Monthly Archives: August 2008

Random Notes

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This week, I was very saddened to hear of the passing of Leroi Moore of the Dave Matthews Band. I’ve been a big fan for years of Leroi and his spectacular abilities on the saxophone. He’s gone way too soon from this world, and I’m certain will be mourned by millions. Thanks so much for sharing your gift while you were here, Leroi.

I finished the development of the ecommerce side of the blaq design website. The technology is something I’m very proud of. Seriously, even if you’re not interested in bikes and whatnot, go take a look at the product catalog for the web design aspects. It’s all pimped out with a ton of cool javascript-y features. The site is still a little bit slower than I’m really a fan of, but that’s something I plan on focusing on in the near term.

I’m turning thirty next Tuesday. Oh well, can’t fight it. I’m still in decent health and have a great career going, so I’m happy. Still, bummer to leave my twenties.

I can’t stop watching the Olympics. Seriously, it’s damaging my sleep in a bad way. Luckily, they’re over on Sunday, but right afterwards it’s time for the Democratic and Republican conventions, which will occupy me as well. And after all that, Castle Crashers is coming out next week on XBLA. Here’s a little promo for them

Castle Crashers

Opera 9.5 – Fantastic Software

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Opera 9.5

I’ve spent about a year off of Opera, given the rocky start I had with it. I don’t remember the exact version of Opera I last used, but it had some major issues with Flash and whatnot. The thing I remembered about it was that what it did, I liked, but there were just some dealbreakers in it. I can remember enjoying the gesture-based browsing as a decent, fun feature. So, when it came down to it, I gave it a little of a time off to mature a bit. Who can blame me – Firefox has been doing some amazing stuff in the past few years, and I was having a lot of fun with it.

I recently came back to it on the recommendation of a friend who had a similar previous experience with it as I had. What an upgrade it’s made! It’s gotten all of it’s multimedia woes wrapped up and it’s actually introduced a lot of great new features to the web browsing experience. The gesture-based shortcuts are stll there, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Their speed dial feature is great – basically, it’s like visual bookmarks, and shows up on your empty tabs to allow you to quickly access them. The download manager is great, and it supports bit torrent by default – win! The design of the browser is tight – it’s cleaned and uncluttered, and it maximizes your screen real estate. It’s got a great right-click menu that has an ‘Open With’ option that can send a page to a different browser – a superb developer feature.

There are also developer tools for it in beta now – a suite called DragonFly. So, if Opera has DragonFly and FireFox has FireBug, staying on the same theme, I think IE should create developer tools called Dung Beetle :) By the way, Opera has one of the most standards-compliant DOM browsing experiences to be had. They’re right up there with Safari on that ground (but I don’t like how Safari renders fonts and a few other things – icky, nothing I’m a fan of it at all).

Seriously, if you haven’t had a chance to try Opera lately (or ever), now is as great a time as any to do so. I’m definitely going to split time between it and FireFox more – it’s a great piece of software that’s at home on any desktop.

iPhone Updates for WordPress

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There’s a handy new WordPress iPhone/iPod Touch app that enables connectivity to your WordPress blog for easy management – writing articles, managing comments, etc. The best part is that it works with both WordPress.com and any self-installed blogs (like my own).

I recently converted from an iPod Touch to an iPhone, so this is hopefully going to be a great productivity gainer for me – instead of having downtime while waiting for someone or whatnot, I can manage my blog from just about anywhere. The unfortunate part is that I’m in need of upgrading my blog before I can take advantage of it – it requires 2.5.1 or greater of WordPress. Either way, that’s not a big deal. I’ve upgraded WordPress a few times, and they all seem to go very smoothly.