Currently the number of downloads of my Facebook Photo Uploader stands at 47. And yet… there are three users.
How is that supposed to work then? I’m wondering if it’s some automated web crawler which has picked up the link from here… seems strange that they would download something like that though! I’m just trying to imagine what web crawlers do with zip files containing Java apps…
Anyway. Not much else to say at the moment…
Hmm, I just realised that I didn’t write my customary “The Weekend” post this weekend. Well, I’m afraid that it was such a long time ago I can’t really remember much of what happened!
It did involve going over to my parents’, as it was my Dad’s birthday. It also involved watching “Hot Fuzz” on DVD (brilliant film!). On Saturday evening we went round to Anne-Marie’s to watch Doctor Who (great episode, by the way) and to watch the conclusion of “Any Dream Will Do”.
And… that’s about it that I can remember. So there :p
I mentioned a little while back that I was writing a Java desktop application which could be used if you wanted to upload photos to Facebook (if, like me, you had trouble using the Facebook-provided uploader applet).
Anyway, I have put the project onto Google Code, and created a release (beta). So, if you want to try it out, check out the downloads section…
I mentioned in my previous blog post that I was selling a couple of speakers and an amp on eBay. These have now been sold to one of my friends, so I’ve pulled the auction. Apologies to anyone who was interested!
Regular readers will know that we are currently in the process of buying a house. I also wanted to quickly update you on that situation, as it’s stressing me out a bit… the contract on our current flat ends at the end of June. We still haven’t exchanged contracts yet, and in fact we are still waiting for the mortgage offer letter (the Building Society have been taking their sweet time for one reason or another, it’s not been helped by the fact that they were waiting for a reference from my old employer about two weeks after I changed jobs…). So we’re just hoping and praying that it all goes through OK!
Anyway. What I wanted to ask is, does anyone know of any good removal companies? We’ve been looking at a few including one called ‘Team Relocate’, but if anyone’s used any in the Colchester area and can recommend one that would be useful… another possibility is just hiring a biggish van and trying to move stuff ourselves, but I’m not sure about that one!
If anyone wants an amp and speakers (mobile DJ style), please visit one of my eBay auctions.
Cheers!
Ok, firstly, a quick update on what happened over the weekend! On Friday evening, Phil’s sister Roz came up to stay with us. We didn’t do much on Friday as Phil was at a church music practice, we just watched a couple of episodes of “Spaced” and … well, that’s about it really.
On Saturday, we went to Colchester Zoo. We really enjoyed it as well – none of us have been to Colchester Zoo before, and I hadn’t been to the zoo in ages, so it was great fun and reminded me a bit of when I was younger! Phil and Roz fed an elephant and a giraffe (I have photographic evidence), and we saw lots of animals of all different shapes and sizes (and colours!). One of my favourites was the white tiger, she was beautiful! We took some photos, which will be uploaded soon – more on that in a minute.
By about 3:30 were quite tired (we’d been at the zoo since 9:30 that morning), and as we’d seen most of the animals by that point we decided to head back home. We spent the rest of the afternoon lazing in Castle Park reading, before going back to ours for dinner and then watching Doctor Who and Any Dream Will Do. Roz stayed to watch ‘Any Dream…’, and then went home.
Speaking of Doctor Who, by the way – how good were the past couple of episodes? Easily the best of this series, possibly the best of all three new series. It wasn’t ‘scary’, but it was thought-provoking, emotional, and very well acted. Jessiica Hyne (nee Stevenson, of ‘Spaced’ fame…) was superb.
On Sunday, we went to Fordham in the morning, and in the afternoon did a bit of driving practice: Phil has a driving license, but she hasn’t driven our car before – I took her out to a quiet area for her to practice! I think she’s getting the hang of it… it is a bit scary driving a bigger car when you’ve only really been used to a Metro, but it’s fine when you get used to it. In the evening we went round to Alex’s, and went to the pub for a couple of drinks before watching “Lord of the Beans”, the Veggie Tales version of ‘Lord of the Rings’ (it was very good).
Right. I think the only thing left to say is, recently I mentioned developing an application which allowed you to upload photos to Facebook. Well, I’ve now completed the first beta… I’m going to trial it tonight (uploading the photos we took of the zoo, there are just too many to upload the simple way). I know it will never be popular (because most people will use the Facebook-provided version, which incidentally is much superior), but it will at least mean that I don’t need to use their simple photo upload tool any more!
Right, all for now…
You know, Opera. The browser, not “The Marriage of Figaro” kind.
I downloaded it the other day because we were doing some testing at work, and there was a bug in a page which for some reason only happened in Opera (don’t worry, it wasn’t Opera’s fault…). Anyway, I decided to give it a go because I’ve heard good things about it, so I did… and I’m rather impressed! It seems nice and fast, the controls are quite smooth (I particularly like the ‘speed dial’ feature), and in general it looks like a very polished and well-written application.
I’m currently using the Windows version (as we use Windows at work, unfortunately), but when I get home I will download the Linux version see how it compares. I’m very impressed though… I don’t know whether I will switch, but I will certainly give it a go and see how I get on!
They say that necessity is the mother of invention. Well, I would like to modify that slightly: “necessity and annoyance are the mothers of invention”. If something is annoying enough, you’ll want to change it. I guess that’s not really invention, but still…
There are a couple of things which have been annoying me recently, and I have some suggestions:
1. On a dual monitor setup, your mouse pointer can move smoothly across from one monitor to the other (which is what you’d expect). Unfortuantely, this does cause a minor annoyance: when I close a maximised window, I move the mouse pointer right up to the top-right hand side of the screen and click. This generally closes the window, and has now become a fairly instinctive thing whenever I want to close a window down (saves actually having to have any hand / eye co-ordination when searching for the close button — just flick the wrist and click). Unfortunately, when you have a dual monitor setup, my mouse tends to glide right over to the other screen, meaning that I actually have to search for the close button – yes, it’s a minor thing, but it’s annoying! What I would suggest is being able to configure a mouse pointer ‘stickability’ for a particular screen. What I mean is, your mouse will ‘stick’ to the side of the screen for a short amount of time before moving to the next screen. I can foresee that this could be equally as annoying to some people, which is why it should be configurable! But it’s just an idea…
2. I don’t like uploading photos via the web. Yahoo! photos provide a web-based interface to do it, which sucks. I mean, seriously, we’re living in the days of AJAX – why provide a fixed number of upload fields? Why not provide an upload progress bar? Facebook’s simple upload thinger is the same. Now, I realise that there alternatives, but they’re just not good alternatives for me: Yahoo! provide a Firefox extension which was cool until I upgraded to Firefox 2 and found that the extension hadn’t been updated (and still hasn’t); Facebook provide a Java applet which I’ve heard is good, unfortunately I don’t like Java applets! They crash my computer at home, and I think that they’re generally slow to load and pretty horrible.
The solution? Well, I propose something like the following. Assuming I wanted to upload to Facebook: I’d login, select the ‘upload photos’ option, create / select the album as appropriate, and then generate a temporary email address which I would then email photos to. I could email the photos as individual JPGs, or compressed (e.g. zipped) files. The photos would then be extracted from the email and put into the album. How difficult would that be? It might need a few more security considerations (i.e., the email must contain a security code which has been emailed to your Facebook account), but in general I really don’t see why that wouldn’t be better than the current system.
Anyway. The good thing about my second suggestion is that I can do something about it: Facebook provide an API which recently includes uploading photos. I started yesterday to write a PHP application which uploads photos for you, although having thought about it I might change my mind and write it as a Java application: if you use a web based system, you’re essentially transferring the files across the internet twice (once to my PHP application, and again to Facebook). It’s a waste… a client side application would be able to send the data straight to Facebook without wasting bandwidth.
If anyone has any thoughts about this, or knows of any such applications already, let me know. I wouldn’t want to duplicate effort!
Firstly, I’d like to apologise for not updating very much recently… there hasn’t been very much to write about!
This weekend has been fairly busy though, so I’ll try to recap. On Friday evening, a few people (Dan, Alison, and Alex) came round to have a curry and watch “Garden State”. The film was really good – it was the first film I’ve seen written and directed by Zach Braff (I think it was his directorial debut), and it was really good! It was an unusual film, but well worth watching. It was also good to watch with other people rather than on my own, I’m not really sure why!
On Saturday we did a bit of shopping during the day. In the evening we went to the chaplaincy social “Top Gear”, where we each had to build a car out of bits and pieces of cardboard etc, and then have them perform a series of gruelling challenges… I’ve got some photos of the event up on Facebook, so if you’re a member there you will be able to see them. That was very good fun, my car was absolutely rubbish but still!
On Sunday, we went to Fordham in the morning and then stayed around to help out set up for the holiday club running this week. That went on until mid afternoon, and then we came back home. In the evening we met Alex at Sloppy Joe’s for dinner, and then went to the cinema to watch “Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World’s End”. It was a really enjoyable film! If you enjoyed the previous two, this one comes recommended. I did find the action a little confusing at times (there was a lot going on, and keeping track of who was double-crossing who was a bit tough…) but the effects were fantastic and Johnny Depp was hilarious as Captain Jack.
And… I think that’s just about it for the time being! All for now…
Sorry for a rather late update this week! There’s no particular reason – it’s not been all that busy… I just haven’t got round to posting here! Ah well.
Anyway, here’s a quick summary of the weekend: on Friday evening, Philippa went to stay with her parents for the weekend. This left me on my own… I spent most of Friday evening coding up an HTTP Server in Java. It’s actually quite a learning experience! I learnt a few things I didn’t know about HTTP, although probably not really useful… you never know, though. I think all experience can be good experience!
On Saturday, I had a fairly lazy day. I spent most of the day reading “Syrup” by Max Barry… it’s a really good read, quite compelling! If you haven’t read it already, I would recommend it (you can check out Max Barry’s website if you want some more info on the story and the writer…). So, yes, not really much to say about Saturday!
On Sunday I went to Fordham in the morning, and then went down to Phil’s parents for lunch. We had a nice afternoon with some of Phil’s friends and it was good to see her parents again (I suppose I should start to call them my in-laws at some point…) We got back home about eight and just chilled for the rest of the evening.
Right, I think that’s about it for now… the only thing I wanted to say was, I’ve now finished “Pierced for Our Transgressions”, and I’d quite like to get some of my thoughts down at some point. I have a couple of other books to read through on the subject, but they seem considerably shorter so hopefully it won’t take so long!