KevinMuma.com

On my way back from New Zealand, I stopped in Singapore for about a week. I did some sight seeing on the weekend. Most of the photos are from Sentosa Isand.

I have added some photos from my 2006 trip to New Zealand. While it was a business trip I did find some time to do some sightseeing and take photos in and around New Plymouth.

I haven’t updated anything here in a while. But I moved my back end php stuff onto a Linux virtual machine which will make updates much easier.

I have some new photos to put up and I’m working on a new application.

Finally some updates… I drove to Port Stanley a few weeks ago and took some photos.

At the beginning of January I started working at Honeywell on an 18 month contract. I have the same cube I had during my internship, and my work phone number has not changed. Right now I am trying to track down and fix a multithreading issue on dual processor machines.

Yesterday I caught the movie Kiss Kiss Bang Bang at the local Rainbow Cinema.

I don’t want to say too much about the film about the film, for fear of giving away some of the surprises. What I will say is that I thoroughly enjoyed it. It has a film noir detective angle, and it contains elements which reminded me of some of my favourite movies: Adaptation, The Singing Detective, and Get Shorty.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was extremely funny. I’m not sure how it will stand up to multiple viewings, but I may try to see it again. Unfortunately the film has only had limited release.

[Update]

I watched Kiss Kiss Bang Bang again this week, I found it still entertaining, but not as engaging the second time.

Trying to draw in PhotoShop lead me to discover the reason for my mouse’s unresponsiveness of in games. While using PhotoShop I noticed my mouse wasn’t moving smoothly.

Under Windows XP’s mouse properties I disabled “Enhanced pointer precision” and my mouse started behaving properly in PhotoShop. Further testing showed that the mouse lag in games was also gone.

Access this dialog through Control Panel > Mouse > Pointer Options.

Update:
I found some more info on this problem in the Microsoft Knowledge Base unfortunatly they didn’t have a better solution.

I reworked the CSS for this site to use different style sheets when printing. So when pages are printed (in a browser that supports it) they will not include the top menu or the side bar, just the page content and a header.

On Opera 8.5 on Windows I ran into a bug where when printing Opera uses the screen media background color for the body tag. So printing from Opera might (depending on your version) result in a page were the bottom is green.

Today I took some photos in Gibbons Park. Hopefully I managed to capture some of the splendour of the striking fall colours. The overcast sky provided soft diffuse light and a rather dreary backdrop.

My photos were very disorganized, especially after recovering them from my accidentally formatted hard disk.

A word of warning: SATA hard drives do not show as drive C: in the Windows XP installer, unless there are no IDE drives, so if you have more then one hard drive don’t trust the drive letters when installing Windows.

So I wrote this bash script to copy my pictures into folders by date. It uses jhead to get the date, and if that doesn’t work it uses the files modified date. So the final path ends up being something like: “/2005/01.Jan 17/10.34.23 IMG_1045.JPG”. This format is fairly easy to change by editing the script.

The script also makes sure that Picasa.ini entries stay with the photos, so if you use Picasa (like me) your edits and stars will stay with the images when they are copied.

To get the script to work on Windows you’ll need cygwin and jhead.