Satya's blog - 2006/01/
My picture album gallery thing
has access keys H and L for previous and next image when viewing the detail images.
I thought no one would notice that but someone did and made my day today:
(11:12:12) kulinp: H and L access keys give a nice web 2.0 -ish touch (11:12:36) satyap: yes :) (11:12:41) satyap: i'm so glad you noticed that (11:12:44) satyap: i thought no one would (11:12:50) kulinp: :P (11:12:58) kulinp: got so used to that with gmail (11:13:20) kulinp: i like sites that build that in (11:13:41) satyap: yaaay (11:13:43) satyap: success (11:13:46) kulinp: :D (11:13:46) satyap: you just made my day (11:13:49) kulinp: kewl (11:14:04) satyap: i should blog about it (11:14:11) satyap: mind if i paste this converstaion? (11:14:16) kulinp: go ahead
Yeah, I know, the feed for my blog is spewing.
That's because I've just put (insert name of my album software
which is NOT to be called 'bins-nih')
into production.
I went through old entries and fixed all the links.
It was either that or
break all the image links in my blog
and the mirror on livejournal.
Speaking of which, any of you reading this on LJ I hope
you know that that's a secondary.
The primary is on my web site.
There shouldn't be spewage on LJ because it has a back-date option.
Yesterday I was trapped in the library elevator (alone)
for about 20 minutes. Here's what happened. I got in on the first floor
and pressed the fourth floor button.
As I went up, I heard a bang and some scraping.
I disregarded it because this elevator is often noisy.
But it must have broken something, because the doors wouldn't open.
The elevator went up and down a couple of times due to people using the other one in the set, and me trying to convince it to open. But as I repeatedly pushed the Door Open button I could hear the whine of the actuator but the doors wouldn't budge, not even manually (by me pushing on them). So I picked up the emergency phone and explained what was going on. So far about 3 minutes had passed. The elevator was on the first floor, as I didn't want a four-floor drop under me even though I knew the *cables* were fine. In a few minutes I could hear voices outside, people saying yeah sure enough it won't open. Then the elevator moved around between floors a bit. There was much banging on top. The maintenance guy asked me a few times if I was okay, and told me to relax. Aside from slight boredom and a mild urge to sit down I was feeling fine. I knew it wasn't air-tight and I had plenty of light -- this elevator was fully functional except for the doors. There was an inch-wide gap between the inner door and the right side of the frame, where I could see some sort of cable hanging. I considered trying to pull it but didn't want to stick my fingers in there. I could see light through it, and see the shaft wall and a little of the other elevator's door. After much (mild) swearing, the guy raised the elevator to the secret third floor and opened the door a little to tell me, he was going to get on top and move it level with the floor (I was willing to climb or jump at this point). Then when the doors opened I should get out while watching my step in case of... a step. In case the floors weren't at the same level. It took him considerable effort to open the doors manually, and I stepped out. The guy asked me to ride the other elevator down and tell the Public Safety officer on the first floor that I was out, but I couldn't get back in from the secret third floor (you need a key) so I went out to the stairs, down to second, out the library doors, into the building's central foyer, down those stairs, ... just as the maintenance guy came down in the other elevator. Waved at Security, got in the other one, and went about my business. Later in the day the elevator was blocked off with big signs and tape. Apparently they need to get a part which they won't for a week or more. There was also an email sent around to library staff about it, saying the person trapped inside was "set free" (their quotation marks) and no one was injured. Update: spell-fix Last updated: Jan 21 2006 12:18
My online photo albums
are generated using a script called
bins.
It's a very good piece of software, but recently I've felt that it's too slow.
It's also hard to change its templates,
and this is not bins' fault.
It is because I didn't know what I was doing when I wrote them.
So I set out to write my own bins-work-alike script, which is so far called 'albums'. Only mine's a little slower, isn't internationalised like bins is, and may be more brittle. And it's incomplete. And it's probably not much faster than bins. On the plus side I can re-do my templates to be cleaner. It also does not use a separate page for EXIF data and it never shows a full-size image on an HTML page -- you will only get thumnail-sized previews until you hit the image details page, which will always give a picture that fits within 640x480 pixels. being my own code, I can also make it do whatever I want. And NIH means Not Invented Here. It's the factor that makes us re-invent wheels. Updated: It won't have RSS because this blog is the one-stop RSS for my site. Last updated: Jan 21 2006 11:59
I'm fed up of eating with the right hand and
not being able to comfortably reach the mouse with the left
-- the mouse has always been on the right of my keyboard.
So today I moved the mouse to the left and found
it pretty easy, but not quite that easy. Maybe it'll get better
with practice.
But for now I've switched mouse hands and hope to make it a long-term
switch, and give my right hand a rest.
Oh, boy. Here we go.
Well, that's nice. A Babylon 5 episode
"View from the Gallery"
from the little guys' point of view.
Two maintenance men on the
foreground and an invasion in the background.
Funny thing, one was running what I assumed was a futuristic vacuum cleaner,
and he asked the other guy what it was, it's not a vacuum cleaner as the
floor's just as clean as before. The other guy didn't know either. So when
you
see someone doing something inexplicable in science fiction, it may actually
be inexplicable.
So an Indian ISP, VSNL, just sent a new year message to its users.
The message, in HTML with no text alternative, natch,
had a subject of
"Message from the Commissioner of Police"
and a body (leaving out the HTML and the boilerplate) of
happy new year or something to that effect. Also included
was a link to an image:
http://www.tataindicombroadband.com/mailers/images/msg.gif
Nothing like starting off the new year with a rant, eh?
Ya know what "grinds my gears"?
You buy/rent a DVD, you spend money on it, and then
you're faced with ads that you can't skip or fast-forward.
I really don't need to see 10 seconds of FBI warnings
(I bought/legally rented the damn thing, didn't I!?
and criminals aren't going to be put off by a warning!),
20 seconds of ::BOOM::THX!::CHORD:: and studio animations.
EVERY SINGLE TIME I play the DVD!
And if it's a rental that skips and stops, I have to go through that
stuff AGAIN when I stop it, pull it out, clean it, and put it back!
(Sidebar: To the people who make the menus on DVDs, do you realise that the transitions and the menu sound bites are nice and cute the first time, but start getting in the way the second time around and are FREAKING ANNOYING the 20th time!) And you know what else? Suppose you buy a movie and bring it home and play it and it has all this stuff on it. So you try to return it. Guess what? You can't return it if it's been opened! Even if it can't be played! Suppose you buy a computer game and don't like it. (Mall Tycoon, I'm looking at you here!) Well, guess what, you're SOL! Suck it up! That'll teach me to do the right thing and actually *buy* my stuff *legally*! Update: And that's assuming your new DVD or CS didn't bring with it some spyware or rootkit masquerading as copy-protection. Last updated: Jan 02 2006 12:14 |
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