• The Author – Bart Busschots

  

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This is the second part of a series of posts I'm putting together on the various clues I think JKR has scattered throughout the first six books to give us an idea of what will happen in the final book. If you haven't read it yet the first part was about Petigrew's Debt to Harry. This post discusses the second clue which can be found near the end of the fourth book but is very easy to miss. it is literally contained in a single line, but to me that makes it all the more signifficant. Read more

Something I’ve always had a lot of trouble with is developing good colour schemes for web pages. (The fact that I’m rather colour blind does not help matters!) I generally end up falling back to a mono-chrome scheme where the site just uses many different shades of the same single colour. This works but often leads to sites that look a little boring. I need to skin a new web portal at work that I want to make look good and professional to speed up it’s adoption so I decided I just had to get to grips with this colour thing. There is no magic quick fix but here are two links I found in-valuable and that I’m sure will also be a great help for others trying to get to grips with this:

• A page explaining the theory
• A nice interactive web-based colour wheel to help you put it into practice

Tagged with: CSS • web design

Was just reading the news headlines on MyYahoo and came across this groan-inducer by Shawn Pogatchnik of the Associated Press in an article about Ireland officially being called Eire from now on:

DUBLIN, Ireland – Ireland is entering a new Eire. The Cabinet of Prime Minister Bertie Ahern agreed Tuesday to use the Republic of Ireland’s Gaelic name (pronounced AIR-uh) during European Union summits.

You will regularly hear religious fundamentalists and Inteligent Design supporters abusing the word ‘theory’ for their own ends. They say things like “Evolution is only a theory” to imply that it is a half-baked idea that we’re not really sure of. This invariably really annoys scientists and gets them all agitated because in science, a theory is actually something very strong, well developed, consistent with reality, and well supported by a lot of observational evidence. The weak wishy-washy stuff should be described as conjectures and hypotheses, only the solid well supported stuff should get the honour of being a theory. However, in the public’s mind that distinction is just not there. The average person on the street refers to things that are really conjectures and hypotheses as theories and things that should be theories as accepted facts. Who is to blame for this? Believe it or not, I think the scientists have to take a large share of the blame. Read more

Just a quick follow-on from my initial review of my new 17″ MacBookPro. In my initial review I had said that the MBP does not get very hot but that is not entirely true. It is true that when just running on the battery it gets significantly less hot than my old Pentium 4 Fujitsu-Siemens LifeBook however, while it is charging it does get annoyingly hot. Still not quite as hot as the LifeBook but the battery it self gets hot enough to be un-comfortable on the legs. However, the base of the 17″ MBP is more than big enough so you can easily sit it on your lap in such a way that the hot bit is not resting on your legs!

Tagged with: hardware • review • MacBook Pro • Mac • Apple

Following on from my review of the 17″ MacBookPro yesterday I got to play with a 13″ Black MacBook today. I was, to say the least, underwhelmed. The black is horrible and tarnishes instantly. The machine I was playing with had had nothing more done to it than have it’s initial setup done and it already looked like it was a few years old. I could get over the look of it but the screen is just too small for me with too poor a resolution and the keyboard is terrible. It looks ‘unique’ which I can live with but then I tried to type with it and was not at all impressed. On a more positive note it is not too heavy and feels much more sturdy and robust than the old iBooks. It’s also very fast to boot and apps load quickly (as you’d expect from a CoreDuo machine). I guess if you had an iBook the MacBook will feel like an upgrade but if you had one of the small PowerBooks you’ll really feel like you’ve gone down in the world. Having said that I only got to play with it for a few minutes so this should be taken as nothing more than ‘first impressions’, this is FAR from an exhaustive review.

Tagged with: Mac • MacBook • hardware • review • Apple

I’m typing this in a swelteringly hot terminal in Valencia Spain waiting for my plane to arrive and hopping that the thunder and lighting in the distance stays in the distance long enough for us to get outta here! Anyhow, I’ve had my 17″ MacBookPro for a week and a half now so I think I have enough experience with it at this stage to go a head and give it a review! BTW, the machine I got has the standard 1GB of RAM, the glossy 17″ monitor and I opted for the smaller but faster 100GB hard disk. Read more

Tagged with: hardware • review • MacBook Pro • Mac • Apple

Having recently discussed running MySQL on the Mac I’d now like to tackle PostgreSQL. I’m sorry to say things are not quite as rosy just yet. PostgreSQL don’t provide us with a binary distribution for the Mac nor do they provide a nice Panel for the System Preferences App. There are also less choices when it comes to GUIs for manipulating and designing your database but there are still options and things are still a lot better than they could be. Read more

Tagged with: tutorial • PostgreSQL • databases • OS X

Having just finished re-reading all the HP books from one right through to six I think now is a good time for me to write down my thoughts on what the important hints are with relation to book seven that JKR has littered through the books. It is a well known fact that JKR has been dropping us hints and fore-shadowing stuff right from the start so I re-read the books taking note of things I interpreted as clues that have not yet come to anything as of the end of book six. Over the next few weeks I’ll be writing a number of articles that follow on from this one, each one focusing on one hint or a related set of hints. I’m going to kick off the series with one of the simpler clues which comes form book three, Petigrew’s debt to Harry. Read more