Unlike Movable Type, Wordpress doesn’t have a system whereby entries are published to static files, every page is php, including all the index’s and archives so every time the service dishes out a page it’s having to render it. This is my biggest concern, generally my site does feel a little slower, but not so slow that i’d be overly bothered. It’s just if the shared server starts getting bogged down in php it’s surely going to suffer.

On the plus side having all pages dynamic and in a language I familiar with is surely got some potential for reeking havoc.

Something worth noting, wordpress’s “write post” page uses a rich text control of some sort to provide a partial WYSIWYG solution, unfortunately it doesn’t work on Safari, but it does work in gecko based browsers.

The battery recall discussion on MacInTouch is interesting. Seem’s i’m far from the only person who had problems getting the serial code to validate, the consensus is that it’s due to the website being overworked, which in that case isn’t very good from Apple at all because surely it should display an Error, and not a message making out the serial was to fault. They’ve also amended the affected range of battery serials as well, so if yours wasn’t one of the baddens when you first checked it might be an idea to have another quick look-see.

Epipheny, otherwise known as “Web Browser” is yer standard GTK+ affair, once you’ve seen a gnome app you’ve pretty much seen them all. Here we have the default gnome icon-set, which is bland to say the least. What else can you say? It uses the gecko rendering engine i think?

Firefox is as firefox does. I don’t mind firefox’s look, but I don’t feel overly fond of it. In fact I seem to remember preferring the icon-set they used for the mid-beta’s. The firefox interface’s greatest strength in my opinion is its in-line search bar, which camino sadly lacks. Oh, and it’s brilliantly customisable, for instance on the windows edition you can even move any element to the menu-bar, with flexi-spaces and all that. There are many user created icon-sets and skins and what have you, but i’ve yet to find one that isn’t terribly amateurish.

Flock is perhaps too early in development to discuss, but I’m guessing they’re going to stick with this look, which I feel is a little too concepty and clinical. But hey, you can’t knock the professionalism.

Things are lucking up in the Internet Explorer department, it no longer has its own idea of what HTML is, well for the most part anyway. Unfortunately I still cannot get my head around this new design. none of it feels as though it belongs, there are little fidgety icons floating in mid-air.

I’ve never liked any design decisions of KDE’s. It all so icony. It’s all so, if there’s a function there must be an icon for it on the toolbar. It’s the same with every app KDE make. To be fair it is difficult to judge konqueror because it’s final design is pretty much up to do linux distribution. This is kubuntu’s default.

Never liked the design of opera, it’s not as messy as it used to be, but it still looks like they can’t decide where things should go.

Safari is still the browser I use day to day. I’m not even sure why though, it just works I guess? My only gripe with it is that after any amount of time using firefox I get back on safari missing the in-line search feature terribly. The one good thing I can say about it’s looks is that it feels as if it has been designed in order to not take away anything from the website you’re visiting. It’s toolbar kind of stands back and doesn’t try to distract you. Problem is, I haven’t even had a mac for all that long and i’m already growing tired of brushed steel. More plastic please.

I’ve had a mad reading fit today, it’s all this cocoa stuff, its terribly addictive and i’m getting close to declaring that i do not wish to touch any other development architecture, regardless of OS other than cocoa from hence-forth.

I’ve also discovered O’Reilly’s Safari Bookshelf. It’s tricky to describe but really it’s an online library for tech-books. You read them on the website, html style. It’s like a library because you can only have so many books available to you at a time, rather like visiting a library and taking 4 or 5 books away with you. For about 10 USD/mo you have 5 slots, so you can choose 5 books to have access to, and to stop you from simply swapping the books that are in the slots to get around the limit, once a book is in a slot it is stuck there for a month before you can swap it for something else. There’s a 14 day free trial of the 10 slot tarrif. So I say sign up and try and cram 10 books of reading into 2 weeks, after all even if you don’t take up the subscription they can’t take the 10 books worth of knowledge away from you.

It’s not only O’Reilly books on there either, the catalogue is really huge with publishers such as sams, addisen wessley, prentice hall, heck even microsoft press is there.

Previously I would have been put off using such a service because it isn’t comfortable reading long books on a monitor. But now i’ve got a wee diddy ibook I can curl up on my bed and read at leisure, it’s no less cosy than having good old paperback.

Cocoa is tricky to grasp, it’s full of strange terminology that I haven’t come across before, mostly i guess because of objective-c. There’s lots of other strangeities too. I read the bulk of “Learning Cocoa with Objective-C
By Apple Computer, Inc. , James Duncan Davidson” but it left me with more questions than answers, and I have a feeling it may have been written by a schizophrenic as it didn’t seem capable of sticking to the same subject. BUT, there’s a saviour. I’ve started reading “COCOA PROGRAMMING FOR MAC OS X SECOND EDITION By Aaron Hillegass” and I think I’m in love with this guy. It’s one of those things that you cannot explain, why an author is more readable than another, you can’t explain what makes a novel a page-turner just as you can’t explain why it is one tech-book is so easy to follow and learn from whilst another goes in one ear and out the other. I think it might be my favourite tech-book ever, he explains so much detail but it never gets overwhelming, I feel like i’ve learnt more in 10 minutes than I have my whole life. Oh and you know an author is going to be likable when he says “Before going any further, assure yourself that you are not stupid and that some things are just hard. Armed with this silly affirmation and a well-rested mind, you are ready to conquer Cocoa.” He also told me that I need to get 10 hours sleep before starting the book, but I couldn’t wait.

I’m too pooped to bother adding any linkage to this entry lol.

Hows about reading about safari on safari whilst using safari?

Been one of those nudeness kinda days… no not nudeness, nuisance. A nuisance kinda day. Eddie had a dose of worming tablets and it didn’t seem to agree with him. Strange because he’s had them before and they’ve never upset his stomach previously. He puked up all over the living room. He could have just got it all out in one go, but he had to make 4 or 5 little sick patches spread apart. Thanks Eddie.

Also irritating, for the first time in ages I really really really felt like having a good long game on warcraft but the urge just had to coincide with the day they choose to have major server issues didn’t it? They always take the servers down for maintenance on an early Wednesday morning, to be complete by 10am GMT. Only today some of their servers failed to come back to life, including the one my character resides “The Venture Co.” It still isn’t up. Damnit. I’m pretty sure they’ve never been down for more than a few hours previously, so it must be bad

2. Re: 30/11 – Weekly Maintenance | 11/30/2005 2:37:07 AM PST

We have encountered technical difficulties with bringing the following realms back up: [...list of 12 servers...]

We are working hard to solve the issue, but the severity of the problem has resulted in these realms having to stay down for further maintenance. We expect them to be up around 14:00 (Paris Time, UTC/GMT+1).

3. Re: 30/11 – Weekly Maintenance | 11/30/2005 5:33:10 AM PST

The issue encountered earlier has proven to be more difficult than first predicted, and we will not be able to bring the mentioned realms up at the time we first hoped.

We apologise for the inconvenience we know this is causing a lot of players. Our technical department is working very hard to fix the issue and they hope to have it solved by the end of this afternoon.

Wel the end of the afternoon has been and gone. Humph. These are the european servers i’m talking about btw. I don’t think it’s even possible for us to connect to the american ones.

Still no game. Incidentally this is the error message you get when you start the game. Anyone else see a slight problem with it? Yah, when exactly did the 3 hours start? Haha. People seem rather ticked off on the wow forums. Along with the usual people who try to use every situation to blag freebies, oooh oooh ooh can I have a free month for this?? Can I can I?

I have to have that t-shirt, now!

The Internet browser you are using is not supported by OnLine Banking. Use the link below to see the complete list of browsers we support. That’s what the natwest website has been telling me ever since apple updated my OS to 10.4.3. In their list of supported browser’s they include Safari 2.0, as seen as this safari version has only been incremented to 2.0.2 you would think it a no-brainer to treat it the same as 2.0. silly sausages. Natwest really are the pits. Is it wise to tell the world who you have supplying your banking needs? I don’t suppose it really matters, phishers seem to think i have accounts with barcleys, lloyds, halifax even citibank who we don’t even have in this country.

I’m absolutely addicted to Guidebook Gallery, whenever I visit I end up spending hours getting lost in the maze of all the lovely historic screen-shots of systems past. One of my favourites to study is their Mac OS X section. It’s interesting how after so many years of development it took to get it off the ground, how rapidly the interface grew up. In May 1999 it looked like an OS9 clone, but by February 2000 it had already started looking like OS X does today. I find it funny how this screen-shot from the developer preview 4 page looks so much like what microsoft are trying to push with their vista previews, all that unnecessary transparency on the windows borders that Apple obviously decided was a bad idea.