supersonic feet

In my early-morning check of the football sites to see who Newcastle’s been linked to buying today, I came across an interesting error on Sky Sports’ site: they’d seemingly run out of either bandwidth or processing power and the server was busy.

Aside from the surprise at a site as big as Sky Sports getting too busy on a Monday morning and being unable to serve content, I found it most funny that they then try to sell you their TV/broadband package - the inference presumably being that with Sky Broadband the site would have loaded fine for you.

As I’m sitting in the office on a fat connection, it’s not a problem of speed on this end. That means they’re either giving preference to their own broadband users (fair enough, I suppose, but a bit of a hassle) or it wouldn’t actually make any difference. Either way, trying to sell me their broadband (which you have to buy their TV package to get) while their website is effectively broken doesn’t seem to me the best testimony of their quality Internet service.

Ho hum.

As I looked at my taskbar yesterday and saw three different text editors/IDEs open at once, it brought home the fact that there’s no one tool that’s the best for any job. At the time I had Zend IDE, jEdit and RadRails open on my work PC, while my laptop had Komodo on the go.

So why not just use one for everything? Because different editors have different features that help when developing in various languages. RadRails has built-in tabs for running generator scripts or quickly starting and stopping Webrick servers. jEdit allows you to clone/split windows infinitely to make better use of the space on your screen. It’s unlikely any editor will notch up all the features you like as well as support all the programming languages you use (though it’s easier if you just use the one language), so we’re stuck switching between apps.

As such, here’s my personal view on each of the editors installed on my computers, either at home or work: (more…)

Another idea for a text editor/IDE feature along the lines of my previous suggestion on keeping track of things when programming: where you’ve got files from two or more different projects open at once (happens a lot for me as clients phone in asking for quick changes), why not colour-code the file tabs based on the project they’re in?

With a colour-blind brother I’m aware that colour-coding can be awkward, so perhaps some other visual aid should be added too, such as a simple number/abbreviation/symbol in front of the file name to further differentiate. Here’s an idea with the colours based on RadRails (sorry, for a quick idea in a blog post you don’t get the symbols too):

Assign each project a colour and symbol as you create it and in theory at least you can then more easily tell which of the two tabs labelled’application_controller.rb’ it is you want to click on. It would certainly be easier than either clicking  on every file tab with the same name until you get the right one, or hovering slowly over each to reveal the full  path to the file and figure it out from there.

As part of my work at Net Effects, since Christmas last year I’ve been working on a new online shopping system wherever other client work allows. For a good few years, Net Effects have run an online shopping site called UK Shopability but when I joined the company last year they had already started getting a bit fed up with the old system.

The old Shopability suppliers stopped doing online mail order recently, having been bought out, so the decision was made to start a new site to re-launch the whole thing, working with the main distributor of disability products. And thus was born Disability Warehouse, an online shop for disability-related products.

We opened the site up to orders a couple of days ago and already a few have been coming through despite not advertising the site yet, so it’s looking good.

The site uses AJAX in places (mainly for adding an item to your cart and admin functions), though this is a site aimed at users with disabilities so it degrades properly if JavaScript is turned off and just submits a form the old-fashioned way. Some bits of the site are still being fine-tuned (e.g. product images that are missing), but the site is ready to go which is why it’s now open to sales without much fanfare - we’ll get a low volume of real sales to start to make sure everything really does work (it does so far!) before we ramp up to inviting all the many customers over from the old Shopability site.

I would have posted this on Friday, but I’ve been having severe trouble with my site going down so here it is now…

Via CSS Beauty, I found .net magazine’s 20 pro tips article online. It’s an article listing 20 tips for writing better HTML/CSS, apparently handed down by professionals. It then goes on to list some helpful tips as well as some unhelpful or plain contradictory ones.

The main one that got me was tip 14: use semantic markup which followed on to the contradictory tip 17 on wrapping textaround images. Tip 14 is sensible - use semantic markup when writing your HTML (though it lacks any info for the uninitiated as to what semantic markup actually is, or links to places to find out).

Tip 17 then provides, as .net describes it (quite accurately), “a quick and dirty way of wrapping text around images”. They suggest using the align=”left” (or “right”, etc.) attribute in the image tag. What happened to semantic markup and doing any kind of presentation in the CSS? Would it have been that hard to provide a CSS class to do the alignment and explaining why that’s a better way of doing things? After all, these are ‘pro tips’, not ‘HTML techniques from the pre-standards era’.

Tip 9 uses the inline style attribute as well. Why? In other tips they provide CSS definitions so they’re obviously assuming their readers can figure out how to use separate stylesheets. Rather than have style=”..”, provide the CSS:

form {
margin:0;
padding:0;
}

It’s no wonder people end up writing poor code when the major magazine in the UK on web development is providing pro tips that are anything but. I actually had to check that CSS Beauty hadn’t accidentally linked to an article from a few years ago, but no - it really was added just this month.

My copy of Ruby for Rails, by David A. Black, arrived today and looks pretty good. It’s aimed at teaching Ruby itself, but in terms of how it can then be used for Rails application development, which is just what I’m after - seeing some more of the power of the Ruby language that I’m no doubt missing out on up to now.

Now that’s a nice surprise - browsing play.com and finding there’s a new J5 album out next week.

Pre-ordered.

Done.

After hankering after trying OS X for quite a while, I’m pretty much decided on going for a Macbook now that Windows can be run on Intel Macs. So much so that I just bought Parallels in advance (virtualisation software that allows you to run Windows and any other OS alongside OS X). Well, the introductory price offer does run out tomorrow

Now all I need to do is raise the cash to buy a Macbook. I reckon I can do so by selling my video camera (Sony DCR-SR90/100) followed by my existing Windows laptop. The video camera was only bought in May, but after my two week road trip, I found that I basically just didn’t use it. I’m very keen on still photography so lugging a camcorder around as well as my EOS 350D (plus spare lens) was too much on holiday and in the end we only used the camcorder from the car (largely trying to capture the V6 roar going through tunnels in the Alps).

So as cool a piece of kit as it is, it’s not something I’m likely to use enough following my holiday experience - if I didn’t use it then, when will I? As such, it’ll be going on ebay soon in the hope I can make most of my money back.

If I get the Sony sold, I should be pretty close to getting a Macbook (hopefully close enough to buying one before having to part with the Dell D410 laptop). If I can then get a decent price for the Dell I should be sorted.

Yes I’m impatient and stupid

Just finished the coding on my first (work) Rails project yesterday. We’re still waiting for the finished logo and content from the client though, so I’ll wait for that before posting a link as I doubt people will be too impressed with pages labelled things like ‘Blibble’.

Microsoft shuts down Windows 98 - they’re finally ending support for the Win98 operating system. It astounds me that anyone who uses their computer more than very occasionally could still be using it, but there are a lot of people who still do (according to the BBC article, 70 million of them!).

I reckon anyone who’s still running the same PC they bought 8 years ago should be congratulated for somehow managing to not have any major part/software failures in that time, but still pointed in the direction of a cheap XP computer (which will presumably be supported for a few more years yet with Vista only out next year).