Mike Mamaril :: Journal » Recent Posts [Page 9]

I just updated my animé stash after more than a month of being unattended. I am especially excited this time aorund since Anime-HQ finally released the final episodes of the series including all 4 movies, all of them in DVD quality and in dual audio goodness! Once I find the time I can finally watch the series, including the movies, with fear of falling short of the episodes.

I'm also looking forward to the release of Ghost in the Shell S.A.C. 2nd gig by Anime-HQ. I have yet to watch the 1st gig since I want to watch it straight through the 2nd gig. Hopefully all goes well and they finish it early.

Requests aside, I wanna thank Anime-HQ for releasing one of my favorite animé in DVD quality. I do hope they release more of their kickass works for a long time to come.

I just scored a live drive for my Audigy 2 ZS sound card. There are 2 versions of the sound card I have; one is the vanilla Audigy 2 ZS and the other is the Audigy 2 ZS Platinum. It's basically the same card with different accessories, mainly the live drive. When I bought my card, the vanilla version cost 6,200 bucks which was way back in 2005; while the Platinum version at that time was like 9,000 bucks give or take. At that time I didn't have the budget to buy the Platinum version so I settled for the vanilla version. I've been looking for that particular live drive for quite sometime now; thankfully some dude with a Platinum version of the card was selling it. Originally he was selling the entire package with the card included, but I managed to persuade him to sell me the live drive separately for 1,800.

I really wanted to have this so I can just directly plug in my headphones in the front panel without passing through the speakers to save on electricity. Plus I also have additional inputs for recording and stuff which might come handy in the future. Also, there is a subtle difference in sound quality if you're plugging your headphones directly into the sound card as to passing through your speaker system. The sound comes out better when it's directly connected to the card... well for me anyway.

I was thinking of selling the card at first and get the new X-Fi line of sound card from Creative. But it just ain't worth the price at the moment. Plus, the sound quality doesn't really differ from the Audigy 2 ZS and the top of the line X-Fi cards. The entry level X-Fi card right now is around 6,000 bucks which is not worth it. Thankfully the dude who was supposed to buy my card was just a poser and didn't finalize our transactions. I guess it was a blessing in disguise... well at least some posers serve a purpose, haha!

I've decided to reinstall the talkback (comment system) feature on my journal engine in the hopes of attracting more traffic through discussions. It's a long shot but it's worth a try since I won't lose anything if I do so. I still used the CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) feature as a deterrent for spammers. It may be an inconvenience for some, but with the current trends on the internet today, I feel it is a necessity. I just made it in such a way that it would be readable even to those who are visually impaired like me.

I guess the main motivation for putting this feature back on is the recent reject I had in joining a certain group of local developers. I was stumped at first, pondering on the possible reasons behind the rejection. Maybe it was a lack of skill on my part, politics or a bunch of other things. Thankfully something good came out of it. It made me realize that I have to focus on myself and what I really want to achieve in my career and just let other people do their own thing.

In a world of corporations, marketing strategies, and monopolies, I would want to believe that people like me can still achieve our own form of success and get a humble piece of financial triumph to get through our day to day expenditures... and focus on what we love doing and keep doing it.

I just got a new motherboard, an Asus P5B-VM. I'm still not sure if I'll be using this motherboard for the long haul, but at the moment it seems to be worth the money. I was originally gunning for the Abit Fatal1ty F-190HD motherboard which is available locally at an 8,500PHP price tag. I got the P5B-VM for only 4,100 bucks, with almost the same features; though the Abit fatal1ty F-790HD does have a HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface). Thankfully, the P5B-VM has an eSATA (External Serial ATA) port on the back which kinda makes up for the lack of an HDMI port.

I also decided to change the stock heat sink of my processor. I saw several people running a fanless heatsink on a Silverstone SG01 using an Enzotech Ultra-X cooler. So I decided to try it out. The idea was ingenious; using the 120mm fan of the PSU which was directly above the heat sink as the fan for it. This saves power and reduces noise which is really cool.

I was skeptical at first that everything would fit, but to my relief everything went well. It was an exact fit (just like a condom), though I had to remove the Ultra-X logo on the heat sink so it would fit snugly. I saw several people who didn't remove it at the cost of bending the heat sink which I didn't opt to do. My next step probably in the coming summer months is to mount a 120mm fan on the bottom. I tried fitting one but it was hitting the north bridge heat sink which measures 35mm. I need an additional clearance of about 5-10mm to make a 25mm thick 120mm wide fan fit underneath. I guess I'll get to this once I have extra money again.

Well, I hope I parted some useful information to those people who are planning on a similar Silverstone SG01 and Enzotech Ultra-X combo, which I doubt since these kinds of hardware often caters to computer enthusiasts only, mainly because of the price tags ^^v.

I was fixing a bug on the guestbook section earlier and decided to add the maxlength attribute to the form. When I tried to validate the code using the XHTML 1.0 Transitional specs it had 1 error. It seems the textarea input field doesn't support the maxlength attribute. For the sake of security I decided to implement a JavaScript solution after seeing a similar implementation on QuirksBlog. I got the concept from that tutorial and expanded on the idea.

The requirements of the script I made were simple: to be unobtrusive, must validate in XHTML 1.0 Transitional, and be modular. The example at QuirksBlog had several limitations such as: it will not validate since it still relied on using the maxlength attribute within the textarea tag itself, and it will not deny input if it has passed the set maxlength value. So to make the long story short I'll show you my code.


 

function setMaxLength() {

    var txtareas = document.getElementsByTagName('textarea');

    var maxlength = 0;

    var counter = document.createElement('div');



    for (var i = 0, txtarea; txtarea = txtareas[i] ;i++) {

        if (txtarea.className.search(/ml-([0-9]+)/)) {

            //get our max length

            maxlength = txtarea.className.match(/ml-([0-9]+)/)[1];

            var counterClone = counter.cloneNode(true);



            counterClone.className = "counter"; //set the style for our counter

            counterClone.innerHTML = "text limit : " + maxlength;



            txtarea.parentNode.insertBefore(counterClone,txtarea.nextSibling);

            txtarea.setAttribute("maxlen",maxlength);

            txtarea.setAttribute("chars",1); //marker for the current chars remaining

            txtarea.counter = counterClone; 



            //events

            txtarea.onkeyup = txtarea.onchange = function(e) {

                var chars = this.getAttribute('maxlen') - this.value.length;

                this.setAttribute("chars",chars);

                this.counter.innerHTML = "text limit : " + chars;

            }

            txtarea.onkeydown = function(e) {

                var evt = (e) ? e : window.event;

                var charCode = (evt.which) ? evt.which : event.keyCode;



                if (this.getAttribute('chars') < 1) {

                    if (charCode != 8 && charCode != 46) { //accept the del/back space keys

                        //make sure we have the exact maxlength even if the user

                        //is typing really fast

                        this.value = this.value.substring(0,this.getAttribute('maxlen'));

                        return false; 

                    }

                }

            }

            txtarea.onkeyup();

        }

    }

}

What this basically does is loop through all the textarea tags and searches for the ml-(number) class name. For example, you want to set the maxlength of a particular textarea to 500 characters, you would add ml-500 to that textarea class attribute, where ml- would be the marker for the script and 500 the actual maxlength limit. This way we just append values to the class attribute so that the code will still validate. This will not affect any style/class you already have for that textarea, you would just separate them with spaces like so:


 

<textarea name="mytextbox" cols="40" rows="8" class="myOwnStyle ml-500"></textarea>

To see this in action, just copy and paste the code and call the setMaxLength function on the window.onload event. I tested this on the following browsers:

Firefox 2.x
Internet Explorer 6
Internet Explorer 7
Opera 9.21

People lately have been ranting about the lack of jobs in the country, though most of them fail to see that it is the exact opposite. There are a lot of jobs out there with a big deficiency in qualified personnel. Most of the younger generation set their sights on "high paying" job trends. It's seldom that you see graduating students who want to pursue other "not so high paying" careers.

At the moment, call centers are a hot item on the job hunting menu. It's a good addition to the economy since it provides job opportunities and attracts more foreign investors to the country. Though it also has a damaging effect wherein people are blinded by the so called easy money, much so that you see teachers, doctors, architects and people of other professions drop their careers for it. Yes, it's a practical choice financially speaking; though I think it's becoming to be a cliche.

You see less pride in people's work now a days. Often they'll reply with statements as "whatever pays the bills" or "I am just being practical". Personally I think people are being too materialistic and fixated on financial success. In my opinion, that is why we see more people getting conned by ponzi scams or the like, or corruption not only in government but in numerous institutions.

I am sounding like a preacher but what I say is factual. We all want to improve the quality of living for ourselves and immediate family. Singular efforts are degrading society itself. Most successful Filipinos are either in other countries or want to live in other countries... with a fleeting message: "I shall retire in the Philippine because it is my country". Yes, overseas workers remit foreign currencies which help the country. But I personally think that the country needs more educated people to teach the younger generations. Instead we see the less fortunate, lazy, or simply unlucky folk here in our country who fail to make it in other countries. The growing stigma of working in other countries will alleviate poverty in his or her family. One may have earned a generous some of money but at what cost.

This is a sad fact that I see all the time. Less and less people give importance to the long term consequences of their actions and view life as routine monetary activity, fueled by the media, and markets, tolerated by the people and government. The trend developing is that less people think for themselves. They supplement personal thoughts and opinions with mass media and the circulating idea within peers. People who think for themselves are often alienated to ridiculed by peers or by the powers that be... where the so called power in numbers philosophy comes into play.

I personally hope that a paradigm shift will happen soon and help turn the minds of the majority in thinking for themselves. Have pride in simple tasks and create a society where currency doesn't hold as much significance as it has in ours today.

I just finished uploading the new design I made for seening.org. The design incorporated a lot of alpha-blending and a simple theming system. The best way I I thought of doing this was the use of PNG images instead of making a lot of GIF/JPEG images to create the same effect which would have a significant effect on development and loading time.

PNG (Portable Network Graphics) supports up to 48-bit color or 16-bit grayscale and typically compresses about 5% to 25% better than GIF files. Which may then very well suited for use in websites. The only problem is not all browsers support them, i.e. Internet Explorer 6 and below. Thankfully there is a way to get around this problem.

First, we make a separate style sheet for the IE6 and former browsers, since most of the new browsers fully support PNG images. The reason behind using a separate style sheet is because the style sheet we will use for the IE6 and below browsers aren't standard and will not validate. In order to validate XHTML and CSS we do the following:


 

<!--[if lte IE 6]>

    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="ie.css" />

<![endif]-->

Note this line if lte IE 6 in the example above, lte (less than or equal to) IE Internet Explorer 6. This stylesheet will only be used by the said browsers. Inside the style sheet itself we put the following code.


 

#element-id {

    filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src="image.png", sizingMethod="scale");

}

Again a few things to notice is the sizingMethod parameter. You can use scale to stretch the PNG graphic or crop to just use the actual dimensions of the graphic. Also in some instances you will need to specify the width and height of #element-id for it to work on IE6 and below.

Now here is the code we put in on our normal style sheet. Note the html>body at the start of the line. It's just a rule so that this line will be ignored by IE6 and below, though IE7 recognizes it.


 

html>body #element-id { background: transparent url(image.png) no-repeat; }

One last thing to remember when doing this, links sometimes wont work on IE6 if placed inside #element-id. In order to get around this you need to put in inside a wrapper like a <div> tag and use the z-index and position attributes on it like so:


 

#element-id div {

    z-index: 99;

    position: relative;

}

Just put your text and/or links inside the <div> wrapper within your #element-id element. Another thing to note that this work-around will not work if #element-id has the position:absolute attribute set. A way to get around this is to just float #element-id and use margins.

So to wrap everything up your HTML code will look something like this:


 

<div id="element-id">

    <div>

        <a href="#">sample text here</a> blah blah

    </div>

</div>

Ok, Project Typecast has officially been implemented. The new design is 95% done with minor tweaks left to be done. Thankfully I didn't procrastinate as much today and got a lot of work done. Next on the project typecast agenda is more content, a bit more visual effects, and maybe a new color to the themes.

I also finished bug-checking the HiraKana game and added a new Review Mode to the game. I already uploaded it and integrated it into the portfolio section which can be found here. That's it for now, until next time!

PS:

Happy 24th birthday to an old friend, Thea. May you have more to come!

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