Now I am sometimes unlucky enough to inflict upon myself a hangover – it seems to get worse with age, so here are some remedies and prevention techniques to try:

http://www.healthmad.com/Health/Hangover-Prevention-and-Remedies.33307

Odds on that they don’t work but you might as well give them ago…

So whilst I have been here three things really stand out as the highlight of Sydney.

1. The Asian food. I have had some really good Asian food here, whether its Japanese Ramen, Korean Octopus or simply Chinese noodles, it really puts Europe to shame – I have yet to have even a mediocre dish put in front of me.

2. The place looks absolutely stunning, it really does have some fantastic views, skylines and buildings. I wish my photography would do it justice.

3. The people generally look very happy, and its no surprise if this is the worst their Winters can bring – the weather here is very good and would have the average North European out in t-shirts and shorts sunbathing.

That being said I am looking forward to getting home to Stockholm.

All over the world right now people are thinking about the price of Oil, mostly because it costs so much to run their big engined, wasteful cars and not because of any effect it will have on the environment. Most of the time these cars are accelerating quite fast, running not so frugally and generally polluting everything around them and adding to general problems of the earth.

Of course hurting people in their wallets or purses will perhaps make users change, but what about if they could actually see how much money they are wasting?

In cars we have meters to show how much petrol we have, and of course how many revolutions the engine is doing per minute, how fast we are going and of course how many miles/kilometers we have done. Some might be lucky to have a trip computer show how many miles to the gallon or kilometers to the liter we have done. If you have a Rolls Royce you even have a power in reserve meter based on a percentage scale.

But why not take it a stage further and show exactly how much money is being spent for every minute / kilometer / mile being done in real time. A simple meter will do, and it can get its information from current speed, the onboard computer which will know exactly how much fuel is being used in modern cars, or an approximation on older less sophisticated cars. You would probably have to enter in the cost of you fuel unless the pump could update the car using BlueTooth or what have you.

I am sure that people will start to aim to get it down, of course their is probably the odd idiot that will want to see how much he, and its bound to be a he, can spend in one minute by some mad use of driving but the majority I think would see how much it is hurting their wallet and change their ways if they are driving along watching their money being used.

I bet modern car manufacturers have thought about this, but want to keep us inside, using more fuel and making cars ever heavier but perhaps this is one trick that might, just might make us take more heed of what is being used by our cars.

Overlooking the office district, originally uploaded by timc3.

I am in Sydney at the moment, mainly been working but we have a great view from our vizrt Office overlooking the office district.

Sydney is really beautiful, and although the locals think its cold – it really is the perfect temperature for an English Man!

Take a look at http://www.flickr.com/people/timc3/ for more photos.

Those who have been here before know that I am a big fan of the Django python webframework, and also a big fan of OS X. So I thought that I would install Django on my MacBook Pro.

I did have it all installed on my G4 laptop, but I am going to be using it with at least two different databases on this machine. I am not going to give a complete, what I typed style install, just an overview because it is fairly easy.

1. Install latest version 2.4.* of Python from http://www.pythonmac.org
2. Check out the development version of Django from http://www.djangoproject.com/download/ (I checked it out in /django – probably not the best place to put it.)
3. Install latest stable version (5.1) of MySQL from http://www.mysql.com/
4. Install latest stable version of MySQL tools http://www.mysql.com/products/tools/administrator/
5. Install MySQLdb from http://www.pythonmac.org/packages/py24-fat/index.html
6. Create a symlink so Python can find django: ln -s /django/django_src/django/ /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.4/lib/python2.4/site-packages/django
7. Then I followed some instructions on blog.vixiom.com to add the path that I need.
8. edit your .bash_profile file in your home directory with the following path: /django/django_src/django/bin/:/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/Current/bin:

Now that should be everything needed to start running with Django and MySQL. PostGreSQL is of course the better database but for the testing work that I am doing my webhost at the moment doesn’t support PostgreSQL..

Just been using Windows Presentation Foundation ( WPF ) to prototype an application that I am working on and althought Microsoft Expression Blend is a fantastic tool I am finding some frustrating limitations with WPF already. Chiefly amoung these is support for Multiple Document Interfaces or MDI.

I was hoping to create an interface where I could open and close windows within an application ala Photoshop, After Effects, Director or any application in the last 10 years to do with media creation but Microsoft have decided, in their infinite wisdom, that MDI is a no no. Now I don’t mind that Microsoft, Apple or Xerox Parc spend millions of dollars on interface design, further interface human interaction etc. But when the best method of interaction for using an application is disable I get a bit annoyed.

People do find Photoshop hard to use, but the interface to me really does serve its purpose. The problem with Photoshop is actually user education and understanding not the fact that it has multiple dragable windows. Its a hard application to get to grips with (I still find it amusing that users describe themselves as expert at it – those are the users that usually don’t understand it as an application, in fact I would say that anyone that hasn’t played with API doesn’t know photoshop, but hey that is another story..) and that is nothing to do with the interface just that the application has a lot of depth and many ways to do the same thing. While we are on the subject, any user that hasn’t paid the license fee and doesn’t spend hours a day in front of Photoshop can NOT be classed as an expert.

But it is really bugging me that Microsoft have decided that its legions of developers of its next GUI interface paradigm can not choose for themselves the method that they want users to interact with their application. They do not always know best – and there are many examples of this, and saying that there are better ways than using MDI is a chief example. The fact that if you are creating an interface in Visual Studio and want to use MDI is non-trival should speak volumes, but instead we are told to use tab views or a single document model.

What happens when I want users to be able to drag and drop multiple media types of different sources into an application window that they are working on? A tabbed interface doesn’t work in this situation, a single document window certainly doesn’t. How annoying. Thanks Microsoft. Perhaps I should make my application OS X based.

This weekend just gone I flew back to England as it was my cousins wedding and I had the honour of being his bestman. I must admit I was rather nervous – mainly because of the speech that English weddings dictate the bestman should do. But everything seemed to go really well.

The wedding was really good, and it was great to see my family and lots of friends there and it was fantastic to see Eric and Ellie getting married. They both looked great and really happy.

I have photos up at http://www.flickr.com/photos/timc3/ in case anyone is interested, including some rather bad ones of me…

So now I am back in Sweden land and really getting back on top of work.

Just a quickone, but I have upgraded wordpress on this site to version 2.2.1 which should be the very latest. I had it stuck at a very old version before so it should operate better now, and also I should have all the latest bug fixes.