Beware the Geek

Are you homophobic if you don’t support gay marriage?

Sarah — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 12:30:29 +0000

Really interesting discussion with a friend and my girlfriend today about use of the term homophobia (and whatever-phobic really). The issue came up regarding gay marriage. If you are a straight person who has no issue with gay people but don’t support gay marriage then are you homophobic? Interesting question. My issue is that on many levels gay marriage is about equal rights for all. By not supporting gay marriage you are saying that this group of people does not deserve to have the same rights that you as a straight person does. Issue number two is to do with marriage as a religious institution. WHY is marriage a religious institution? As an athiest, providing I was marrying a person of the opposite gender, I can still get married, under a god I don’t believe in, in a church I’ve never attended . As a lesbian, I cannot. Also let’s go back to before Christianity attempted to take over the world. Marriages were not about religion, they were about legality and ownership. Here, take my daughter, but I want that goat you’ve got there. Granted this isn’t much better but you see the point.

Opinions?

x-posted to bewarethegeek.tumblr.com

Firefox fonts bold and italic after upgrading to 3.6.x

Sarah — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 22:11:31 +0000

Has the latest Firefox upgrade caused font problems? Are fonts randomly appearing in an ugly bold italic format on certain places? I recently had this problem myself and a lot of research into it suggested that upon upgrading, some of the main system fonts become corrupted. The most commonly corrupted font was arial, so your first port of call would be to replace this font with a clean version. Here’s how:

1. Download a fresh version of Arial: http://web.nickshanks.com/fonts/microsoft-core-web-fonts

2. Close your browser and anything else currently using the Arial font on your system.

3. Delete the arial font from C:/WINDOWS/fonts

4. Run the installer to install the fresh version of arial.

5. Reboot your computer

6. Start your browser up again and check to see if the font problem has resolved.

Now, here it is important to note that it might not be Arial causing your problems, but one of the other main fonts used in websites – particularly courier, trebuchet, helvetica, verdana or times new roman. If the problem still hasn’t resolved after replacing Arial (in my case I needed to replace Helvetica), then repeat the process with different fonts until you find the right one. Good luck!

Disclaimer: this article assumes you are comfortable and confident making changes to your computer’s system files. bewarethegeek.com assumes no responsibility should following any of the changes suggested here cause a system failure.

My favourite pineapple cheesecake recipe

Sarah — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 08:53:11 +0000

This recipe has been floating around my family for as long as I can remember. It often gets pulled out at christmas and birthday get togethers. I recently learned to make it and was amazed at how easy it was. Next time I make it’ll take a photo and post it, but for now, here’s how you do it:

You will need:

1/2 lb. plain sweet biscuits
4 oz. butter
1 dessert spoon gelatine
1/3 cup hot water
8 oz packaged cream cheese e.g. philladelphia
14. oz can condensed milk
15 oz. can crushed pineapple
1 dessert spoon grated lemon rind
1/3 cup lemon juice.

To make the crust:

Crush sweet biscuits until crumbs and combine with melted butter, mix well. Press the mixture over the base and around the sides of an 8 inch springform pan. Refridgerate until firm.

To make the cheesecake filling:
Mix gelatine with hot water and place in fridge to cool. Beat cream cheese until soft and smooth, add condensed milk and beat well. Add well-drained pineapple, lemon rind, lemon juice and cooled gelatine and mix thoroughly. Spoon the mixture into a prepared crumb crust. Refridgerate until firm.

Decorate with pineapple rings and whipped cream before serving.

e-Learning Competencies and Assessment

Sarah — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 12:23:52 +0000

I’m doing a pair of e-learning subjects in my masters this semester so the next couple of months of posts will probably be centering around what I’m learning there, interspersed with the odd rant about Flash, as I’m doing a 2D animation elective. I just finished reading through a paper from the American Society for Training and Development that was meant to allow you to assess your competencies in a range of areas important to an e-learning designer. However I think I missed the point of the paper. The way the subject works this semseter is that being that the students come from such a diverse range of working and educational backgrounds, one must assess their own background, skills and current state of knowledge and then determine where they want develop from there and what skills they will need to acquire to do so. The ASTD paper appeared to be useful in that at first it had several pages of competencies and a sliding scale of 0-6 with 0 meaning you knew nothing and 6 making you an expert and then a rating of 1-4 as to how important the skill was for your future career progression. However in the end there was no assessment, no collation of scores. What would have been nice is a way to rank yourself, for example if you scored between x and y then you should investigate resources about p, q and r, for example. The paper was useful to list some of the competencies that do exist for an e-learning or instructional designer but for me at least it seemed to stop there.

In a similar vein, I read a chapter on Instructional Design Competencies and found it much more descriptive and helpful. In a nutshell it showed me that through my web developer and scientist background I already have a great number of the skills required by an e-learning specialist (which is ultimately where I’d like to head, career-wise), but the skills I did lack were those that crossed over between e-learning specialist and an analyst/evaluator role. Which made sense because this role focuses on needs assessment, identifying the learner’s needs, goals, and the environment they’re best able to learn in and then communicating this to the e-learning specialist or instructional designer, whilst still keeping the goals of the business/institution/stakeholders/corporation within the plan as well. So ultimately I think the areas I need to focus on are looking at incorporating learning and instructional design theories and methods and applying them to what I already know about technologies, adult and social learning, and learning communities.

References

Richey, R.C., Fields, D.C., Foxton, M. (2001) Instructional D?esign Competencies: the standards. ERIC Clearinghouse on Information and Technology: Syracuse, New York. Chapter 5: The Competencies and ID Specialisations.

American Society for Training and Development (1998) ASTD Models for Learning Technologies: Roles, Competencises and Outputs. American Society for Training & Development: Alexandria, Virginia. Note the updated 2004 Competency model available at http://www.astd.org/astd/Research/competency_study/competency_study.htm.

Delete a Message Stuck in the Outbox – Microsoft Outlook

Sarah — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 02:00:48 +0000

Ever had that problem where you’re trying to send a message in Microsoft Outlook and it gets stuck in the outbox? You’ve tried deleting it but it gives you the message that the message is in the process of being sent so you can’t delete it? And any other emails you try and send get stuck in the queue behind the message that won’t move? The reason the email got stuck in the first place is usually because it’s too large for your server to process. If you google the solution to this you’ll find a long list of really complicated ways of trying to remove the message, often involving having to add new PST files and who wants to do that? I have two easier solutions for you.

Solution 1:

Go to file –> work offline to put outlook into offline mode.

Go get a cup of coffee/tea.

Come back, close outlook.

Re-open outlook and try and delete the file.

Solution 2:

Go to your outbox.

Right-click on the file and click “move file to another folder.” and move it somewhere else, say drafts.

Go to drafts, delete the file.

HOW TO: display Google AdSense on your wordpress blog

Sarah — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 03:40:20 +0000

In the process of putting this blog together I’ve learnt a lot about wordpress, themes, plugins and so on, being that this is the first time I decided to try and use it. Interestingly, the thing I had the most issue with was not modifying a theme, installing plugins, modifying layout or anything along those lines, it was getting Google Adsense to display. So I’ve decided to write a brief little how to, for anyone else who is new to Wordpress and wondering how to go about it.

1. Sign up for Google AdSense.

You can do that here. If you already have a google account (through gmail for example) then all you need to do is log in and fill in the application form. Note that to apply you’ll need to have already started a blog or website with some decent content on it. You’ll go through the normal acceptance emails and so on, these don’t take very long.

2. Set up Adsense

Click on the AdSense Set up tab once you’re logged in/signed up. This will show you a list of options for the different kinds of ads you can display on your site. Have a think about which kind of ads you want to display. The most common ads you’ll see on other people’s websites are the image and ad banners (like the ones on mine at the moment). If you’re looking for these, they’re under AdSense for Content.

The other options are self explanatory and pretty similar in terms of set up, so I’m going to walk through setting up AdSense for Content.

3. Choose your ad type

Do you want your ads to display in a box as an image or single ad, or as a list of ads? Both use the same algorithm to display the most suitable ads based on your page’s content and both evolve with your content to keep the ads targetted. Using image ads does give you the option of setting up placement-targetted ads, however, if you’re running that sort of compaign.

Anyway, choose your ad type and press continue…

4. Choose ad format and colours

This is where you choose the appearance settings of your ad. Think about where on your site you want to put it. Would you like it to run across the footer or header? Then a horizontal leaderboard or banner might be suitable. Does your site have a side column? A vertical skyscraper might be appropriate. Or if you’re looking for something more unobtrusive, you can select a small vertical banner or square.

Have a play with the colours and try and match them to your website’s colourscheme. If you’re in search of a good colour-picking tool, I recommend Nattyware’s Pixie. It’s free and small and very easy to use and will allow you to run your mouse over any colour on your website and pick up the colour code for it. If you plan on using multiple ads, you can save the pallate so you don’t need to go through the colour picking process every time. When you’re done playing with the aesthetics of the ad, press continue.

5. Add Channels

You’ll now be given the option to add channels to your site. These are used to track how well the ad is doing when compared to another. These can be based around a keyword, or area of your site, for example you might have a channel for top vs. bottom to see if your header ads are doing better than your footer ads. I’m currently comparing ads across two different websites so I’ve got channels for both sites.

6. Get the code

You should now be provided with a nice code snippet from google. Copy and paste this into a notepad somewhere (or keep the window open), we’re going to figure out how to actually get the code into wordpress.

7. Get the code into wordpress

Unfortunately it’s not as simple as just pasting the code into the HTML view of wordpress or by using the arbitrary HTML widget for adding information to your sidebar. Wordpress will strip out all the Javascript code and your ad will not display or function properly. So, what to do?

I’ve used two plugins for my site – one is called HTML-Javascript Adder and lets you paste the code directly into the sidebar. You can also select how many of the widget you have, for multiple ads in the sidebar. It works like any old widget, so you can drag it up or down to position it. And you can download this plugin here.

The second plugin I’m using is called WhyDoWork Adsense and I’m very glad I’ve found it. It lets you have multiple ads and has options to position them all throughout your content. It has options to exclude some pages/posts but not others, to show ads on the homepage or only once a user has clicked through to the post, or to show ads only after so many days, so if you have regular readers they are not bothered by the ads but those trawling through the archives will see them. You can download it here.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed these plugins, you can activate them and get started. The HTML-Javascript adder will work as a widget, but the WhyDoWork Adsense plugin requires you to access it through the settings. Experiment with different ad sizes and positions to find what works best for you, your users and your website.

Are you Skynet?

Sarah — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:13:12 +0000

Today is my day off work. I was planning on a long, leasurely sleep-in, maybe read a bit…no. I forgot to turn off my alarm. I was woken at some ungodly non-day-off hour. Sigh. So what does a young nerd do on her day off when she’s awake 3 hours ahead of schedule? Why, plays with Wolfram Alpha of course! For those of you who haven’t already heard about it from some source or another, Wolfram Alpha is a new method of searching for the answer to problems. It’s not a search engine; the creators call it a “computational knowledge engine.” In a nutshell, it’s very cool. And I wish I’d had it when I was at university wading my way through maths!

If you click the approximate form links, x is approximately 11. I’ve also asked it about plutonium, gravity, and the molecular mass of DNA. But what really blew my mind is when it offered to sequence some DNA and find code occurences within the human genome. When I was working in the lab this would have been an amazing tool! And I bet most of the scientists out there who work in molecular biology or genetics don’t even know this thing exists.

So the Terminator nerd in me just had to ask…

I’m glad it doesn’t want to launch missiles at us.

Would you work for Google for free?

Sarah — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 11:33:42 +0000

There’s been a lot of hype at the moment because Google is contacting artists asking them to work on skinning and theming Google Chrome. The reason for the hype? Google wants them to work for free and there appears to be a pretty big backlash. I can see both sides of the argument here. Google is a massive (MASSIVE) company – they can afford to pay these designers ten times over, economic climate or no economic climate. With that in mind maybe they should, too. It’s tough to find work at the moment, especially if you freelance. That new website design that a company was considering 6 months ago is suddenly on the back burner.

But the other side of the coin? The open source movement. Some of the online community’s best work has been created by open source developers for no cost. It’s done for the enjoyment of doing what you do and to contribute to the community. From this point of view, can you blame Google for following what has become almost a culture in some online spheres?

Is there more to it than monetary gain? If you’re looking to land a job and you’ve got that you skinned Google Chrome on your resume, you’re looking pretty good. Is your potential employer going to ask you how much you earned for this job (or any other job) on your resume? Unlikely. I’ve never been asked how much I earned for any contract I did. And speaking of freelancing, some of the best contracts I’ve picked up have been through word of mouth, originating from a website or design that I did for someone for free.

So, would I work for Google for free? Damn right I would.

Mac Viruses Do Exist

Sarah — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 11:42:34 +0000

It amuses me somewhat that the first post I make on this blog is about porn.

Nah, not really. I’m reading about boobytrapped porn sites designed to infect Macs and wondering about the whole thing. I’m always engaged in a constant war of Mac vs. PC with various Mac-loving-PC-hating friends of mine and strangely the number one point in every argument they present is that Macs don’t have any known viruses. Untrue now? I think untrue previously but quashed by marketing attempts and as the article says, it’s lead to a whole lot of complacent users.

Are PC users as complacent as Mac users? Hell no, because they’ve all been brought up on a steady diet of spyware, malware and email viruses. Even my (very computer illiterate) father knows how to use a virus scanner. And of course I’m not saying Mac users don’t know how to use virus (or any other type of) scanners but given the way the internet is today it seems risky to listen to the Mac marketing people when they assure everyone that Macs are safe. Also, that no one kicked up a stink when it took Apple 6 months to plug a security hole is pretty amazing. If Microsoft haven’t patched new security problems within 6 hours half the PC community starts crying foul.