Just had a quick play with Google Street Maps and was interested to see how peoples faces and car number plates are automatically blurred. However, what I also noticed is that the blurring only detects such features in the "current" frame. E.g. you see a car and then move towards it, the car is now at a good resolution and the plate is blurred. However, if you move back a step and then use the zoom button you can easily read the plate. So if your car in visible I would recommend you try this trick and then use the report a problem button to ask for it to be blurred (or removed).
Computers and Internet
Tip: Virtual PC slow?
I just discovered that when I remote desktop to a machine that is hosting a Virtual PC and try to use the VM from the "player" then the user performance is terrible. You try to move the mouse pointer and it stutters which results in you spending 10mins just to trying to get the mouse-pointer to click a button! Don’t despair there is a workaround. Simply enable remote desktop access to the VM and remote desktop directly to the VM. The UI performance is fine, in fact you wouldn’t know it was a VM.
RIP IE6, goodbye old friend
To start off I’m not an IE6 hater. Much of what is written today vilifies IE6 but for me it’s been a steady, if limited, platform. However, even I concede that it no longer fits the bill. I could second Calling time on IE6 reasons of it’s limited CSS support or it’s now poor JavaScript performance but the final straw for me is the lack of bug fixes. Sure Microsoft will fix the critical (aka security) issues but anything else it just isn’t interested in. E.g. Want to use IIS compression and content-disposition? Yes please, but wait it doesn’t reliably work in IE6 😦 (Edit: note to Systems Admins, you should move away from IE6 too for the same reasons, the users should have the best experience including decent caching, compression, parsing, rendering and bug fixes – all things IE6 doesn’t give you)
So I’m joining throngs of the ivory tower W3Cers and fed up web designers…
Although to balance out the post, Firefox, Safari and Opera can all be royal CSS pains in the….too!
Things to consider when developing with JavaScript
I admit that I’m used to using JavaScript to provide the odd bit of client functionality and to plug gaps with CSS. However, the more complicated script I write the more problems I find with it. So I found this slide show by John Resig to be very interesting (if you get the chance to attend a seminar by him then do so).
Html empty cells and table cell spacing
I finally became frustrated with having to ensure that table cells have some content to make them wok properly and from being hit by the requirement to set the horrible cellspacing attribute so I had a look around the web…
and to stop lines breaking in a table;
overflow:hidden;
white-space:nowrap;
What is the top position of an html element?
I was playing with AJAX Contol Toolkit today and wanted to position a control (ie DIV) at the same position as the control (ie element) however I was suprised to discover that there is no such property, you have to total all the offsets of the elements parents to get the actual position. Fortunatley I stumbled across this…
Find Position which worked a treat.
Visual Round Trip Analyzer/NetMon not working?
I spent 30 mins today trying to understand why the Visual Round Trip Analyzer (VRTA) or NetMon wouldn’t capture any data. After a lot of fiddling with network settings, Virus checkers and the like it turned out to be something very simple. NetMon has settings about how much disk space you should have free before it automatically stops capturing…yes I’ve got less than the default 2% free. After changing the setting it started working. Would have been nice if it has said, "automatically stopped, not enough free disk space" or something!
Goodies from Remix UK
Finally managed to get the download subscription from Remix working, only about a month late! However, getting the correct subscription information was only the first hurdle. Once armed with the information to subscribe to the american site (where the downloads live) I hurried to the download only to discover that although the keys were now ready the download was greyed out. Turns out that it doesn’t like Firefox on the Mac (MS sites can really be bad examples of how to write web sites, especially ironic given this is the Expression site). So fired up Vista and tried again. Hurray the download was ready so clicked it….
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VBScript: Microsoft File Transfer Manager
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There was an error launching File Transfer Manager.
VBScript: Microsoft File Transfer Manager
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There was an error launching File Transfer Manager.
If you are running Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1,
this installation may have been blocked. If the gold IE Information Bar is present above, please
click the bar and select the option to ‘Install ActiveX’.
For additional assistance, please visit the web site https://transfers.ds.microsoft.com,
or contact your help provider.
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OK
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OK
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Erm ok, played around with the IE settings and no joy. Went the link in the message, ‘bad page’. Oh wonderful, I can see this is a really great example of a web site. To be fair there is some info about this in the FAQ page, although I found the easiest solution was to go and download the msi for File Transfer Manager. Once installed things started to work. So I’ve now finally managed to download a disk full of iso images and a Vista iso mounting driver from http://www.slysoft.com/en/download.html
Begin Rant
It appears that Microsoft are trying to learn from Apple, that really was a very painful dowload experience similar to the farce of downloading DRM material from iTunes. But don’t worry because we’re soon going to be putting all our life into the cloud…<gulp>
End Rant
Remix UK replayed
Did you miss Remix 08 UK? Did you attend but couldn’t decide which session to miss? Well fear not, Remix Replayed is now up and running.
Francis Bacon, data visualisations and the Turner Prize (?!)
It’s been long overdue but finally I managed to get back to the Tate Britain today, and as luck would have it there was both an exhibition of Sir Francis Bacon and the Turner Prize.
One thing that struck me during the tour was how painters reaction to photography was similar to a number of recent presentations about data visualization. E.g. you can take a photo of someone but it doesn’t (normally) convey the inner person whereas a painter can show those inner attributes via their particular skill or style but in a way that is often quite foreign to our normal experiences. In a similar way many people are striving to show data in peculiar but compelling way. Oh well, not sure why I shared that but there you go 😉
Ah the Turner Prize. It’s all too easy to knock the artists that are nominated for the Turner Prize so it’s only fair that before making comment you visit it, so I thought. Hmm, I have to say that I didn’t see anything that was particularly challenging or innovative. That’s not to say it was, "all rubbish, a five year old could have done it" as I did like some individual items but prize winning? The bit I enjoyed the most was the comment wall at the end of the exhibition. Some were funny, some just venting their anger others asking for the prize themselves based upon the drawing on the comment card. I think the most telling comments were, ‘I’ll never get that back’ and a drawing of the recycling symbol with the word prize in it. Of course I can only hope to earn a tiny percentage of the money those artists will make, so who am I to throw stones? Good luck to them, I’d go for the work about zooming into pictures or the glass sculpture.
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