The Insider

One of my colleague has highlighted this interesting article regarding how workers wanted a pay rise to overcome inflation effects. But an analysis would definitely point us to a direction where a high pay rise would mean more money with people and hence more money to spend and obviously would rise inflation.

As most of you might already know, we here in Australia, are fighting inflation which is why Reserve Bank Of Australia has been constantly increasing interest rates. If people or workers want a high pay-rise to fight inflation then they are forgetting that this would add more to inflation. I just think that people have got used to the high standard of living which is why its being so hard for them (I would include myself as well) to swallow the after-math of the rising interest rates by RBA to fight it.

But one thing that always gets on to my mind when I think about inflation is, why dint RBA react to it when it first noticed its signs in the Australian economy? And now, its just too harsh for people to cope with the effects. What a chaos!!

As a note, I would add that, I am not an economist. I have just done some reading on the news and a bit of individual research. Please consider this post as my personal opinion and I am not responsible for any of the practical outcomes of this discussion (just to be on the safe-side)

I was going through some blogs and I found this interesting concept of ‘spriting‘ . With a bit research in it I found how handy this technique is for page optimization. A bit of research in wikipedia confused the hell out of me and so I spoke to various experts in that part of the industry and came up with the following ideas:

‘Spriting‘ is a process where 2 or more images are merged to form a single image. Now I can see you all looking at my post and thinking”How the hell does this help in page optimization?” Have a look at the following url: http://nz.finance.yahoo.com/ Now in that if you have a look at the following image Sprited Image is a combination of 3 images. Now when required to show the calculator symbol using CSS this is shown and when required to show the graph symbol you can show it by CSS and hide the rest.

What is happening behind the scenes? If you had 3 different images instead of 1 then you would be doing 3 http requests to load these images. But because its only one image, the browser does only one http request the first time and later on it displays the image from the browser cache. So in this case instead of 3 http requests we have got only 1. And imagine if a page has some 24 images and instead these can be merged into 8 big images. So only 8 http calls instead of 24!! So your page can load 3 times faster!! (well technically it is faster, though not as fast as 3X)

Now this does have some limitations like if you are displaying a list and the images for the <li> are sprited, if the text in <li> is more than the width specified then you see the list is broken. Umm but it should be working well in most cases.

I also hear that there are some public (free) tools to sprite the images (accept 2 or more images, merge them into 1), but I could not find any in the first glance. If any of you have come across any such tools or have got previous experiences in this then feel free to share it here

Cheers

I know its been a while that I wrote here. Just was so busy and flat out working on something and its with immense pleasure that I introduce you to my new launch Yahoo!Xtra Business . I have been a finance engineer (ok unofficially) here at Yahoo!7 and this is my biggest finance launch. It gave me a great insight to the finance architecture and not only from the engineering-side of things but also from the actual finance market perspective.

So, I thought I would share some of my launch experiences with you here and talk a bit abt my product (oh well I am not the Product manager for this, but since I engineered it I think I would dare call it my product).

NZ Business site keeps you updated on the shares, funds prices, latest news from a wide-range of providers, discussion boards to discuss everything about finance, Opinions which are the expert blogs from the experts in the industry. I like the sleek design of it which is using no funky colours but instead is giving more emphasis on the content of it. If I had a wish list, I would like to make the entire site wider like how the home page is. But to keep it inline with AU we kept the investing and quotes section narrow.

You can also create your own portfolios and add watches on the quotes. The content is all NZ oriented and the news is very frequently updated with a wide range of providers.

So have a look at it and feel free to throw any comments but do remember that this is my personal blog, so I can take in your advice but no promises made!