Ramblings, Musings and Photographic Moments of my Life
I’ve been pretty bad this week with no photos 🙁 Unforetunately I’ve whatever time I haven’t spent at uni I’ve been at work.
But in other exciting news, I suppose I could share this screenshot.
That’s right folks, I’ve been going through the application procedure for exchange since October last year. Formally have an offer to study at the University of Sheffield in the UK. So come the second half of this year hopefully there will be piles of photos involving European travels… and snow!!
So it’s a new year and I thought that I might start with a new resolution to actually publish stuff to this blog. My goal is to go out and shoot at least once a week and update this once a week be it an iPhone photo or actually going out and going for a photowalk. We’ll see how that goes over the course of the semester though.
UPDATE: Because I’m so indecisive I’ve decided that I might do more than one photo a week 🙂 Yay!
So I was over at UNSW the other day accessing some of the books in the library as, once again, I’d left my essay until the last minute and all the books were out in Fisher. I noticed the eduroam SSID popup when I went to check for Wifi. For the uninitiated, eduroam allows users from participating institutions to access wifi even if they aren’t at their home institution (check out this YouTube video done by AARNet). I remember have using eduroam at UNSW a while ago when I had Snow Leopard. So I tried to follow the instructions I used the first time at: http://staff.ask.sydney.edu.au/app/answers/detail/a_id/285/~/how-do-i-access-eduroam-on-my-mac-computer%3F but I noticed the little disclaimer that stated that eduroam didn’t work with Lion at this stage.
So apparently, Apple have the removed the ability to create your own 802.1X profiles in Lion (and Mountain Lion) so I couldn’t configure it myself. Now, I managed to get eduroam setup on my iPhone using a .mobileconfig profile that USYD provided. I thought that if I perhaps downloaded that it might work on the Mac, as knowing Apple, there would probably be some form of interoperability between OS X and iOS. Sure enough, the profile installed but for some reason had issues connecting.
After a little bit more research, I discovered that my hunch about OS X using iOS configuration profiles was right. I could actually create my own profiles using the iPhone Configuration Utility. Which is what I then proceeded to do.
Given that the .mobileconfig is basically just an XML file, I opened up the iOS version in VIM and was able to replicate the basic settings, there were a few things that I had to change to get it to work on the Mac but after a bit of trial and error I got an acceptable profile that worked.
I have uploaded the file below. Just double click it, accept that fact that it isn’t a signed certificate (the original one wasn’t either) and then enter your username as: UniKey@usyd.edu.au (this is important! It’s not the same as your email!) and your password as your normal UniKey password. You might need to hit continue a few times. After that, connect to the eduroam network, again using [email protected] as the username and your normal UniKey password.
Now this profile isn’t specific to The University of Sydney, even though it’s there in the organisation name, purely for organisation sake. So if you want to get eduroam working on Lion (I tested this on Mountain Lion but there’s no difference really), then download this file, and run it. You should login using the details that your home uni provides. If you google “eduroam <uni name>” it should tell you what username you need to use.
Actually, if your Uni doesn’t provide a config for iOS, then this might actually get you on eduroam on your iDevice. This is why I like Apple products, nice and seamless.
Seems that I’ve been totally out of it, haven’t put up anything on here for over half a year now. I’ve been neglecting this pretty badly you could say. Unfortunately, I haven’t been posting up photos elsewhere so I guess I’m going to start chucking some up. Heaps of stuff has happened since I last posted. I went into, and out of employment, and then back into it again. I went overseas and I decided to take stupidly hard courses this year.
Anyway, let’s see what’s been happening since I was last here.
Mah iPod is still uber shiny despite having been bought in 2007! I am amazed 🙂
I mean, it’s good enough to use as a mirror!
Even the front has remained relatively unscathed. All I used was a cheapo silicon cover, none of this invisible shield stuff either.
I guess people look after more expensive stuff better? I can’t believe that an 80GB iPod cost $500, and nothing fancy like the iPod touch either. Just a bog standard music (and this ones does video) player.
So I was bored yesterday afternoon and after fixing someone’s website for them, I thought, what they heck, I’m bored and I wanna play with CSS3. So I started the design of my new home page. After 4 hours I’d gotten the majority of the design down pat and I spent the majority of this morning and part of this afternoon adding in the CSS3.
Yep, all that is done with code, no images (except for the slideshow of course)
Stuff I used:
border-radius for that nice rounded edges effectbox-shadow for that subtle drop shadow around the borderopacity for the semi-transparent black bar@font-face for the custom web fonts (WebKit/FF4 only as .EOT wasn’t working out for me)-webkit/-moz-transition for the slow fade in/out darkening on mouse over otherwise it just cuts from grey to black. Obviously this only works in WebKit/Mozilla so FF4+/Safari5+/Chrometext-shadow (admittedly not CSS3, but still cool) for that embossed. Apple-esque copyright footer as well as using RGBa for the shadows on the links.The hardware that this is hosted on was all free (except the domain)!
Actually, I signed up for this deal (only because it was free!) and I couldn’t really think of what to do with the 2000’s space/bandwidth that they provide considering that the site was 1.5MB in size before I compressed the images some more. But it was still going to result in a site that was 1MB large which would have chewed through the 250MB’s of bandwidth in no time. I had 100MB of space so I was fine on that front.
To get around this, I leveraged Google’s huge network of servers as my own private sort of CDN. Google App Engine provides 1GB bandwidth for free so I uploaded the images (700KB) there (convenient since Google Apps for Domain also provides App Engine). Then I used a minimised version of jQuery (80KB) provided Google API and finally the web fonts (200KB) I pulled from the Google Font Directory basically reducing the bandwidth on the free server to a few KB in CSS and HTML/PHP.
For someone who hasn’t touched CSS and HTML for over a year, I’m pretty proud of that effort (and intensive Googling)
Anyways, check it out here!
Anyways, since I posted nada in December, first post of the new year!
Yeah, I know, the HSC was over months ago, but I’ve been that lazy and/or busy that I haven’t gotten around to cleaning up fully. I’ve shifted my computer from the office into my room.
Pros: I have privacy and can turn music up loud now! No need to stream stuff to my laptop now.
Cons: I’ve moved from a GbE connection to a 802.11g which tops out around 2-3Mbps (ie: ~250KB/s) which isn’t fun 🙁 took ~30mins to move 370MB of photos. I guess that what happens when you have a few double brick walls over 30m – even with my briilliant attempts to get a better signal, notice my USB-extension-tenna. Might get a 802.11n dongle (should push that up to 30Mbps)
Anyways, I love shiny photos.
Possible this screen is too big for the desk? Thinking of getting a smaller, say 19-22″ screen and setting up laptop with the 24″ (below) when I move out to Sydney.
OS X looks ohh so good on a 24″ screen 😀
Got a review of my Chrissy present (Samsung 2TB hard drive) coming up soon. That’s the black box sitting underneath the cordless phone.
The HSC is a waste (of paper) I tells you! I’ve accumulated sooo much crap over the course of these last two years I thought I might highlight the fact that many trees probably died to put me through school.
Here! I took some photos and did some really quick stats in a spreadsheet.. data is pretty amazing…
Read on (otherwise the main page gets too long)!!
So after complaining about my camera for aggesss in a bit of a impulse buy, my parents bought me a Canon EOS 500D DSLR 🙂 Woot!
We actually bought two cameras. Dad got the 1000D on the right and I got the 500D on the left. Good day to be THAT sales girl, wonder what her commission was (not to mention the other stuff we bought off her)
These two have become the bestest of buddies! I’ve also found this cool program that lets you control your camera via your computer, you can save to PC, open up Live View, view histograms. Going to take that for a test run when the clouds clear up at night.
I’ve just downloaded the beta for Firefox 4, it’s quite good actually. But look! How could one NOT love Firefox 4!! The little guy is just so damn cute!