It’s all Apple’s fault. No, really. I went with Kim down to the Apple store in Regent St just after xmas because she wanted to have a look at the video iPod.
So I’m wandering around looking at various bits and pieces when I notice there’s a G5 and large tft monitor vacant. So I walk up have a look in the applications folder as I usually do, spot Quark and fire it up.
I’m used to a 17″ crt at work and suddenly find I have loads of desktop space for toolbars, pallettes and, well everything. Quark is running even worse than it does on my G4 at work so I’m unimpressed although I now suspect it’s Quark that’s the problem and not OS X on a G4.
Anyway, we leave, Kim with new black iPod and me with head full of widescreen monitor. This isn’t good. Not for my bank balance anyway.
Last week I gave in and splashed out on a Dell 2405FPW, possibly the most expensive, non-essential thing I’ve ever bought.
I was a little disappointed initially as I was used to running at 1600 x 1200 on a 19″ crt and windows and text was larger on the 2405 although the resolution was set at 1920 x 1200. I still have more desktop space for apps than the 19″ but it’s took a little while to realise this.
Games on the other hand are incredible. I haven’t tried a DVD yet but can imagine the effect to be the same. It won’t be long before I’m used to things this way so I’m trying to make the most of things now before the shiny effect wears off.
Damn you Apple. Thank you.
As you can tell we’re still alive at monki towers and we’ve made one or two changes. We upgraded and have changed to a very nice pre built theme for the moment. Once we figure out the new bits and pieces then PRS may get running again.
With that in mind we’re going to run off again because it’s 2am and we really should be in bed.
I saw announcements recently that Opera was now a free download. The comments I read at Anne’s site and 456 Berea St seemed positive and some seemed genuinely hopeful that Opera would now become a force in the desktop browser market place.
While I have no strong feelings about Opera one way or another I can’t see it happening.
Opera has always had a free version, y’know, the one with the banner ads?. Opera didn’t gain much prominence when it was “free”. I can’t see that changing now it’s free.
I don’t think that users really care about banner ads if it allows people to get what they need. Look at Kazaa. That had banner ads (and spyware) but was installed and used by many people - I don’t know the figures for installation/use so I’m being purposely vague. Anyway, my point is that I don’t think banner ads was ever really Opera’s problem.
I’ve tried various versions of Opera over the last few years starting with either 3.x or 4.x (I can’t remember) and have found the claims of it being a fast loading browser to be true when using the back or forward buttons on a cached page but it didn’t grab me enough for me to use as a main browser. It’s number 3 on the list of browsers I reach for to test pages in which is why it still lives on my dev machine, doing strange things to my layouts. That could simply be my coding although Andy Budd seems to think it’s all Operas fault.
Let’s face it, Firefox isn’t even that great a browser. The underlying engine (Gecko) is but I’ve never been very happy with the browser UI. Any browser UI for that matter but that’s a story for another day.
So, Opera’s problem? Mozilla has been around for a number of years but was only used by those looking for an alternative. IE users were still saying “so what, I’m happy with things as they are”. Firefox only took off once people started spreading the (security) benefits of it over Internet Explorer. Even if Opera started marketing their browser along the same lines are those that made the switch from IE to Firefox going to switch again. Why would they? Too little, too late.
There we have it then. Opera doesn’t sit behind IE and Firefox because it has/had banner ads. It just wasn’t sold to the masses very well. It’ll be interesting to see what Opera does on Linux where desktop users are more likely to chop and change apps and try new things but I won’t be holding my breath.
Ooooh Doom film trailer. If other game tie-ins are anything to go by it’ll be crap. See you in the cinema queue.
Just a quick note to wish my sister and her husband Jez a happy birthday. Yep, they share the same birthday, although there’s an age difference of 52 years.
Just kidding. It’s 27 years difference :)
Talking of the Mercury music awards (heh it turns out to be called something else) I decided to keep a closer eye on things after Bloc Party.
Which turned out to be a good move otherwise I’d have missed The Go! Team. God, I thought this lot were brilliant. I’ve always had a soft spot for people who just couldn’t keep still on stage and they were all over the place, in a good way. Watching them I had the same feeling as seeing At The Drive In for the first time on Jools Holland’s show. You get the feeling if you look in one place for more than 2 seconds you’re missing something else, and you probably are.
The music? It was loud. It was shouty. I loved it. Feed me.
I was sick as a dog on wednesday night, so much so that I’m still feeling the effects today, so I’m sitting at home writing this. Just catching up before I go back to bed.
We first saw Bloc Party on the live coverage of this years Glastonbury. To begin with I wasn’t sure one way or another, live performance being what it is but towards the end it all came together. We liked Bloc Party.
It wasn’t until I was at the airport a couple of weeks back that I picked up the album which has made them grow on me even more. I hadn’t realised they were nominated for the Mercury music awards as I don’t usually take much interest in awards. Kim was watching it while I was in the other room and I wasn’t paying much attention but something filtered through to my subconcious as they started playing “So here we are” and I went to have a look. Brilliant.
We like Bloc Party. Very much.
And… we’re back. Went to Italy for a week and there was the usual bedlam at work prior to anyone going away so I didn’t have much time for other things.
Things of note now I’m back?
Textpattern had their first official release. Old news for those who care I know but there’s always been something elegant about the user interface that’s drawn me back. The Wordpress UI seems clunky by comparison. My opinion of course.
Once I get time to get things installed and running on the new pc I’ll try it out.
I finally got around to picking up Dan Cederholm’s Web Standards Solutions Which is pretty good. Some of it confirmed some things that I was already doing anyway, which is always good to know and gives a different (and at times simpler) version of things I tend to code. Definately worth buying.
There’s other things worth mentioning but I’ve things to sort out so I’ll leave it to next time.
New pc smell permates monki towers at the moment as I finally put together a new system over the weekend. It’s amazing what a 2GHz 64bit cpu and 1 gig of ram can do to spruce things up and there’s a 200 gig drive ready to be filled with Kims iTunes purchases. The laptop will be so relieved.
Now all I need is to get a keyboard whose “m” key doesn’t stick. Oh the trials we go through.
Proof, if any was ever needed that cats are smarter than dogs. Assuming we overlook the default Internet Explorer thing of course.
Someone went to all the trouble of recreating the front of their ipod from wood. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.
Via Gui galaxy
Doctor Who came to an end last weekend and has left a little hole in my TV viewing.
I was worried that it might feel quite dated but the whole look was brought kicking and screaming into the 21st century. It’s a pity that Christopher Eccleston decided to leave after only one series as I felt he played the Doctor really well. We’ll just have to see what David Tennant brings to the part.
We’ve been watching Glastonbury excerpts on TV over the weekend. Kim was waiting for the Magic Numbers but they didn’t play due to the singer losing his voice. Not the best thing to happen to a singer but there you go. I wasn’t sure about Bloc Party. They’re the sort of band I should like but the set didn’t really move me until 2 songs from the end. Worth picking up a cd though.
Off to watch Primal Scream.
Update: Kim tells me the Magic Numbers did play in the end. They just didn’t make it on TV.
The Mac Mini turned out to be what we were looking for in a Mac. Cheap. Kim had mentioned a few times about getting a Mac (especially after I bought her an iPod) but my current obsession with a certain Windows only based game had put me off. Oddly enough when we first discussed getting a PC a few years ago I wanted a Mac but Kim had far more knowledge of PC’s and, well, it was her money we were spending so we went the PC route.
For a while we could have switched as Quake3 (and some others I played) was also available on Mac as well as PC but unfortunately it became too late when I discovered Eve. It’s sad when the things you want to do are dictated by a game but there you go. Who said I was perfect?
I’ve needed to upgrade the PC for a while now so was looking at that when they launched the Mac Mini which seemed to be ideal. We could use the Mac as the main work machine for both of us and I could setup a Shuttle PC as a games machine. Sounds good doesn’t it?
Until Apple announced the processor switch that is. Macs tend to hold their second hand value though and it’s still going to be useable due to the emulation software Apple will be using (whose name escapes me at this moment in time) so it may not be an issue.
In my opinion the key with any hardware upgrade is to think in terms of the current market and just buy when you need it. If you look ahead you’ll always be waiting a few more months for something better.
If you continue repeating things often enough you’re bound to be correct at some point. A friend pointed me to news report on news.com stating that Apple would be switching to Intel processors and the mac community breathed a collective sigh of “here we go again”.
The weird thing was that this time it was true. An awful lot of people, like myself, who’ve used Macs for a number of years simply dismissed it as another rumour to add to the pile of ones already discarded.
Apple have always been hardware manufacturers. Mac OS was simply the interface and the fact that people liked it was the carrot to make them buy the hardware. If they released Mac OS as a standalone OS running on x86 architecture then who would honestly pay the premium that Apple charge for it’s hardware?
The question for me is how are Apple going to stop people from buying a copy of Tiger and installing it on their home built x86 rig?
I had thought that maybe Apple hardware would carry a security chip that the OS has to detect before it can be installed on that machine but then realised it won’t take 5 minuites for someone to code a crack for it. Well maybe a bit longer but you see what I mean surely.
Are they going to stop them or are we seeing a new direction from Apple? Let the rumours begin.
The much anticiapted upgrade to OS X hasn’t gone so well. We spent a week testing one machine with all our RIPs, printers and other devices and most seemed fine. With the one or two that wasn’t ok we found a workaround anyway so off we went and upgraded the whole studio. Then things went badly wrong.
We run a Windows 2003 RAID server and the OS X finder seems to have a problem seeing files we’ve just updated, the result being that we have to wait a few minuites for the server to update before we can use the file on OS X. For the first couple of days we couldn’t figure out why the files we were dropping onto the imposition program weren’t the updated ones. Then there are the odd things to do with filename lengths.
There also seems to be an issue with postscripts made in Quark 6 and 6.5 but lets not go there.
Generally while we were able to do things at a fast pace with Mac OS9 and the server we’re now having to wait for OS X to agree with the server on what’s there before we progress with any job. Oh and sometimes doing “save as…” in Quark 6 will make some of the images disappear. I could go on but I’d rather spend the time doing something constructive but needless to say we’re not happy.
Oh joy.
I am so close to Mac OSX that I can smell the leather. I swear my G4 knows what coming as well as it’s started playing up more than usual the last few days with apps crashing all over the place. I’ll give it a couple of weeks and then see if I can get another 512mb of RAM in there.
Remember the remote sentry guns that made an appearence in the special edition version of Aliens? There’s actually a toy version available as “room defenders”.
Sadly the whole concept is ruined by some supposed satisfied customer quotes:
“It looks great, it’s fun and my room has never been safer!”
Er…yeah right.
Did I ever mention that a friend of mine from way back actually worked on the sentry guns for the film?
A month ago we were looking at upgrading the machines to OSX but, of course things never go to plan. We currently have one machine running with upgraded apps and spent the last four days trying to get it to talk to our various printers but as it’s not my machine then I only get to play with it after they’ve left work for the day.
Favourite bit so far? Discovering I have an Apache install to play with. Oh and that Expose might be more than just a neat trick.
Least favourite bit? That animation that takes place when minimizing a window. It just makes me feel sick.
A couple of nights back we were hit by a comment spam bot. Fortunately we’re not that regular when it comes to posting so it wasn’t too time consuming shutting off the comments for each post.
Once we’ve sorted out a couple of things comments will be back on.
Venice didn’t really click with me to be honest. The people there are really friendly but it all kind of melded into one. A typical conversation went like this;
Kim: Do you recognise where we are?
Me: No.
Kim: But we’ve been down this street six times in the last two days!
Me: Did you just call me Piggly Wiggly?
I didn’t suffer tech withdrawal quite as much as I thought I would. The evening we returned there was a series of programmes about Venice on tv. Life’s like that sometimes.
As you may (or may not) have heard me say on numerous occasions we’re still using Mac OS9 at work as we can’t afford the downtime in the studio to get all the different devices working together. Something happened this week thats forcing us to finally upgrade to Quark 6 and as Quark 6 is OSX only then you can see where this is going.
Unfortunately for me it’s going to be happening while I’m away so I’ll get to miss out on all the fun. I’d rather be on holiday but all the same, I wish it could’ve happened while I was there.
While I’m on a posting frenzy I may as well get this one down. I haven’t been to Design by fire for a while but a link took me there and I have to say the design (at the time of writing this) looks really good. I’m a real sucker for orange. And drop shadows. Orange and drop shadows. Mmmmm. Chicken.
Jon Hicks has done some graphical updates to Sage, a fork of RSS panel reader which is no longer in development.
Jon uses OSX but the improvements are still valid for other platforms and another version is available from Josh Jarmin if you prefer.
Did you know Gmail browser sniffs? I thought that sort of thing went out with “best viewed in…” etc. Having to use Mac OS9 and disliking IE5 my only option is to use a Wacom version of 1.3.1. I’d guess it’s a security issue but it’s still annoying all the same.
After following the Gbrowser story for a few days now (fortunately some of the lnks have been collected together at 456berea street so I don’t have to work to hard) I have to admit to being a bit confused as to how I feel about the whole thing.
A big part of me believes it’ll turn out to be vapourware. A stray comment on bugzilla and the whole thing get blown out of proportion.
Then there’s the part that want’s Mozilla/Firefox/whatever it’s called to succeed. I’ve followed and used Mozilla since 0.8. There’s a history there that I don’t want consigned to a footnote by an upstart browser. Can’t Google simply adopt Firefox? If they’re happy to use the engine then why not use the whole thing?
More recently though (after reading various peoples thoughts) I’ve started to think that maybe whatever Google does it’ll be good for the user (and the devs). I firmly believe that Gecko is currently the best browser engine available today and if Google can get Gecko onto a lot more machines then that can only be a good thing. Maybe it’ll finally force MS to put some serious effort back into IE and bring it into line with current browser technology. I did say maybe.
All this because someone stumbles across a public entry on bugzilla. Vapourware indeed.
The Etherdoxproject has had some content added and code tweaked. It’s proof for me how far I’ve progressed as there were some things that had me wondering why I’d opted for that route instead of the way I’d do it now.
For instance I used <strong> to represent headings. There’s nothing really wrong with it but nowdays I’d use a <hn> tag. It still didn’t bother me enough to go and change it though. I’m too lazy.
As far as I’m concerned people can use tables for layout, non-semantic mark up and have sex with animals but it’s just made me realise how far I’ve come over the last year. I must have been really bad a couple of years back.
Actually I lied. Sex with animals is just weird. Especially if you use tables for layout.
Monkiboi Dot Net hit the big 3 a few days ago. Happy birthday mate (and if that isn’t surreal then I don’t know what is).
We went live earlier this week and although there’s one or two bugs to sort out they’re only minor so allow me to present Colourcards. Again I was code monkey on this one not designer but it looks pretty good. Expect a liquid layout sometime in the future, but don’t hold your breath. One down, three to go.
Ernie Ball died sometime last week. I don’t remember the make of strings I used on my bass as it’s been a while but practically every guitarist I ever played with used his “slinkys” so it’s still a part of my past.
The award for my favourite web comic of the moment goes to Copper.
# cat /dev/hdb > /dev/dsp - Use CTRL-C to kill it when you’ve had enough.
What? September? already?! So what happened there then? As usual when we disappear for a while work is to blame but we’re back. For the moment at least.
I missed the newest release of enlightenment which, according the enlightenment.org Has theme transparency available to the end user. I thought this was a theming addition but then realised (because I don’t have 16.7.1) that it must be something available in the user menu. Sounds fun.
One of my projects is scheduled to go live this week although, technically it’s been sheduled since er… May. The biggest problem has been that real work keeps getting in the way. Plus a mix up meant the order form was re-written twice. Expect some slippage.
My journey into classes is continuing at a slowish pace. I started programming at uni writing (rather bad) assembly language for micro controllers and I think that method of planning and writing code has stayed with me, so I expect to see lines and lines of code in one file. At the moment the only advantage I can see with classes is cleaner code in the main file but then I’m still having trouble with this concept of “objects”. Mind you, at least I don’t have to worry about stack pointers and 2’s complement anymore.
It was Kim’s birthday yesterday but due to work we ended up heading out to eat today instead. Dim sum. Mmmmm.
Probably my favourite time to eat in Chinatown is late on a summer evening. Sitting on an upper floor of China China with some roast pork, crispy pork and rice with sounds of the street below coming through the open windows. It’s pretty much empty on the upper floors by then so there’s a feeling of calm despite the noise below.
I was going to get Kim a remote for the iPod but the things I’d read online about it made it seem a bit…er…crap. So she got Strictly Ballroom instead. I’m much better at spontaneous gift buying than for events. Honest.
Sometimes when something is bothering you but you can’t figure out quite what it is, the best course of action is to strip the thing right down and take it from there. I guess it would be possible to make this site even more minimal but then you wouldn’t be able to read this. Even I have my limits.
This post is going to look so stupid in the archives :)
Tired. Been playing Eve a lot this weekend so it’s my own fault but it doesn’t help when you have a work shedule like mine. I’m still trying to fit the finishing of my companys web site into that shedule. How long ago was it I started? The main problem is that it doesn’t feel like work to me (work isn’t supposed to be fun) so I usually abandon it to do some “real” work.
I’ve also become the code monkey on a revamp of a popular open source projects web site. I realise that last sentance is clunky but it’s probably not right to mention which one as it’s still in the early stages but I was pleased to be asked.
Why is it that most of my CSS based problems stem from Internet Explorer for mac. Is Mac IE used on OSX? Please tell me it’s not.
Kevin over at denial has put up a great new design and moved to Textpattern at the same time. I tried the early gamma versions and really liked the UI but couldn’t really get to grips with creating a whole site with it. That doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s a good bit of kit but that it didn’t work for me at the time. I’m fed up of moving systems so I’m going to stick with wordpress. Unless something new and shiny catches my eye that is.
While browsing on sunday night I found a link to HardOCP Doom3 hardware guide which has a page listing the hardware requirements. I thought I’d be close to the minimum specs but I didn’t think I’d be under the requiremements. For a start I need Windows 2000/XP to play. Yeah I know, I know but it’s my choice as to what I run. Well, it was my choice. Seems like I’ll finally have to give Mr Gates some more money.
The 1GHz Athlon might have just made it as I was (just) getting away with playing Black and White with a PII 350MHz and a Voodoo 2 sli rig (I’ve still got them under the bed. I’m a sentimental fool :)) but the final straw was the 2.2Gb of hard drive space. Kim’s been on at me to upgrade for a little while now as using iTunes has eaten all the available space on the laptop so I guess I’ll have to put some money aside to keep us both happy.
The worst bit is that I find this out on the week of release. Ok, maybe I should have been paying a little more attention to things other than the great screenshots but…ah hell, I’m just stupid.
The good news is that once upgraded I’ll be ready for Half Life 2… surely?
We went to see Measure for Measure at the National Theatre last night. It’s not something we’d have chosen but the tickets were given to us so off we went.
As usual I didn’t bother too much with what the actors and actress’ were actually saying but simply listened and tried to pick out the meaning. Hmmm that doesn’t make a lot of sense but I know what I mean. Shakespeare’s guide for writing seemed to be “why use one when you can use ten words instead”.
We had fun although we could have done with an interval as we were there for two and a half hours during which my bum fell asleep. It never seems like a good idea to get up and wander around rubbing your bottom, or anyone else’s come to think of it unless it’s that sort of play of course.
Afterwards it was off to Chinatown for some barbecue pork, crispy pork and rice which was as good as always.
Monki Towers has been an Internet Explorer free zone for the last couple of weeks. Kim read a newspaper article about the various security issues and decided that was it. I wonder how many others thought the same. It probably coincides with the 1% increase in Firefox usage I read about recently.
Half the fun of getting software to run on Linux is trying to interpret the error messages. I finally got Evidence to run after going through the error messages and finally realising what it was it needed to run. It’d be really nice if someone wrote a utiliy that ran in the background that brought up a message box saying “Hey! you need to get this library to get this to work”, and no, I’m not talking about apt-get or it’s clones.
Still can’t get Skippy to compile though.
The GTK2 theme I’ve been working on looks nice but nothing more. There’s nothing special about it. Looks like I’ll have to rethink this one a bit.
On a slightly different tack, now that every Linux distro and their dog has a package management system which (supposedly) takes care of dependencies what’s the main selling point of Debian? I’ve never tried it so I’ve nothing good or bad to say but I’m curious.
We saw Spiderman2 last night and it’s not that different from the last one. The action bits are great. The rest is just slow. Sloooowwww. The comics never interested me so I guess that’s why I didn’t take to the films.
Staying with the subject of films I saw Awakenings recently. Since Good Morning Vietnam I’ve tended to avoid films with Robin Williams in them as I find them overly setimental and my sugar intake is already too high. We started watching as there wasn’t anything else on at the time but somehow I got caught up in it. While Williams was ready and willing to do his usual thing Robert De Niro’s acting made the whole thing watchable, although it didn’t need the pseudo happy ending the film makers gave it.
As people we tend to work around our shortcomings when doing things. Can’t get the hang of “a” but find “b” relatively straightforward? Then there’s a good chance you’ll use “b” 99% of the time and “a” only when you have too.
For a while now I’ve lived under the assumption that I’m quite good at the XHTML/CSS part of development. I suck at anything javascript related but can mockup a layout quite quickly but (and this is the key bit as it turns out) only if I’m working to my layout so I can do things my way.
I’m currently putting the finishing touches to my companys new web site. Being a print company we have plenty of graphic designers (and good ones at that) but all of them are used to designing to a size and having it stay that way. It’s been a trying time for both sides with some changes in direction from them and some embarresment from me:
Me: “No, you can’t do that I’m afraid”
Boss: “Well this site does it” - types in url
Me: “Ah…oh..er…well I’ll give it a go then”
Lets not forget the different browsers and platforms out there as well. Just when I think I’ve got it working ok on the pc side something doesn’t look right on the mac. Why is always someone else who spots these things?
I suppose it’s all part of the learning experience really and I just hope I haven’t come out of it looking too bad. We’ll see as they’re designing the site for a sister company and if they offer it to me then I guess I passed the trial by fire.
The kitchen is pretty much done and life is returning to a semblance of normality here at monki towers.
I’d written a rant on Aqua style themes but deleted it as I wasn’t really making much sense. If you’re going to make a case for something it may as well be coherent otherwise you just look an ass, which is something I’m quite capable of doing without needing to rant thank you very much.
I know I’ve been tired this week but I’m sure I saw an add for a 30″ flat screen monitor from Apple. I’m not sure I’d be too popular if I bought one of those home and I’ve certainly got more important things to spend the money on right now, but later? who knows.
You ever have one of those days when nothing seems to compile correctly? Me too. Obviously I’m managing to narrow this sites readership right down to 0 by asking but going through the output from Make hoping for a translation of that obscure error is never fun.
While on the subject does anyone know what DHAVE is (I think that’s what it says) because it crops up frequently during Make? The first few times I compiled code I kept thinking “Who’s this dave?”
Operation Kitchen Freedom has started in earnest with skirmishes occuring all day between the builders and the cupboards, with the tiles also coming under heavy attack. At this point it looks as if the sinks resistance is weakening now that cupboard support has fallen away. We’ll keep you updated as the situation here progress’.
Following on from NPD we present this list of the 100 worst pron titles. My favourite? “Why things burn”. Don’t you wish you owned that one? (via BoingBoing)
Possibly the cruellest trick you can currently play on a gamer: “Hey I see they’ve released Doom3″!
While in the local gamestore yesterday I walked towards the back to check out the older (cheap) games, looked up and there it was, three shelves deep. I grabbed one, scanned the back to make sure it wasn’t a joke and turned it over to study the front. It was then I noticed the white on red lettering saying “Pre-Order Your Copy Today!”
Needless to say, if anyone asks you about the apparently motiveless killing of the staff, I was with you all day. Got that?
There’s not much point me saying anything about the England - Portugal game. I’ve had enough of “experts” and others trying to give me their opinion. Life can suck sometimes.
I’ve been having connection problems with Eve since the last patch a couple of weeks ago so I decided to play Quake 3 yesterday while waiting for the kitchen to be delivered. I’d really forgotten how much fun it is. And fast! I’d forgetten that as well. Oh and I sucked. Badly. Against the bots. Don’t expect to see me on a q3 server anytime soon but I did dig out some of my favourite maps from yesteryear and have a blast.
I was hoping to download Slackware 10.0 before I finished work on thursday (because they have a fatter pipe :) ) but the iso’s are generally distrubuted via Bit Torrrent and I don’t think I’d get away with installing Bt on the Macs at work. That’s assuming there’s an OS9 version to begin with. Ah well, I can wait. Amazon have 9.1 in stock, which is something that took me by suprise but may also be another option. I’d like to pay for this one as I got 9.0 and 9.1 the old fashioned web way.
We walked into a newsagents earlier today to find the (nowdays) rare sight of someone browsing the “artistic lingere” magazine section. The next shop we went into was a second hand book/magazine shop where we spotted someone else doing the same. As soon as I realised it was the 26th June I knew what was going on. National Porn Day (NPD). Your all jealous now aren’t you? Sitting there wishing you had an NPD as well.
While in Chiswick this afternoon I stumbled across ITunes 4 for Macintosh and Windows. You need a book to use iTunes? Not only that but while searching on Amazon to create the link the search pulled out 21 other titles for iTunes. I really think the market has reached saturation on this one.
The good news? As I put it back I noticed Designing with Web Standards on the same shelf. It’s cheaper at Amazon but the post around here has gone to pot over the last few months so I haven’t wanted to risk it.
Bah! It’s been one of those weeks where you get up, go to work, come home and go to bed. Rinse and repeat.
The good news is that I’m getting paid for some site development I did a couple of months ago. Which is nice. Because it was a friend of a friend the amount was never really decided on and probably like most people I’m really bad at judging what my work is worth. You don’t want to go too high but at the same time you have this feeling you’re undercutting yourself. I wonder if there’s a formula for this kind of thing? A developers minimum wage?
I started mucking about with the Smooth engine for GTK2 the other day, just hacking an existing theme so this GTK2 engine tutorial should come in very handy. Whether you get to see the results is another thing of course.
Listening to Joss Stone as I’m writing this. The bass playing on “Fell in love with a boy” reminds me of an old friend and fellow bassist. I can see him jumping about on stage playing this everytime I hear it. I guess I associate that “auto-wah”ed bass sound with him rather than Bootsy nowdays. Not sure if that’s a good or bad thing but whatever, I hope Marco is still tearing it up on stage somewhere.
Well, England managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory earlier this evening. I only hope the rest of the tournament improves. I’ll have cheered up by tomorrow. honest.
A release candidate for Firefox 0.9 has been out about a week now and the official 0.9 release is due tomorrow (14th). I have to say that 0.8 has been trouble free for me but i’ll still be upgrading to the latest anyway. This time I’ll make a note not to keep any previous version lying around the harddrive. I made a menu entry for Firefox in Enlightenement but pointed it to MozillaFirebird instead. It took me 2 hours of reinstalling extensions and other bits that had suddenly stopped working to realise my mistake. Note to self: Firefox FireFOX.
One extension that caught my eye recently is Sage, which is based on Flysons RSS Panel Reader. Sage isn’t radically different (on the surface anyway) but does allow the “feed item list” under the feeds pane to be hidden. Useful if the feed content is being shown in the main window otherwise it’s a duplication. Sage can be installed along with Flysons extension and it’ll be interesting to see how they both develop.
Another couple of things I need to get round to trying out. XtDesktop looks like it might be useful while PyPanel also looks worthy of further investigation. Yes, I know Enlightenent has it’s own taskbar/manager/thing but it’s so unobvious that I forget it’s there most of the time, and 1600 x 1200 really encourages you to have lots of windows open.
Time to kick this thing off. I’ve never been a prolific writer and there hasn’t been much I wanted to comment on anyway, put that all together along with being busy at work and there you have it.
Monkiboi isn’t dead, it’s more “resting”. Most people in the skinning community go by a psuedonym and that’s how I started but recently I’ve found myself stifled by what I percieve the site to be and the whole “monkiboi dot net” thing. I had grand designs where I would host screenshots and review themes and… well, it all ended up taking longer than I thought it would. When I moved from blogworks to Nucleus I had intended to move the archives and static pages over to the new style and update the content. That obviously didn’t happen although we can blame some of that on my Eve addiction. Kim will be very happy when I finally grow tired of it.
So, we’re not going to be making any promises here. Things will appear when they are done and that’s that.
Although, now I think about it…
Well, we got this thing up and running. so far anyway. I’m not sure how things are going to work out but hell, I usually get away with making things up as I go along so lets see how things go.
Excuse the mess for a while as things get shifted, sorted, moved around and generally screwed up. Same as usual then.
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