I woke this morning with the plan on spending some time updating mine and a few other sites I have hosted on my Dreamhost account.
But after firing up Coda it reported it could not connect via ftp. So I decided to try standard http, only to find my (and others) down. Off to the Dreamhost site where I find a support blog with this message. Turns out they are moving the cluster my site is hosted on and t will be down for 12+ hours!
WTF! 12 hours and you could not be bothered to actually let me know, you posted it on a blog that I’m not subscribed too, nor did I know I needed to visit. Now I know that my site is not mission critical, in fact the interwebs might not even notice it missing but what about all those people who run a business on their site. You owe it to them to give them advance warning of downtime of this scale. I mean come on I’m sure you can guess our email address!
Over the last few days I having been bringing back my old Vaio laptop from the dead. I purchased the laptop many moons ago, before my adventure into the world of Apple. But once I had found utopia with OSX the little Sony got put away some where and forgotten about. Meanwhile Microsoft have seen sense and 180’d on their views and IE8 will be the first fully functional standards aware MS web browser. The beta landed at the beginning of March and I’ve been keen to try it out. So what better chance to format, install and rebuild the once forgotten machine. So off I went, install XP, service pack, updates, more updates. Now onto web browsers, update to IE7, then find the IE8 beta page. Right install. Whilst I was watching the bar as it checks for web updates I thought to myself will this install over IE7? Or will I have to versions of IE I can play with? It was the first, installed over version 7, so all I have is IE8 beta. Not a problem as also installed on there is Firefox, Opera and Flock (got me some browser love going on). Thinking nothing about it went about my routine. Ahh rumours of Service Pack 3 for XP are running through the vines, lets do an update and see what is about. As most people know, windows updates are just web pages with activeX magic that update your system, but they need to be run from Internet Explorer. But here is the kicker, not from IE8! On firing up the update screen I was greeted with an error screen to say my browser was not supported and that I should be using IE5.5 or higher. Clever that I always though that 8 was higher than 5. Panic set in as I thought I have now upgraded the only web browser that will work with Windows Update to a browser that it not know by Windows Update! But to my saving IE8 has a clever little feature ‘Emulate IE7’ this not only makes pages look like they would in IE7 but also convinces Windows Update that you can update your installation.
It feels like ages since I’ve put together one of those more personal posts were I go on about stuff that no one else really understands.
But today has been one of those crazy lazy Sundays that has left me feeling quite content. Which is strange for tomorrow morning Lucy is once again off on business, this time she is only heading over to France and only for a week.
But in light of that we decided to have a day of just chilling out and sorting out.
Strange how I have not completed any of those ‘things’ that I think I should be doing, maybe they are just not that important after all?
I’ve not worried about if I should be doing this or being somewhere, instead I’ve just let go and enjoyed some spare time. Think I need to try this more often as there is more to life than worrying about deadlines and keeping up with the Jones. Plenty of time next week for that…
Yesterday saw the release of Ghosts I-IV from NIN. Not only was this release not really publicised but it was also following in a similar track of Radio head and their In Rainbows album. Not quite a ‘pay what you feel’ option but some seriously price reduced DRM free chunage. Being quite a closet NIN fan I wanted to download this, but I decided to go with the free 9 track starter pack and if impressed I would payz my wayz and invest further. But due to the popularity of the event my download was bumming out all over the place. I must have tried 30 times and not got further than 700kb of the 82mb download. Frustrated I turned to the only service I knew could help; sure enough Twitter came through. Turns out that Trent had released an official copy of the album and it was on The Pirate Bay. So a torrent file later I’m enjoying the new NIN album. But it got me thinking, I’ve just downloaded music from a p2p service, will the feds be knock my door down tonight? With all the talk in the news of British ISP’s planning on cutting down and banning offenders of sharing music and files via peer sharing, where does this all end? Of course p2p software uses certain ports which is where your ISP is looking, plus your excessively high bandwidth! I opened up those ports and joined the millions of users out there sharing files; legal or otherwise. Yet there was nothing illegal about my actions. I was following a free download, by the artist themselves, to a known torrent tracking website to download music in the most frowned upon manor. How will this all turn out? How will ISP’s know what is legal p2p sharing versus the illegal side?
Jon Hicks has been ‘fiddling’ with his site; his words not mine.
If you take a visit over there you might notice some good looking heading tags. Or you might not. Why is that?
Jon has decided to target specific fonts in the CSS. Normally when declaring fonts in a tag you would go some thing along the lines of a couple of system fonts and then a font family:
body { font-family: “Arial Black”, “Helvectica Bold”, sans-serif }
But Jon has broken the mold (again) and selected some fonts that are not present on your standard OS installation. Have a look (sorry Jon I’ve just copied your code)
body { font-family: “P22 Underground Pro”, “P22 Johnston Underground”, “P22 Underground”, “Gill Sans”, “Gill Sans MT”, GillSans, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; }
As you can see the first three fonts are definitely not an OS standard.
This in my mind is a brilliant substitute to font replacement hacks and tricks. But how far do you go to catch everyone and every font type. Luckily for me I got to view the site from a machine with P22 Underground installed. But after a quick trip to Font Explorer I de-activated the font and presto; Gill Sans!
Whilst you could get carried away with this and apply different fonts to all manor of tags and elements, what effect will it have on your page loading and the load on the CSS file?
I spent my lunch hour reading through Mike’s brilliantly well written article about the differences between the proposals for both html 5 and xhtml 2.0.
Normally something like this would not have engaged my full attention but recently I have really been trying to touch up on my standards; for reasons that will get explained later.
But reading through this I found myself already seeing the code and putting ideas into place. I’m not going to re-trace the points; your better off reading the original.
Whilst some of the ideas are stunning and a complete piece of ‘why was that that not thought of earlier’ such as nl list’s for navigation. I can not see it being a mass migration to new methods.
Lets be honest even now we can not get all browsers to play friendly and support the elements we have got. Add some more new clever bits in there and I can only see a mess of broken sites; I’m looking at you Internet Explorer!
That said there is definitely some interesting times ahead and they will both have their set purpose on and in the interwebs. The development of these two standards is something to keep an eye on.
For the last couple of evenings when I have been out running round Sudbury I have noticed an abundance of other runners and joggers out there.
On one run I actually saw the same person twice! Once within the first 2 minutes and then on the last leg.
You could say that there are still plenty of people out there taking up their New Years resolutions and keeping fit.
Personally I like to think that Apple/Nike have done their thing and promoted more people to get out there and run; they all have iPods (the ‘mug me’ white cables say so) and so they might all be Nike+ users. Hell they might even have seen my ‘round the block’ route and been trying it out.
If you are a runner or jogger from the Sudbury area drop me a line, would be good to see how many there are out there.
Let’s be honest, since its launch back in March 2007 it has not exactly been as big as can be expected. Yet I have always had a little flame for the media box that is AppleTV and often found myself stopping by the Apple store with my mouse hovering over the ‘Add To Basket’ button. Earlier this month Uncle Steve decided to have another go at the AppleTV market with Take Two. A software update to the AppleTV that would allow better streaming (no PC required) improved online photo’s with the addition of Flickr but also the ability to take advantage of iTunes new movie rental service. All of this with a reduced price ticket. With my current media setup I have all my music stored on my main machine; a G5 up in an office space in the loft. But when I want to chill out with some music I stream it down to my Mac Notebook that can be plugged into the household stereo. But what about those time when I want to listen to some music and still surf from the comfort of my sofa, well I end up with the head phones on and being anti-social. So having an AppleTV that I can stream too whilst keeping my laptop free would be awesome. Yet not awesome enough for me to swallow the £199 price tag; so that mouse kept on moving past the buy it now button. But now they have thrown in Flickr integration and a cheaper price I’m 99% sold. So I make my way back only to find no price reduction. Now I know the dollar is not doing great to the pound but if you compare it, US priced AppleTV: £115 after the promised price reduction. In the UK it is still £199 with no price reduction in sight. Of course us UK residents are quite used to not getting all the services from the off. The movie downloads will not be here until ‘later this year’ which is just before ‘around that time’ if your curious. But this is all down to that DRM bug that makes every one sweat and panic. Yet this is a price reduction, not a service, not something that needs an infrastructure to prepare. So come on, just knock £50 off the price, be done with it and wait for some orders. I for one would purchase it.
You have read that right, I am without iPhone.
My beloved little gadget; the third arm I have learnt to live with; the grail of all Apple products has broken.
It all started with a bike ride. The phone was in my pocket, as I do nearly every day, yet this time when I went to retrieve my phone I noticed it was turned off.
I hit the ‘home’ button to check and sure enough nothing. So I tried the power button, still nothing.
Did I not charge it?
Was it flat?
Not convinced by this I connected it too my G5 to check. For once I was not greeted by the little two-tone connection noise, instead I got more of the same; nothing!
No idea what has happened, the phone was not knocked, dropped or abused in any other way. There are no visible signs of damage or malfunction, just a dead phone. So back to Apple we go.
The only problem I have now is learning to live without it. I can manage a lack of text messages and phone calls but I miss the extra bits the most. Checking my emails on the fly, updating my Twitter status on the move, checking my feeds on the toilet. How will I cope!
