Say It Aint So Devon

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Looks like the first shots of KITT are out from the upcoming TV series based on the old show Knight Rider. From here. As you can see, it’s a Ford Shelby GT. Personally, I think it looks rather stupid, but that’s just me. Maybe I’m just a bit nastalgic, and miss the old version of KITT. ...

Facebook S'Macebook

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Is it just me, or is facebook getting a little old these days? Except for the event planning thing, which I think is fairly useful, there’s not really a lot about it that I really think is that great anymore. And to be honest, I’m getting a little tired of saying ignore to things like the funwall, or turkey tossing and what have you. I know people are just having a little fun with it, but I’m just not that interested in alot of those things everyone is inviting each other with. It’s not really a big deal, as I don’t get enough of them to where it takes a lot of time out of my day, I ...

Last Vista Bash, Promise

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I just read this while surfing the internet – that in a comparison of Windows XP SP3 against Vista SP1, XP blew it completely out of the water: Vista’s first service pack, to be released early next year, is intended to boost the operating system’s performance. However, when Vista with the Service Pack 1 (SP1) beta was put through benchmark testing by researchers at Florida-based software development company Devil Mountain Software, the improvement was not overwhelming, leaving the latest Windows iteration outshined by its predecessor. Vista, both with and without SP1, performed notably ...

Shot Of The Moon

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The moon looked really cool tonight, so I popped on the longest zoom lens I have in the house, the 70-200mm f/2.8L, and fired a few shots off of my balcony. I think it turned out not bad, considering I hand held it. If I had an extender I could probably do an even better job. ...

The Dead Of Winter

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Vancouver, being a coastal city surrounded by mountains, has one of the most moderate climates in all of Canada. The average temperature in the summer probably hovers around 20C or so, and in the winter, rarely drops below 0C. Last time I checked, only one out of every five Christmases in Vancouver is white. And despite the relatively warm temperatures here, walking the streets of this city in winter you’ll see the homeless struggling to keep warm, often forced to cover themselves with newspapers, cardboard boxes, or whatever damp clothing can be found in the dumpsters. Every night, they find ...

Vancouver IETF

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For those of you who don’t know, the Internet Engineering Task Force is a group of people that ultimately decide the technologies that will ultimately be engrained into the internet. UDP, TCP, SSL, HTTP – these are all examples of technologies that were originally put through the IETF before becoming standards. Next week, the 70th IETF meeting will be hosted here in Vancouver. A bunch of people from our company usually participate in the sessions, and I might swing by and check out what’s new and exciting. One of the best parts about meetings like this is that it brings together a bunch ...

Windows Vista Rated One Of The Worse Products Ever

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From hereWindows Vista rated one of the worse products ever by CNET: Any operating system that provokes a campaign for its predecessor’s reintroduction deserves to be classed as terrible technology. Any operating system that quietly has a downgrade-to- previous-edition option introduced for PC makers deserves to be classed as terrible technology. Any operating system that takes six years of development but is instantly hated by hordes of PC professionals and enthusiasts deserves to be classed as terrible technology. Windows Vista conforms to all of the above. Its incompatibility with hardware, ...

Designing A Site For Cross-Browser Support

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As you can plainly see, I spent some time updating my blog theme the other day. One of the main problems whenever anyone does any web development is still unfortunately in the area of supporting multiple browsers. Usually a design that at first looks good in your development browser might look a bit weird in IE or another one. It takes a lot of effort sometimes to make a site work in multiple browsers, something that should not be lost on those who visit sites frequently. For the most part, I’m lazy in this area. I generally target Sarfari and Firefox, and just sort of pray that it works in ...

More Research That Caffeine Is Bad For You

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I’ve posted a few times on this subject, but this is a new paper that’s hot off the presses. Once thought to help with weight loss, caffeine has recently been cast in a new light as actually contributing to weight gain. Even caffeinated diet pop can lead to weight gain, due to increased insulin secretion in the body. A double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled crossover study with periods of 7 days and washouts of 5 days comparing caffeine with placebo capsules was conducted. Participants were 16 healthy adults aged 18 to 22 years with a history of caffeine consumption. Blood samples from ...

Trial Brother HL-4050 Printer

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So a while ago Darren posted on his blog that Brother was looking for a few west coast bloggers to potentially review a printer or two. Considering I take a ton of photos and ultimately end up printing a pile of them out, I thought it might be a good opportunity to test out a fairly nice printer from Brother. Well, this big boy showed up at work today, and once I figure out just how in the world I’m going to get it home, I’ll test it out and see what it can do. I plan to try printing out a bunch of my artwork to see how it performs in that capacity, as well as a few other tests with the card ...

More Videos?

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I’ve sort of gotten tired of dragging my big digital SLR with me everywhere, so lately I’ve been taking along my little Canon point and shoot, which by comparison takes garbage photos, but the size and weight of it is attractive. I’ve been thinking I might start taking a pile more videos just for the hell of it. While this video is completely boring, I just decided to give a quick virtual tour of my apartment, with a quick video of how nice a day it is in Vancouver. Don’t worry, they’ll get better. ...

Toronto — It's Official

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Tony officially booked all his flights and everything for New Year’s in Toronto, at which point he tossed the email-gauntlet towards me and said “what’s up now?’ So, I have stepped up to the challenge and have also booked a flight for Toronto. Unfortunately, flying in Canada at that time of year is pretty pricy, so my flights are all at weird times to save money (and coming home it’s a three-city milk-run). The Guy On The Left Should Really Come Too I’ll be spending Christmas at home with the family, and then heading out to Toronto to enjoy the cold for a few days. I’ll probably ...

Updated Content

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Since I’m knee deep with reworking this big bitch, I’ve updated some of the content as well. Check out the new About Page, as well as a brand new Projects Page. ...

Safari 3.0, Leopard and GMail

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For all of you people who upgraded to Leopard and are using GMail, you have have noticed a few weird things going on. For me, my contacts no longer auto complete properly, and periodically all the javascript in gmail stops working. I’ve checked a lot of newsgroups and many people are having the same problems. Apparently gmail has tried moving to a newer version that isn’t really compatible with Safari 3.0 yet. The solution is to just go up to the top right in gmail and click “old version”, which will roll back your GMail version to one that does work with Safari. You’re welcome 🙂 ...

The Weekend

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Well, here we are, at the end of another week. I’m so looking forward to relaxing a bit. There’s a show tonight down at the Media Club I might go check out, but I haven’t decided yet. Other than that, I’m probably going to stay close to home and get caught up on rest. December will probably be filled with lots of Christmas type things and a few parties, so I’m going to do my best not to wear myself down this month, considering I’m still on antibiotics. Good news is I saw a guy this morning who knows his stuff, and he said I should be fine and is gonna mix things up again. So in theory ...

This Made Me Laugh Out Loud

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Mainly because I hate windows and I like star trek. I removed the inline image once I realized it was 1.6 MB. You can view it here. And also a neat little tidbit of information that I learned about by reading the history on the blue screen of death. In the new Mac OS, Leopard, the Finder shows all Windows machines it finds on the network as a CRT with a Blue Screen Of Death in it. From Wikipedia Too funny. ...

Toronto Bound? Maybe?

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So I spent about two hours tonight talking to Tony, and I think we both agreed on one thing — spending New Years in our own cities was pretty fucking lame. So, right now, we’re both thinking about heading to Toronto for New Year’s eve, which might be a fairly large mistake for me, I’m not sure.. To be honest, I’m not sure Toronto wants to handle me for that long. I need to convince Chad and Danielle to come with me. But, I’d love to get out of Vancouver for the holidays and just be me for a while. Not Duane the programmer, or Duane the engineer, or Duane the anything.. Just duane ...

Broken Macbook Pro

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Wow. I just spent the last 30 seconds walking around my apartment looking for my laptop so I could pack it up and take it to work like I usually do. Then I remembered that I no longer have a laptop, as it’s in for servicing. Which means I can leave my big bulky bag at home today. Which is weird, and honestly, sort of feels a bit freeing. I can walk to work today and actually just enjoy the nice sunny day with my iPod. I tried finding a nice sunny autumn shot for this entry, but this Central Park Shot came up from last year, and it made me miss New York. So enjoy. PS – My new iMac kicks ...

It's Time to Update Your RSS Feeds Again People

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So tonight I was trying to figure out just how in the world I was going to go about merging multiple RSS feeds together. The end result I was trying to achieve was so my RSS feed on this site would actually have my entries from duanestorey.com as well as those from matthewgood.org. I sort of assumed that feedburner would do that for me, but it turns out you can’t combine your own RSS feeds using it. The solution? Yahoo Pipes. I had never heard of it, but after doing a quick search, I learned it’s the tool to use. And man oh man, is it cool. You can pick and choose different source elements, ...

New Apple iMac For Home

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As everyone knows, I’ve spent the last six months battling my Macbook Pro. It’s been plagued with various problems, the most severe of which lately is intermittent connectivity wherever I go. Not coming back whenever it sleeps it pretty lame too. Anyways, I went to drop it off at the repair facility, and they said it would be gone for at least two weeks. So, being the impulsive buyer that I am, I decided to pick up an iMac for home. And to be honest, I used to always use a desktop computer, even though I had a Windows laptop before. But when I got my Mac, I ended up formatting my Windows machine ...