In yet another delay of my Gaming PC Project, I’ve decided to take up photography about 3 months ago. I went the Nikon route and I have no regrets so far. I’m pretty sure I’ve spent more than I originally expected so here I have an itemized breakdown of expenses for my new expensive hobby.

This is the first time I’m going to calculate how much I’ve spent so far, and I’m going to let it sink in so I can set aside some quiet time and reflect on how splurging is bad. Bad Carlo, baaad.

Well, shit.

The fruits of my labor can be found on my Flickr account.

After my shift yesterday, I met up with a guy who was selling these Sennheiser CX300-B canalphones. It was a weird feeling, I had never spent over P1,000 for earphones before. But taking into account that I had already spent P14,000 for my MP3 player and P2,500 for a leather pouch, it would just be plain stupid to not go the extra mile for an item that will let me fully enjoy the device.

So he handed me the earphones still in its packaging and urged me to try them on. He suggested I try the small size silicon rubber eartips first. It was a very uncomfortable feeling having a foreign object stuck into your ear canal. It didn’t feel right at all. I pressed play on my player and I got this horrible tinny sound, there was no bass at all. Utterly disappointed, I paid him P2,300 anyway and took them home to give it another shot. I wasn’t keen on looking like an idiot in public.

At home, I pulled out the small size eartips and attached the medium ones. I read somewhere that people, usually westerners, have a comfortable fit with the mediums. Maybe I have large ear canals, I thought.

I gently pushed them into my ears. It felt like there was a vacuum inside, after all there are rubber sleeves stuck in my ear blocking out the rest of the world. Must be what a butt plug feels like. I could barely hear the vehicles right outside the window, that’s probably a good thing. Probably. I mean, that’s the point right? I adjusted it some more and once I had a good seal, I picked a random song and played it.

Oh wow.

The tinny sound was gone, the bass was strong, everything was clear and it sounded like the band was playing from inside my head. It was earsex, I swear. Once you get past the discomfort of having rubber sleeves plugging up your ear, it’s all sonic paradise. Mind you I’m no audiophile, but this is the first time I’ve heard music sounding this clear and this good.

I shuffled around through other songs, through different genres, and each song I played sounded entirely new simply because I’ve never heard them like this before. Even the testicle-shriveling power metal wails are divine with this thing. I popped in a 24 DVD, looked for an action scene and enjoyed all the rumbling explosions and gunfire. I could’ve sworn my head was vibrating.

I’m 95% satisfied. The other 5% went to the weirdness of being able to hear my own footsteps, breathing, and talking via low inner ear vibrations while I have them on. Overall though, these canalphones are worth every peso I paid. Besides, it will take only like a day and a half to earn it all back, so it’s all good. If I ever lose these or if they ever break, I wouldn’t hesitate to pay another 2k to replace them.

I’m not even going to proofread this post, I wanna get back to using them.

It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Even my sister and her boyfriend, both iPod Video users, are impressed. They will readily admit that the Zen is the better device. Why? Because I was watching DivX episodes of Lost and 24 I copied directly off my machine. They have to convert theirs first. Plus, the screen is superb; the colors are better, the screen is brighter and the themes are a lot less antiquated than the tired, old iPod version of Aqua. Aside from a few useful extra features that the iPod doesn’t have, I can transfer files to it using Windows Media Player 10 or Windows Explorer. Another thing, though I haven’t tried it yet, is that it’s supposed to work under Linux. Later, I will try transferring media using Banshee under GNOME to see if it’s true. MTP is sweet.

There are some drawbacks though. The package I bought doesn’t come with a power adapter, it’s a separate purchase. Also, the A/V out cables are proprietary and I need to buy them if I ever want to play my videos on a TV. The accessories are less widespread than the iPod’s so I have to go to particular shops that sell Zen-specific accessories. Another tiny detail, the first unit I got broke within 12 hours and I had to run back to the shop the next day to get a replacement unit. I guess it’s a good thing that Zens tend to break while still under warranty.

My next purchase will be a non-white set of headphones or earphones. I’m personally blaming the iPod for making people wearing white earphones such a juicy target for muggers and thieves.

Gone were the days when I had to make 2 sets of CSS to make a site look consistent. I will miss them.

Today, I discovered that the CSS hover menus I use break in IE7. Now, I have to make 3 sets of CSS to make a site look consistent, at least without resorting to messy hacks. Conditional comments help but still, having to use 2 extra sets of styles for the same family of browsers is ridiculous.

I hate.. no, hate is too weak a word.. I loathe IE7.

Update: Development on Swift has resumed! You can download the new 0.2 version from the Swift site.

It all started a couple of weeks ago when a client kept sending revisions for their website. We were confused as his revisions concerned portions of the site that didn’t seem broken, at least to us.

Later, it was discovered that the client exclusively uses a Mac and Safari was rendering our work differently. Borrowing a Mac from the company’s execs wasn’t really an option, so I went around looking for a way to view sites the way Safari would render them. I came a cross browsercam sites BrowsrCamp and iCapture but both were slow and overall an inefficient way to tackle the problem.

Eventually, I came across a few sites making mention of a Windows browser called Swift that utilized WebKit just like Safari. I discovered that the project, while still in it’s alpha stages, seems to have been abandoned. Scouring the web for mirrors, I found that there were none. I wasn’t able to find any mention of it on WebKit’s site, as if the project was erased from history. Disappointed, I made it a point to try looking for it again sometime in the future, perhaps something will come up.

A few days ago, I came across Dave’s post. He had a copy of the files for Swift! I downloaded it immediately and attempted to run it. It gave me an error, citing something about the configuration. I contacted Dave and he provided the proper installer for Swift. I tried again but this time I got errors saying something about being unable to register WebKit.dll. After a quick search of the phrase in the error on Google, I discovered that I needed some Visual Studio runtime libraries to get it to run. So I installed the libraries, reinstalled Swift and it worked!

I tried the client’s site again and it was showing the same bugs as the ones I saw on the browser cam site. I never in my life thought that I’d be so glad to see such glaring and consistent errors.

Thanks Dave.

- Swift Browser mirror (21MB, zipped)

If you get an error that says it’s unable to register WebKit.dll, you need to install this:
- Visual Studio 2005 runtime libraries (2.5MB)

Take note that Swift never left the alpha stages, you may experience frequest crashes and be aware that forms do not work.

As much as I want to summarize this entire post by saying “Internet Explorer 7 is fucking gay,” it won’t really explain why Microsoft’s latest release of IE crushed my hopes of less frustrating work.

This blog looks fine on Firefox and Opera. Even on Linux (Firefox) and Mac (Safari), the only glitch is the search field which gets a bit wider than it should be. Heck, it even looks fine on IE6.

On IE7, the footer at the bottom by some means of forbidden arcane magic moves up considerably and covers certain portions of the site. I have no idea how it got there and why it’s only happening on this supposedly improved browser. I played around with my CSS to try and fix it, but I already had this feeling that it would amount to nothing.

My temporary quick fix is this conditional comment:

<!–[if lte IE 6]>
   Footer code goes here
<![endif]–>

I enclosed my footer in that so IE7 would ignore the code and seal off whatever ancient magics put in place by Microsoft’s development team. I’ll keep it in there until I figure out exactly what the problem is and fix it. Not the best course of action, but I doubt anyone will miss seeing the copyright text and page rendering speed for the time being.

The judging guidelines provided by the PWA state that they’re mere suggestions and are not exhaustive. So basically, as before, I can judge however the hell I want.

However, judging for the Blogs category will involve wading through a whole lot of crap, I’m going to say that upfront. To prepare myself for the inevitable shitcluster, I’ve come up with my own personal judging guidelines so I may stand firm on my scores. The scores I’m gonna be giving out are gonna be harsh, but it will be my only shield when charging head-first into this ugly, semi-pretentious collection of melodrama.

I’ve written them in the form of questions I would ask myself during my evaluations. Hopefully some of you readers (there’s like 1 of you out there) share my views.

Content

• First and foremost, is this person writing coherent entries?
• Do the entries seem sincere, or is this person sugar-coating the mundane? While sugar-coating isn’t bad, it requires skill to pull off effectively.
• How is this person’s spelling and grammar? By default, this person is subject to the holy tenets of the grammar nazi in you.
• Do you get the feeling this person’s entries exist for the sole purpose of getting site hits?
• When was the last time this person wrote a non-filler entry?
• Would I willingly subject myself to this experience a second time?

Design

• This is extremely important, how far did this person deviate from the default theme of his chosen CMS/blogging software/blogging service? If this person fails here, give him a score ranging from 0 to 2, forego the following guidelines and skip to the next criteria.
• If the design did not make you cringe or did not blind you, how purrrdy is it?
• Does the site look like shite in popular alternative browsers like Firefox and Opera?

Usability

• Is any of this person’s content readable by any discernable standard?
• How long did it take for you to realize that that blob over there is this person’s site navigation?
• Were you attacked by unnecessary Javascript alerts, prompts, or any other unnecessary steps to access this person’s content?
• Does the site transform into total shite when you disable the stylesheets?
• Has the site in any way, shape or form disabled or crippled your beloved keyboard shortcuts and normal browser functions?
• Does anything at all in this person’s site cause your browser to crash or respond slowly like that fucking Reuters video feed at the bottom of the layout?

Functionality

• Is the site even up?
• Is anything broken?
• Did you doze off while it was loading?
• Does looking at the source code give you a warm fuzzy feeling deep inside?

Now I realize my own blog may not pass my own standards, but I’m not entered in any sort of awards, so there. Bah, I’m going to continue judging later. That is, if the judging page cooperates and stops giving me that goddamn database error.

Apophysis is a free open source fractal flame editor for the Windows platform. I recently found out that GIMP actually has this functionality (in a more basic form, apparently) buried somewhere in the Nature submenu and I’ll be testing it out the next time I get the urge to boot into Linux.

While I don’t fully understand what fractals or fractal flames are, the images it output give off a very surreal and ethereal look depending on how much you tweak the options and parameters. After some tinkering and running of a handful of bundled scripts, it’s only a matter of time before you end up with very striking visuals that will leave you staring and examining the finer details.

Like most applications that use math to generate images, there is a drawback for the impatient: rendering time. A 1600×1200 image at with the quality set at 600 rendered in a little over an hour. The images won’t be perfect. You’ll notice little unwanted specks that you didn’t see in the tiny preview window (the larger you resize the application window, the slower previews will be generated), but it’s nothing a little run-through in Photoshop won’t fix. You should retouch it in the first place before using it anywhere, don’t be a lazy ass. Also, sometimes the final render will have some parts look a tad blurry. One side would look brilliant, while the other would look like you’ve been tripping on household cleaning liquids. I’m not sure what causes it, perhaps certain combinations of parameters just give you half-crap renders.

All in all, this is a useful application for coming up with patterns to fill in spots in your designs that might need a little spicing up.

Download Apophysis 2.02 (2.6MB)
Apophysis website
Apophysis tutorials

As you may already know (there’s 1 other person who actually comes to this blog), I was invited to judge again at the Philippine Web Awards this year. Anyway, so I login to the judge’s page –which by the way has a very classic feel (hover over dashed phrase) to it– and the list is quite long.

I wanted to test their web application out so I picked out a site from the list and visited it. The site was amusing in a very bad way, but that story is for another day. I enter my chosen scores, click the “Update Scores” button, then lo and behold:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error ‘80040e14′

[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Incorrect syntax near the keyword ‘AND’.

/elimination_save.asp, line 20

I guess I won’t be judging anything today. I miss having this much held-back criticism for a higher pseudo-authority.

If you use Linux, you’ll understand.