fplanque: glob

I guess many people spend about one third of their time at work.

Remove sleep time and people spend half of their awake time at work!

Yet they tend to focus more on the other half. The half that they feel is their "free time". The half they spend in transportation; the half where they shop for food, where they pay the bills, clean up their home... well "free time" you know :roll:

Wouldn't it make an lot of sense to devote substantial energy on taking advantage of the work time? Make the work time fun?

Some people do, but so many don't even try. They just take work as a necessary burden and they wait for it to be over. |-|

I don't get it.

I've been banging my head on my Mac & PC monitors with this! :'(

I had gone a long way already with color matching my Mac & PC displays, but this is far worse!

Suppose you have a logo on a plain color background that has a specific color code, let's say #A1B2C3.

• If you save the logo as a GIF, you can just put it on a css background of #A1B2C3 and the background colors will match.

• If you save the logo as a JPEG, it's a tiny little bit more complex but it still can be done. Just make sure that:

  1. You save the JPEG withOUT incorporating an ICC color profile
  2. You do not compress the JPEG so strong that it cannot encode a proper background color

• If you save the logo as PNG-8... good luck! First there is no option (in Photoshop CS2 at least) to choose whether or not to include a color profile. But worse: it will include the gamma of you current display. So if you save the image on a Mac then try to display it in a PC browser, the displayed background of the image will no longer be #A1B2C3! IE7 and FireFox2 both try to compensate for the gamma being different on PC and Mac.

  If you now try to match the displayed color on your PC and put that into your CSS, then it will probably display incorrectly on the Mac. Crap! :(

That's a shame, because in many situations, PNG-8 will compress much nicer than JPEG and much better than GIF. But if you can't color match it with your CSS on all browsers, it's almost useless... :no:

One of the cool things you can do with b2evolution 2.0 is redirect older posts to a new URL.

I've put this to use by redirecting some of my first English posts on fplanque.net to fplanque.com.

Here's an example: http://fplanque.net/Blog/devblog/2003/01/21/quote_of_the_day_computers_and_programme

If you click on that link you go straight to France and bounce back immediately to:
http://fplanque.com/dev/dev/computers-programmers-dangerous-match

All that automagically with a nice 301 Permanent redirect! ;)

I have already observed in the past that Page Rank would follow 301 redirects when moving pages on the same site. I'm quite curious to see how moving posts to a different server, heck a different country, will affect the PageRank.

If all goes well, PR should follow... someday ;)

So... this is like my first post in my brand new b2evolution 2.0 English only blog.

One of the nice things when you start a new blog is that you can write sentences like the above. Sentences that are almost impossible to read. Worse: sentences no one cares about! :>>

Who cares? No one is reading this yet! And I bet my first reader will be the Google bot...

Of course my plan is to move all my previous English posts from my French site over to this one.

I gotta do this carefully though...

• First, I wouldn't want the Google bot to see any duplicate content.

• Second, I need to redirect from the old location to the new one.

• Third, I'd like to take that redirect opportunity to clean up the URLs a little bit.

One thing I'm having a hard time deciding on is whether or not to keep the /2007/03/11/ parts inside of my URLs. The alternative is to use category names...

WOW! All this time I've been running the wrong AC3 codec on my Mac Mini!

Last week, I found one that works soooo much better! To find it, I actually had to search for "a52 codec" and not "ac3 codec". Go figure!

• Intel version (Universal)
• Original PowerPC version

It is GPL licenced and merely based on the "a52 library". But I really wonder were a52 comes from. Too late to investigate tonight though ;)

Update: a52 is now included in a codec pack called Perian and you can even get 5.1 surround sound out of it.

Update: the easiest solution now seems to just use the VLC media player and not worry about the codecs (VLC has everything it needs included).