somehow still alive after the weekend heat wave. was actually a pretty pleasant weekend, all considered (being 3 days long did help in making it so). highlights include visiting people with airconditioning, eating dimsums in an air-conditioned restaurant, drinking bubble tea in an ai… yeah you get the idea.

this week on upppy!

it’d be great if i could do a segment like that on my blog :p. anyway there’s quite a bit of impressive content up there this week – so why not. as i can’t yet link to threads directly, you will have to navigate from the main site if you want to see the originating threads. i have to say thanks to alll those people out there with the constantly flowing suggestions and bug reports . development is quite steady, considering how many hours i actually have to throw at it D:.

first up is karl, who took an initially horrible quality panoramic image taken on my phone (by phill) and turned it into something very psychadellic. i remember a point where lens flares were overused and went out of fashion, but this has a nice balance to it.

next lets enter the world of HDR – a style of photo manipulation where many individual photos are combined to increase the intensity of lighting and overall quality of the photo without requiring the camera exposure to be on some exponentially long setting (although this still helps :p). we found out that cameras with small lens aren’t improved too much using this technique in low-light situations, but it makes quite a difference in normally lit photos nevertheless.

lastly, a photo taken by karl on saturday night amidst the lightning storm on saturday night. pretty uber!

if you haven’t been to upppy yet, knock out your up-to-date *cough* not ff1.5 or ie or anything *cough* and take a look around. just a note that if you get offended by not such.. mainstream content easily then you may want to refrain from doing so before i implement the categorical separation of images. and yes, that is a disclaimer. anything posted by “peppy” on the board is actually some other guy using my name, as well. at least that might keep people off my back until i have left the country. :d

the bad thing about working is having no time, no energy, and no shortage of false transperth infringement accusations. the good part is having a bit of money to throw around. of course, then you have to find time to enjoy what you spend the money on. which means the end result is 睡眠不足 (lack of sleep).

i decided it was about time i got my own pair of headphones for my yamaha keyboard – i have been stealing my dads at every opportunity over the last couple of weeks. after doing a bit of research, i was pretty keen on the audio-technica open air AD900s.

they are ever so comfortable, and the sound quality is unquestionably better than any headphones i have heard up until now. works especially well with the keyboard – the grand piano soundbank sounds nothing short of awesome!

i also didn’t pass up the opportunity to pick up something to replace my falling apart 3-year-old sony headphones. enter the Ultimate Ear s3 canalbuds. while i haven’t really tested these out, they definitely put out sound that at least equals my old sony headphones, in a much smaller footprint. it will probably take a few days to get used to having plugs in my ears, but will be good for blocking out the idiot aboriginals that catch the train at the same time as me every day!

(｀□´)　以上である!(爆)！

just thought i’d mention the progress on upppy.  i’ve been spending around 80% of my non-working time pouring code into this project, and there are a few visible results from the last couple of days.  mainly, you will notice that there is now the option for image replies.  this means a single thread can hold an unlimited number of images.  i’ve worked a lot on the smaller nuances of navigating the posting in these thread and hopefully it will be quite simple to use.  the replies begin in a collapsed state, but the first 5 images are thumbnailed to show you vaguely what is coming.  the number of thumbnails here will be a preference setting (along with a few other new ones) coming soon.

i don’t know if anyone noticed firefox refusing to scroll in some areas of the page?  i sure did.  and i finally fixed this bug.  it was to do with the way firefox (fails to) renders the display:table css elements.  basically you can’t mix table-cells with non-table-cells when they are block elements next to each other, or parts of the page are considered to be void!

comment sanitisation has been fixed, and links are converted to hyperlinks amongst a few other enhancements .

oh and i will take this opportunity to say that i don’t take any responsibility for the content of upppy.  even if i am the one uploading the images.  disclaimed! muhah