johnnypez.com

What do you get?

The next generation iMac. Isn’t she pretty..cooooohh

Click the thumbnail picture for larger image.

So some of you guys that read Ken’s blog will know that I have finished up working in Kilkenny with Event Ireland and I started yesterday morning with TSSG in Waterford.

I have to say that driving home that last time was a sad occasion and I will miss the lads terribly. I couldn’t imagine better people to work with than Ken and Aidan. The craic in that office was always mighty!

I’m very excited about my new job at the same time. There’s a huge pool of extremely talented people here and I know I’m going to learn a whole lot from them.

Via Ken

Apparently I’m 71% addicted to blogging. I’d have thought it was a little less but I suppose I do spend a fair bit of time on blog related activity. Like my new theme? I was supposed to be doing other stuff last night, like maybe relaxing after work, but no I sat down and started redoing my blog theme. Then I sat down and began to write a Flash Flickr widget for it. I need to be doing something all the time or else I get bored very easily.

The concept of surface computing wasn’t particularly new to me. I had seen some really cool experimental projects over at proce55ing.org (Processing is an extremely useful prototyping tool / language for rich media developers).

I hadn’t seen anything new in a while so it all drifted to the back of my mind until the unveiling of Microsoft Surface. I have to say it has really got me excited. I know Apple have multitouch control built into the iPhone and that is really cool, I just hadn’t seen anything anything on a larger scale. The demo videos show a very impressive smooth performing system handling anything from organising your pictures to playing games to playing waiter at a restaurant. It all looked a little too smooth, I think the spec of the demo machines may be slightly higher than the spec listed for the production models of the first Surfaces Computers that will ship later in 2007.

Now the initial uses displayed for the system are very interesting but I would really love to see how this technology could be used in my graphic design work. Imagine how quickly you could work in the likes of Photoshop and Illustrator with the freedom to use both your hands to activate tools and manipulate graphics.

Bring on the new age of computing. I’ll be watching this space very eagerly.

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Getting back to one of the goals of this blog.
I wanted to bring useful web and graphic design related resources to your attention and I’ve been catching up on some video podcasts from PhotoshopQuickTips.com of late. They’re nice and short weekly video podcasts that cover wide ranging and highly useful photoshop tips.
What? Did the name give it away?

I’ve been using Photoshop for a long time but it always seems to have secrets to give up. Or someone always comes along with a new method for doing things that gives better results than others. PhotoshopQuickTips.com is definitely a great way to keep your skillset up to date and it’s a must for students and beginners.

You can grab the podcasts on the website or subscribe to the video podcast in iTunes.

Thanks Godaddy for costing me my whole afternoon.

I was simply setting up a wordpress contact form plugin this afternoon for one of our projects. When I tested it no email arrived. I checked and checked again that everything was configured properly, still nothing. I gave it a reasonable amount of time to allow the emails to arrive. I figure 30mins to an hour is extremely reasonable.

So after that I spend the last 4 hours examining everything I’ve done, and checkingt FAQ’s to make sure everything’s right when suddenly, an email arrives, then another a few minutes later. 3 and 4 hours after they had been sent. Not all of the test mails I had sent have arrived yet but I’m sure they will. At least I know theres nothing wrong with the code but for feck sake Godaddy, 4 hours of a delay is ridiculous and it cost me an afternoon’s work.

Well I’ve been using Adbrite to serve ads on this site for the last few months and I have to say I’m disappointed with it. So as of now I’ve dropped it.
I was very enthusiastic about Adbrite in the beginning however it just doesn’t seem to get results, not for me anyway. I think the problem is it doesn’t have the ad content to serve to my typical audience so I’m not getting very much value out of my traffic.

I would prefer to use Google Adsense but I had a small problem with a few stray clicks of my own doing over a year ago and lost my Adsense account. It was very naive of me and I deserved to lose the account. But Google if you’re reading this, I’m sorry and I won’t do it again. Please give me a new Adsense account! I’ll behave

Having recently switched to from a Windows web development environment to OSX I had to get around to setting up my usual Apache, MySQL and PHP configuration. Now normally I just download the latest versions of each and install them all separately, and it’s a quick and painless process. I know there are one stop shops that fire up the whole lot in one install but to be honest, I like to know how things work. I like to know that I can do this stuff myself without having to get someone to do it for me.

Anyway, a colleague recommended I should try MAMP when I was looking at getting my web development environment up and running. And as much as I like to know how things work, I didn’t really have the time to fart about with separate installs of Apache, MySQL and PHP so I gave it a go and I have to say it just works. It saved me plenty time and it does what it says on the tin.

You can easily start up / shut down / restart your servers. Apache comes pre configured with all the commonly used modules enabled, PHP the same.

So, until another day when I can spare the time to set up the individual servers and tackle any minor obstacles that lie therein, I’ll be using MAMP.

I recommend this one. For a quick and easy Apache, MySQL and PHP setup on Apple OSX, try MAMP.

I’ve been eagerly awaiting the launch of the Adobe CS3 package for sometime now. Particularly because Dreamweaver CS3 has been a long time coming and we need it now!

The full details of the Adobe CS3 (Creative Suite 3) have just been released and the package is available for pre-order.

Have a look at the feature list for Dreamweaver CS3.

Bring it on!

My colleague Ken McGuire posted about this recently also.

I run Roaddeaths.ie, a blog that tracks the worrying number of fatalities on Irish roads. Spam comments run at a rate of anywhere between 500 – 1000 per day at this stage now. Akismet does a fantastic job of removing 99% of those but the number of comments escaping Akismet is increasing. It doesn’t seem to be any particularly clever exploit or anything, these comments contain keywords that are obviously spam like drug names and keywords of a sexual nature. So why aren’t they being caught with the rest of the spam which appears to be pretty much the same?

Just wondering if anyone else has been noticing this trend and if you’ve found any solution.

Most of the computer users find the spam as the biggest nuisance after a virus. Many of the spam messages are the ones that offer free computer software .in many cases the spam emails claim to offer even the microsoft office software at a fraction of the actual retail price. These spam messages are usually in the form of a link to a website where the customers can order a number of software products ranging from the mathematics software primarily developed for school kids to the norton antivirus. The sites are typically designed very professionally and can appear to be the legitimate online sites selling useful software.