Work

The Trouble with Macs…

| Richard

So with the move to London happening soon, one of the items I had to sort out was my Internet access. Here at home – working for myself from my office on the side of the house – I have a business broadband package from Demon with fixed IP addresses for all the computers and printers. When I’m out and about, I usually use a 3G USB dongle from Vodafone which is more often that not either a regular 38Kbps service or on occasion nothing more than a pretty white plastic thing for decoration only. Where there is good coverage, it’s supposed to deliver 1.8Mbps with the promise of 7.2Mbps in parts of London though annoyingly Rotherhithe doesn’t appear to be in the Promised Land but just outside – I’ll check when I get there.

So anyway, with 5GB/month I thought that might make it easier: no need to get a phone line and a broadband package, just use my allowance for a change.

But Mrs RHM then suggested I should get a webcam for my laptop so I could help the kids with their homework if need be and also keep in touch with her. Fine, I thought, though alarm bells started ringing: she uses our venerable iMac while the rest of the family have PCs.

So what’s the problem with the iMac?

Well the iMac and OSX Leopard has iChat which promotes its video chat features. To use it to its best, you need to have a .Mac account – which is expensive for what you actually get which is why I abandoned my .Mac account after a couple of years – as does your friend and .Mac is pretty much a waste of time for anyone on a PC. “Never fear”, says Apple, “you can always link up with AIM.” What?

“iChat works with AIM, the largest instant messaging community in the U.S. You and your buddies can be either AIM or .Mac users. Text, audio, and video chat whether your buddies use a Mac or a PC. Sign in with your AIM account, and all your buddies appear in your iChat buddy list.”

Great! No-one in the UK – OK, I exaggerate a tad – uses AIM: AOL Instant Messenger. The client software seems to have issues here on this PC, by the way, which comes as no surprise to me having once used AOL software for testing purposes. Go on: ask any of your connected friends what they use for instant messaging and they’ll say “MSN” (or “Windows Live Messenger“, to give it its proper name).

You can, of course, download the Mac Messenger client, but the ‘usual’ home user version does not support video messaging. Not really a surprise as I think Microsoft doesn’t really bother with Mac users as they’re lost causes as far as “the Beast of Redmond” appears to be concerned.

Maybe this is another reason not to get a Mac? Until Apple comes up with an instant messaging client that supports video messaging with Windows Live users, you’d otherwise be partially cutting yourself off from the majority of computer users, at least here in the UK.

London is drowning and I live by the river

| Richard

I will shortly be starting a new full-time job in London which means that I shall be moving to a flat to live in during the week. Commuting isn’t an option even though living near the far end of the train line means at least I ought to be able to get a seat, £6000 for a second class ticket is money wasted especially when it’s two hours by train each way and another half hour from the rail stations to home and the office. Six hours’ travelling each day isn’t exactly my idea of fun … and that’s when the trains are running to time, but there was a recent issue with a new bridge closing the line outside Liverpool Street and more recently shuttle buses after a power line was brought down by a train.

So I have taken a lease on a flat in Rotherhithe overlooking the Thames.

The landlady insures the property itself and her own contents – it’s being let furnished – but I need to insure my own contents so I got some quotes this morning and will be going with More Than. A number of other insurance companies wouldn’t quote because the property is within 400m of a river, though it would have to be a major catastrophe for the Thames to rise to the degree of it overflowing its banks and water levels reaching a second floor flat, I’d have thought!

Oh and I shall also be adding on cycle cover for the first time: £25 extra to cover a bike, as if I buy one to get around on, it’s more likely to go walkies in London than it is in Norfolk.

The Trials of Trustees

| Richard

It appears that this October I shall be required to attend a couple of meetings here at Sabah in Malaysia. I’ve yet to find out of we’ll be insisting on business class travel or choosing to travel economy for the benefit of the members…

Now to me, that looks like a little bit of paradise, but I will be mainly sitting in some conference room or attending some semi-formal dinners whilst I’m there. It might be nice to share the trip with my partner, but it may well be a tad expensive for a short break… Still, at least they’d be able to relax in luxury, so we’ll see.

Web 2.0 – The Management-Speak

| Richard

Over a sandwich this lunchtime, I started reading an article in the February 2008 edition of “Project” magazine about using Web 2.0 technology to aid communication within a project team.

But I must admit to a true “laugh out loud” moment when I read the final paragraph:

“It is by leveraging Web 2.0 technologies to facilitate excellent collaboration, the dissemination of the common vision, streamlining of workflow and delivery of rapid authorisation processes, that organisations can create the highly effective working environment required to keep a project focused on the corporate objective.”

Pardon?

Management-speak at its best!

The Trouble with PNG Images

| Richard

I’ve recently been doing a web site refresh for someone who wanted their site to be more up to date looking, less ‘blocky’ and still CSS-based and standards-compliant. They’d had another designer approach them – or more particularly, the boyfriend of a staff member had approached them – and knocked up a good-looking, if table-based, version of their home page.

OK, he’d forgotten to check the site in different browsers and on different platforms, so it was very broken and likewise it was nowhere near being standards-compliant, but hey-ho…

So they asked me to produce a working, standards-compliant version which I duly did. One of the elements they wanted was a navigation bar to match their current logo colours and I created the background for the navigation area and saved it as a PNG: I didn’t want a GIF image due to the blockier look of the curved ends that would result from using that format and I didn’t want a JPG image due to the file size (I try to ensure my pages come banging in as quickly and efficiently as possible).

The result looked great in all the browsers I tested it on.

The client then asked me to change the navigation element so that there was some mouseover effect, so I went for their logo colour on the text over white when the mouse is over the link and white text over their logo colour in the ‘off’ state. At this point, it looked great in Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc. but the colours were off in Internet Explorer 7 (which has only recently included support for PNG images).

I thought it was just my CSS being screwed up and checked the PNG file I was using for the DIV background against the hex code I was using for the navigation element colour and found they were exactly right. I then did a screenshot and lifted the hex code from the background to find that it was different to the original image when displayed in Internet Explorer 7. The reason? Gamma correction within PNG images which gets stripped out by web browsers except for Internet Explorer! I’d never come across this before as I was used to using GIFs and JPEGs due to the earlier lack of PNG support in Internet Explorer.

There’s a good blog entry about it here that links to this article and this paper.

Soap

| Richard

I’m currently in Leeds in a really rather nice hotel. And as usual that means some nice toiletries but I do wonder about the soap.

I get back to my room, get changed and shower to freshen up. So I open up the soap box and use the soap. Then in the morning I shower and use the soap again before breakfasting and heading off.

By the time I get back, the old soap has disappeared and new one is in its place. So what do they do with the old ones? Do the chambermaids take them home en masse?

Fortunately this evening my soap was still in the wire soap dish and a fresh one placed next to the sink.