Sometime when bad things happen all you can do it show your support. That’s what I’m doing here. The first cause is “One Day Blog Silence”:
This is to honour the victims from Virginia Tech and all those other innocents throughout the world. Given that the “blogosphere” is where many students poured their grief and vented their anger it seems appropriate.
If you came to look at ZX81.org.uk a couple of hours ago you may have noticed that it wasn’t here. I’m pleased to announce that we’re back, and better than ever.
The reason for this outage was an upgrade. I generally find it easier to stay with the current version of WordPress but with the big jump to 2.1 I chickened out. Until this evening.
And, honestly, it wasn’t too tricky. I did a test upgrade on my laptop using the webserver and MySQL database in MAMP. I found that the template I use needed a quick update (as detailed on GFXedit) but otherwise the upgrade script seems to have done the job without any trouble. Please let me know if you do find anything wrong.
Some would say that it can only mean that I have far too much time on my hands. I claim that I’m merely interested. As is often the case, the truth maybe somewhere between the two. But the fact is, I do like to keep an eye how many people are visting ZX81.org.uk and what they’re looking at.
There are also some oddities, I think anyway. My most popular picture is just of a tea leaf! (From when I was in the tea growing region of Sri Lanka.) It’s basically just a standard record shot, and even has a horizontal line across the middle where the lab scratched the negative. Not my greatest photograph. Some day I’ll invest the time to clean it up in Photoshop.
If you’re subscribed to my RSS feeds you may well have noticed already, but I have started, as an experiment, adding interesting links to my del.icio.us account and syndicating them from here. Is that a good idea? What do you think?
If, on the other hand, that first paragraph made no sense, read on.
First, let me explain terms. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and is a way to get your web browser1 to tell you when a website changes. If you have Internet Explorer 7 you should see the feeds icon (an orange square with white lines) next to the home icon on the top right, just below the search text box. In Safari the bar with the URL will have a blue RSS icon to the right. And Firefox has “Live Bookmarks” which do the same thing. Simply click the appropriate button and see what happens.
The day has finally come. As previously discussed my other two websites are finally going away. Very shortly, links to darlingtonphotography.com and stephendarlington.com will no longer redirect here so please update any links you have. Pretty much all the content available on those sites is now here. A quick search should turn up something useful but let me know if something you liked has gone missing in action.
Combining my two favourite subjects — Apple and taking the proverbial out of Dubya — how could I not post a link to this: What George W. Bush could learn from Steve Jobs.
Is this neat or huge security hole?
(You need a Mac with an iSight camera to make it work.)
It seemed to take pretty much everyone by surprise. Techie-oriented website Slashdot greeted the introduction of the iPod with the words: “No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.” Even I, on the way home from Tottenham Court Road with a first generation, 5Gb model, thought, “What have I done? I’ve just paid ?350 for a walkman!” And I did wonder about the name.
But we all underestimated Apple. Five years later and now it’s difficult to see someone on the London Underground without an iPod and they’ve captured the public imagination in a way that few products have in recent times.
Sometimes a quote from the article can say more than I ever could:
Alton Verm’s request to ban “Fahrenheit 451” came during the 25th annual Banned Books Week. He and Hines said the request to ban “Fahrenheit 451,” a book about book burning, during Banned Books Weeks is a coincidence.
I think they should look up the word “irony” in a dictionary.
I’ve refrained from commenting about Microsoft’s iPod competitor so far as it’s not much of a challenge to mock it when they decide to make one model dung-coloured.
However this article caught my eye:
AppleInsider | Microsoft says Zune to sell for $249
What the headline doesn’t tell you is that they are planning to make a loss on each unit to make that price-point, just like they do on each XBox games console. I can’t think of many other companies that would make a loss of $388 million in one quarter and consider that to be a good strategy worth replicating for another product.