Sorry for the absence of pretty much every one last week but life is often too hectic to ever predict.

This post is just really a check out of a FireFox extension I have just installed – Deepest Sender. So far, I can say it is pretty good. For those of you enlightened enough to already use Firefox, visit http://deepestsender.mozdev.org/ and grab a copy for yourself.

It really is worth it.

Well, not wishing to leave a good story down (see magazine cover disk blog entry) and having got the latest copy of .net magazine it seemed reasonable to give them the same level attention PC Plus has had.

First off, I like the magazine. It is useful and informative. It is far from perfect though!

It blurbs it’s cover disk is “worth over £350″…. well really…….

Continue reading →

Click on http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8372603330420559198&q=spore to see the preview of a game that is supposed to be in development. Perservere or fast forward through the explanations and the early stages of the evolution of creatures and worlds. After about 17 minutes you can start to see the possibilities.

This game looks like genius because it brings together aspects of games from the basic Game of Life through Civilisation to galactic war space games. It is very complex, so it doesn’t seem likely to have a very wide appeal except for people who like world building games and would still like them without the preset scenarios. The genius is in design – the amazing levels of interactivity and the incorporation of so many elements. The designers must be both brilliant and blessed/cursed with the most workaholic capacities, because it looks like about ten years’ work just to have prepared the demo and probably half the lifetime of the universe to get a playable game issued. but I look forward to seeing it.

Well, being able to remember the dim and distant days of when PC magazines first started having floppy disks on thier covers with a whole 1.44mb of data may not be a good thing. Recently I was looking through my magazines and I realised just how lame the cover disks have become.

Now, before anyone complains I am going to use this months PC Plus as an example – but it is not the only one. Pretty much any magazine is guilty of the same crimes 🙂 PC Plus is a good magazine and one I have bought numerous copies of.

First, looking back in time to the dark ages of floppy disks on covers. For those of you who dont remember it, this was when the WWW was a foundling at best. People connected to the Internet via 14.4 modems. Systems like archie (veronica et al) and gopher were still in use, and the only way you downloaded software was by arcane command line FTP. (None these evil incarnate file sharing things). Continue reading →

Roman Soldier,
originally uploaded by etrusia_uk.

For info – this is a photo uploaded to flickr showing a roman legionary in lorica segmentata of the type worn in the 1st century AD.

You can read more about this sort of thing on the Roman History website.

Enjoy 🙂

Why oh why are there no simple, straight forward tutorials on things like Ajax? (signed Disgusted, Tonbridge Wells). You would think, given the hype around this new “Web 2.0” (kill me if I ever use that phrase again) and it’s associated technology would have actually produced something of value. But no.

There are tons of articles going on about “how great” AJAX is and how it will revolutionise the web, but the reality is it is very much a niche product. Great for people who want an interface into GoogleMaps for instance – but for 95% of websites does it actually add ANY value what so ever?

I have yet to see an application of this where is has been anything other than eye candy and really, not worth the effort. The technology is not so far removed from the common usage so I assume for normal people it’s not that hard to learn (only dullards like myself struggle with the non-tutorials on the net), but there is still new things to learn. There are new methods of working to be put in place etc., and all these things cost money. What value does AJAX add to a website (or the web in general) that cant be achieved by an existing technology without the training burden and associated costs?

Hopefully someone will prove me wrong here and point to the BESTâ„¢ website on the net…. but I wont hold my breath.

Now, if you really want to see a rant, ask me about web 2.0……….

Tags: AJAX, AJAX Tutorials, Web 2.0, JavaScript, Technology,Web Design

(from http://splasho.com/blog/2006/02/26/the-superbrowser/)

Firefox is definitely growing in popularity (it is used almost exclusively here at Why Dont You and by our linux friends) and this blog entry shows how someone decided to install the “top 100” extensions. While we have never gone this far, as you can read at the blog, despite the strain this must place on FF it has remained stable.

Load time and system resources will inevitably suffer, but the fact that so many programs written by so many different people can work together so well is seriously a testament to the open source movement.

Well done firefox.

The update at http://romans.etrusia.co.uk/ is continuing well. There is a new article on the Roman Army, before and after Marius’ reforms which makes very interesting reading.

Please let us know if you find any other interesting history sites.

Writing .htaccess files is something of an arcane art. The problem discussed previously was to do with not having the obligatory /. However, no sooner had the redirect seemed to be working perfectly when the whole site disappeared under the weight of a 500 error (which is being worke don at this moment.)

First stop on looking for how to switch files to a new location without losing search engine ranking is to use a redirect 301, the syntax for which is on http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_alias.html#redirect

However, to make it clear why and how to do this, there was a fair bit of useful help in more comprehensible English on http://www.tamingthebeast.net/ as well as some (as yet untested but apparently good) Search Engine Optimisation advice.