A little bit of art and craft dedicated to a friend on a special day. :)

I'm off to London tomorrow for the annual lunar new year celebrations. Last year, with China hosting the Olympic games and with London due to follow in 2012, the organisers put together the largest lunar new year festival in the capital so far. This year, with the current economic situation and the Chinatown redevelopment scheme draining the bulk of the funds available, the festival promises to be a relatively low key affair. Still, I'm sure there will be plenty to see and do.

Hopefully the weather will remain dry. At least snow is no longer forecast for Sunday, although sub-zero temperatures are predicted. Time to dig out the gloves again...

Spotted this on Slashdot yesterday. NASA have released a candid video tour of the ISS, filmed a couple of weeks ago by expedition 18 crewmember Mike Fincke, taking the viewer from one end of the station to the other. The 36 minute video is available to watch on YouTube, split into 4 parts: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4. (HQ versions available) Alternatively, the complete video is available to download (ASF... ick) here: Tour_2009_.zip. For anyone (like me) with an interest in space exploration, the video provides a nice overview of the current state of the ISS project, even if it is a little lacking in detail. The videos are probably going to be a little boring for everyone else though.

I feel less bad about the "storage corner" in my lounge now.

It was a relatively slow day so I was doing some (very early) spring cleaning on my work computer over lunch. One of my tasks was to clear out my junk e-mail folder; since a number of well-promoted company email addresses forward to me, it can fill up reasonably quickly. I have a fairly reliable spam filtering system in place so I don't have to go through everything, thank goodness. All that's required is to hit "Empty folder" once in a while.

Today though, instead of just erasing the folder without a second thought, I decided to run a quick analysis on the messages contained within. As you do. It had managed to collect a few hundred messages over the two week period since it had last been emptied which I felt represented a good sample set to work from. I created a number of broad categories and placed each email where it fit best. Percentages are rounded to the nearest whole number.
 

Pharmaceuticals — 50%
Viagra, viagra and more viagra, making up exactly half of the spam emails I receive. I wonder how much actually gets sold?

Male enhancements — 29%
Seriously, 29%? I really do hope that figure isn't a reflection on the number of men who lie awake at night worrying about such silly things. Of all the groups, this one probably has the most irritating and stupid subject lines.

Replica goods — 9%
I'm sure replica handbags used to be popular once upon a time, but it seems to be just watches at the moment. Buy something openly fake from someone openly dodgy over the Internets! What an offer!

Personals — 7%
Introduction agencies, chat rooms, russian brides and all manner of thinly-veiled pornographic sites.

False qualifications — 2%
Degrees and diplomas from the University of Unicornland.

Pornography — 1%
A mere 1% of the spam I receive is for openly pornographic sites. I'm sure it used to be higher.

Finance — 1%
I wonder if this has anything to do with the credit crunch. The thundering river of stock tips, loans and remortgage offers that was is close to drying up.

Gambling — 1%
Online casinos also don't seem to be promoting as much as they used to.
 

It feels strange looking at the "classic" spam groups - pornography, finance and gambling - barely hanging on at the bottom. I'm guessing that the current fiscal climate has hit the finance and gambling groups hard, but I would have thought pornography would have fared better.

It's also interesting to note that about 90% of the junk email I receive is obviously targetted at men and the remainder is not gender-specific. I'm sure I used to receive at least a couple of emails each week promising to increase my bust size. Maybe the spammers just decided that insecure males were an easier target.

It was two weeks ago today that I wrote my first re-launch post. I had naively assumed that I would be back up and running by now, but had failed to foresee the hardware failure that would occur the following afternoon and the avalanche of work that would keep me occupied for the better part of the past fortnight. Anyway, now that these setbacks are behind me, it's time to get back to business.

First, the complete blog archive going back to February 2003 has now been pulled across from the old site. I'm afraid you probably won't find much of interest in there - the content in most cases is rather poor - but feel free to look around. At the moment the front page only displays the last 5 posts; to access older posts, you'll need to delve into the blog archive.

A random selection of archived posts from 2003:

In the process of transferring the posts from the old site to this one, I did read through a few of them. It's interesting to be able to look back on aspects of one's life and observe the changes that have occurred over time. It helped to stir up a few long-forgotten memories too. Nostalgic acronym of the day: PLACICACDASCP.

My recent lack of time means that the "About" page is still missing - that's next on the to-do list, I think. The old Bokeboke Island also had a links page, directing those that came across it to the sites of friends, artists (both graphic and musical), etc. I'm toying with the idea of bringing it back, but I haven't made any firm decisions yet.

The rest of the site is largely as it was two weeks ago. I've tweaked things here and there but I don't think there have been any major changes. I still need to tidy up the code a little, but that won't have any effect on function or appearance. I would welcome any suggestions on how to improve the site if you have them.

So, what next? Now that the foundations of the site are relatively stable, my short-term aim will be to try to make the blog a little more interesting. I have some post ideas floating around in my head which I'll try to get out over the next few weeks, time permitting. Looking further into the future, I have a number of plans for things which may or may not evolve into something beyond the "plan" stage. But I'll save those for another time.

Thanks again for visiting Bokeboke Island~

An unusual sight. (BBC) (CNN)

Sorry for the lack of substantial updates this week; work has been manic. Maybe I'll have time to throw something up at the weekend. Although with the number of things I've postponed "until the weekend" so far I'll probably need at least 5 days' worth of weekend to get everything done.

I spotted this on Slashdot while chomping on my breakfast this morning - Crayon Physics Deluxe. It's an update to an independent game that's been floating around for a while, although I'd never really paid much attention to it before. It does look rather fun though. Perhaps once I've finished my current indie physics puzzle game I'll give it a try.

I spotted this while out grabbing lunch. I have the tagline stuck in my head now and for some reason find it fantastically humorous.

...would surely be quite draughty.

Microsoft made their Windows 7 beta publicly available on Saturday after a failed attempt on Friday. Out of curiosity, I thought I'd give it a quick go. I've uploaded a short screenshot tour for anyone without the resources to try it out. Please note that I am running Windows 7 in a virtual machine with no graphical hardware acceleration, so the GUI isn't as flashy as it could be. Also, I have spent a limited amount of time around Windows Vista, so if I mistakenly label a Vista-era feature as "new", I offer my apologies.
 

We'll start with the initial loading screen. Gone is the traditional progress bar/activity throbber. In its place, we have a quiet screen that simply reads "Starting Windows". The Windows logo appears about half way through startup and gently pulsates until the loading screen vanishes. On the one hand it does look smarter than the XP/Vista loading screens, but on the other, if your system decided to hang on startup (this is Windows we're talking about), you wouldn't be able to tell.
 

The login screen. Vista's login screen, in fact.
 

And finally the desktop. HDD boot to desktop took around 1 minute 20 seconds, excluding password entry. A fresh install of Windows XP on the same hardware takes around 20 seconds.

While we're looking at the desktop, I'd like to bring to your attention the Windows "Gadgets". These are the same components used in Vista's sidebar, a feature dropped in Windows 7. Now they can be placed anywhere on your desktop. This is obviously an improvement, although it's still not a particularly useful feature. Apple got it right with their Dashboard - a single keypress to show and hide your widget collection without disturbing your work. Microsoft have tried to get around the shortcomings in their approach by making the desktop more accessible. As in previous versions of Windows, the taskbar button or Win-D shortcut can be used to hide your open applications and reveal your desktop. In theory, another click will bring your open windows back, but if you open another window in this time, the saved status of your open windows will be lost. Hovering over the "show desktop" button will supposedly (I think it's a feature only available in the fancy hardware accelerated GUI mode) make any windows appear transparent, allowing you to see the contents of your desktop, although you aren't able to interact with it.
 

Nothing new here. Task Manager is classic NT, the pop-up clock/calendar and system information summary is pulled straight from Vista. Memory usage seems comparable to Vista.
 

A quick look at some of the applications shipping with Windows 7. The ones you would expect to find are still here, although they have undergone a few changes. Paint and WordPad have both received minor functionality upgrades. The most noticable difference however is the move to the infamous Office 2007 "ribbon"-style toolbars and menus.

Calculator has also been revamped. There are now 4 modes (standard, scientific, programmer and statistics) as well as an optional slide-out panel which allows you to perform unit conversion, date calculations, etc.

The number of applications included with Windows 7 is actually quite small. Many of the traditional XP and Vista applications have been moved into the Windows Live Essentials pack, an optional free download. This is most likely the result of various legal matters.
 

In Explorer, the navigation panel on the left has been redone, but everything else is more or less as it was in Vista.

The taskbar is a different story. Gone is the classic strip-buttoned Windows taskbar that the operating system has sported since Windows 95. In its place, we have a kludgy copy of OS X's dock. Applications can be pinned to the taskbar when open or dragged there manually. Open applications will be displayed with a faint border around them in a nod to Apple's different yet equally hard-to-spot way of indicating to the user what's running. A hover or left click (in the case of an application with multiple windows) will display a pop-up list of the windows belonging to that application.
 

A right click or left slide will reveal a few options as well as application-specific tasks and commands.
 

The Windows 7 beta is shipping with a copy of Internet Explorer 8 beta. It's an improvement over previous versions, but not something I'd want to use on a daily basis. It seemed to have a few bugs, especially loading and rendering images which often wouldn't display properly or at all.

Something I hadn't seen in IE before (it might be in IE7, but I don't use IE7) is the "accelerators" pop-up that appears when you highlight text. It displays a small preview of the result of sending your text as a query to a number of (Microsoft) web services. The Encarta, map and translation options all worked well. I love Encarta's wonderfully scientific answers. :)
 

Window docking. It works as per the CES demonstration. I'm not sure how useful it will prove in the real world though. Perhaps in an office environment when comparing documents or something...
 

Vista's enhanced Windows Firewall makes a comeback.
 

Microsoft have finally killed off the "classic" view in control panel. Instead, we have the new "All Control Panel Items" view which looks suspiciously similar.
 

The games available in Windows 7 won't come as a surprise to anyone. Games Explorer provides a custom Explorer view of Microsoft's usual Windows games. The games themselves appear to be direct Vista copies. I hadn't realised that Vista made use of hardware acceleration for Solitaire and Minesweeper though. >_>
 

Prefer a command line? Windows 7 sports the latest version of PowerShell as well as the classic "DOS" command prompt.
 

If you crave the classic Windows look, you'll be pleased to hear that it's alive and well in Windows 7, although some of the applications - the redesigned Explorer for example - don't look too smart. But then the same was probably true of Vista.
 

This happened when I tried to shut down. Not all of the bugs have been worked out yet...
 

I aborted and had another go. Things seemed to go a little better.
 

I think Windows 7 is to Vista what Windows XP SP2 was to the original release of Windows XP. It does feel very much like a Vista service pack. There's not much in the way of innovation - it's simply been an exercise in tidying up what's already there.

On the whole, it does seem to be an improvement over Vista. Interaction with the UI feels more nippy and responsive and it's more cautious about running housekeeping tasks in the background whenever it thinks you've turned away. The new taskbar is the most obvious change (which I think sums up the extent of the changes over Vista). In terms of function, I don't think it would be possible to rip-off OS X more blatantly than Microsoft have done here. It's like the dock's ugly cousin. Of course, they've tried to work extra features into it too, resulting in something rather frankensteinian.

The question is whether Windows 7 will be enough to save Microsoft's reputation after the damage caused by Vista. I'm still not sure we'll know the answer to that one until a few months after its release. For home users, it's not a bad operating system (as Windows operating systems go). It doesn't feel quite as "thrown together" as Vista did. The real test will be in the corporate world though. Vista was always going to struggle here - it was released at a bad time, when most companies were happy with their Server 2003/XP Pro infrastructure and when, in most cases, a hardware upgrade would have been required. Windows 7 improves on a lot of Vista's failings in the enterprise management area and should also be out around the time that businesses that have been hanging on to XP (most of them) will be looking to renew their hardware.

Bottom line: Yes, I think it will succeed where Vista failed. It's still a Windows OS with all of the annoyances that one would expect, but it should at least be tolerable. Nothing is certain though - a release is still 6-12 months away and with the competition still innovating, the race isn't over for Microsoft yet.

According to the Met Office, next week could be positively tropical (if a little damp). Time to put the hat and gloves away again?

My new hard disk arrived the other day. It will be a few more days until I'm back up and running properly, but I'm still hoping to upload the remaining bits and pieces next week. Not much else to report at the moment. The weather is cold, work is busy and the world is a strange place, as always.

Stay warm~

First snow of this winter, at least in these parts. If this continues, I'll need to fish out some warmer clothing.

In other news, the BBI relaunch is sort of on hold at the moment. A hard disk failure at the weekend means that my desktop is out of commission for the time being, so any BBI updates will be limited to brief blog posts. A replacement should arrive tomorrow, but with the other things I have on at the moment, it will probably take close to a week to get everything up and running again.

Greetings! If you're visiting this site for the first time, welcome. If you're familiar with the site and are foolishly returning for more punishment, welcome back.

In early 2003 I started a blog/website thing called Bokeboke Island - the site you see before you now, albeit in a slightly different form. It was good fun and provided me with somewhere to rant, ramble and do as I wished. Unfortunately, due to a failure to cope properly with events in my life, Bokeboke Island suffered years of neglect.

Now that I'm more or less back on my feet, it's time to make amends. Today marks the launch of the new and improved Bokeboke Island. Not only has the site been completely revamped, but it's running on a new, more spacious server. Of course, all of that is rather pointless if I don't end up doing anything with these new resources, so I intend to try to settle into a routine and update the site as often as I am able.

If you poke around a little, you'll notice that there is still some work to be done. The "About" page is still M.I.A. - it will put in an appearance once I figure out what I want to put on it. The previous version of the site had a lengthy document listing my hobbies and interests which, while admittedly quite comprehensive, was a prime example of tl;dr content. Whatever I end up doing, it will be shorter this time.

The "Stuff" page contains a few photo galleries at the moment. In time, I hope to expand it to feature a few other things. Watch this space.

The blog itself, the one you're reading at the moment, is a little empty right now. Over the next week or so, I plan to import a few posts from the original site to make this one feel a little more lived-in - I managed to grab a backup of the database before my previous host failed me.

That's all for now. Tune in again soon for more pointless rambling!