corrected it. All very impressive since so many airline booking forms suck badly these days.

Then I clicked to go to the homepage and noticed how my Firefox almost froze and started stuttering. Even though the homepage fits on one screen and hasn't got much information it took 11 seconds to download it completely! (apple.com takes 4 seconds, peterbe.com takes 2 seconds on this WiFi connection I'm at)

Has anybody used Sedo.com to try to convince a domain namn owner to sell his domain name? They charge $69 for this service but it doesn't sound like they're going to do much.

Or does anybody have some good advice for how to negotiate to buy someone else's domain name. The domain name I've got my eye on is a .co.uk and was registered recently but is not being used; just a redirect to a splash page about a new site due to be launched soon.

favicon2dots is a cute little app that converts your favicon to a "dot image" or whatever it's called.

Here's what mine looks like.

This is probably one of the funniest clips I've seen since the last one that made my laugh out loud.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkD90ZV07zo

The guys is trying to write a Perl program in notepad and the Vista voice recognition program is not helping. It's amazing that they guy doesn't give up. In fact it's actually quite impressive how he continues to struggle on. Enjoy!

UPDATE

This clip has been removed from YouTube unfortunately. Does anybody know where else it can be found?

Long story short, if you need to compare floating point numbers against columns defined as REAL you need to first cast them to NUMERIC in PostgreSQL. And to compare equality between two numbers with different amount of significant figures you have to use ROUND().

cbeau.ca or "Retouche Photos Retouching" is a neat little online gallery showing what can be accomplished with photo retouching of models and other photos like that. What's interesting about the gallery is that the interface is great. It's done in Flash and I'm often disappointed and very rarely amazed by Flash interfaces. I still love Flash games as a user interaction medium and the Flash video players have worked a zillion times better than Quicktime, Windows media or Real player.

Most Flash interfaces are just annoying. Thinks flash, blink and move away from your attention. Nothing ever looks the same so you never learn how to use the interface. Also, a lot of Flash interfaces are slow to load and once loaded you rarely get content but just decorative fluff that you don't really need.

This is an exception though. They even clearly mark out which photos you've clicked on. (I guess they've read and taken in Jacob Nielsens books). The interface is fast and obvious and there is very little else of distractions from what you're there to see.

To all Flash developers out there: Keep up the good work! Don't use Flash when HTML is better even if it's less fun to develop. Look at sites like this for inspiration.

I've wanted to Gzip the static content (CSS & Javascript) on my sites for a long time but never found a good enough solution. mod_gzip is out of the question because as far as I've understood it it does a compression on the fly, every time you request the file.

Other solutions have disappointed me because enabling gzip compression has been for all content. I don't want my HTML files gzipped because they're rendered on the fly based on business logic plus by compressing the HTML files. Long story short my yet-to-be-released app now serves the following files from Zope but are only compressed and whitespace slimmed once per server restart:

FILE               ORIG SIZE  NEW SIZE   REDUCTION
screen.css             15224      2738   556%
print.css               2633       885   298%
jquery-latest.js*      57712     18130   318%
jquery-latest.pack.js  20461     10513   195%
common.js               3803      1131   336%
complete-expense.js    18184      2847   639%
Total                 118017     36244   326%

* only used in debug mode

Clearly from watching these stats about cameras used on Flickr Canon and Sony Ericsson rule. Canon is totally dominating the usage of Point & Shoot cameras which doesn't surprise me. Even if I'm a Nikon user I still recommend the Canons for Point & Shoot if people ask me.

By far, the most popular SLR is the Canon EOS Rebel XT as you can see. It doesn't surprise me that much. It is a great camera. I had sort of hoped that my camera, the Nikon D70, would be more popular but perhaps it doesn't really matter.

Another interesting observation is how cool pictures people take with the Sony Ericsson cameras. It's amazing what can be done if you're a bit artistic. Most of those pictures are much better than mine taken with my much more expensive D70. Pictures taken with the Sony Ericsson 750i and the Sony Ericsson K800i