Monthly Archive for May, 2005

983667817 down, 1 to go

Published
by
Jeremy Higgs
on May 30, 2005
in General
. 0 Comments

On Friday I handed in my second last assignment for the semester, and boy was I relieved… Due to a severe lack of time up until one or two weeks prior to the due date, my group had not had a real chance to sit down and actually CODE the damn bastard. We ended up working all of last weekend, and a couple of us were up to all hours of the morning throughout the week completing it. The worst part of it was working from midday on Thursday to 6am on Friday morning (with small breaks for dinner and lunch). Sheesh! Never again… I then had to go to Uni the following day to combine what we had with some other group members, and run through the test procedure (which raised a couple of other bugs).

Thankfully, I've only got one assignment (and two weeks) left until the end of the semester (easily the hardest one, so far). Looks like it's going to be a real PITA though. Method engineering? Pffft.

UPDATE: Obviously, it was just all too much for Will, who fell asleep under the table at around 5am:

William sleeping

:)

“Macquarie Bank’s million-dollar pay hikes”

Published
by
Jeremy Higgs
on May 19, 2005
in Rants
. 6 Comments

News.com.au has a story on the multi-million dollar pay rises given to some of the execs at Macquarie Bank recently:

The bank's chief executive, Allan Moss, now pockets $18.5million - a $6million hike on the previous year - and executive Nicholas Moore takes home $18.2million, up from $11.4million, while property chief Bill Moss is paid $15.5million - a handsome $10million pay rise.

$18.5 million dollars… Damn, that's a lot of money. I'm sure these people worked hard to get where they are, and continue to work hard, but is anyone really worth $18.5 million dollars a year? (Or even US$32 million, the amount the CEO of Merrill Lynch gets paid.) I don't have any information on what these people do with their money, but I'd suspect it would be to expand their property investments, buy a new Mercedes E-class, oh, and maybe a BMW 7-series too - basically, spend it on themselves.

I'm all for making money, living comfortably, etc, but in my view, that amount of money is just excessive (yes, I know there are plenty of people that earn much, much more). If you're spending $9 million a year (when you take out taxes) to live, then there's something seriously wrong with your lifestyle. Even if you're not spending it, what's the point of keeping it in properties/shares/trusts, when it could do so much more for plenty of other people that don't have homes and can't feed themselves? Calling in the poverty line may be cliche, but it's true. You have a handful of people earning absolutely obscene amounts of money (which most of us will never, ever earn in our entire lifetimes), and a whole, absolutely frickin' huge mass of people living below the "poverty line" - some without running water and electricity!

Why don't these people (or the companies paying out these amounts of money) sacrifice even a small percentage of their pay to help others out? With a profit of $823 million, spending $1 million isn't exactly going to hurt the company. I bet the feeling of helping someone (let alone a community) out, by feeding them, educating them, or even building infrastructure far outweighs the cheap (and short) thrill they might get from buying that brand new Mercedes or house in Rose Bay.

It's sad, really.

What happens when Uni takes over your life…

Published
by
Jeremy Higgs
on May 14, 2005
in General
. 0 Comments
What happens when Uni takes over your life...

Thankfully, the assignment that has been keeping me (and my assignment partner) up till all hours is finished! Now I just have to deal with the other pile of assignments due before the semester is over. *sigh*

A cool Spotlight hack: Delimport

Published
by
Jeremy Higgs
on May 10, 2005
in Apple
. 0 Comments

I came across a neat piece of software called Delimport (thanks to Timo from this post on Russell Beattie's blog), which allows you to search your del.icio.us bookmarks using Spotlight:

Delimport

It does this (I think) by downloading all of your bookmarks and storing them in one of the cache folders in your home directory. Spotlight then comes along and indexes the files for you. I guess this is one of the limitations of Spotlight, in that it will only index the attributes of individual files (as opposed to one big file containing a lot of separate entities - e.g. bookmarks).

It'd be nice to see something like this integrated in Quicksilver or LaunchBar (Quicksilver may have it already, I don't know). I currently have a search template in Launchbar to search del.icio.us, but to have the results show up in LaunchBar itself would be awesome. :)

One gripe I have with Delimport is that it requires you to install the Spotlight plugin and two frameworks. I understand that it's beta software, but I don't see any reason for them to be located outside of the application bundle. As far as I know, a Spotlight metadata importer and frameworks will happily exist inside the application bundle (and that is how it currently works in Connoisseur).

Spotlight Tagger

Published
by
Jeremy Higgs
on May 5, 2005
in Apple
. 0 Comments

I came across an Automator action that some nifty person created tonight, while reading Russell Beattie's post on Spotlight and tagging. The action is called Spotlight Tagger.

Basically, it works around a limitation of the Finder where if you want to add "Spotlight comments" to multiple files, it will open multiple "Get Info" windows. With this Automator action, you can simply select the files, right-click and scroll down to "Automator" and select the "Spotlight Tagger" menu item, as shown below:

Spotlight Tagger

In order to install the Automator action (which you can download from the above link), you need to open the "Spotlight Tagger.workflow" file, and then go to File -> Save as Plug-in. From there, you can name it (I called it "Spotlight Tagger") and save it as a Finder plugin. You should then be able to select multiple files and set their Spotlight comments!

Cool Dashboard Widget - Flidget

Published
by
Jeremy Higgs
on May 3, 2005
in Apple
. 3 Comments

I came across a cool Dashboard widget today, called Flidget, which allows you to easily upload images to your Flickr account! Nifty.

Firstly, to have to setup your account details (accessible by clicking on the "i" in the lower-left of the widget). To use it, all you do is take your screenshot, hit F12 and drag the image into the frame of the widget (where a "+" sign will appear. Type in a tag or two, and hit "Upload"! Easy…

Flidget

It seems to have a problem with recognising when the upload has finished (the widget still says "Uploading…", a long time after the photo appeared on Flickr), but hopefully that'll be fixed soon.

Some notes about Tiger…

Published
by
Jeremy Higgs
on May 2, 2005
in Apple
. 3 Comments

After using Tiger for a day and a bit, I thought I might note down some of my experiences/issues.

Interface
Firstly:

Tiger's Copy Window

What the hell is that? There was nothing wrong with the background of the copy/replace window in Panther! The person who decided to change it to plain white needs a good bitchslap.

There's also this:

Mail Toolbar

Gah. That's two bitchslaps.

On a happier note, Mail is now MUCH faster. I'm loving the smart mailboxes (mainly because I now have a "Flagged Items" smart mailbox). Still waiting for the ability to label emails, though (in order to categorise emails - answered, waiting for reply, etc).

Spotlight
Spotlight is cool, however it's performance on my lowly 12″ PowerBook G4 (867MHz) is pretty piss poor. After doing all of it's indexing and running of the applications (I was told by Mat that in order for Spotlight to start indexing an application's files, you need to run it once), it takes a good 30 seconds or more to get some decent results (emails, photos, etc). Not *quite* like what you see in the demos from Steve Jobs.

I still find I'm using LaunchBar, though, because I can control it totally from the keyboard (among many other things that Spotlight doesn't have). I can't wait until the LaunchBar developers add Spotlight support to it… (I also tried the new QuickSilver beta, but it performed horribly, even with icons off, so I went back to LaunchBar, which has always been fast for me.)

Dashboard
Dashboard's quite neat, as well. I wasn't too enthusiastic about it, at first, but some of the widgets that have come out are pretty nifty. I like that the widgets aren't visible all of the time (I don't have a big enough screen to have the widgets viewable all the time, especially with all of the apps I run).

I'm sure there are plenty of other things I haven't noticed yet, but I only just managed to trawl through the 1000+ items that had accumulated in NetNewsWire over the weekend (I haven't read them, either… only flagged). It seems the web (well… at least the Mac-centric web) is going crazy over Tiger!

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Australia
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Australia