The mountain view aside, you’ll not have noticed much difference but I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 yesterday. All went swimmingly this time thanks to using the SVN based upgrade procedure (although I’ve just noticed that my last.fm feed seems to have vanished for some reason). I also took the opportunity to install a nightly version of the K2 theme which should squash a few navigation bugs that you may have noticed in the past.
The aforementioned header image is from the letter ‘F’ installment of the ongoing Hogmanay alphabet tour: Flaine.
Update: I found some more photographs in iPhoto that I thought may make nice header images and a random selection from these is now in place.
At least it does for web pages.
“Try holding your breath for as long as it takes your home page to load. If you are now dead, it took too long.”
- Art and the Zen of web sites
A decade ago, in the age of dial-up connections, page weight was everything. Images were compressed to within an inch of their lives and Netscape (R.I.P.) even had a special attribute for a lower resolution image to use as a placeholder while the proper image loaded. Then along came broadband and web developers got lazy. Continue reading ‘Size matters’
This year has already started to see the blurring of the edges between online Web 2.0 and traditional desktop applications. The traditional downside to this software as a service (SaaS) has been what to do when there is no connection to the Internet. There are various technologies now available from the big players (Adobe AIR, Google Gears, Microsoft Silverlight, Mozilla Prism and Sun with JavaFX). These all allow developers to keep your data in sync when you don’t have Internet access to their applications.
Another obstacle is changing attitudes to software. You will no longer own the software that you use but instead be charged either on a pay-as-you-go tariff or, more likely, on a monthly subscription basis.
There is also a gathering trend toward smaller, more portable computing devices with limited hard drive capacity like the Asus Eee PC. New solid state Flash drives offering a reasonable amount of storage are still expensive but these drives offer better battery performance and allow for smaller footprints.
Couple these new machines with a wireless connection, offline synchronisation and advancing online applications and you’re not a million miles away from the thin client model of computing in the 1970s. The major difference I can see between the aged dumb terminals and the new emerging way is a matter of the public perception of security and trust online. Throw in reliability (or lack thereof) issues, encryption bottlenecks and the economics of dealing with a serious amount of bandwidth into the mix and it’s clear than there is still a lot of progress to be made.
Today’s (and probably the last of the year) Edinburgh Coffee Morning was the busiest it has been for a good while. The cryptic promise of some gifts that Ewan McIntosh left in a Facebook message last night turned out to be some really nice signed Hugh MacLeod posters for Stormhoek. The season of goodwill and giving continued with some warmed Panettone and some chilled Prosecco courtesy of our hosts at Centotre. Many thanks to the aforementioned for their generosity.
A couple of stand out things from this morning before the conversations paired off as things are wont to do in group dynamics. Ewan briefly demoed Seesmic which seems to be some kind of video Twitter. I’ve never sent a “tweet” in my life and do have difficulty of seeing the point of it if I’m being honest. At least with Seesmic, there is an element of a two way thing going on.
Via Will Richardson, I found this video of Johnny Chung Lee turning the tables on the light sensing aspect of the Wiimote to produce an interaction whiteboard for around £40 much more interesting:
It has to be said that I’m a little indecisive at times. For instance, I’m always happy to “go with the crowd” when it comes to suggesting somewhere to meet friends and very rarely propose a venue myself. This can be a problem when everyone that you are trying to meet up with is of the same non-committal mindset.
I was struck by an idea while strutting to work yesterday morning. Later that afternoon I remembered that it was actually a redux of an idea that came about a couple of years ago: using Google maps to work out a central point twixt your location and the location of those you want to meet.
To this end I knocked up Whithr over the course of the last couple of evenings. Click on the map to indicate the location of people you plan on meeting (and obviously your own location too) and a marker will be placed at the most mutually convenient midpoint. By default this point is weighted toward being beneficial to the majority of people but you can change this to get a fairer average by selecting the “Needs of the few” option. You can remove a location marker by double clicking on it or move it around by clicking and dragging.
Next, either type the kind of place you want to meet at (like “pizza” or “sushi”) in the search box below the map or click on one of the predefined options (”coffee”, “pub” or “restaurant”) to get some suggestions.
It’s still a work in progress with a few bugs and issues remaining but also some interesting ideas emerging for future enhancements.
Mad props to DN, Alex and Simon.
I downloaded around with the first beta of new Firefox browser last week and have to say that I’m impressed by the updates already. Memory usage, once the bane of my browsing experience has been vastly improved. Take a look at this screen grab of my task manager. Guess where I got bored of Firefox hogging 700,000K of my memory and ended the process?
Cocoa widgets played a big part in me installing Bon Echo (which is the Mac Intel optimised version of Firefox 2) but now with Firefox 3 Mozilla are giving us native form controls themselves.
Look-and-feel is one thing but for a web developer at a design agency more important than this and the memory usage is the support of standards. Firefox now follows the lead of both Opera and Safari and passes the ACID2 test. ICC color profiles are now fully supported (again, a good few months after Safari) although the not enabled on default installs. You can switch it on using the special about:config URL of Firefox (you can safely ignore the cute warning message for this), changing the gfx.color_management.enabled setting to true and restarting. You can see the color profile support in action at color.org.
We’ve all encountered a captcha before (although you may not have known at the time). The “enter this obfuscated text in this form field” device that is supposed to stop automatic creation of user accounts or prevent comment spam postings by web robots.
That’s all well and good (unless you require an accessible version — many do not offer an audio alternative). However I’ve never come across them while simply trying to search Google.
I was trying to search for the keywords “php submit post” to get some references for some code I was writing and having trouble with. Everything was fine after entering the captcha but it seems that this only appears sporadically.
I’m aware that I’ve mentioned the Edinburgh Coffee Morning a few times in my blog before but have never really expanded on what it was.
Basically a loose affiliation of people from various professions gather on a Friday morning in Centotre to chat about social networks, Web 2.0 technologies and related topics before we scuttle off to our places of work. Web developers like myself, IT professionals geeks like Jamie Clague, marketing bods like Mike Coulter and Mark Gorman, teachers and educators like Ewan McIntosh and authors like Bill Coles (who has a book out: The Well-Tempered Clavier). You don’t have to be a web geek — all are welcome and it generally proves to be a thoroughly enjoyable and diverse start to the day.
I noticed earlier on that this October is one year since I started sporadically blogging. I thought I’d try and mess around with the monthly archive code to try and tidy the navigation up a little. I’d also have a peek under the hood to try and see if I could work it into my first WordPress plugin.
While browsing around investigating the finer details of plugin and theme development, I came across the pimping K2 theme which is now in place. Pretty much an upgrade to the classic Kubrick theme with styling abilities, nicer code and the Fam Fam Silk icon set.
My personal tweaks to the scheme will be coming along in the not so distant future along with a WordPress 2.3 upgrade and probably with a new style to boot.
I’m not talking about Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (easy for me to say) but the brilliant just-out-of-beta text editor that my colleague introduced me to last week. It basically brings the power of TextMate to Windows. I’ve tried to switch from TextPad several times before but I’ve always been shackled by just how used to the keystrokes and shortcuts I’ve gotten over the years. True enough, you can alter the keystroke bindings in a lot of editors but one thing kept me returning to TextPad time and again: the context-sensitive transpose call invoked with Control-T.
I’m glad to report that it wasn’t just me being weird. The developers of e obviously value this functionality as highly as me. Actually, scratch that. Higher than me as they’ve extended how this tool works to embrace multiple sections and a column mode.
It’s not quite perfect just yet. Line bookmarks and a split-screen edit mode are missing. A more powerful search and replace is also conspicuous by its absence. One final downside is that after a lot of excited discussion of new features with my colleagues it will probably be expected that I’m at least 15% more efficient!