If you have been reading the old articles here (especially this one) you will be more than aware of the current situation regarding my opinion of AJAX and all the modern buzz words zinging their way around the net

Despite this, there is no escape from the fact that if you want to maintain any ability to earn an income online – even just pin money from Google Adsense – then you need to keep up with the latest trends. As “industries” go, the web industry is by far the worst for destroying existing skill sets for no apparent reason.

Anyway, enough ranting. This is a normal technology post not a sixteen thousand word rant.

The current situation, is that despite my misgivings and opinion on the transitory nature of the current “buzzword tech” I have been put in the position where I have little choice but to catch up with AJAX and rapidly get to grips with what it can offer. The problem this created is that I truly have NO idea what applications are best suited to AJAX or how to actually add value to a website by using it. I honestly cant find a decent project to use as a learning curve.

Well, this is the internet so off to Google I go. A quick search on AJAX tutorials produces a LOT of hits (as you can see, there were over five and half million when I did it). It seems that there are lots of people not only well ahead of me in the understanding stakes but they also have a lot of spare time to make tutorials….

The good thing about this is that not only does it give me some starting points to learn about AJAX but hopefully it will give me at least a running chance of working out something useful to do with it… Sadly, based on the AJAX implementations I have seen to date, I am not holding my breath about this.

One, very good, thing I feel I need to mention on the subject of AJAX is the wonderfull script.aculo.us site. (Screenshot on the side here). This site provides some basic tutorials (not brilliant to be honest) but the real strong point is the excellent framework they have available for download. Although it is much to early in the days of my learning curve to be completely sure, I still think it is well worth getting to this site and downloading everything they have to offer.

Hopefully, in the very near future I will be able to update you on my learning curves and eventually be able to point to a fully working AJAX site.

Following on from Admin’s post on hammering firefox, I have been installing a mountain of extensions for Firefox. Unlike the guy who the original post was about, it wasnt the “top 100” I installed. I have spent most of the day trying out extensions to find good, useful ones which seem to have a decent purpose.

Now, needless to say, there has been a MASSIVE performance hit. At this time I only have 41 extensions installed but it is already taking a noticable amount of time for FF to actually start up. I have been ruthless with removing the toolbar’s some extensions like to install, but it has cost me about 1/5th of the screen real estate – and to be honest, for some extensions why would you have them if you turned the tool bar off…..

Anyway, on the positive side, it is pretty amazing that FF lets you bolt on so many different packages to generate the functionality you want. This really is a “good thing” from the open source movement. As it stands I cant see this level of customization being available for IE for quite some time.

For the terminally curious, the extensions I have are:

• DOM Inspector
• Talkback
• PDF Download
• HTML Validator
• ShowIP
• Gmail Notifier
• OpenNewWindowFromHere
• ColorZilla
• MeasureIT
• All-in-one Gestures
• BBCode
• Athens Toolbar
• Web Developer
• RSS Editor
• InfoRSS
• SEOpen
• Answers
• Image Zoom
• EditCSS
• GDirections
• Greasmonkey
• del.icio.us
• Periodic Table II
• rel Links
• wmlbrowser
• ForecastFox
• Live IP Address
• Digg This!
• SessionSaver
• TinyUrl Creatro
• hbar
• Colorful Tabs
• CuteMenus – Crystal SVG
• Gish It!
• Kaboodle
• Performancing
• FireFTP
• Long Titles
• Deepest Sender

If you can think of any others worth getting, please let me know.

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.

(quote from Digg.com)

Astronomers have witnessed a never-seen-before event in observations by ESA’s XMM-Newton spacecraft – a collision between a pulsar and a ring of gas around a neighbouring star.

The rare passage, which took the pulsar plunging into and through this ring, illuminated the sky in gamma- and X-rays.

Not a lot I can add except to say this is very interesting – even if space stuff bores you!

read more | digg story

(quote from Digg.com)

Virtual Earth’s New feature allows you to take a rid on the seat of a car and drive around town….google watch it!

Well, hyperbole aside this is an interesting development, but I am not convinced it is going to be a major threat to Google Earth.

In a nutshell, you get the choice driving a car or walking around one of two street plans (I assume more are to follow soon) using the arrows on your keyboard to move. Now, it is interesting but it is a FAR CRY from virtual reality. I am on a fast-ish broadband connection and the lag between moves is shocking.

The other problem with this, and it is the same with Google Earth, is that the photos are immediately dated. It makes this like playing Grand Theft Auto (or similar) on a 286 with a mod to make it boring.

Google Earth and its clones were (and are) an interesting way to pass time idly looking at remote parts of the world. This is good for about 10 seconds.

When (if) the mapping and response times improve this could be brilliant. It would be great to have a driving sim as good as current flight sims – but we arent there yet.

read more | digg story

(from digg.com article)

Sun has master the art of meaningless marketing. That Solaris (whatever version) is NOT Linux, hence, the phrase Solaris is better than Linux at being Linux does not even rise to the level of an oxymoron. Want some facts? Then read on.

This is an interesting and somewhat thought provoking article that examines some of the “issues” that revolve around Sun’s marketting machine. While it does highlight some interesting points, I can’t say it is really as clear cut as made out.

Sadly, Sun appear to have targetted Linux as their opposition – which has caused a natural backswell of linux devotees now slashing and burning Solaris.

Sadly, both are excellent OS and should be capable of standing on their own. They serve different functions and meet different needs.

Why dont they all just attack MS Windows like sensible people 🙂

read more | digg story

Well – previously the Dell Linux Workstations were discussed here and the end thoughts were that while it was a great idea the price was far from “right.” To make matters worse, UK customers would be charged an arm and a leg shipping and import duty. All in all, not in our top ten purchase lists.

However, today, thanks to the wonders of email, we have found out about a similar offer for people in good old blighty. This time it is Ebuyer (a legitimate online shop – do not confuse this with eBay) is having a warehouse clearance sale. Part of this is an “eSys ePC” for £127. The machine is not a top of the range monster, however at that price it seems almost trivial to get enough to run a Beowolf cluster at home.

The specs are:

• Processor: Intel Celeron D 315 (2.26, 533, 256MB)
• Memory: 256MB DDR expandable to 2GB.
• Disk: 40GB 7200Rpm
• 52 X CD-Rom, additional slots available to add more optical drives.
• LAN 10/100
• ASROCK/ ECS Intel 845GV chipset with built-in 64 MB Intel Extreme graphics
• Audio on board incl. Front Pannel Audio

The on board video is a bit of a downer, but at the end of the day this is a fully functional home PC for next to nothing.

One word of caution, some of the reviews talk about this coming with a monitor – as far as I can see, this offer is for the PC, keyboard and mouse, nothing else.