SlyCat's Journal

For years CSS has been something I've never been able to get my head round. I had learnt to format pages using tables for formatting which it seems was never the intended way to use tables. I've always learnt how to do webdesign by breaking apart other pages and looking at the code to see what it does but there was something about CSS that never seemed to make logical sense. However with the new version of my SlyCat's Pad site, I had decided to use it as a training ground to do a full site completely without the aid of tables and use CSS for formatting. Needless to say I came across countless pitfalls where I just didn't understand how things worked but now, I have finally got a good understanding of the logic behind it all. Ultimately, it's all about the CSS box model with the margin, border and padding to consider. When using containers and elements, you have to consider these features with everything you do. I wouldn't say that I know know CSS, but I do now grasp the basics and can get sites to look how I want. Floating and clearing also seem to be very important as containers like to collapse due to floated elements being detached from the containers they're within... but again I seem to be getting the hang of it.

So while the design isn't finalised, I've got the basics down for my new site. I'm also trying to get the site to basically update itself with all the pages being built with dynamic content. I've now done this for the homepage with my twitter feed and the videos page with feeds from YouTube and Vimeo. All that's left really is to do the blog page to include LJ posts and then I'll consider it done. Shouldn't take me long to do but won't be doing it tonight.

Feel free to take a look and let me know what you think. I know it's a bit lacking in images and artistic flair, but I've never really been good with making sites look pretty, just functional. There's always room for improvement and so I imagine I'll continue playing with it as time goes by. All that remains to be added is one of those stylish "Under Construction" workman signs everyone used back in the late 90's :P

For those who missed it last time (or couldn't be bothered to download another massive file), I've now got it uploaded to Vimeo. I much prefer this cut, especially for the music at the end. I assure you this will be my last post on the subject now :D

Again, full screen it to get it in 720p HD.

In addition, the video on Vimeo was made with a new higher quality version of the source I was able to generate using rendering in MPEG2 and then compressing with Handbrake rather than DivX Pro to H.264 MPEG4. If you like, you can download that file from Vimeo or from my site: CFz2010SE.m4v (1.99gb)

Note that this is the only version where I've correctly mentioned the Fatboy Slim track I used during the parade! For some reason, I completely forgot to mention it in previous versions. For those who may be curious and don't want to re-watch the video, the track is "Everybody Needs a Carnival".

Finally after weeks of editing and pulling my hair out at the constant crashing in Power Director 8, I present my ConFuzzled 2010 video!

Be sure to view in full screen to see it in HD :)

Chapters:

00:00 Intro
00:55 Friday Fursuit Frolicks
03:51 Wikifur Pub Quiz
04:33 Saturday 'Suits
05:56 Furrylimpics
15:25 Saturday Night Swolf
16:46 Sunday's Shennanigans & Science!
19:49 Fursuit Parade
32:32 Sunday Night Dances

Alternatively, you can download the following versions:

CFz2010.wmv - 720p WM9HD - 1.7gb
This was the source file rendered from Power Director 8 that the other versions are based on. As such, this is the best quality file of them all but it is a bit on the large side and it's also Windows Media so not everyone can view it. However if you're like me and value picture quality (and a fast connection), this is the one to get :)

CFz2010.mkv - 720p DivX Pro HD (H.264) - 691mb
This is the squashed down version which uses H.264 compression but loses a bit of quality from the original. I used the DivX Converter which doesn't produce great quality so if you can make a better H.264 version, let me know!

CFz2010.avi - 640x360 DivX - 184mb
For those who don't care for HD or have slow connections. Again converted using the DivX Converter so again quality is lost.

I hope people enjoy watching, it was fun to make but I felt like I could always have done more. For example more footage syncing with the music. Also, I'm not happy with the Sunday dance footage as it was recorded at around 3am when there were fewer fursuiters around (and more balto_mike it seems!). Another problem was the fact that I'm using a compact camera to record video so people kept on thinking I was taking photos and posing rather than moving about. I think I need a sign or something to say it's video!

I'm contemplating doing a similar video for EF, but I think I'll need to get me more silly music first. Finding appropriate music is a bitch :P

Had to change a bit of code to get the furmeets pages working due to apparently me using an old fashioned way of getting variables from the URL but now all of my sites are now online. The only thing missing is the galleries for each of the sites. That will take me a lot longer to rebuild and I will need help from people who have photos from furmeets past and present and also those who had uploaded photos of their fursuits to fursuit.co.uk.

Edit: Looks like some people still can't see the sites. The likely reason for that is that I had to change the nameservers associated with my domains. Hopefully people should be able to see the sites over the next 24-48 hours as the DNS propagates.

Well I was planning to write up either my ConFuzzled report or even about the LondonFur meet I attended today, however I don't feel in the mood to do so having heard from Furble the situation with the server which my sites were hosted on. Basically, it seems that sometime on Thursday, one of the drives in the raid failed and so this was replaced and the drive started rebuilding. However allegedly something which was totally unheard of in the hosting company's 10 year history, while the new drive was rebuilding, another drive died. Two drives failed in a RAID-5 = total loss of data and it seems that there are no other backups stored. So, in other words, they have lost all data for all accounts hosted on that particular server which is called their "Flagship" server. There's a number of other furs who happen to be hosted on the same server such as Furble, Graafen and Glis as well.

It seems they have the SQL databases backed up but that's it. I have what appears to be the complete code for the Furmeets.co.uk site so if I can get the SQL tables restored, I can get that site back up and running rather quickly. However all of the photos on that site will be lost. The majority were sourced by myself but there are a large number of photos submitted by other contributors and so I would have to re-request they upload their photos to the site.

I was in the process of redesigning SlyCat.co.uk so I'm not so fussed about losing that site. It means I have more reason to finish the new design I was working on. However, again all of my photos will have disappeared which was my convention photos and the like. I should have them all someplace here but will be a right pain to get them all back online as they used to be.

Finally, the Fursuit.co.uk site can be restored but there's not really much to the site itself. Again, this lends itself to a site redesign. Maybe I can actually make the site what I wanted it to be which was a place people could log into, submit links to various fursuiting resources and rate existing links. There was a large user generated photo album which is now gone too which was where people could upload their own photos to the site so that'll have to start from scratch again which rather sucks.

Most annoying of all, all of my email accounts have ceased to be at the current time so any email sent to any of my email addresses will have been returned undelivered. I really need to get my email accounts back up as soon as possible :-/

Despite all this, I have heard absolutely diddley directly from the domain host, TopClassHost. I sent them a second email this evening demanding to be informed of what was going on. Hopefully I shall hear from them tomorrow. In terms of compensation, I don't want to be upgraded to their higher package which is what they seem to be offering as I'd never use the space. I'd be looking to get at least 1 year's free service...

At the end of the day, I guess you get what you pay for. TCH offered a very comprehensive hosting platform for a very low price and so it seems that because of this, they don't have fully resilient servers or at least full daily backups. As much as I would want to move to someone else for hosting, the other options just can't deliver the features for the price. However I plan to take regular backups once I'm back online.

I've been using mobile phones since 1997/8 and so I thought I would make a post to document all of the phones I've used over the years:

( Table of phones within )

I've currently got the HTC Desire and the Nokia N900 on my radar for my next phone, however I'm quite keen to dabble with the Android OS to be honest. My current contract is for two years and will be up in October and so I expect there will be a number of new shiny phones available by then. There's even the 4th iPhone which will be out by then but I doubt I can be convinced to get such a restrictive device.

This post is inspired by the BBC's recent 4 part documentary on the history and influence of the internet, The Virtual Revolution (check it out if you've not seen it!). The documentary made me think about how I use the internet compared with how I used to use it over 13 years ago when I was just starting to use the internet. I used IRC back then like I do now, but back then I used IRC for finding “warez”. I don't do this now however as I just use IRC for chatting with furs. However what is interesting about internet usage back then was that I would normally be browsing websites I could find for various information (using Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo, etc) and when I eventually found the furry fandom, I'd spend a lot of time viewing personal sites made by various furs detailing their exploits, etc. This was a time before blogs, LJ, Twitter and pretty much any community based sites you can think of. The trend was if you were on the net, you would have a homepage regardless of whether you had anything relevant to add to the world as it was all about having a presence.

My first site was a perfect example of this. It was called “The Stuff” (so called as I didn't want it to call it “My Homepage” like everyone else) which became a place I would dump things I was interested in such as cheats for games and tracker music I had made. The site was complete with swooshy DHTML effects and irritating midi playing constantly in the background. I had a page of the month page where I asked people to submit suggestions for the page of the month. I only ever received one such suggestion in the form of someone asking me to have their site about the Stone Temple Pilots advertised. Needless to say, the site didn't really do much traffic and was entirely pointless.

On finding furry however, I had more of a reason to have a website and so I made a page where I would eventually start blogging my life (before blogs were known as blogs I should point out!). Through tools like the fursuit ring and other portal sites, I would end up finding other furs and other furs would find me and that's how things would progress until 2001 when I got this LiveJournal account. I pretty much stopped frequently updating my site at this point as I would just update my LJ instead. As this was before YouTube, I would still post videos on my site of furries in the media or stuff I had recorded but with the growing popularity of YouTube, I had moved to that too.

So now, I have this personal website which is pretty much obselete in today's world. This is because these days, people don't need a personal site to let the world know they're there. Now, you just need to sign up to a blogging site, Facebook or Twitter and you're instantly connecting with people, publishing information and receiving instant feedback on what you have to say. It's obviously a lot easier to do than painstakingly designing and building a site and you get the instant gratification through people's comments, etc.

This makes me then wonder about the use of websites in 2010. Generally, you'll be using them to gain information through news or knowledge sites, shopping, or you'll be participating in some kind of web 2.0 site networking with people. There's not much need for personal websites in this day and age it seems.

I've also got my fursuit.co.uk site which I had intended to be used as a hub for UK fursuiters to find out about other fursuiters and also have a central place to find resources to make or buy suits. However as it's not very interactive, I have to manually update it which I seem to do about once a year. Really what I need to do is to redo the site as a place where people can log in and submit links for places to buy suits or materials but also allow them to show off their suits. Thing is much of this already exists elsewhere so I lack the inspiration to do anything.

The one site I made which is actively updated is one I made which updates itself due to user submitted content, furmeets.co.uk. I made that site through wanting something like that to exist and at the time it didn't. Because of this, I see myself adding to the site and helping develop it as I can see people like to use it and find it useful but I don't know what will become of my other sites.

I think it's interesting how the internet has changed over the time I've been connected up to it and will be interested to see where it goes from here, but part of me does wish it was like the old days with personal sites, etc as it was a lot more personal back then as opposed to just having a profile on a million different sites. Even LiveJournal and probably other blogs are dying off thanks to the immediacy of Twitter it seems. I personally certainly use is a lot less than I used to and according to the aforementioned documentary, 90% of blogs lay dormant and unused these days.

However, I will personally try to ensure that I keep my LJ updated with things I find I want to talk about like this. It will just contain less random nonsense and thought as that's what Twitter's for :)

In case your curious and want a trip down memory lane, you can see my site as it was back in it's first version (hosted originally by Freeserve) circa 1999 or the updated version from 2001 which has my whole pre-LJ diary archive. Be sure to use IE and enable the ActiveX script to get the full nostalgic effect due to the poor coding :P

PS. This is the 3rd damn time it took me to write this post due to my PC freezing and it's way past my bed time now!

I'm looking at the weather forecasts and it looks like the snow which fell today will be my area's last (or at least for the foreseeable future) as the temperature's on the rise with the temperature consistently staying above freezing point and the only precipitation will be rain. Other than it being bloody cold, I don't really mind the snow itself. What I do hate is the chaos it seems to cause this country with the public transport system and the like. The other thing I hate is when the snow turns to ice and the temperature remains below zero so it becomes very dangerous to walk outside.

When we got freak ice occur locally shortly before Christmas, I found it to be a rather scary experience on just the short walk to work due to having no traction with the ground at all for the entire journey. After that day, I decided there must be a better way of dealing with that kind of weather and considering it was only December, I had expected similar weather to occur again. I ended up finding a rather nifty solution called snow grips, which are a rubber sleeve thingies with small metal studs on which you pull over your shoe. When I told people about it they thought it was a bit of a silly idea, but this relatively cheap item certainly helped me regain my confidence with walking in the icy conditions as with them on, I barely lost my grip on the ice at all. In fact it was quite satisfying passing other walkers who were slipping and sliding about with relative ease :)

Anyway, it looks like I won't (hopefully) need to use them again unless we get some more freaky cold weather hit the area. Bring on the summer is all I can say!

Well I was planning on making one of my normal long posts but I think I'll just summarise it all. BrumCon isn't a convention, it's just the name given to the private house parties hosted by badgerguy and colifox. This BrumCon, number 6, was to celebrate the New Year. I was unable to make it last year due to being on call over the New Year period so I made sure I wasn't on call this time round.

Anyway, I really enjoyed myself due to having fantastic company and a superb firework show put on by yagfox. Yag also brought loads of lights and lasers for the party as well as a laser displaying the time on the garden wall so we all knew how long it was until the New Year. There were also quite a few fursuiters there which made me wish I could have brought my own fursuit. Unfortunately, as I was already bringing a sleeping bag, my new inflatable mattress and a laptop, I couldn't realisticly bring the fursuit as well as I was travelling on public transport.

I recorded some video and took some snaps, but not a huge amount as other people got better footage/photos than me. Also, my camera's flash mechanism had been damaged by a Slushie otter :P However, I've uploaded what I took. I already made a post about the video, but now the photos are online and they're available on my gallery. Not too sure why most of the "People" photos are of Ember, I guess he was doing the most photo worthy stuff due to being rather drunk :P

Thanks to everyone who was there, I'd say it was probably my best new year's party so far :D Hopefully my next one will be just as good!

If you had asked me a year ago about 3DTV, I would have said it was a gimmick and would never catch on in the living room. Most of the 3D films were in their own right used 3D as a gimmick to poke your eyes out, however with films like Avatar and Up before it, directors are using 3D as a cinematic device to help tell the story and help the viewer feel more immersed.

In terms of home 3DTV however, the first time I saw what the technology was capable of was when I viewed a ~£8000 JVC HDTV which used polarised 3D technology at EuroGamer Expo back in October. They were showing the Avatar game which while looking like a dull game, the visuals were utterly stunning and created the same effect as 3D films in the cinema. As the TV was polarised, it was just like the way RealD 3D is done in the cinema with, right up to the point where you only had to wear the same glasses you do in the cinema for the 3D effect to work. The problem with polarising on an LCD screen is that for the polarisation to work, they're effectively using two screens layered over one another, each with the different polarisation for each eye and doing it this way is very expensive. The only other way to do polarised 3D would be what nVidia were doing at their seminar which also at EuroGamer Expo, which was to have a clever set up with two projectors which were perfectly matched for the distance of the screen and each had a different polarising filter on it. However this isn't really practical for the home as it would require a lot of fiddling to get right. Maybe eventually they'll do digital 3D projectors for the home which do what the ones in the cinema do but still, most people don't want a projector in their living room anyway.

So, what seems to be happening in 2010 is that RealD is partnering with companies such as Sony for their home 3DTV setup which would involve active shutter glasses rather than the passive glasses used for polarised 3D. The main difference is that the glasses themselves have to be synced with the screen and need to be powered to blink each lense in time with the frames displayed onthe TV. The TV would also need to be able to support at least true 120hz (60hz for each eye). This technology already exists in the form of nVidia's 3D Vision for PC where you need to get the glasses, receiver and a 120hz screen. It seems that in the next year, Sony will have standardised the format for 3D on Blu-Ray and there's also a new HDMI 1.4 standard for 3D video.

My prediction is that the film Avatar will become one of the first 3D Blu-Ray films to be released with the new standard and due to it's popularity, it would become the "killer app" or must have movie which makes people to want to upgrade their setup. Personally however, as much as I'd want to get on to this bandwagon, I can't see myself upgrading my TV any time soon as no doubt early adopters will be stung with high prices and I really like my TV! I may eventually get me one of those nVidia 3D Vision & 120hz monitor setups for my PC sometime next year however as I do like the effect it gives.