b-log!

Every now and then, I stumble across actresses and models that I find attractive. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there? So I thought I’d post a list of five of my “most stunning” and maybe less recognized, or under-appreciated women. These aren’t in any particular order, because I would have difficulty picking my favourites.

1. Zooey Deschanel I first came across Zooey quite recently when my girlfriend had nagged me to watch “Yes Man” starring Jim Carrey. There was something strange about her in the film. She had the “unique” vibe about her that the role obviously called for and it didn’t feel forced like so many other actresses. For me she rounded off what was a pretty good film. Although that was the first time I knew of her, I had previously seen her star as Trillian in the 2005 movie version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in which she also gave a rather promising performance, even if the American accent should have disappeared… Seeing as the character was from Islington… So what makes her so attractive then? Could it be the dark hair and blue eyes? The soft girly voice? Or the fact that she seems fairly normal, the type of person you could actually go out with? Either way, she’s made it into my list and goes to prove you don’t always need to show your skin to get attention

2. Madeline Zima Ok, so there is a similar story with this little lady as well. I found a magazine dropped on the floor on one of my walks, with a her sexy photo and her name on it. Not wanting to pick the magazine up for obvious reasons, I remembered the name and Google’d it when I got home. For some reason I found a load of pictures of Gretchen from Heroes. My jaw hit the floor as I realised that this fairly ordinary looking girl (who I’d been watching for a few weeks have a quite believable on-screen lesbian romance type thing), was actually hotter than I though (although I did already think it to some extent). Further searching gave me a huge list of shows she’d been in, including Californication. Although I don’t watch Californication, I have watched a certain clip a few times.

3. Sarah Chalke Back in 2001, we were introduced to a new sitcom, “Scrubs”. The initial love interest of the main character “JD” (and eventual partner as the show transitioned into a new format). From the first time she said “I love Pac-Man”, she had me. I don’t know what it was, but she was just the right level of hot and messed-up. As the years have gone by, she has matured and still looks fantastic for it. Scrubs could have worked if she had just sat there for half an hour in a tight fitting top or bra (or doing her German voice…) As I’m writing this I’m still having images of her in a nurses uniform twirling chewing gum around her finger. I think she’s actually bad for me.

4. Cobie Smulders If you haven’t heard of her, you are missing out on one of the most “awesome” TV shows ever. First saw her in How I Met Your Mother and probably like so many others, wanted things to work out with her and first Ted, then Barney. She’s not scared of playing a character that looks stupid (“Let’s go to the mall” and all the other Canadian references), but is also a strong actress when it comes to the serious things. To be quite honest, 30 minutes (including adverts!) is not enough time to bask in her glory. She needs to expose herself more (take that either way you want to…) so everyone can get a good look (and that too…)

5. Tabrett Bethell Tabrett portrays my favourite character (Cara) from my favourite book (series of books if you wanna get into it, but I thought this was more about the women). It could be something to do with the leather, but in my opinion, she is one of the best looking women on TV today. Everything about her is perfect from her green eyes to the length of her hair (which I can’t decide looks better blonde or dark as they both look good on her). I think this is my “If you could be stranded on a desert island with one person” person. I’m counting the seconds between the episodes of “Legend Of The Seeker”. I know that makes me pathetic, but I don’t care.

I’ve noticed after writing this that not one person really seems to have what I would consider a “normal” name. Oh well, If you didn’t make it onto my list, you can always try and persuade me in time for the next one… ladies? No?

I’ve been experiencing  a few issues with the domain name over the last week and a half, so a number of you may not have been able to access the site. It was still reachable via other methods, but to save all the confusion I never gave out the alternative address and decided to wait to post an entry until it was fixed. As you can see this has been done now and we can get back to the chit-chat

Despite being available since around September 2008, I have only just got around to upgrading my Sony Ericsson w580i to the updated, albeit very similar looking, model that is the w595. Sony Ericsson, being my favoured manufacturer, have yet to disappoint me with a device I’ve bought from them. My first experience was with the k750i, which is probably why I fell so in love with the brand. I’ve since owned the w880i and of course the w580i I have just upgraded from. The w880i was a good move; the Walkman© phones have always had excellent quality media capabilities, although at a cost of the obvious drawback of losing the higher-end cameras etc. Sticking with the Walkman© phones, the w580i was fantastic, although like all SE phones recently, it had a few bad reviews due to certain problems with non-essential parts of the phone.

Back to the w595… As soon as I opened the box I panicked; Where was the CD-ROM and the User Guide? A little leaflet inside then instructs you that you must now download these from the Internet as they are trying to be more eco-friendly. Crisis averted (unless you have no Internet access). I removed the handset and set aside as well as removing the, now extremely familiar, charger and USB cable along with the ear-phones. The ear-phones felt a little bulky however. As I examined them, I noticed that the larger size was due to the extra port for a second pair of ear-phones. Now, this isn’t something I would regularly use, but it is still a nice feature to have and I’m sure very useful for people in some situations.

Putting it together

I then inserted my own SIM card into the phone, replaced the 2GB M2 card that came in the box with the 4GB I was already using in the w580i and turned it on. Now, again the phone has had some criticism over the “flimsy” back cover with people feeling as if it would snap (In some cases it has reportedly snapped). However, after using the w580i for so long, this back cover seems to be a dream. All it takes to remove is a simple nail into the groove and a quick pull (Speaking as a habitual nail-biter, I can testify to how easy this actually is). Pushing it back on seems to take more than a simple click though at the top and the bottom and may require the sides to be clicked back into place.

Setting up the phone

After going through the usual setup wizard you find on SE phones, I was presented with standby mode (decorated with the blue 02 theme I’m so used to seeing as a default). My first port of call with any new phone is to go straight to the settings to fix all the little annoyances (I’m quite set in my ways about how I think phones should be set up. I’ve noticed for example, that both the w580i and indeed the w595 both have the option for ending a call by closing the slider disabled by default). After doing the important settings first, I changed the theme to see which one I would be able to stand the longest. The phone introduces 3 completely new themes: Connecto, Pastelle and Splatta (which appears to be a much better variation of a theme I didn’t like very much for the w580i). After changing this, I went back to an option I had come across a moment before called “Main menu layout”.  If you have ever done any “phone modding”, the options will appear very familiar. They are the 3 options for how the main menu is displayed (Grid, Rotating and Single Icon). The days of having to access the phones file system and edit a file are over with for this phone. Whilst I was on the main menu checking out these different displays, I noticed a new option on the left soft-key (the phone essentially has 3 soft-keys including the central play/stop/ok button. This option was entitled “options”. Fairly inconspicuous to be honest, but it allows quick access to both the theme setting and the menu layout without having to go through the settings. So I quickly changed the theme to Connecto, which apart from the Electric Blue text, seemed to be the best theme. Oh my God! The menu switched to the Flash-based beauty that I have been so accustomed to. I should explain this for those of you that do not know about this:

Flash Menus explained

Quite a few of the SE phones come with what is known as a Flash menu. Yes, that’s right, Flash as in the Macromedia/Adobe product you’ve all been using to play games on the Internet at school/work. The only problem is, the operator (in my case 02) places their own icons on the menu (usually just WAP links etc) which actually breaks it and forces the phone to revert to the classic menu similar to that of the k750i. In the case if my w580i, it actually stopped the phone from using light settings (LEDs built in the phone to create little light shows when the phone was in use, one of the most attractive features.) and on other operators (AT&T for example), it was claimed that any ring-tone you set from a media file would only play for around 15-30 seconds, whereas it should have played continuously. The only way to fix the phone to work properly would be to delve once-more into the phone’s file system and “debrand” the phone. Some places offer this for a charge (although I do all mine myself) and they will usually open the phone to accept all networks at the same time. The only down-side to this is that you lose all the operator-related content, which is in most cases, never used anyway. Look out for an upcoming post on how to unlock, debrand and patch most Sony Ericsson handsets. Coming Soon…

The Main Menu

So the menu, is essentially the same as what I had on the w580i, although the icons have moved around a bit, which may take a bit of getting used to. One major part of this move around though, as any SE user would notice, is that the File Manager icon is missing. I’ve actually seen people post that they will be returning the phone, partly because of this. Which shows how long it takes people to rate a product, seeing as the menu has just been replaced as a sub-menu inside the “Organizer” menu; a logical place in my opinion… The reason for this though is to allow the shiny new icon of the “Media” menu. It kind of reminds me of the way you could access songs on older Walkman©models, except that it has a better layout, has animated backgrounds depending on the theme and also includes Music, Photos, Videos, Games, Web feeds and also has a settings option. The games option may be a bit superfluous however, as it has an icon on the main menu.

Media Player

The media player has changed slightly from the versions I’ve previously used. It is now version 3.0. I feel it is now better looking and more optimized for use on slightly larger screens (the screen is a 2.2″ rather than the 2″ of the w580i). One thing that might slightly annoy me is the fact that the ear-phones must be plugged in to change the equalizer settings. It’s nothing major as it obviously uses it’s own EQ settings when they aren’t plugged in so as to get the best performance out of the built in speaker; I do still feel however, that you may want to change the setting for the next time you do actually want to plug them in. The radio seems to have remained completely untouched, even since the release of the k750i; how much can you change something that does such a simple job so effectivley?

The Video Call Fiasco

Now for video calls, a feature I have never used in my life, but I like to exploring on my phone so I know is there. It seems a bit wrong to me. With my w880i, you had a front-facing camera near the ear-piece that you used for this purpose. You could also change it to the rear-facing camera if you so wished. I am a bit disappointed with the phone in this area. Am I supposed to turn my phone around if someone does ever decide to video-call me? Seems like a bit of an after-thought adding the video-call feature to be honest as the designer sure didn’t take it into consideration.

J2ME “Java” Applications

The phone came with a few Java applications as standard including a familiar World Clock (from w580i applications), Walk Mate (similar to another w580i fitness feature), Music Mate 5 (also available on previous phones), a converter application (which you usually have to download elsewhere, all bugs included) and a rock bobblehead (can’t see any purpose to this except to show-off the fact that it has a built in accelerometer, which we can all tell by the fact it has shake control, orientation based display (rotate phone to rotate display) and a pedometer function. It does also have a comic strip maker though, although it is essentially a 5 frame media message.

The Camera

The camera seems to be of an excellent quality, although moving targets and dark rooms are best avoided as they will blur or be much too dark (even with the night-mode enabled). The photos and videos this handset can take can be uploaded straight to a blog (although it only seemed to support Blogger when I tried it, I will try again later as there are rumours it works for a variety of networks such as Facebook). I’m not 100% about this so I can’t say it’s a fact, but the resolution is a very peculiar 2048×1536, which some may notice is exactly double that of a very common screen size. I have a feeling the 3.2 MP camera is only capable of taking pictures at 1024×768 and interpolating them to make them bigger. Also, the photo fix option just seems to make pictures too bright (I’m not a keen photographer, but I would expect that they wouldn’t be too happy with the results of this feature).

General Design

The design of the phone is stylish candybar-slider, a little on the plump side, with a bit more weight behind it. When I say plump, I mean it’s not the slimmest phone (not as slim as the w880i for example, although this is a slider), but not as big as to be called bulky. It’s like a girlfriend toning up a bit of muscles; similarly it’s a good thing. The weight is not too much either. According to Wikipedia, it is 104 grams (which seems a little high for me as my side-winder mouse feels heavier with 30 grams of weight inside). Again though it’s a good thing, it doesn’t feel delicate and you know it’s there. It’s reassuring.

The Big Picture

Overall, the phone promises to be a popular choice with me, despite some noticeable flaws in the whole design. It’s altogether a more grown up phone than it’s previous counterparts, as you would expect. Whereas the w580i felt like fun and a good phone for any teenager, the w595 has a more corporate look to it (based on my own handset; I have a silver one that appears to only be available on 02, whereas you can get a floral design or pink for the girls or jungle blue, cosmopolitan white or gold-ish for the boys). It even has grilles over the earpiece and microphone to make it more sleek. It remind me a high-performance car in the looks department looking from the top down.

Phone Information

Screen	240×320 pixels (QVGA), 2.2″, 262,144 (18-bit) color TFT LCD
Camera	3.2 megapixel
Second camera	not featured
Input	Keypad, Accelerometer,Motion sensor
Defaultringtone	Polyphonic, Realtone (MP3/MP3/AAC)Video Ringtone (MP4/3GPP)
Memory	40 MB Internal, Memory StickMicro M2
Networks	GSM 900/850/1800/1900 andUMTS and HSDPA and EDGE
Connectivity	HSDPA, 3G, USB 2.0,Bluetooth 2.0
Physical size	3.9 x 1.9 x 0.6 in. 100.0 x 47.0 x 14.0 mm
Weight	3.7 oz 104.0 gr
Form factor	Sliding candybar
Media	Walkman 3.0

Back when I first started writing in PHP and integrating mySQL databases, the tutorials I found were often all similar, almost as if copied and pasted between websites. I know there are only so many ways to skin a cat, as the saying goes, but what if you want something a bit more optimized? Today, I was making a ‘latest post’ page for the site with which I could alert people to updates through a forum signature for example. As I started typing out the trusty old mysql_connect command in PHP, I decided to do some experimenting.

The first example on PHP.net uses this code to teach you how to use the mysql_connect function:

$link = mysql_connect('localhost', 'mysql_user', 'mysql_password');
if (!$link) {
    die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());
}
echo 'Connected successfully';
// Changed from mysql_close() to mysql_select_db() for completeness
mysql_select_db('foo', $link);

Ok, 6 actual lines, that’s not bad; it works at least. It just seems to take up a bit too much room for establishing a connection. Let’s try a bit of streamlining. We don’t actually need the if… statement at all, even if we want to do something on the event that we don’t connect. So if we change the structure a bit:

$link = mysql_connect('localhost', 'mysql_user', 'mysql_password') or die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());
echo 'Connected successfully';
mysql_select_db('foo', $link);

3 lines. Much better. Seeing as we still need the variable $link for connecting to the database, we still need to assign it, even though we aren’t checking it for a connection. Although we aren’t checking the connection, the “or die” statement means that the script will fail with an error message if no connection is made, rather than give what could be a much more unfriendly message. We could also add one for the mysql_select_db function too, in case the database is unavailable for some reason.

$link = mysql_connect('localhost', 'mysql_user', 'mysql_password') or die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());
mysql_select_db('foo', $link) or die ('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error())

I’ve now removed the comment saying that we are connected, it’s not needed and almost instantly deleted by anybody that knows what they’re doing; you don’t want end-users to see you just connected to a database do you? So that’s 2 lines. Now, the reason I was thinking about shortening code down today is because I had a revelation about using return values from functions. We know that $link is a “MySQL link identifier“, which is exactly what is needed in the mysql_select_db function as the second parameter. So rather than return it to a variable and pass that, why not pass the function directly?

mysql_select_db('foo', mysql_connect('localhost', 'mysql_user', 'mysql_password')) or die ('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error())

And there we have it, 1 line instead of 6. We also have the added bonus of only having one “or die” statement; mysql_error() means it will always tell us the exact problem rather than a generic error message. This code shortening technique can be employed in more than just this small snippet however. Back to the original idea, this helped me out doing my latest post page as I turned this:

$link = mysql_connect('localhost', 'mysql_user', 'mysql_password');
if (!$link) {
    die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());
}
mysql_select_db("foo", $link) or die("Server or Database connection failed");
$result = mysql_query('SELECT * FROM `posts` WHERE post_status="publish" and post_name <> "about" ORDER BY ID DESC LIMIT 1');
$row = mysql_fetch_array($result);
$result2 = mysql_query("SELECT display_name FROM `users` WHERE ID='".$row['post_author']."'")
$row2 = mysql_fetch_array($result2);
$date = explode(" ", $row['post_date']);
$date2 = explode("-", $date[0]);
echo $row['post_title']."<br/>By " . $row2[0] . " on " . $date2[2]."-".$date2[1]."-".$date2[0];

into this:

mysql_select_db("foo", mysql_connect('localhost', 'mysql_user', 'mysql_password')) or die("Server or Database connection failed");
$row = mysql_fetch_array(mysql_query('SELECT * FROM `posts` WHERE post_status="publish" and post_name <> "about" ORDER BY ID DESC LIMIT 1'));
$row2 = mysql_fetch_array(mysql_query("SELECT display_name FROM `users` WHERE ID='".$row['post_author']."'"));
$date = explode(" ", $row['post_date']);
$date2 = explode("-", $date[0]);
echo $row['post_title']."<br/>By " . $row2[0] . " on " . $date2[2]."-".$date2[1]."-".$date2[0];

Feel free to use the method of grabbing the latest post. There are some potential problems with using this sort of structure for your code. Mainly, it might make it harder to determine the cause of problems if an error suddenly crops up. It’s obviously just a case then of expanding the code out. Luckily the PHP error messages are fairly informative when you get used to them, which should make it easier. Also, make sure that if you are adapting code that’s already written, that your ensure special characters and the like are correct. A semi-colon after mysql_connect, but before the end of the line, could have dire consequences for example. It will tell you there is an unexpected “;” on line x, which could mean looking through quite a bit of code. Finally, I would like to say this is probably only a good idea in an already implemented page, not one in development or being offered as a download to other developers.

… and a very cliché title. The year 2009 is drawing to a close, seemingly rather quickly this year. I think we ran out of leap seconds to try and make the year stretch out. So, “Xmas Eve” and what am I up to? To be honest, not a fat lot. I’ll be watching the usual TV specials such as Wallace and Gromit, Blackadder, The Muppets Christmas Carol and Scrooged. Each year gets less exciting and I’m worried that one day I’ll be so bored of the whole affair, I may just change religion; Jewish seems cooler anyway, more presents, learn a new language and I will be able to become a man! (Not to mention the supposed monetary benefits everyone always seems to talk about.) The most exciting things about christmas this year are the fact it is my son’s first, and I am now engaged to my fiancé (obviously else it would be a bit worrying… Who else would I be engaged to?). The son is 10 months old so doesn’t understand much of what’s going on, but instead dutifully unwraps all the presents under tree and then decides to eat the paper. It’s good to know that he already has his priorities in order. I don’t believe I ever expected how hard the whole “being a parent at christmas” thing would be. Leaving milk and cookies for Santa and Rudolph (well, more likely a bottle of beer and a big mac; thank god for McDonalds being open almost every single day ever since the dinosaurs roamed the Earth), explaining the methods Santa has at his disposal for entering houses without a real fire, explaining that they wouldn’t use those powers to rob the place. Now, I must leave… Santa won’t come if I’m still awake

So, this is the “Who are you” and “I should care about that because?” post. The post that sets out the path for this blog to follow. Call me apprehensive, but that’s a lot of pressure to put onto somebody so soon in the game. I think I’ll just leave it as saying:

Hi, I’m Shane (a.k.a Spunky). I will say things occasionally. Some you’ll like (hopefully). Others you won’t. I’ll try to keep up-to-date with the latest news, but don’t put too much pressure on me, I have a life too!