Monday 28 May 2007

Spider-Man 3

2 weeks ago we saw Spider-Man 3 and overall, despite it being a long film at 138 mins, we enjoyed it. However, despite it being fun to watch it is not as good as its predecessors. There are too many things going on in this film because of having too many villains and this leads to it being a long film with many plot holes. They needed to have either Sandman or Venom not both. Ultimately, despite these flaws, Spider-Man 3 was still fun to watch.

Ben: 3 stars, Ruby: 3 stars.

Saturday 12 May 2007

Stuff from this week #8

I think Ross Gittins article on the Work Choices legislation is spot on. Howard's recent minor changes to it does not change a think. This is bad legislation and must go.

Bono's 47th birthday this week (10th May). Happy birthday mate, keep up the good work :)

Were you one of those people who thought Marty McFlys shoes were cool in Back to the Future? Someone has set up a petition to get Nike to put these up for sale. Hmm I would much rather the flying DeLorean...

Looks like New Order have officially broken up (unlike going on hiatus like in the mid 90s). I wonder where the album worth of songs that were recorded during the Waiting For The Sirens Call sessions will get to...

YouTube video of a car owner revenge on a traffic light window washer :)

The Federal Budget was released this week in Australia and you can't half tell they are buying votes in this election year (as they have done in the past couple of election year budgets). Also they have plenty of cash left over for some election spending and wasting it on advertising for Work Choices or Superannuation. I would have preferred that instead of a tax cut and all those payouts that they invested in more infrastructure (like water tank rebates, better public transport, improvement to hospitals).

UPDATE: The New Order break-up seems to be only the bassist Peter Hook. A source close to the band says they are still together.

Wednesday 9 May 2007

My Money Minder 1.9.6 released

Just a quick post to announce the new version of My Money Minder. In fact today is 5 years since I released v1.0.

Originally I was planning to have v2 out this May, however, I realised a while back that this was not going to happen. Along with that several users reported some bugs. So, instead, I combined some of the work I was doing on v2 which fixed issues in csv/tsv file importing, fixed some of the other bugs and added 2 partial localisations. I am hoping that this is the last 1.x versions of MMM...

Anyway head on over to the My Money Minder pages to see what the changes are and grab a copy.

Saturday 5 May 2007

Stuff from this week #7

Oh no! You can now buy baby clothes to match up with your iPod!

Telstra starting on the broadband propaganda wagon. I getting really sick of Telstra's propaganda on this broadband issue, I have been getting stuff in the mail from them too!

Cool pics of Jupiter from the New Horizons probe on its way to Pluto and Kuiper Belt.

Stephen Hawking takes a zero-g flight. Looks like he had fun too!

Finally Australia has implemented a Do Not Call register for telemarketers. I signed up yesterday, pity it takes 30 days to activate and only lasts 3 years...

Funny stuff from YouTube: Darth Vader calls the Emperor after the Death Star is blown up and Darth Vader vs Japanese police.

Wednesday 2 May 2007

Website update

I have now updated each of the three sections of our website (done over several days). I approached this update much like I do with home renovations, I make a list of things that are broken and things I want to improve.

While my blog is relatively new and the standard Blogger template I was using was ok, if I ever wanted to change any of the colors for the nice rounded boxes I would need to change all the images. This would be a pain! I had used some CSS trickery on the Ben's Software pages to do this but that was also a pain to maintain. I also wanted to have random backgrounds on the blog. The Ben's Software pages were the oldest part of the site (having been transferred from Geocities with little modification) so it was time to do a general cleanup to make them look at bit more professional. With the addition of the blog I now had three separate sections to the website and I wanted each of these linked and improve their navigation. Lastly I wanted to add in better website tracking.

To find the rounded corners I just did a couple of Google searches and reasonably quickly found what I wanted. In the end I chose two different javascripts that generate the corners on-the-fly. In the end I found 2 different javascript solutions. To give me nice anti-aliased boxes that will work with any of the random backgrounds on the blog I chose Curvy Corners. However, since I wanted a drop shadow for Ben's Software, I chose Ruzee Borders (which does not work well with the random background). Another Google search found a random background javascript, currently there are 6 possible background images.

For improving the navigation I had a look at a couple of other websites (such as Apple.com) and they used links at the end of each page called breadcrumbs. These have been added to Ben's Software and the Photos pages.

Lastly I added Google's Analytics to monitor traffic on each section of the website.

I have tried to make sure that these changes work in well in most browsers (let me know if things don't work or look right). However, I have done most of my testing on Safari and Firefox. This should work in Internet Exploiter but I highly recommend you get Firefox as it is quite simply much better :)