Channel4, the official broadcaster of LOST here in the UK has an excellent LOST microsite and I only just found a new bit - visit the site and click on the top image, LOST - Untold thing, it’s a great interactive Flash thingy majig. Enjoy!
Remember: We’re only to Episode 11 of Series 1 in the UK so no spoilers!!!
Last week at their Developers conference Microsoft released a beta version of the Developers toolbar for IE, you can download it from here.
Its feature set seems less than that of the equivalent Firefox extension but nevertheless it’s a darn useful tool for checking stuff crossbrowser.
Sloppy has to be one of the most useful tools I’ve only just discovered. It’s a Java app that allows you to simulate page loading times on various connections - it’s darn handy when your boss keeps reminding you ‘not everyone has broadband!’
I just discovered something in Firefox when it comes to ‘view source’ - perhaps everyone already knows about it but I thought I’d share it just in case.
It appears when you do View Source in Firefox an additional HTTP request is made to the server to pick up the file, whilst IE just displays the already rendered HTML. I came across this when dealing with a user validation page. The user clicks on a link in an email and comes into the webpage whereupon their account is made active and they get to set a password, if i did ‘View Source’ I kept seeing the message they’d see if they tried activating their account twice - what I as expected to see was the html for the change password form. In IE i saw the code for the form, not important just something to bear in mind!
My iPod Nano that I ordered on Monday arrived yesterday and was the centre of conversation in the office yesterday afternoon. I’d previously thought that I didn’t need an iPod, I already have a SmartPhone and PocketPC, did I really need an iPod? I tried using the PDA as an Mp3 player (I really did!). Media player syncronisation was pretty naff and I could only manage about 6 hrs before the battery ran out. I filled the iPod to capacity lastnight - man it’s a sweet little unit and the screen, definition is pretty much on par with my PSP screen! So far I’m really loving it….the whole switch to iTunes from Media player is taking a while to get to grips with but hey, it’s worth the time spent!
For Sale: One Dell Axim x30
Interesting choice of default behaviour in tag completion in Dreamweaver 8, by default it waits until you start the closing <\ and then does the completion for you. Fortunately it’s pretty easy to change so when you close the first tag it automatically adds the closing tag for you, Preferences > Code Hints > ‘After typing the open tags’ “>”.
I just sat starring at some code I wrote for a CFFORM, nothing too complex - an accordian and some input boxes etc. I had a cfformitem type=”text” in the form and a cfselect with some options. Now when the form loaded the form initialised - I could switch between the page’s in the accordian but no matter what I tried I couldn’t get the cfformitem=”text” to appear nor the options in the cfselect, the rest of the form was fine. I tried the code on a production box and it worked fine…then I remembered this was a newly created virtual server and I hadn’t created a mapping to the CFIDE folder. Once that was done it all worked fine…so note to self - make sure the CFIDE mapping exists!
At last Studio 8 is available for download and Dreamweaver is a lean 60mb or there about - seems a reasonable size these days give the ‘bloat’ around the place. I fired up and immediately set the layout in Dual Screen - so I’ve got the site manager on one screen along with ‘reference’ and then the main code screen on my laptop screen. I can make it crash instantly (which is nice) merely by trying to add/edit sites - which is a useful feature! (UPDATE: In fact it doesn’t crash, it takes approximately 3 minutes to open the screen once you’ve clicked ADD SITE). More to come as I play with it during the day.
Things still moving at lightening pace on the home front, the plumber has nearly finished installing the central heating/combi boiler so we shan’t be running out of hot water any more soon. Replacement windows have all be ordered and the bathroom is beginning to take shape now - shower cubicle is set to arrived today.
At work things are monsterously busy with around 8 sites to get out the door before the end of the year - all ‘microsites’ as we term for key developments under our corporate branding. Something I do plan on starting soon is a dedicated iCM category in my blog. iCM is the ColdFusion content management system we use from Goss Interactive and to be honest, I had my doubts but after 6 months of using it I’m really liking it so figured it’s about time to give it some real exposure from a developers point of view - and not the typical sales and marketing viewpoint most CMS providers come from.
Oh and did I mention I ordered a iPod Nano? - I finally gave in on trying to use my PDA as a music device, syncing it to media player was a hit or miss process and storage on MMC seems to have hit the limit at 2gb. I ordered it yesterday, it shipped earlier this morning so it’ll be sometime soon.
Like a few other fellow Brit bloggers I followed suit and moved house a few weeks back and have been offline for a while but whilst it’s good to be back online there’s still a big pile of stuff to be doing at home!
The house we bought followed the ‘worst house in nicest street’ thinking - meaning that we knew from the start it needed a lot of work but got it at a fair price and the area is really nice. So far, I’ve taken countless rubbish bags of wallpaper to the local tip, filled a skip up on my drive, taken down 2 walls, rodded blocked drains (what was down there was gross!), fixed heaps of leaking pipes (kitchen, shower, bathroom), fixed a hole in the roof, temporarily fixed leaking garage roof, painted garage door, brick work, two bedrooms and now this week the central heating is being installed….despite sounding like a house of horrors it’s all coming together now and should be well on track to be sorted by Christmas! And boy, some people really have no idea of colour matching, i mean bright green walls really don’t go with bright pink walls!!!
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