Visitors Since Site Inception (late 2005) : 146,790
Visitors This Month : 13,835
Nice to see the visitor count rising, which shows the new engine is doing it's stuff.
The actual DB weighs in at 5mb even with 400 posts, countless links, notes, snippets, etc. plus it handles the digg-effect with ease!
Good stuff, will have to do a future post on this.
;-)
IE6 is a pain, especially supporting it when you're trying to build something really wonderful with javascript. However when you're web metrics come back showing over 60% of your users use it you really have to go that extra yard to put a smile on their face, it's tough but it's worth it in the end.
Thankfully a good friend pointed me to a site called evolt.org providing standalone copies of IE6, should help.
There are alternatives, Microsoft provide Virtual PC images to help you support their latest browsers; they've got a lifespan of about 3 months per download so you've got to grab a new one every couple of months but good as an acid tester.
On the Linux front you should be able to use the standalone IE6 build from the link above with WINE, or IE4LINUX.
Beyond that there's IETester for Windows, good for Vista as it's hard to get IE6 on Microsoft's latest O/S (xp is easier).
There's also another browser built by the Japanese company fenrir called Sleipnir for Windows which allows you to run Firefox and Internet Explorer side-by-side, last time I tried it had some stability issues but it looks to be getting there with the 2.8.2 release.
Should help.
...by the way the engine used by IE is called Trident ;-)
Well Michelle just showed me something E4 are doing and either someone's pooling off my brain or I really have premonition ;-)
Last year I thought up a great story about a couple who have this place out in the woods, they soon get set upon by a group of psychologically un-hinged teenager's. They eventually hold up in the bedroom while the attackers run amock thru the bungalow trying to lure them out into harms way. The husband takes a look outside the window and notices one of them just standing there looking back at them lifelessly, next moment they're gone. A couple of months later I see a film called The Strangers, good movie, just a little uncanny.
Round two, I have an idea about a family getting ready for the morning run. They're in their flat rushing around to take the kids to school, the wife is in the bathroom fussing with makeup, the husband is in the kitchen half watching tv (that weirdly is only showing the test signal) while eating breakfast. They get out to the car, drive thru town and start to wonder where everyone else has gone, the place is deserted. Then out of the corner of their eye they spot a dark figure just standing there in the middle of the road not moving zombie-like. Really spooky, right?, well apparently Channel 4 are doing something around those lines with a programme called Dead Set.
Well trust me the latest idea I have for a good book I'm keeping to myself, Michelle agree's with me, it's a little on the scary side.
Take care thru Halloween and remember,
"Midnight 'til one belongs to the dead..." Father Patrick Malone (the fog)
Last night I upgraded my laptop's o/s to the new Ibex 8.10 release, not yet official still in beta but so far very stable.
This can be done via,
sudo update-manager -d
...then choosing the new distribution 8.10 from the top of the update manager dialog, you'll need about 1 hour for it to download & install. Be around for some of the dialogs; one of which will ask you if you want to merge or replace your network script (i clicked merge) after which you should be ok.
It comes with a lot of new updates and a major interface overhaul.
There's now a fallback linux kernel if the main one should fail (like ArchLinux), more windows-like logout panel, better hibernation and a new theme called NewHuman (see screenshot above).
Along with this there's available from the repository,
...and a ton of other newer packages, Mercurial is also updated along with the Kernel so any new hardware should be properly recognised.
After the install I had to reboot obviously, on rebooting my wifi no longer worked, so after another reboot that came back. Did an update & upgrade for any newer packages and so far other than the battery indicator applet crashing a couple of times nothing majorly serious.
Eclipse is still at 3.2 in the repository, along with NetBeans at 6.1 so that's a little bit of a bummer. However NetBeans does come with an easier installer so just grab the latest nightly build for that, Eclipse Ganymede and 3.2 are proving a little flakey at the moment.
Interface-wise it is a heck of a lot better than the previous release and although unofficially available I would recommend grabbing a copy, definitely worth the effort.
Just done an update,
Did have a problem with the NewHuman theme, after doing a safe-upgrade I lost the theme, although I did find a replacement;
..you need to download the Murrine debian package for the distro you're using, install it, then download + install the Dust Theme.
Other than that this release is shaping up pretty nicely!
Found this good guide to replacing OpenOffice 2.4.1 with the latest 3.0 release, pretty simple.
Basically add this to your repository then update and upgrade & you should have the new build.
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ubuntu intrepid main
Add this to your repository to grab Firefox 3.1
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/fta/ubuntu intrepid main
Turns out you can actually run commands remotely via SSH, plant some scripts on your server and boom you can clear your logs, backup your db and restart your webservers all without having to remote in; major help!
For example;
ssh -i /home/me/.ssh/mybox root@mybox.com '/var/www/apps/myapp/start-myapp.sh'
Here I'm specifying an ssh key file to use to connect to the remote box via the -i parameter, then the username root (because we want the script to have all the power it needs to without specifying sudo; web address of the box (or you can use the ip address). Then surrounding the command I want to run in single-quotes.
Simple effective and saves me from remoting in one night when I'm not myself, hitting the wrong key & doing something I really shouldn't ;-)
John Griffiths
