equivocal ramblings » Kevin Francis

He’s Definitely Not Getting a Zonda

Kevin Francis — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 06:53:35 +0000

“I want a 350Z”, Sanjev said to me. “Well, I want a Zonda“. We were discussing dreams for one reason or another while waiting for the phone-shop dude to finish sticking on a screen protector for me. It took him about fifteen minutes from start to end, which really built up my expectations. From the care he showed in positioning it (3 retries!) I thought to myself, “this is going to be the best screen protector ever!”.

I was wrong. He positioned it too far right, and somewhere along the way managed to leave a mark on the top left edge.

As we walked away, I was ranting about how badly done it was, and Sanjev turned and said sardonically, “Well he’s definitely not getting a Zonda”. I have to agree.

SVNKit + Subclipse Problems

Kevin Francis — Thu, 21 May 2009 17:35:47 +0000

If you’re experiencing difficulty getting Subclipse working with SVNKit, install the very latest. One of the dependencies pulled in will list an SVNKit beta. Install that one and it’ll suddenly show up as a provider.

This is true as of Eclipse Ganymede and Subclipse 1.6.2 (installed with CollabNet Desktop). Just thought to save someone else several hours of their life :)

On Google Accounts

Kevin Francis — Tue, 19 May 2009 15:34:30 +0000

I have several domains running Google Apps for Domains. I also have a GMail/Google account. I’ve always found it odd that I cannot link my kevin@kevinfrancis.net account to my Google account in some way.

It’s a bit funny to have to keep what appears to be multiple Google accounts sitting around… I wonder if OpenID will factor into this in the future?

Firefox Scaling Zoom Kills Performance

Kevin Francis — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 17:13:47 +0000

I’m rather insistent about scaling zoom being set by default 120% of my copy of Firefox. I achieve this with the NoSquint ~~plugin~~ add-on. Of late I’d been noticing that Firefox page scrolling was really really really bad.

Turns out this is caused by scaling zoom — turn the default page zoom to 100% and performance is really good, with scrolling being smooth and uniform.

Also, I today discovered that I’ve been right to avoid using the word performant — performant is not a word! Seems this is quite endemic to the technology industry as I’ve seen this word being used in everything from white papers to published books…

Safari 4 Scaling Zoom

Kevin Francis — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 13:10:10 +0000

Finally, Safari has page scaling in the v4 Beta. Sadly though it appears to exhibit strange behaviour with GMail for instance — When I zoom in, it also scales the width of the entire page, which means I now have to scroll left and right :(

Now, whilst this may or may not be the best thing for scaling zoom to do, my question is rather about whether it’s the right thing to do…

Page scaling should in theory scale everything right? Thoughts anyone? Perhaps you’re familiar with the W3 recommendation on this matter…

A Case of Mistaken Identity; The Use of Corporate Email for Personal Messages

Kevin Francis — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 16:09:15 +0000

I’d been receiving what seemed like spam from the worlds most intelligent spam bot ever — I was getting invitations to baby showers, house warmings, company events and meetings. I started to feel like the bot was stalking me, like it was getting in my head.

Then someone named Karen Francis sent me this:

Hello,

My boss has mistakenly been sending you emails that are meant to be delivered to me, if you still have any of those emails could you please forward them to me. I would appreciate that so much. They would be messages from name removed

Thanks, Karen Francis

Yes — another kfrancis. This was in August 2008, a full 6 months after the first mails started coming in. There’s more though.

I’m still getting her emails today…

Personal Email from Work Addresses

The most amazing thing is the fact that nearly 100% of the personal emails that have been mistakenly sent my way are from work accounts. I find this disturbing. Don’t people know better?!

P.S.: Her sister has a $53 credit on her card (whatever that means). She wants her mum to use her card when she next buys a flight ticket.

Make Your Band’s Album Cover Meme

Kevin Francis — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 14:44:45 +0000

The meme has been going around, and here’s my take — click to embiggen :)

Make your band’s album cover meme:

Go to Wikipedie’s special random page. The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
Go to Quotations Page’s random quotations page. The last four or five words of the very last quote on the page is the title of your first album.
Go to Flickr’s explore the last seven days page. Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
Use Photoshop or similar to put it all together.
Post it to FB with this text in the “caption” or “comment” and TAG the friends you want to join in.

Your Next Favourite Band

Kevin Francis — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 16:47:51 +0000

Your Next Favourite Band is a service that ties into your Last.fm profile and attempts to predict what your next favourite band (duh) might be. I’ve run it a few times and it keeps saying the same thing: Jason Mraz. I really think they need to overhaul their algorithm because I dislike Jason Mraz.

Overall Impression of Windows 7

Kevin Francis — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 20:23:40 +0000

After using Windows 7 for 2 weeks I think I’ve got a pretty good feel for it. I haven’t wavered once in all this time, sticking closely to my goal of using Windows through and through.

It was not an ordeal. It was not painful. It is a definite improvement over XP/Vista. Will I switch to using it full time rather than Linux? No.

Windows has improved to the point where it no longer makes me rip my hair out, but it still doesn’t impress me. It’s finally what I expected Windows XP to have been, so really, I’m not impressed. I am however not irritated by it, which is impressive.

P.S.: For all you who are considering it — nothing has proven incompatible for me except for Daemon Tools which won’t install at all. Yes it is faster. No, really.

Internationalisation and Localisation

Kevin Francis — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 14:10:00 +0000

Found in the comments for the British English Dictionary pack for Firefox 3:

“My favourite dictionary. COLOUR COLOUR COLOUR COLOUR COLOUR See? None of those are spelling errors!”

— scmartindale