I recently convinced a friend that the Firebug plug-in for Mozilla FireFox is an essential development tool. Well, it’s now time for me to praise YSlow, an extension to Firebug provided by Yahoo!, that analyses your web site, and recommends how to improve performance in the way of download speed. So if you want to learn how to speed up your web site, read on.
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It’s official. Natalie and I have now officially registered our intent to marry with the local council. Having produced some ID, answered some questions and parted with some dosh, the registrar has approved our application.
So, unless any of you decide to pop into Crewe Town Hall in the next 15 days, and raise any objection, I’m going to be making the biggest commitment of my life!
Yes. You may have noticed that, somewhat belatedly, it has finally sunk in that in a few months time, I’m going to be a kept man.
I want to love Apple Macs. I really do. I want to be like Stephen Fry (in so many ways.. though not all). They look cool, and more importantly, the operating system (OS), Mac OS X, is really rather good. As a Java web developer it is brilliant - the power of unix without the need for me to get my fingers too dirty, plus great graphics support.
Sadly, as good as Apple are at design, marketing and software engineering, they are appalling at manufacturing. Whilst Microsoft’s strategy of leaving the hardware to everyone else initially caused endless problems with driver compatibility, Apple has always insisted that their OS only run on their own hardware.
With this in mind, you’d think that quality control would not be such an issue. Well it is. So much so, that there’s a web site dedicated to listing the defects with their products, and a flickr photos set showcasing one of the many issues.
Here’s my personal, miserable experience so far:
I’m loving this story about John Darwin, the missing canoeist who has recently re-appeared. I haven’t really got much to comment. I just wanted an excuse to bastardise the famous palindrome.
Regardless of the outcome, you can bet John and Anne will make plenty of money form selling their story to the press. And a film must sound tempting.
Interestingly, BBC online shows links to the older articles from when the canoeist went missing. At the time, his wife was quoted as saying:
I have no reason to think he would have left and stage-managed this
Really, Mrs Darwin?
I was reading Simon’s blog today and he was talking about Google analytics, so I decided to take a quick peek at the stats for this site.
I noticed a referral to my entry about public transport from an interestingly titled site - manchestertransportsucks.blogspot.com. No guesses what they blog about. Nice of them to add a link back to my blog. If only thy knew that I work on the National Rail Enquiries site.
Anyway, on their site, I found a link to a much more interesting site called www.traindelays.co.uk. Basically, they assist you in getting compensation for delayed and cancelled trains. And when I say assist, I mean it. Rather than you having to fill in a form and send if off, simply sign up, submit your details and let them take care of it all. Nice.
