For anyone interested, it’s a Perl script which watches for the D-Bus signals from gnome-screensaver. Code is as follows:

my $cmd = "dbus-monitor --session \"type='signal',interface='org.gnome.ScreenSaver',member='SessionIdleChanged'\"";
open (IN, "$cmd |");
while () {
  if (m/^\s+boolean true/) {
    system(’/etc/acpi/screenblank.sh’)
  }
}


Note that it relies you running Linux, using GNOME and there being a screen blanking script ‘/etc/acpi/screenblank.sh‘ (which in turn executes ‘/usr/share/acpi-support/screenblank‘ for every display). Not too much to ask I’m sure

The One Account is one of those ‘offset everything you own against your mortgage’ type accounts. This means that you merge your mortgage, savings and current accounts in a single pot so any money you have is constantly offset against your mortgage. This means the actual amount of money you’re borrowing at any one time is less that it otherwise would be and hence you pay less in interest. Ok… sounds interesting but what does that actually mean? Well, it gives you a variety of options but the most important one for me is that you can pay of your mortgage in a much shorter time period.

We signed up for the One Account at the beginning of this year and set the ambitious aim of paying our (not insignificant) mortgage off in 4 years instead of the usual 20-25. What?! 4 years? Are you freakin’ crazy I hear you say? [Well you might not be saying that but it makes this post far more interesting for me if I imagine you are so I'll pretend.] We didn’t pluck the 4 year figure out of thin air; the One Account website has a handy Mortgage Shrinker you can use as a guide. The following graph gives you an idea how this works:

As you can see, salary comes in every now and then which reduces how me we owe to the bank and then this amount slowly increases as we spend money before the next salary payment. More importantly, the amount it increases to each time is lower than the previous amount, i.e. the mortgage is getting smaller.

So half a year in, how’s it looking? Pretty darn good actually. Amazingly, that ability to offset your salary payments against your mortgage until you spend them, plus the ability to effectively pay off bits of your mortgage constantly has left us in pretty good shape. We are entirely on track to pay the thing off in 4 years, if not sooner.

P.S. Worth noting that just because you can pay off loads of your mortgage quickly, doesn’t mean you can’t spend it too. Effectively you could end up only having paid off interest after 20 years and no capital, or pay off £20k and then blow it on a new car or something. Only a good idea if you have some self-control over your finances!

• CN Tower: tallest building in the world and some fantastic views, try and go when it’s quiet though as there’s not much space to move around
• Toronto Eaton Centre: a large shopping mall that feels quite impressive and plenty of shops to wander round
• St. Lawrence Market: a really fun and interesting market with all kinds of food

Bars/restaurants

• Jack Astor’s on Toronto Life Square: a chain bar but pretty cool and this one has some great skyline views
• Arrabiata: a fantastic Italian restaurant on Yonge street with great staff, food and atmosphere
• Eggspectations: a fun place with an egg-related theme, very good for brekky
• Spring Rolls: a chic Thai restaurant right by St Lawrence Market with some amazing food and not too pricey

]]> http://blog.garethj.com/2008/07/17/things-to-do-in-toronto/feed/ http://blog.garethj.com/2008/07/17/things-to-do-in-toronto/ http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/garethj/~3/325602794/ http://blog.garethj.com/2008/07/03/dojo-checkboxes/#comments Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:17:28 +0000 gareth http://blog.garethj.com/?p=54 I recently hit this snag when working with Dojo. Basically I wanted to set the checked status of a checkbox on a webpage programmatically. Simple you might think? Apparently not as easy as it should be.

Interaction with checkboxes has changed slightly in Dojo 1.1 (apparently) but myCheckbox.setValue(true) should be valid. When calling dojo.byId('my-checkbox-id').setValue(true), I was getting an error saying the method didn’t exist. The object was definitely the checkbox as I could determine the correct checked state from that object (myCheckbox.checked) so I was very confused. I then remembered another way to access objects with Dojo is using the HTML attribute ‘jsId‘. This creates a global javascript variable referring to that object in the DOM. So I set something like jsId='myCheckbox' and then called myCheckbox.setValue(true) and it worked!

Very odd behaviour. I can only guess that the javascript object created by Dojo using jsId and dojo.byId() is a different bit of code and creates an object pointing to the DOM checkbox object in a different way. Very strange but at least there’s the workaround above…


]]> http://blog.garethj.com/2008/07/03/dojo-checkboxes/feed/ http://blog.garethj.com/2008/07/03/dojo-checkboxes/ http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/garethj/~3/325062663/ http://blog.garethj.com/2008/07/02/me-a-professional-bsl-interpreter/#comments Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:33:21 +0000 gareth http://blog.garethj.com/?p=53 Ok, so that’s definitely not true but I try. Although he often has interpreters coming into the office, I regularly act as a backup interpreter for Ben for small meetings etc. The other day however, his interpreter had an accident and Ben was supposed to be giving a talk in the auditorium at Hursley where we work. Can you guess what happened next?

So I stood up to the challenge and tried to interpret Ben’s talk to the audience. It was a very strange experience as I’d never really interpreted from BSL to English apart from in small groups, or even seen it done very often - most interpreters I see are from English to BSL for Ben’s benefit. I wasn’t sure how well it went as knew I didn’t manage to get everything across, my language was quite simple compared to what Ben was trying to articulate, and I did swap from the 1st person (the correct method where I pretend to be Ben) to the 3rd a couple of times. However, a few people (including Ben himself) were extremely generous with their praise which was fantastic to hear (e.g. here, here, here and here).

Following that talk I was full of confidence and so then happily interpreted for Ben at the next one (someone else on stage, English to BSL). Definitely got a rush that day, very exciting. Maybe I’ll do more of this in the future…

P.S. I know I’ve done more signed versions of BSL-related posts in the past but I’m finding it quite hard to find the time to do it. Writing is much quicker for me and to then translate I need to get a camera, work out what I want so sign, how to translate etc. Maybe it would be better to start with a BSL version and translate that to English instead. I’ll have a think about it and see what I can do.


]]> http://blog.garethj.com/2008/07/02/me-a-professional-bsl-interpreter/feed/ http://blog.garethj.com/2008/07/02/me-a-professional-bsl-interpreter/ http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/garethj/~3/324935508/ http://blog.garethj.com/2008/07/02/some-interesting-deaf-related-things-online/#comments Wed, 02 Jul 2008 14:33:32 +0000 gareth http://blog.garethj.com/?p=52 My BSL Level 3 class has now finished temporarily for the summer and I figured it would be a good idea to let them know the interesting deaf-related blogs etc that I keep an eye on. So here we have a very brief but hopefully useful and interesting compilation of things I know about:

Blogs

• Benfletcher’s Weblog (from my good friend Ben)
• Bsl Jeff’s Vlog
• gwallgofi
• Noesis
• Grumpy Old Deafies
• This site (anything tagged ‘bsl’ that I put up here)

Online dictionaries (there’s many more but here’s a couple)

• Mobilesign
• ICT Dictionary (a list of some common technical BSL signs)

Other resources

• My bookmarks tagged ‘bsl’ (should have everything here already and will be updated as and when I find anything interesting)
• Some multi channel signs
• BDA Sign Community
• DeafPulse.com

For the non-technical amongst you it’s worth pointing out that all these blogs (and some of the other sites) have feeds that can be subscribed to so you are notified of new posts. Worth checking out rather than regularly going to each and every page looking for updates. Google Reader is a fairly good aggregator to use for this purpose - check out this video for a really good simple explanation of it all.

If anyone has any more recommendations, please add them as comments below or let me know some other way.


]]> http://blog.garethj.com/2008/07/02/some-interesting-deaf-related-things-online/feed/ http://blog.garethj.com/2008/07/02/some-interesting-deaf-related-things-online/ http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/garethj/~3/308165624/ http://blog.garethj.com/2008/06/09/links-for-2008-06-09-kind-of/#comments Mon, 09 Jun 2008 17:20:47 +0000 gareth http://blog.garethj.com/?p=50 Del.icio.us seems to have not wanted to publish my recent bookmarks for some reason so here’s manual (boo!) list of things that might be of interest:
• YouTube - SIGNING FOR DEAF (WITH TRANSLATION FOR DUMB)
  A video on YouTube providing a different audio feed for BBC News 24 based on the BSL signer in the corner. Very funny but probably not politically correct
• MobileSign
  A BSL dictionary site aimed for mobile devices but with quite a good collection of signs.
• morgueFile
  A great resource for free photos (commercial use allowed). Handy for presentations.
• bkkeepr | Track your reading and bookmark on the go
  Publish and keep track of the books you’re reading via twitter using ISBN numbers
• Canonical Announces the Ubuntu Netbook Remix
  A version of Ubuntu designed for small computers such as the Asus Eee PC

]]> http://blog.garethj.com/2008/06/09/links-for-2008-06-09-kind-of/feed/ http://blog.garethj.com/2008/06/09/links-for-2008-06-09-kind-of/ http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/garethj/~3/298748807/ http://blog.garethj.com/2008/05/27/links-for-2008-05-27/#comments Tue, 27 May 2008 01:32:03 +0000 gareth http://blog.garethj.com/2008/05/27/links-for-2008-05-27/
• BSL multi-channel signs
  A collection of BSL multi-channel signs from Redditch Deaf Club
  (tags: bsl sign language multi-channel)