Will's Blog

Welcome to Hong Kong

willhughes — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 16:59:58 +0000

Our first day in Hong Kong was spent wandering around Hong Kong island, figuring out the local transport and how to buy things.

The Hong Kong public transport system really doesn’t deserved to be compared to Sydney’s. Put simply: It completely outclasses Sydney’s.

From the automated train system that runs on the secure side of the airport to transfer between terminals, to the underground system with it’s amazing cooling – an awesome way to escape the heat and humidity up stairs.

The heat and humidity everyone writes and talks about, but you really need to experienced it, in order to truly understand it. Comparing it to a Sauna ignores the baking heat of the sun which is an ever-present threat.

Your only defence is to get under shade, drink as much water as you can, and don’t go running around.

I’ve uploaded a few photos to Flickr.

Dear Everyone: Stop redirecting to “Mobile” sites

willhughes — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 10:34:07 +0000

There’s been a trend for many years now to serve up “mobile optimised” sites, usually by redirecting users to a different domain like “http://m.example.com”.

Please, for crying out loud, I beg of you – STOP this practice. Not only is it bad for your site, it’s bad for your users too.

It screws up your site’s search engine ranking

All SEO folks will tell you to ensure your site has one, and only one domain. That is: pick either “www.example.com” or “example.com” and stick with it, redirect all your traffic onto that one domain. The same goes for mobile sites – pushing users off to some other domain means links they share will go to your mobile site.

You’re probably going to screw it up in some subtle way anyhow

You’ll test like crazy, and hey – it works. For you. On that version of the mobile phone software, with that screen size, on that internet connection.

Change some of those variables and suddenly the page layout is screwed up because a Carrier decided to rewrite your site to be ‘mobile friendly’.

A new device comes out with a larger screen – say, something like a Tablet/iPad. To your site’s code that looks like a mobile device, but to the poor sucker using it – your site looks terrible, is missing features/functionality.

And if you don’t get redirection right, You’ll be completely stuffing up the users who try to access the ‘desktop’ link, and instead get sent to the front page of your mobile site, or at worst a 404 page.

Links from the mobile site are useless for the desktop

Someone on a phone or tablet emails a link like say http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee - ah, crap, it’s the mobile version, and is missing a bunch of stuff. How do I get the proper page? I have no idea, there’s probably a link somewhere though.

Mobile probably isn’t what you meant

You probably actually mean ‘small screen sizes’ or ‘low bandwidth’.

Folks who are on modern smartphones or tablets actually have a pretty fast internet connection (either 3G or Wifi). They also have browsers as capable as your desktop, or nearly so anyway. All up, redirecting is a pretty good way to just waste people’s time and cause frustration.

Just serve them the same content

(Disclaimer: I’m not a UI designer or developer)

There’s techniques like CSS Media Queries which let you serve up the one page, which will re-arrange or completely remove elements based on screen size. The good thing is that this means new devices with oddly shaped screens will work automatically. See Scott Hanselman’s site for an example of this done right – make your window wider or narrower, and elements turn on/off.

I realise there’s exceptions to this – if you’re mainly aiming at users in markets where smartphone penetration is low and 3G is non-existent then having a low bandwidth, WAP site is a necessity.
For most sites, though, you don’t.

Edit 10AM Friday 27th July: Server-side browser detection isn’t a solution

In case I wasn’t clear – server-side detection of browser isn’t a solution (imo). WordPress “mobile” themes, for example, are ugly on tablets and other large screen “mobile” devices.

It should be left to the user-agent (browser) to determine how to lay out the page. Trying to detect this on the server will eventually fail – either because technology has moved on in ways you didn’t cater for, or you didn’t test it on all the devices in the world.

This leaves users with the need to either switch off the theme, or put up with a design that looks terrible for their device.

There’s a huge stable of sites that do things like what I’ve described here. A few examples I can think of off the top of my head:

Gawker Media’s sites (eg IO9) – Redirects to a mobile domain
Delimiter – Uses WordPress Mobile themes, which are terrible on tablets
Sydney Morning Herald – redirects to a mobile domain.
Wikipedia – reidrects to a mobile domain.

Queenstown NZ – Too Big for Flickr

willhughes — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 03:46:09 +0000

I’ve created a new (bigger, better) version of the panorama from the top of the lookout at Queenstown, NZ back in 2010.

Unfortunately it’s far too large to post to Flickr at full resolution, given it’s 57MB and 29,905 by 5,314 pixels (Approx 158Mpx).

You can download the full resolution version here on my blog, or from dropbox. (They’re the same file).

NB: This panorama is copyrighted, (c) 2012 by Will Hughes. Personal private usage permitted (eg wallpapers), all other usage (including commercial, and re-hosting) requires explicit consent. Please don’t hot-link this image.

New Blog URL, New IPs

willhughes — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 10:00:49 +0000

After six years at http://will.hughesfamily.net.au I’ve moved my blog to a new Domain: http://willhughes.me

I’ve also moved off a dedicated server (which I used to host a fair few sites on) to a small micro Amazon EC2 instance.

Email/etc all remains the same for the moment (though, I can also be contacted by the obvious addresses on the new domain too)

New IP for SmartScreen Blocker

Folks who are using my smart-screen blocking URL redirector will need to update their hostfiles.

The OLD IP address is 174.36.36.2

The NEW IP Address is 174.129.197.55

You’ll need to update before the end of the month (June 2012) as that’s when the old server will be decommissioned.

Smartscreen Fights back

willhughes — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 13:25:35 +0000

Previously I expressed how I was annoyed with SmartScreen – Microsoft’s ‘link malware detection’ service that runs inside Windows Live Messenger.
Microsoft, with the release of Windows 8 coming up (where it’ll be apparently OS-Wide this link detection/filtering), seems to be updating how SmartScreen works.

They’ve now started sending some Urls via /info/, and are encoding the Uri as Base64 encoded ASCII characters.

Example:

http://link.smartscreen.live.com/info/?a=info&l=aHR0cDovL2JhdHRsZWxvZy5iYXR0bGVmaWVsZC53aGF0ZXZlci8%3d&p=1&c=f0644a78-ac91-4d16-ab6b-d27aefa947fd&ti=634710413638367764&h=%2beEg%2f9ns

There’s some additional data in the Url, so perhaps they’re adding some kind of behavior tracking. Either way, I find Smart Screen to be obnoxious and incredibly annoying – especially with it’s lack of any options to disable it – and choose to filter it out.

In addition, I’m also now filtering out the MSN Ads, this requires a bit more work, and seems to have some geographical elements.

For me, adding these DNS aliases has done wonders:

174.129.197.55 ssw.live.com
174.129.197.55 rad.msn.com
174.129.197.55 g.live.com
174.129.197.55 ec.atdmt.com
174.129.197.55 view.atdmt.com
174.129.197.55 wltoday.ninemsn.com.au
174.129.197.55 secure.wlxrs.com
174.129.197.55 cm.ac3.msn.com
174.129.197.55 m.adnxs.com
174.129.197.55 sup.live.com

Edited 2012-06-25: IP Address has changed to 174.129.197.55 - please update your hostfiles accordingly.

Planning (Euro|Asia|World)Trip 2012

willhughes — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 14:26:49 +0000

I started this blog back in February 2006 when I was getting ready to go to Europe for about seven weeks.

Now, coming up six years later – I’m planning to do something like it again.
This time I’ll be travelling with one of my Uncles (Mitch).

When and Where are we going? Not sure yet – we’re just throwing around some ideas.
How long for? Also not sure, but at this stage thinking something like four weeks. We spent about three weeks in NZ in 2010.
What do we want to do? Well, neither of us are really drinkers or party goers – but we both like food, and music, and things like that.

Not sure if how we’ll divide up the time either – I’m not keen on spending all our time in one country – I’d like to travel around a bit. Car or Bus or something is possible.

Current destination countries/ideas being tossed up:
* Vietnam
* Spain (apparently this is where the slow food movement started?)
* Canada (The great lakes, and forests look like particularly nice places)
* Italy (Tuscany I’d really love to go back to)
* Norway
* Denmark
* Iceland (Volcanoes and Fjords together – But this is probably an impossibility given cost of flights/etc)

If you had four weeks off work next year (say Mid-spring to Mid-Autumn) and a modest budget – where would you go, what would you see, and why?

Quick thoughts on the Windows 8 preview

willhughes — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 15:51:28 +0000

Downloaded and installed the Windows 8 preview to give it a try.

My initial impression with setting up the OS was quite nice – the UI seems nicely put together. Once the machine is configured, I was dumped at the new ‘Metro Start’ screen.

The look of the new start screen is interesting at first. But a few moments actually trying to use the interface with a mouse reveals a few major issues.

It’s painfully evident that the Start screen is designed for a touch enabled device, with hardware back/home buttons. That is: Tablets, or mobile phones.

Anyone using a keyboard/mouse is going to get frustrated and/or lost very quickly. The only way to navigate is to find the scrollbar hidden at the bottom of the window and drag it (which disappears if you keep your mouse still).

This touch optimisation (or rather: exclusivity) extends to the new Metro style immersive applications. When you launch the new application it completely takes over your desktop, with a full-screen interface.

Dude, where's my multitasking?

Once you’re inside the application, there’s no UI elements indicating how to get out. Yet another indicator people are going to need to use Windows on a tablet from now on.

Dude, where's my exit/back button?

It is possible to bail out using just the mouse – so far I’ve found that putting your mouse on the far left edge lets you click away to another application. And eventually, perhaps, to the Metro start screen. You have to actually press the Start key to get back home reliably. (Seriously, wtf?)

Back on the home front, clicking on the Desktop takes you to what you’ve come to expect from Desktop OSs of the last oh 20 years or so.

Gah, what the hell... they've added the Ribbon UI to Explorer? 20% of the window real estate gone to this.

This brings up another point of frustration with Windows 8. They’ve now effectively got two completely different ways of dealing with applications.

The “Classic” windows way lets you have windows (whoa, crazy) and to quickly switch between tasks using a mouse.

The new “Metro” way lets you have only one task open at a time, and switching requires a keystroke of some kind.(I’ve been told you can have two apps side by side in an 80-20 split, but I havn’t figured that out yet)

It also means that you’ve got two sets of applications – and to use them together is nigh on impossible.

Perhaps in multi-monitor scenarios you could have the two combined – but again, that the Metro UX is entirely touch focussed means those using a mouse are going to have trouble. This brings into contrast that those using Windows8 on a tablet are going to have trouble using “Classic” windowed applications which expect relatively fine control from a mouse.

I don’t see the purpose, other than as an elaborate practical joke, of combining the two.

Shut down? You don’t need no steenking shut down options.

Lastly, figuring out how to shut down or restart is an ordeal. In every version of Windows back to ’95 you click Start, and then Shutdown (or a power icon).

In Windows 8, either this has been forgotten as a task users do with some regularity – or it’s being deliberately obscured because on a Tablet you don’t need to.

In any case, it’s a multi-step process requiring you to click Start, then your Profile, select Log out. Then windows goes to a tablet/mobile style “lock screen” which you need to (no shit) drag up, so you can hit the power option ,and finally select shutdown.

Conclusion

My only conclusion from a few hours poking around is that Microsoft are deliberately abandoning the desktop, or have decided that since Windows Phone 7 was such a raging success (yes, that’s sarcasm Sheldon) they’d go copy/paste all over the new version of Windows.

Seriously, I have this vision in my head of the design meetings for Windows 8. They’re all in mutual admiration that they produced a Phone OS that doesn’t suck as much as Symbian*. Then someone says “Well hey, it worked on the phone, lets make the next version of Windows ALL ABOUT THE TILES”.

I can only hope that someone realises they need to target the Tablet and desktop seperately before they launch, or they’ll realise that despite awesome engineering in the backend – they really can repeat the apparent disaster of Windows Vista.

* Okay, so Windows Phone 7 is actually pretty nice. I’m just venting, ok?

Will’s W520 FAQ.

willhughes — Wed, 25 May 2011 15:49:56 +0000

Recommendation for Dev & Workstation Laptop: Lenovo W520

Where to get: eBay (recommended), or Lenovo Website.

Where did I get mine? eBay.
Why eBay? About 40% the price of the same model on the Lenovo Australia site, including shipping.
What eBay Seller? bunnypan

What specific configuration?

This one: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=140531673940

Or, summarised:
– Core i7 2720QM 2.2Ghz (Quad Core w/ Hyperthreading). Turbo mode = 3.3Ghz NB: This is a “Sandybridge” CPU – latest, fastest as of May 2011
– 8GB RAM (2x 4GB) NB: 2 free slots for adding more ram. See below
– 1920×1080 Matte Screen. NB: IPS Screen. Best colour quality.
– 500GB 7200 RPM SATA HDD.
– nVidia Quadro 1000M w/ 2GB Video Memory, and Optimus.
– 3 year (1 year battery) RTB Warranty.
– Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6205 2×2 Wifi card. NB: Can add 3G Modem

What did it cost you? USD$1598 + USD$149 shipping to Australia.
With the prevailing exchange rate – this worked out as just over AUD$1600 on my card, including conversion fees.

What else did you do to it?
Upgraded RAM – two more 4GB DDR3 DIMMS for $55 each. ($110 total)
Replaced HDD – OCZ Vertex 2 250GB SSD. (~$499)
Added a ThinkPad Mini Dock Plus Series 3 (170W) Model 433830U – USD$240 + shipping.

Why the RAM?
Why not, it was only $110 more, and more ram is almost always useful.

Annoyed with Windows Live Messenger’s Smart Screen

willhughes — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 10:08:29 +0000

If, like me, you find Windows Live Messenger’s “Smart Screen” link interception annoying, you can “disable” it.

Just edit your hosts file, and add the following on a new line at the end.

174.129.197.55 link.smartscreen.live.com

The server at that IP address will just do a regular HTTP Redirection, sending your link on it’s way quick smart. No nanny-net b.s.

PS: This server is run by me, and, technically, I could do bad things like redirecting you to malware. I promise I won’t.

Edit: Oops, got the wrong IP. my bad.

Edit, 2012-04-26: Smartscreen Fights Back

Edited 2012-06-25: IP Address has changed to 174.129.197.55 - please update your hostfiles accordingly.

Pasta Sauce Recipe

willhughes — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 13:07:56 +0000

This is the rough template I tend to use when making up a (tomato based) pasta sauce.
On it’s own it’s great over pasta, or in a lasagne. I’ve even had it on toast for breakfast.

As with all sauces, it gets better with age. If you can cook it the day before, and put it in the refrigerator and re-heat then it’s great.

Quantities are generally indicative but based on what I actually used just recently. Feel free to add other vegetables that you have (olives, mushrooms, etc) – it’s a good way to use up what’s in your fridge. Don’t be put off by the the amount of olive oil indicated – it gives it a good body, and as the sauce cooks the oil will be absorbed.

Vegetable Pasta Sauce

2 Brown Onions, Peeled & finely chopped
8 Cloves Garlic, peeled and finely chopped
4 Carrots, Grated
1 Zucchini, Grated
1 Cup (approx) of grated/finely chopped celery
8 Tomatoes, Peeled – Chop roughly to break up.
1 Jar Pureed Tomato (Approx 600ml)
1/3 Cup Olive Oil
Dried Italian Herbs to taste:
- Rosemary
- Thyme
- Bay Leaf
- Oregano
- Parsley
2 Massel Chicken-Flavoured Stock Cubes (NB: Contains no meat product)

Substitutions:

Peeled tomatoes can come from a can, or fresh.
Pureed Tomato could be replaced with approx 6 tablespoons of Tomato Paste Concentrate.

Directions:

Add a tablespoon of the oil to a very large frypan (with lid), or large pot on medium heat.
Test the temperature of the oil by placing a wooden spoon into the oil – it should sizzle.
Add the onions.
Sautee/Fry until softened (but not brown) – stir frequently.
Clear a small space in the middle of the pan and Add garlic
Allow to cook for a minute.
Add grated carrot, zucchini, and celery
Continue to sautee until softened (approx 10 minutes). Stir frequently.
You may need to place a lid on the pan if the vegetable begins to dry out.
Add the remaining ingredients, including the remaining oil.
Increase heat to high, and cook with lid off for 15 minutes on high – stir frequently.
Test consistency. If sauce is very thick, add water.
Reduce heat to medium, and add lid. Cook for at least 30 minutes. Stir regularly (every 10 minutes or so).
You could serve now.
Ideally though: Reduce heat to low, and allow to continue to cook with lid on for several more hours, on a low heat. About 4 hours is ideal. Stir regularly, and monitor consistency – adding water as necessary.

Serve over freshly cooked pasta of your chosen variety. Top with Parmesan Cheese.

Variations:

Minced Beef, Lamb, or Pork. Add while frying the onions.
Bacon. Fry in the pan before adding the onions. Retain the bacon fat, and remove some (or all) of the olive oil.
Chilli, Fresh or Dried. Add with the herbs.
Use pasta sauce as the tomato layer in a lasagne.

Cooking Time: 1-4 hours.

Produces: Approximately 2 Litres of Pasta Sauce.