Bridging The Gap

Sport

The new squash season has started at the Robina Squash Club and I’ve already made pretty reasonable headway into improving my game. After losing every encounter I had with Steve last season, I put together a short list of improvements that I needed to make to my game:

  • Vary the pace of the ball more
  • Change the length of my shots
  • Boast the ball more
  • Develop a slice backhand

This week was my first encounter with Steve since last season and after trying to implement each of those points, it made a huge difference to the score:

  1. 15 – 10
  2. 13 – 15
  3. 9 – 15
  4. 12 – 15

it might seem like there is a lot of losing in there, however the games were very competitive and this was the first time I really had Steve working hard on the court.

To vary the hitting pace, I selectively chose the loose ball and drove my forehand hard and low. The significant change in pace, coupled with the low ball means that it doesn’t bounce much and it comes onto your opponent much faster – that worked really well. As a by product of changing the pace of the ball, I was able to comfortable change the length as well, which made Steve have to move a lot on the court. Unfortunately, I only found one or two opportunities to boast the ball; fortunately one of them was a high ball! The slice backhand worked really well, however I persisted with attempting a slicing drop shot off the serve and dropped four consecutive balls into the tin during game three. Although I lost the points, it was quite valuable as I now know that with further practice I’ll be able to hit that shot during the game as they only just missed.

The next couple points which I’m going to add to my list are:

  • Run run run, just like tennis is a pressure thing. When I hit a loose ball, I often don’t chase it down as I think to myself I don’t deserve to return it was I should have played a better stroke. That isn’t the right attitude on a squash court at all, so from now on I’m going to consider it penance to chase down the stray balls.
  • Know your opponent. When I was playing casual squash with a couple of mates, it was very easy for me to keep an eye on where they were on the court and hit the ball appropriately. Since starting fixtures, I haven’t been doing that as much and I know I’m making poor shot choices as a side effect.
  • Ball placement strategy. I want to work on a hitting strategy, such that I’m forcing my opponent into hitting a particular type of ball into a particular region of the court – as the only ‘reasonable’ shot left to make. If I can force my opponent into hitting particular shots, it increases my ability to play to my strengths on the court.

If you’re interested in joining the club for some fun and fitness, you can contact:

Robina Squash Club
University Drive
Robina QLD, 4226
0427 627 229

Degeekified

Hardware, Humour, Life

Tonight while doing some work, the kitty decided it was a perfect time to play with one of her toys. Unfortunately, while she was fetching her toy from behind the computer – she bumped the video card cable and my computer shutdown unexpectedly.

To get my computer to start again, I needed to take the side panel off of my Lian Li case, re-seat the video card and tighten the thumbscrew. As I was restoring things to their rightful positions, I realised a shocking fact:

I haven’t taken the side panel off my computer in nearly two years!

With such a traumatic event taking place, I think I need to go and buy some computer hardware on the principle of it.

Internet Explorer IMG Element & Empty Width/Height Attribute Error

Programming, Software

Recently found an error, bug or omission within the Internet Explorer rendering engine which I haven’t personally encountered before. The error involves the familiar <img> element and the use of the width and height attributes.

The following <img> element definitions will render as expected within Mozilla and Opera:

  • <img src="/path/to/image.jpg" />
  • <img src="/path/to/image.jpg" width="" />
  • <img src="/path/to/image.jpg" height="" />
  • <img src="/path/to/image.jpg" width="" height="" />

When a web browser encounters an img element without width or height attributes, the browser is required to render the image in its default aspect ratio. When either of the width or height attributes are provided, the browser is required to resize the image when rendered to meet the requested size.

Unfortunately, when Internet Explorer encounters items two, three and four listed above an error occurs where the browser does not render the image at all. Instead of disregarding the img elements empty width and height attributes, it considers the empty value to equate to zero (0) and the image is rendered appropriately.

Channel Nine CEO Eddie McGuire Resigns

News

On Friday 18th May, Eddie McGuire announced that he will resign as the Chief Executive Officer for the Channel Nine television network. There hasn’t been a lot of coverage as to why he has resigned as the Channel Nine CEO, however he has confirmed that he wasn’t pushed out the door.

In February 2006, I couldn’t believe that Eddie McGuire was appointed as the chief executive office for the Channel Nine TV network in Australia. Soon after the appointment, the Channel Nine CEO dropped his existing television commitments to take care of the business. However, it wasn’t long before he couldn’t resist the pull of being on the television once more and started hosting the 1 vs 100 game show.

Statements released by Channel Nine and Eddie McGuire state that he has signed another five year contract with the Nine network and that he will be involved with program and development for the network in some sort of a creative capacity which apparently suits Eddie McGuire down to the ground. I wonder if he is going to regain the Eddie Everywhere title once more now that he doesn’t have to focus on the the less exciting aspects of running a television network.

Google Search Revolutionised Through Vertical Integration

Search, Websites

Google have announced a revolutionary change to their famed search engine and its called universal search. The millions of people that use Google Search every day of the week would have probably considered it fairly ‘universal’ before, however that hasn’t got a drop on what they’re releasing to the market now!

Google universal search is going to allow you to search, as you did before with the familiar single search box; however many additional sources will be used to formulate the search results. As most people are aware, Google houses many different indexes of information:

  • web sites
  • news
  • books
  • local
  • images

which have been available to internet users through different search locations such as http://www.google.com or http://news.google.com. While separating out various types of search information into different web sites might have made sense from a development and technical level initially, Google were not leveraging their various indexes to their potential. Even with the initial release of the universal search service, I’m sure there will be significant improvements to come in the near future.

The key to the Google universal search is that their disparate search indexes have been vertically integrated. For those that aren’t aware, vertical integration typically refers to taking totally separate sets, be it a business, process or data and combining them into a single unified service. By removing the barriers between their various search indexes, Google have knocked down the information silos they helped build during development.

To the average user, this will mean they are more likely to find the information they are looking for on the Google home page. When a user searches, results will be returned from various sources and combined based on relevance. It will now be common place to see:

  • web sites
  • news
  • books
  • local
  • images
  • video

all within a single search results page. Of course, it is unlikely that a search would return results from all indexes at the same time. After all, the algorithms are looking to return the most relevant content to the user – not the most sources. As such, if the algorithms deem it appropriate then you may only see web and image results with no video or book content.

This is an exciting space and it is going to be interesting watching how the search engine optimisation landscape changes now that Google universal search has been released into the wild!