Woo! It’s FireFox update day! I’m lovin’ the new features in 1.0PR like the rss integration, tweaked theme, faster UI, etc. It’s just so much better than Internet Explorer I don’t know where to start. If you haven’t switched, do so now.
If you’re looking for an Outlook alternative there is also FireFox’s sister project Thunderbird . This became my preferred news client after Outlook drove me up the wall with its incessant crashing and generally being lame and un-responsive.
Adam is back in Edinburgh after his industrial placement at Rolls-Royce. He’s finally had time to do a re-design of his site and has gone for the “oh so cool” photo at top. I hear it’s what all the cool kids are doing…
The Beasties have a new single out: ‘Triple Trouble’. It uses the hook from Rappers Delight and is just superb. As usual they also have a hilarious video that just has to be seen.
Yes, the first Mario game came out 19 years ago today in Japan in 1985. To celebrate this I give you these images:
My ex-colleague from Waterstones, Joe has set up a new blog for the SF book club that he runs at the east end branch in Edinburgh. Expect the usual Joe madness along with some book chat.
Mozilla have had a bit of a re-design. I like it.
As you can see (except you rss feed slackers) I now have a side navigation bar/box thing. You can hide it by clicking the little triangle up in the top-right corner there. I always wanted some more navigation on here but I really didn’t like the menus that I had. But, I don’t want the navigation to clutter up the place. A hideable side bar solves the problems nicely. I did have to use a tiny bit of javascript but it works in Firefox, IE, Camino, Safari and Opera so I’m content 🙂
My good pal Alex has recently been promoted within Waterstones to a buying position based in big ol’ London. He moved their yesterday, on the train, more of an advance party I think. He’ll most likely be without any kind of ‘net connection for a while, but has just got a new bling-bling mobile that comes with a ton of free picture messages. Being the enterprising geek that he is he’s going to put those free picture messages to use with the free photo log service provided by phlog.net. He’s already started documenting his adventures including a blow-by-blow account of his delays on the train journey down. Have a look at what will no doubt evolve into an interesting small-ginger-man-in-London photo-blog.
Looks like the free .info domains offer wasn’t a scam. Amazing. I now have :
cyber-junky.info
ojackson.info
oliverjackson.info
ollyj.info
ollyjackson.info
all pointing at cyber-junky.co.uk.
Pretty sweet, if a little pointless 😉
Just noticed International Talk Like A Pirate Day is coming up. Yarha! me hearties!
This place is doing free .info domain registrations. There doesn’t seem to be a limit on how many you can register either. No doubt there is a catch somewhere but I regged about ten just now to see how it goes. http://ollyjackson.info and http://oliverjackson.info could be live sometime tomorrow.
J 5 inna hizzy!
Went to see Jurassic 5 at the Corn Exchange last Wednesday, I’ve basically been too slack to blog it so far. They were pretty awesome. I’ve never really seen any big hip-hop/raps acts live before so it was a lot of fun. The crowd were totally up for it, lots of hands in the air, bigging it up. They did all the faves and actually interacted with the crowd loads. It seemed liked they actually gave a crap about us, the audience. Which was nice.
Of course, I had to buy one of their sweet t-shirts while I was there. Cheaper than buying them from their online shop aswell 🙂
This whole thing with Mark Thatcher (Scratcher lol) is pretty crazy. Him and his ex-SAS buddies were going to stage a coup in Equatorial Guinea. Gee…what is there in Equatorial Guinea? Oh! Oil! I can only think that this kind of thing is going to happen more and more. If the oil runs out in the middle east or it becomes even more un-settled then “entrepreneurial” people may start looking at these small (corrupt) oil-rich African nations. Get a hundred or so mercs, some weapons from South Africa and then stage a coup and rake in the cash.
I am back and installed at Ian‘s flat. This is Good News. No longer do I have the ~2 hour commute every morning. The extra lie-in on Monday was so good.
Green Day also seem to have a new album out. There’s new stuff coming out all over the place at the moment. I noticed that they also picked up a life-time achievement type thing at the Kerang awards the other week.
I’ve been hearing some good things about the new prodigy album. I’ve caught bits of the single on radio1 and it sounds pretty darn good. Think I may have to pick it up once pay day comes around.
Fatboyslim also seems to have a new single out which is the usual much repeated sample thing. It’s kinda annoying at first but I’m sure it will grow on me as most of his stuff does.
Work is pretty constant at the moment with lots of design “look n feel” changes on our main store. We finally managed to drag www.scotwebshops.com kicking and screaming out of html 4 hell. It took some convincing as it wasn’t a “critical” project but we managed it in the end :).
I’m feeling a bit nomad-like at the moment. I’m still without flat and for the last week have been staying at Kerry’s down in Selkirk. I’m staying there next week and then I think I’m back to Ians place for a wee while. Staying in Selkirk is a nice change from the city but the hour and a half+ bus ride in is a bit of a drag at times.
Also, I’m without internet when I’m not at work so if the blog/email is a bit quiet you know why.
Travelling is strange at times. One minute I can be sipping coffee in the dawn sun at home in chemical suburb Billingham. In an hour I can be climbing over mine spoil heaps in Nenthead with rabbits scampering around and grouse flying overhead. Give me another couple of hours and I can be back in the city muggy-heat of Edinburgh with the smell and sounds of the festival on the air.
Monday? Already? gah! Weekend was very busy and fun. Kerry and I got the train down to my parents on Friday night for my Mums birthday celebrations. We had a nice lazy Saturday morning with a huge array of food for brunch. In the early evening my sister and I got the barby going and cooked a great dinner. We had bacon steaks, huge burgers, thin beef steak, blackpudding….yum yum.
On Sunday we all piled into both cars and set off to Nenthead to show John and Kerry around the museum and site. The weather was gorgeous for the most part with some random light showers. Us kids went down the mine aswell about an hour after we got there. It was very cool and peaceful down there and we were absolutely ravenous when we got out. All in all a good day. I should really finish their website for them…
I received a very nice email from Blake Ross of the Mozilla FireFox team the other day. They are obviously trawling the web for blogs making nice comments about FireFox. The email was basically asking me to post a link graphic to FireFox on my page. Which I more than willing to do. So there it is, down at the bottom there. I utilised the “sliding door” image roll-over technique from a.l.a. to do the nice colours.
Well, that was not fun. I’m now installed (temporarily) at my very, very generous friend Ian’s flat. It took literally the whole weekend to get all my junk shifted. Plus, this wasn’t the junk-junk, I’d already weeded that out. On Saturday the other Ian brought his car to help me with the really big stuff, which was jolly nice. We thought that would leave a small amount of stuff to do on Sunday. It didn’t. I miscalculated the extent of my junk. Needless to say, when I move to the new place I’ll be hiring a van and/or some llamas.
Whilst the fabled flat move of doom is in progress it looks like I will have No Internet. Expect a slight lack of blogging and then an almighty splurge whenever I get somewhere with an IP address…
“Amidst all the various Doom ports and expansions, we are starting up on our next game. It will have a new rendering engine, which will be keeping me busy for a while, but the only other thing we are saying for now is that it won’t be a sequel to any of our previous work.”
-John Carmack
Could be worth keeping an eye on: Guardian Games Blog
I especially like the ad on the back of the bus in the last one.
I’m always taking snaps of any cool stencilling or grafitti I see around town. I’ve been meaning to setup some kind of site for them all and I’ve finally got around to it. Check it out here: http://urbanart.cyber-junky.co.uk.
Not to jump on the bandwagon with this no-www thing, but I’ve not been using the ‘www’ bit of my domain for years. It always did seem a bit silly. My browser browses the World Wide Web, why should I have to put www in front of every domain name? Chopping the ‘www’ off makes sense. I remember back in the day when a few sites obviously discovered the magic of dns suddently had ‘www2‘ in their domain. We were amazed! “Is this the second, secret internet??”.
Firefox is the best browser out at the moment. If you’re still using Internet Explorer, stop, now. Browsing around their site yesterday I found they had a new release out which fixes a couple of bugs. They don’t seem to announce the 0.0.1 releases which is strange. It’s now on 0.9.2 and has nicely funked up icons. Whilst I was there I noticed the increasing selection of Extensions. Extensions are a genius feature where developers can extend the functionality without reinventing the wheel. I’ve now get a spellchecker installed and the very useful Web Developer plugin.
First pay of proper job! Woo! Plus its all the part-time I did last month and all of this months full-time. Cha-ching. I am in my overdraft no more.
Messing around with amazon’s xml-soap interface:
http://cyber-junky.co.uk/projects/amazon/test.php?keyword=banana
replace keyword with whatever you want to search for.
Been tweaking and re-coding bits of the site. As promised there is now an archives page, which lives way down the bottom there in the ‘WordPress stuff’ box. I’ve also added an ‘other blogs’ menu up on the top. These are basically all the site/blog/magazines that I read probably every day. I’m slowly xhtml-ifying and css-orising the gallery which was written back in the halcyon days of html 4 transitional. Don’t click validate on that page at the moment, it’s not pretty.
I just realised that the 20th was my two year blogging aniversary. Man, two years… It doesn’t seem that long. Anyway, for nostalgias sake here is my first blog entry. Fascinating eh? I really need to sort out the archives linkage so you can browse back over my gripping life.
One of my favourite films.
Alex at work has recently finished the companies latest pet project. We got an article in yesterdays Herald and there is a big fancy “press event” this Thursday. Should be interesting to see what the general public reaction is, some of the kilts are pretty “out there”.
I am now officially on the Ben flat hunt team. We have our max price, we know our room requirements. All that is left to do is view some flats. Wish me luck tomorrow morning on the phone…
Hrmmmm, interesting: Pattern Recognition (2006)
Jurassic 5 are on at T On The Fringe on the 1st September. I discovered these guys last year and it was one of those moments when you wonder how you couldn’t have know about them already. If you know what I mean…
I really, really need to get off my ass and find a flat. I’ve only got two and a bit weeks left here and I don’t want to be stuck in somewhere crappy.
Interesting article on Wired about designers who redesign other companies inaccessible websites.
All very topical at the moment after the morons at Odeon closed down the Accessible Odeon site.
I finally managed to get the new design online. I should I have pointed out that the post below was a photoshop mockup. When comparing it against whats online now it’s suprisingly close. The shadow on the background was inspired by Alex’s background shadow technique. The drop down menus are ‘Suckerfish’ menus taken from A List Apart. They still have some bugs on Safari and Opera but seem to be working ok on IE and FireFox. Its not perfect on IE but it’s usable. I’m making use of IE only css with the star html selector bug. I’ve also converted to xhtml mainly because I’m using it at work and cause its pretty neat. I had to use yet another IE hack to get it work in IE and yet still validate.
I’ve also moved from MoveableType to WordPress for the blog engine. Mainly becuase MT was just getting too clunky and annoying. The final straw was when I realised I couldn’t use completely custom archive templates. I needed to put php in them, and I couldn’t. I was letting MT get away with stuff because I though changing over would be a hassle. I was wrong, the WordPress install is a dream, a million times easier than MT. It also managed to import all my MT blog entries perfectly. Which is pretty darn good.
Overall I’m lovin’ it. What do you think?
“During a Q&A with id CEO Todd Hollenshead, Todd confirms the already stated plan for id’s next internal project to be an entirely new intellectual property, and drops the news along the way that some unnamed third party is currently at work on an as-yet not officially announced sequel to Return to Castle Wolfenstein, the World War II shooter originally built on Quake III technology.”
sweet
(from bluesnews)
The intelligence: flawed
The dossier: dodgy
The 45-minute claim: wrong
Dr Brian Jones: vindicated
Iraq’s link to al-Qa’ida: unproven
The public: misled
The case for war: exaggerated
And who was to blame? No one
great, that was time well spent then.
What do you think?
Its a bit plain at the moment, but I’m lovin’ the fixed-width centred column look. I really want a largish image on there somewhere (with my own photos) and some nice vertical scrolling for the blog text. I may try moving away from shades of grey (gasp!). Basically I just want cyber-junky to be my blog and then I’ve got a separate portfolio site in the works. I’ve also got to put some effort into the ninjahosting site and finish the “ninja gallery” that Alex, Ian and I are supposed to be developing.
HULK’S DIARY – made me laugh
Defense Tech – military technology blog that is full of interesting Iraq news at the moment
Federation of American Scientists – huge site that contains oodles of information about intelligence, weapons etc
Many thanks to Jed for pointing out that the Film Festival programme is out for this August.
Some good stuff aswell: Tokyo Godfathers, Primer and Mirrorball Japan all look very interesting.
