IMS_Blog

Following the addition of a search box to the navigation menu, I’ve added a search box to allow easier searching of the blog archives. I don’t know if it will stay, mainly due to the fact it seems quite tricky to style form elements (might have to do some reading up on that). It’s there at least for the moment though. Easier than trawling through the archives week by week.

For Julie and Al, photos from the wedding here!

I haven’t blogged it because it it’s all over the place but it’s been a couple of days so here goes. Mozilla Firebird, the development next generation from the Mozilla foundation, has changed name to Mozilla Firefox. It’s still a wonderfull, lean, mean and above all fast browser but FireFox. In the space of five minutes reading the MozillaZine Forums I’d seen at least half a dozen better names. It’s accepted that for various reasons FireBird had to go, but why FireFox? What does that mean. It’s just cringe worthy. It’s a reference to a name which only those in the know would appreciate when it’s supposed to be a name to attract new users. If you must change the name ditch the old one completly if you like but don’t come up with a terrible compromise.
And then there are the problems. Extensions failing to be compatable, the browser failing to start, installer problems. The code was held back for ages because of the name change, why weren’t the problems sorted then. Because of the complete lack of transparent communication. Apparently, according to Ben Goodger, FireFox isn’t a community project. Someone should tell the community of users (and for users one might read beta testers) who feed back to the project. Why did no one ask them for name suggestions, even if the final decision for obvious reasons would have been with the exclusive clique of developers who were in the know? Did the fact that the name was going to change have to be kept that secret? At least his MozillaZine posting shows he at least realises what’s important for FireFox (the ability to easily switch and a lack of future upgrade problems). If only he’d talk to those testers (or users if you prefer) more.

Ahhh. I seem to have managed to bugger up my Mozilla profile on my laptop. This isn’t much of a problem (can quickly restore the bookmarks, address book etc) but it seems to have forgotten the passwords to a lot of sites, and I can’t really remember half of them! ahhh.

This has been linked all over the web, but it’s just so laughable that I have to mention it. Cleaning up Frontpage, eh. First saw it linked to from mezzoblue. Just in case the add vanishes (and it’s even more laughable that it hasn’t been removed yet), the original image is here.
For those wondering exactly what’s wrong with M$’s latest ad, see the comments to this post.

Well, that wasn’t too painful thanks to the power of CSS. A few tweaks later and we have the current blog style. The layout’s the same, but it’s a lot less harsh I feel; a lot cleaner.
Not a hair of markup was harmed in the making of this transition (i.e. I didn’t touch the HTML markup one bit. I didn’t even remove a few
tags which were causing problems in the links boxes. Simply applied display:none to them instead ;)
So there it is, feel free to tell me what you think. If your reading this never having seen the old style, a screenshot taken just before the change is here. For the sake of prosperity, a screenshot of the new style applied is here.
Let me know what you think :-)

Edit: I’m beginning to distinctly dislike IE. Just had to play around a bit to stop the post times going wandering off to some random place :( Fixed now anyway.

OK, sod it, I’m doing it. Changing the styling of this blog to something a little better. So if things look completly disjointed when your reading this, that’s probably why!

Grrr, don’t have time. That’s why there’s never much published to this blog. I was going to redo the style to be more like the nav menu, but I simply haven’t gotten round to it (I’m disliking this pinky red now though). Been playing with the new website for the Surface Physics Group instead (I’ll post a link when it’s live-very soon). And there’s my PhD of course…

Daniel Glazman’s Disruptive Innovations has just released the first look at Nvu, the web page authering software developed for Lindows.com and closely related to Mozilla Composer. Nvu 0.1 Beta, whilst developed for Lindows, is also available for other linux distros and Windows: Nvu Download Page. Nvu looks like it might be a very nice utility, so let’s see how disruptive this innovation is.

May I just give a nod to Blogpatrol for free blog counter/stats. There are actually a couple of counters/stats collectors running on my pages, not that you’ll see anything cause I’m too sneaky for that :-)

I blogged it dying, so I’ll mention its resurection. Spirit, the Mars rover, is alive. Reminds one of the joke, the only thing common to all unix flavours is the message of the day reminding users to clean up their files. Remember people, keep those files in check. Well done the NASA and JPL guys for getting it back up and running.

Hmm, I’m wondering if this wouldn’t look a little better if I sort of followed the style of the navigation bar. That would probably be a bit more simplistic looking, though the layout would probably stay roughly the same. I might create an alternate stylesheet to see how it looks.