Aug 2, 2007 · 1 minute read
Here's a question I'm throwing out to whoever is reading this, and who uses an iPod: what do you use to manage it and how has it worked out for you? I've recently been experimenting with a multitude of ways of controlling the little beast but nothing has really provided a complete solution. No, not even iTunes. I'll write about what I've tried some other time but I'd like to know if there's anything out there I've missed.
Aug 1, 2007 · 2 minute read
After [the last post][1] about Intel vs. AMD in Australian prices, the battle has raged on for control of your CPU slot. Both sides have made price cuts and Intel has actually released a complete line of updated processors. Does this change anything? The first thing that jumps to mind is that Intel and AMd now have processors competing at the exact same price so comparisons are easy! The updated Intel processors feature improved clock speeds and faster front-side buses so overall performance will be (marginally) better.
Read On →
Jul 30, 2007 · 1 minute read
The website on the billboard hell.co.nz is a pizza place (and notice the phone number – 0800 666 111). I wish there was one nearby as I can just imagine the fun you could have: "Where are you off to?" "I'm going to Hell." Or: "Do you want pizza for dinner?" "Go to Hell."
Jul 30, 2007 · 2 minute read
Reviews
Update: You can find my improved English translation here: http://www.chnorton.com.au/files/xinu/UK.php.txt. It seems Smashing Magazine also appreciate Xinu, see it their in list of web designer checkpoints. Xinu is a nifty little web application that collects all sorts of information about a URL that you give it – such as Google PageRank, Alexa ranking, a screenshot, W3C validation results, etc – and displays it all on a single page, in a kind of dashboard style layout.
Read On →
Jul 28, 2007 · 2 minute read
This marks the 50th post that I have written for this blog. The inaugural post was published on the 29th of May – almost exactly 3 months ago – which means I should get cracking writing some more! So far there have been 10 comments, including 3 that I wrote myself. Accompanying those are 7 spam comments that were picked up by Akismet, which is an extremely useful plugin. The blog layout has changed slightly in that time.
Read On →
Jul 27, 2007 · 1 minute read
News
In an interview with J. K. Rowling for the TODAY Show in America, the author has given us some extra tidbits about what has happened with the characters 19 years on. The full article can be found here. As a summary: Harry and Ron are awesome Aurors. Hermione is "high up" in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. The trio "revolutionises" the Ministry of Magic. Luna searches for exotic magical creatures.
Read On →
Jul 26, 2007 · 1 minute read
Yahoo! has released a new Firefox extension called YSlow that plugs into Firebug and gives you additional performance measurements and suggestions for improvement. It measures things like how many HTTP requests your pages requires, whether content is gzipped, if JavaScript files have been minimised and so on. It will give you a quick "grade" for a page to let you judge how many optimisations still need to be performed (my homepage scored a 74 – C; not too shabby).
Read On →
Jul 25, 2007 · 5 minute read
Continuing on from Part 1 and [Part 2][2] of the guide, this post will be about the topics of branching and tagging, two extremely powerful tools you can use when managing your repository. This guide will cover the topics from a Subversion-oriented point of view. Tagging I think tagging is the simpler of the two concepts so I'll start there. Tagging is simple assigning a tag – a name – to a snapshot of your repository.
Read On →
Jul 24, 2007 · 1 minute read
Two quick, yet extremely useful, resources for HTML writing from me today. The first is an HTML elements index that you can use when checking whether or not a tag is supported by the HTML version you're using, or for just seeing what elements are available. The other is the HTML Entity Character Lookup, which gives you a fast and simple way of looking up the HTML entities relating to a character.
Jul 23, 2007 · 13 minute read
Reviews
Many years after I first started reading Harry Potter (about 6 years) the 7th and final book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has been released. I got the book on opening day and I ended up reading through the entire book inside a day, starting at around 10:30am and going until 8pm with only quick breaks in between. Whilst the rest of this post will details some of my initial analysis and thoughts I will say straight up that I thoroughly enjoyed this book and think it the best in the series (although the later books are all really good).
Read On →