What's going on?

Wow, I've been pretty slack with keeping up to date with posts in the past but it's been almost five months since the last one which has to be a record for me. Sad thing is I've had more than enough material to write about in that time but haven't been able to get around to doing it. Given that we hope to welcome a new baby into the family in the following week I thought it would be best to briefly catalogue some of the recent big events before I hopefully descend into newborn minutia again.

A new car

Our civic has served us well for many years and we were sad to see it go. The upcoming influx of family members however demanded some adjustment to our transportation so we had to do something. Getting a second car was something we considered but we didn't like that idea due to the additional operational cost and the need to travel separately. In the end we got a pretty good deal on the run-out design of the Honda Odyssey - what some would argue is the ultimate Asian family car. We certainly don't feel out of place at Sunnybank and can now fit mum and dad along with the children when we need to.

Alison had an operation

Just in the lead up to mum coming out for Christmas we had a bit of a health scare with Alison and the baby. Alison took a trip to the GP which turned into an ambulance ride to the emergency department and ended with an emergency appendectomy.  Not the easiest 24 hours but the family and baby all came out of it unscathed thankfully.

Mum over for Christmas

So it was lovely to have mum out here to spend time with Nelly and the family. Had a lot of fun and ate heaps of good home cooked food, which was a relief for Alison who was still recovering from her operation.

The baby's heart is fine

During our morphology scan last year we were told that our baby boy had a small hole in his heart. It was nothing life threatening but still a small concern for us understandably. In January we had a follow up appointment and were told that they could not detect any abnormalities much to our relief. The doctors still can't be 100% certain that the hole isn't there anymore but it's certainly no longer something that will have an impact on his health.

Aussie Aussie Aussie

I suppose it was just a matter of time before I got my act together (or Alison would force me to get my act together), but I've finally applied and successfully completed my test for Australian citizenship. I did miss out on one answer on the exam but thankfully they have a pretty lenient passing grade. Unfortunately there's a bit of a back log so it's unlikely that I'll be able to attend my ceremony and officially become a citizen until September this year. Even so it didn't stop us from having a great Australian day out with friends.

Got a new job

The last year and a half of owning my own business with Chris have been really exciting. The reality of self employment and new ventures however mean that sometimes things don't turn out the way you expect them to. We are still keeping the business going but I've decided to focus on the product side (What Bin Day and Nose to Tail) in lieu of the service arm of the business. This comes with a new position as a developer at Wotif Group, a role that I've been enjoying quite a bit if only for the comparative simplicity. I never got around to that blog post about Socket Software so I won't make promises about discussing work in more detail, but who knows.

Imminent Baby

It's now day minus 6 till we are supposed to meet our boy, not that those estimates are anything to go by. We're enjoying the time we have left as a small family and can't wait to welcome the new bub home. Mum will be flying out on Wednesday to help us out and we're ready to have our lives changed all over again soon.

Rabbit Reevaluated

I haven't done a whole lot with the blog layout since the redesign over a year ago. At least nothing that I've felt worth writing about. One thing that I did nut out a about a month back was the Archives section at the bottom of the page. For a long while you couldn't see any posts further back than a year but now you should be able to navigate all the way to the start, post numero uno that was scribbled back in 2005. Who'd have thought that I would stick to it for this long eh?

I'm starting to think a little bit about kicking off another redesign at some point, especially now that mobile/touch devices have become more prevalent. The current design was really made to serve a traditional mouse driven experience with hovers playing a big role (in the links under the title bar for example). As it stands the site experience on an iPhone or other mobile devices smaller than a table leaves a lot to be desired.

Update: Seems like Google have saved the day once more. I've since activated the Beta feature for mobile templates and it makes browsing on the iPhone heaps better

In the interim it seems that the great team at Blogger have done quite a bit of work for me already. They have just recently introduced Dynamic Views which utilise the feeds off the blog to create a pretty snazzy HTML5/CSS3 view of the posts on the site. The only supported view on mobile phones is Mosaic which is a fluid layout that can support different device resolutions. Pretty smart idea and it works well on the phone. You can check out what the Rabbit in Mosaic here.

You'll probably notice that there are quite a few other views that Blogger are supporting. I love the Flipcard, which I would assume is the default when using a desktop browser. What's particularly funky about this is the ability to dynamically regroup posts by dates or labels. Pretty fun stuff and I'd encourage you to have a play here. In fact, I like it so much that I'm probably going to put a permanent link to the view on the page somewhere for easy access. Just haven't quite figured out where yet...

Not all the dynamic views seem to work all that well with the site for some reason so I guess it's either a bug that they are still working out or I'm doing something dodgy on my side. Likely to be the latter, given how smart the guys at Google are.

Digging through the other videos from Google they have a heap planned for Blogger in the near future. Fast forward to about 1:40 to check out the new features that will likely be coming soon. About time I say as the Blogger admin interface needs an update even more than the Rabbit does.

Rabbit Redesigned

Voila! Welcome to the newly designed Skin the Rabbit, the fruit of over three weeks of labour. If you're reading this on Facebook or an RSS feed then I'd ask that you visit the main site here. Otherwise this post isn't going to make much sense.

Part of my new role at work involves clueing up a lot more on Web technology than I have in the past. With all the my research and studying I slowly developed a drive to put some effort into the design of this blog. The old girl hasn't had a face lift in the five years I've been posting here, so I guess it was about time to give this old format a make over.



The first thing I wanted to address was the layout of the blog itself. Sites with the two column format (posts and widgets) or three columns (posts, widgets and ads) still seem very much in vogue, but I've found myself growing tired of the look. While I think the model works well for printed media where the eye can flick around columns quickly, I'd started to think that it didn't quite fit what I want on a weblog. My argument is that having extra periphery content on the side while the reader is trying to read a post vertically becomes a distraction. Potentially a welcome one if I these were revenue generating ads, but in my case I simply had an assortment of widgets with no real purpose. At best this restricted the horizontal real estate, at worst it forced the reader to scroll back up to review sidebar content.

What I've gone for here, as you can see, is more of a sandwich approach. Images and tweets along with a menu bar are at the top but quickly give way to full width posts. The old archives and tags are in their own section at the bottom, with shortcuts in the title menu to jump down and shortcuts at the end of each post to bounce back up to the title. My hope is that this new format will give me the flexibility to play around with new post layouts and include larger images or embedded movies in future posts.

I wasn't just content with shuffling things around to widen the post area though. It's a convention in web development to design sites with a minimum resolution in mind, padding out the rest of the site with filler (note the stylish dark grey bars on the left and right). The previous layout for Skin the Rabbit was just as guilty of this, though a little less noticeable with the white on white. The old "minimum resolution" was set at 800 pixels, which was all well and good for 2005, but in the year 2009 I think I can safely bump this up to accommodate 1024x768 as a minimum resolution with a modest 990 pixels. I'm sure this will just keep going up as the years go by.

When I sat down with pen and paper to design the new look I had a pretty solid concept in my head.



My problem was that I've never really been a decent artist. No false modesty there, I just can't seem to draw or paint free hand on account of some cross-wired signals between the image I have in my head and my shaking hand. Maybe it was the stark and clean iPod commercial look I knew I wanted, but I thought I'd give vector based drawing a try with Inkscape and I'm rather chuffed with the results. I think it's something about being able to tweak a bezier curve for minutes until I'm satisfied that it bears some resemblance to what I'm going for. I have no illusions about quitting my day job to draw portraits on the street, but at least I can say that all the art on this site is original (aside from logos), something I'd never thought I could do.

Just as strong as my vision of the style was how interactive the site would be. I've always been a sucker for Flash based websites with funky slideouts and transitions. Unfortunately I've never really taken to ActionScript or Flash in general, not to mention there's the whole issue of Flash containers and plugins which annoy me. Thankfully I didn't have to go down that path thanks to advances in Javascript (particularly in modern web browsers) and particularly jQuery.

Oh I could gush on and on about the wonders of jQuery. Most of the things that made me decide not to go down the Web Development route originally in my career have been neatly put aside thanks to this miraculous plugin. It makes programming behaviour and manipulating the DOM an absolute joy. Even more so when you combine it with jQuery plugins! The photo slideshow you see at the top is made with Cycle. The funky scroll effect you get when you click the Archive/Tag or the Top link at the end of this post comes courtesy of ScrollTo. Then there's ThickBox, just click on one of the images in this post (or any other post for that matter) to have a look at that.

Right next to jQuery on my list of wonderful web technology is CSS. I never really got how powerful this was before but I can definitely say I'm a fan now. I was still a little naughty here and made use of some inline styles towards the end as my stamina flagged, though I'm sure I'll come back later to clean it up.

Other parts of the design that I'm quite happy with are the expanded photo section (click the carrot) and the archive section, both done with just jQuery and Javascript. The archives were tricky as I wanted to be able to navigate through all old posts while keeping a sense of quantity of content, all in a fixed amount of space. Hopefully the bar denoting post ratio gets this across. The expanded photos came out pretty sweet I think. Kinda wish I could link directly to the photos hosted on Flickr, but that change is going to require a little more research into the Flickr API.



Of course to make an omelette you often find that you have to break a few eggs. Getting the new layout to work across multiple browsers was definitely a challenge. One big casualty in this big redesign has been support for Internet Explorer (at least those prior to the current version 8). Much has been said on the net about the horrors of Internet Explorer 6 but I think this article here sums it up pretty nicely. To quote:

Since there were no universally accepted web standards in the early days, Microsoft created a browser that attempted to force the web to behave like any other Microsoft product. Nearly 15 years later, in spite of the development of widely accepted web standards, Microsoft has still not entirely abandoned this approach. Even today, Internet Explorer is to web standards what Ebonics is to standard English.

You can try the latest web browser acid test here. Chances are if you're using a non-Microsoft browser then you're going to get a decent score. To avoid all the extra work involved in getting a site working well with IE6 and IE7, I've just decided to drop support entirely. There are many free standards compliant browsers out there, which you'll see if you try and visit this site with an Internet Explorer version older than 8.



I'm sure I'll be tweaking things a little over the next few weeks. There are a few bugs still that I know about but figure they're minor enough to ignore for now. Do drop me a line if you notice the site breaking though as I've only tested this with the latest versions of most browsers (the usual four; Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera).

Hope you all like the design. I normally don't solicit comments but do let me know what you think if you have the time. I never thought when I first started a blog that I'd have the discipline to keep going this long. Here's to another five years of banal accounts of my life. *clink*

Edit: Grrr... looks like I failed to sacrifice some sacred cow for a smooth release or something. Lots of things seem to be broken including ThickBox on Blogspot images, Archives prior to July 2008 and who knows what else. Will have to fix these up through the week. Curses.

Music

Seems like I'm in a bit of an experimental mood. Just signed up for a last.fm account to try to expand my musical horizon as I seem to be listening to the same four albums again and again. I'd read about Pandora before and found the concept of a "music genome project" a fascinating one. If it works right you should be able to submit artists you like and the service will make new recommendations based on your selections.

Due to stupid licensing issues we can't use Pandora here in Australia, or anywhere else outside the US it seems. Thankfully last.fm seems to be free of this rubbish. Played around with it a little and uploaded my listening history to my account and resulting recommendations have been promising.

I especially like how you can plug an artist in and have a custom radio station of similar music created just for you. It works pretty well for the more common western artists but I must say that the recommendations I received for "Hitomi Yaida" weren't all that impressive. Seemed like they just chucked in every J-Pop band they could think of in there. Symptom of a limited Japanese music library perhaps.

Even so I've gotten quite a few new names to look up (excuse my teenage girl like taste in music)

• Sarah Blasko
• Rachael Yamagata
• Aimee Mann
• Charlotte Martin

As with my other recent web 2.0 take up, I've added a little gadget to the Rabbit on the right side so that the Internet can snigger at my song choices in unison. Enjoy.

Reshaping the Rabbit

Hunted high and low for a decent alternative to the official Twitter badge, which in my opinion is a little bland. I could probably have come up with something that stood out a little more with some CSS hackery but I'm not sure if I could have really made it any more prominent sitting all the way on the side.

In the hope that I'll be using Twitter more, I've made the bold move of placing my Twitter updates above the blog posts here. Given that they're really just small blog posts anyway I figured that would make sense. Any thoughts people?

I'll just have to remove it if the Twitter phase passes...

Tweet Tweet

I thought I'd never jump on this Web 2.0 bandwagon but I guess I've been wrong about things like this before. Looking to try something new, I've signed up for a Twitter account and finished setting things up so that my diminutive musings propagate through all corners of my online presence. If you cast your eyes over to the right you'll notice that a new gadget has been added to The Rabbit, perhaps distastefully titled "Skin the Bunny" in light of the short nature of Tweets.

So what is this thing? Twitter's basically a form of micro-blogging crossed with some social networking. The idea is that there are things that happen in life which don't warrant a full blog post or an email but may provide a passing interest to other people in your life. Trying an interesting recipe, reading a good book, going shopping for an iPhone (I wish)... essentially anything that would normally come up in small talk. Rather than catching up and asking all the usual questions you can just check your mate's Twitter feed and do away with inconsequential chit chat. Don't you love it when technology brings people closer? :)

I jest of course. Here's an entertaining youtube video which does a reasonable job of explaining the attraction of Twitter. For me, it's really a handy way to do a little blogging on the move through my phone or when I don't feel like typing out a full blog post. I'm sure that a better man would just leave his private life off the internet rather than contributing to the build up of shite content in cyberspace... but I'm such a geeky exhibitionist that I just can't help myself.

I've been told that you get to find out a lot more about your friends and family through this disconnected voyeurism which could certainly be interesting... if any of my friends or family actually used the darn thing. Expect the usual torrent of inane blah-blah until the novelty wears off for me. I'll try my very best not to keep things out of the gutter...

Happy Snapper

Not much time to post lately as I'm getting my spurt of internet communion through my daily pictures. I must admit that I didn't think I'd even last this long and it's surprising how the 'pressure' to come up with something new each day puts the squeeze on your creative glands. Immersing myself in taking photographs has also got me reading up more techniques and theory which is absolutely fascinating. Hard to believe that I once thought I knew enough about photography to get by.

Try as I might I haven't figured out how to display images from photoblog like I do with my flickr badge yet unfortunately. Yeah, I know that all you flickr pros out there would scoff and tell me I shouldn't have used photoblog in the first place. Hopefully someone will figure it out later but in the mean time I've just added an RSS feed to the side bar of The Rabbit

The rest of our spare time has been spent printing out and cutting up invitations for that big party in June. We'd invite more of you but I'm feeling faint at the thought of the amount of sticking, cutting, folding and printing we've got ahead of us already. Invites should hopefully be going out towards the end of the month... *sigh* snip, snip, paste

Looking back

Haven't had a chance to work on the game much in the past week as I'm trying to fight this stupid virus. Still coughing up half my lungs and it's been going on for far too long now so we're off to see the doctor in an hour.

I have however tentatively settled on a name for the game. It was one which I'd been considering for a while but James suggested it unprompted so I think we're on to a winner. Elementals. Probably make more sense if you knew more about the game though so I've included a link to the latest design documentation in case anyone is interested in having a flick through. It's still an early draft though so be gentle.

On a game related note, I checked out Google Pages for the first time and I'm loving the free webspace that my favourite company provides. To make use of it I've put up a link to a page I created that details my previous attempts at game projects with a few screen shots. Half of them are old DOS Pascal programs which don't run all that well in Windows so it was pretty challenging to get screen captures of them. Really should have written more games by now if I want to call myself a Games Programmer though. :P

A stroll down memory lane

New look... sorta

Seeing as this blog has actually lasted for over a year I figure it's about time to update the little beast with all the new functions that Google have provided. Probably doesn't look all that different to the casual observer but I really like what I see in the new Blogger beta that Google have on offer.

• Funky new UI for customising templates
• Collapsable archive links (nifty!)
  
• An "Older posts" link at the bottom of each page (Finally!)
• Support for labels (Yahoo!)

Of course now I'm going to have to go back through over a hundred posts to apply labels to all of them... consistently.

I've also removed the recently added search bar on the side when I noticed that the navbar above already includes a Google powered search feature. Seems to work a heck of a lot better than that add in anyway.

The only downside to upgrading to the beta is that they don't support direct HTML changes to the template so I've lost my favicon and collapsing comments. Guess I'll just have to wait till Google takes it out of beta. Not a comforting thought when you realise that Gmail after all these years is still considered a "beta" product by the company.

Looks like I've managed to "prolong" my holiday after all. I've been at home resting for the past two days trying not to hack up my lungs into the sink. Taking lots of fluids and popping pills like tic tacs but it looks like I'm going to be in for a long fight to recovery.

Seek and ye shall find

I've just added a nifty little Google search bar to the side bar (Look that way --->)

Hopefully this will help look for all your favourite posts... ah who am I kidding I'll be the only one that uses it. :P

Als and I will be flying off to Sydney to spend the rest of the week with James and Dora. Can't wait to get to the fish market so I can eat uni by the bucket load.

Look over there

I've added Flickr and del.icio.us to the sidebar. This blog is actually starting to look half decent.

Since I feel like I've ranted to death over Flickr I think I'll give del.icio.us some fan-boy love. For any of you that haven't tried it head over to del.icio.us. When you boil it down to it's essense del.icio.us is basically a bookmark list that you can share with people and (more importantly) one that you can access regardless of where you log onto the Net from. I seem to have a knack for losing my bookmarks through reinstalls, virii or pure stupidity so the idea of an online, persistant bookmark list is pretty darn attractive.

To take things to the next level you can even browse other people's bookmarks based on tags. This is a fantabulous idea as even Google doesn't always serve you up with similar sites that match your interest. Can't beat both productivity and fun in the same package. :)

Skin the wha?

Well this had to start somewhere. I've just recently come upon this whole 'social internet' concept and from what I've seen it's pretty neat. It's great knowing that you can claim a part of the web for yourself these days without the bother of maintaining a site for posts and pictures.

I've never been comfortable with sending mass emails to all my friends and emailing everyone seperately just isn't possible anymore (because I'm a lazy arse, not because I have loads of friends). This is about as close to a mass mail as my concience will allow and I predict I'll find writing my thoughts for all to share somewhat cathartic.

Given my fickle nature this probably won't even last all that long but it'll be interesting to see how long I can keep the ball rolling. Expect to see a torrent of posts intially describing every aspect of my latest banal experience to be followed by a rapid plunge in frequency. Over the course of the blog I hope to share the new locales that my distrubed mind has happened upon.