July 2004 – Page 2 – Something Odd!

Preparing For Emergencies

hehe. Thanks Donal for the link to preparingforemergencies.co.uk which is a parody of preparingforemergencies.gov.uk
Surely the British Government isn’t scare mongering? Bertie tried that last year, but even he’s given up on it!

In an effort to worry the public and convince them to vote for us again next year, and because George Bush asked us to, this website includes…
We are also launching a national advertising campaign letting you know to look out for the booklet coming through your letterboxes during August. In no way does this resemble the Reader’s Digest Prize Draw.

Abstracting The Landscape

Thoughtful and interesting essay on shooting landscapes. 2 great photos included.
I find that by cropping a shot later I can completely change what an image feels like. When you work with high resolution images you can crop aggressively if you’re only going to be displaying the images online!

What's in a street name?

Cathedral Walk, or Casan na hEaglaise lies just behind the brewery in Blackpool. The street is named for the North Cathedral which is situated up the hill from this road. (the Cathedral used to be pictured in the photo above but can be seen to the right of the original photo.)

How Stating the False Hides the True

At first glance this essay makes a lot of sense but think about it. Is the media not biased? The author makes the assumption himself by referencing Fox News. Still, great comments after it and worth a read! (Thanks Justin for another great link!)

How to download Real Audio streams and convert Real Audio to MP3

This guide is good, and there’s even a link to a page with instructions on doing the same and more on Linux!
And in a timely coincidence, Justin’s delicious bookmarks points at this page with instructions on recording streaming audio with Mplayer! I’ve done the same and posted command lines here before. Go search for “mplayer” or something! Lots more Linux stuff on that site including the odd opinionated piece..

Blackpool Side Street

Never having been down this street before, I snapped a few pics of it. That guy walking up the road is a van driver who stopped to talk and joke with me before heading off!

Compress Me!

This technique is an old one. Feed your content through the PHP output buffer using the gzip handler, then at the end flush it out to the browser.
Even if the text doesn’t compress well, just using the output buffer results in slightly less network traffic as the data is sent in one big blob. I have to investigate if the HTTP headers are affected yet but it seems to be working fine.

The Willful

The Willful played in the Coal Quay Bar last night and went down a storm! Great night, especially as I hadn’t been to that pub in months!

Broadband in Blarney!

Woohoo! I got the DSL connection going eventually! *phew* My phoneline extension cable isn’t the greatest, and I couldn’t remember the password I entered when I signed up for the 3 month free trial with IOL.
Naughty IOL – you should email the username and password when you send that nice advertising blurb after signup!
/me got a big grin on my face!