www.nickhodge.com

In Mel­bourne? An InDes­ign user? Mel­bourne InDes­ign User Group

Phew. Exams over. Now the wait­ing for the results.

This day a year ago, we became the proud own­ers of a MINI Cooper S. Happy birth­day, MINI!

Rus­sell Brown has a new tip called “Dr Browns Image Pro­cessor” avail­able at: Rus­sell Brown. Use­ful with the new revi­sion of Pho­toshop CS, it is a take on my Moon­shine: Dis­tilling PDF into JPEG using Scripting

A crazy week in the US later, and home again. Some­where in the last week, this site reached 200000 page views. Back to work tomorrow.

brain fade. high packet loss. wire­less net­work down. blam­ing big­pond, but found out rj45 wasn’t recon­nec­ted cor­rectly to airport.

Pos­ted from: Macin­tosh Ti Power­Book, run­ning MacOS X 10.2.3 with Bluetooth (sim­pler, more integ­rated than Win­dows XP) using Optus GPRS (also more and bet­ter integ­rated than Win­dows XP). Just double-checking that this works. Seems to drop out a little quickly…

In all this talk of 1980s music, I keep for­get­ting that Crowded House’s Don’t Dream Its Over was released in 1987, there­fore mak­ing it a 1980s clas­sic. Neil “dont­ated” the song to the NZ Tour­ism Board in their advert­ising cam­paign for New Zea­l­and. “In 5 days you’ll feel 100%”. Too right!

Post­ing this entry via Bluetooth, GPRS. Wire­less, Baby. Yeah!

GPRS con­nec­tion setup time is really quick; there is no over­head of nor­mal modems (hand­shak­ing) — but its still a little slower than ISDN setup time. It feels about as fast as a 56K modem con­nec­tion, so its still not super-fast, but much more accept­able than the 9.6Kb you nor­mally get with the data-over-voice cel­lu­lar style con­nec­tion. With my Bluetooth adaptor, the con­nec­tion between the laptop and the phone is wire­less. It cre­ates a vir­tual COM port you address like a nor­mal modem, and works without the dir­ec­tion­al­ity of IrDA. The plan I am on from Optus is 1c per KB (that’s a Kilo­byte). There are other plans, and I’ll feel out my usage. The idea is to use it min­im­ally and just to stay in contact.

Once you have con­nec­ted, you have essen­tially a TCP/IP pipe — just like an Ethernet/Cable Modem/PPP style con­nec­tion. VPN, email etc all work just like a nor­mal dia­lup con­nec­tion. Albeit a little more expensive.

After over a week, the site is back. Last Octo­ber, the period of down­time was due to DNS con­fig­ur­a­tion issues. This time, its a col­lec­tion of cas­cad­ing prob­lems: all to do with the host­ing provider’s data centre turned off my server due to a Denial of Ser­vice attack. In fact, look at the logs the down­time was exactly 10 days — to the hour and minute.

I do keep backups, and these were restored on Sat­urday 15^th March. If I had time earlier in the week, this would have been com­pleted sooner. But it was just one of those things that hap­pens in the IT industry. Hav­ing a con­ti­gency plan is highly important.

In the interim, I’ve been to Adelaide and Perth (hi Cari!), pur­chased a new mobile phone (Nokia 6310i: Bluetooth and GPRS) and had a typ­ical Adobe crunch-week. Lots going on, brain going at a mil­lion miles an hour.

The “idea” with Bluetooth and GPRS is to get faster wire­less inter­net access from any­where. Includ­ing the back of a taxi. I cal­cu­lated that in recent weeks I have spent over 8 hours in taxis — per­fect time to get online and grab/respond to a couple more emails. Is this the first signs of addiction?

I should have learnt this fully years ago. A good source of info is here: Javas­cript and Level 1 DOM manip­u­la­tion of HTML. There are some “things” I want to imple­ment that can only be done using these meth­ods. Look­ing into the his­tory, it looks like there are many deep dark secrets. Such as Tantek’s hack: how to fool older browsers by tak­ing advant­age of bugs. Interesting.

A day of web site tweak­ages. google search in my nav­ig­a­tion bar and a new SOAP based MSN Mes­sen­ger status. This was imple­men­ted in 3 lines of PHP!

Now this is scary. Neil Finn as described by Goog­lism. You can type in your name, and there is a report of what google knows of you…

80’s Music Lyr­ics. I won­der if we could load the lyr­ics into the Ran­dom Neil Finn Lyric Server? Wouldn’t that be cool.