Blog Random

I’ll often check out the radio times website to see what is currently on TV if I get some spare time. I’ve noticed that 1/5 times I go to the site, it is completely down and it is often very slow to load.

I imagine the site could be quite busy but surely a site that popular (and with a decent budget I’d imagine) must be able to sort out some decent hosting for their website?!

I wonder how it is hosted.. possibly in-house?

I was having some trouble getting sounds to play dynamically using javascript today. I’m not sure dynamically is the right word but basically I wanted different sounds to load and play on the click of a button using javascript without having to preload the sounds.

At first I tried using a single embed object, then changing the src of the embed on a button click and using embedObj.Play(); but for some reason changing the source of the file stopped that happening.

My second idea was to replace the entire embed code each time, and then call Play on the embed to get it to play. Still no luck!

Finally after a bit of searching I found somebody that had managed to do it. Its similar to my second idea only instead of calling .Play() on the embed object you just use autostart=true in the embed code, simple!

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I don’t often take the time to report on a decent service I’ve had. I usually spend more time thinking about and talking about bad experiences but I was very impressed with the guys over at car world uk, in Peterborough.

I was sceptical at first, the car was a pretty good price for what it was (not always a good sign) and I had to travel 2 hours to go see it! Having checked them out on-line and by telephone I went to take a look. Not only was the car great but so was everybody I dealt with. Most car show rooms seem reluctant to help, as if turning up is causing an inconvenience but not this place.

Having got the car home I found something very small wrong with a part of the interior. The part could easily be replaced for £40 and I had a free 3 month warranty, but the warranty wouldn’t cover it. At £40 I was just going to replace it myself but I gave them a call and after refusing to drive back to Peterborough for a cheap part they happily agreed to just reimburse me if I bought it myself - excellent!

To top it all off, they sent me a Christmas card the other week!

If you found this looking for a review of car world, I’d recommend them based on my experience. If you’re a regular reader of the blog, apologies for the niche topic.

When designing and coding the template for this blog I didn’t have access to IE6 (thanks MS), but I finally got hold of Virtual PC and managed to sort out a number of issues that made it look worse than it is supposed to be!

Unfortunately there are still many people using IE6, at least 15% of visitors to this site and a lot more to other sites that have a less technical audience. Luckily that number is falling day-by-day and hopefully soon we can all stop wasting time making exceptions for IE6. I’ve found there are far fewer issues with IE7, hopefully it will stay that way in future versions.

I’d apologise to IE6 users but I think its about time they upgraded! :p

I’ve neglected both the plugin and the blog a little lately due to the run up to Christmas but have made some time to release a major upgrade to rb internal links.

Some of the new features include:

• Changing the charset to utf-8 for tinymce plugin (thanks to vanco)
• A switch from the {{ … }} method to <!– … –> for entering a link
• Putting in the option for ID or slug returned to editor, default to be ID (good idea, thanks again vanco)
• Support for creating an internal link with an image
• The intlink code is now hidden in visual mode, replaced with the highlighted text
• The parsing engine has been completely rewritten for speed and scalability
• Some code changes that should help people with problems related to the wysiwyg icon not turning up
• Added filter for ‘the_content_rss’

I’d like to thank everybody that has commented on the blog so far regarding the plugin, it has been more popular than I had hoped for and I really appreciate it. More feedback, ideas and code very welcome!

If the PSU on you’re powermac g5 has gone, or you think it may have, you aren’t the only one (see macintouch forums). When I was reading around on the subject I read the failure rate is around 11%, I can’t remember the exact figure but hopefully I’ll find it again later. Luckily Apple did acknowledge the problem and has extended the warranty on the power supply, which you can claim here: Power Mac G5 Repair Extension Program for Power Supply Issues

A relatively new customer phoned us up last week in a panic, claiming his server (the powermac) had stopped working and wouldn’t even switch on. We’d recently set-up a remote backup solution for him and installed an extra internal hard drive in the powermac for local backup. I’m guessing the extra load of the hard drive took it over the edge. Needless to say he needed the server back up asap.

Phoning around we found one supplier with a spare powermac psu in stock. None of the local apple stores did and most companies sounded confused, as if I was asking a silly question. We ended up paying £150-£200 for the psu, a little on the expensive side but desperate times call for desperate measures.

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This summer I visited Cape town and even though it was winter there the weather and views were far better than here! Its a beautiful place and I often check up on the web cams available of the area. There are even some of the beaches we visited, which is quite cool - if only I’d arranged somebody to take a screenshot of me.

Some of the better and more updated cams I’ve found are:

• Kapstadt.de
• Bay tv (these guys have quite a few)
• Fish Hoek Galley (we went and ate here)

I’m quite proud of some of the photos I took on my point and shooter. As there don’t seem to be too many decent sized images online I thought I’d put them up for all to see. I’ve brought them down to half size to save some space!

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The coolest (practical) gadget I’ve come across in the last few days is this wireless SD card that you can use to automatically sync pictures from your digital camera to your PC.

The brilliant thing about this card is that it will work in current hardware without having to update anything. The wifi adapter and firmware are built in to the SD card allowing it to connect to wireless networks when your camera is on to sync photos to your computer and straight on to photo sharing sites.

My digital camera happens to require a special cable to connect it to the pc (why not just use standard connectors!!) so this would save a load of time and the need for carrying around a cable or a card reader. Only problem is at this moment in time I can’t find anyone selling them.

I was reading through the Web Design survey by AListApart and found some of the results quite interesting. As a director of a web design company it was good to see how we compare to other companies. One statistic I’ve always wanted to know is the average price a website design/development project.

Broad I know but the price of website design and development fluctuates greatly and its something that has always bothered me. I tried looking for a decent guide or survey on the matter but couldn’t find anything. If anybody knows of one please let me know!

On some quick research of this topic I put “website design prices” in to some search engines hoping to find some sites or blogs that gave an overview of prices across the industry but to my surprise all I got were company guides for individual companies. From these results and a little experience, I grouped prices in to the type of company. I got it down to:

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A friend recently recommended signing up to SeeFilmFirst if I wanted some free tickets for up and coming films in the area. I have to admit, I was a little sceptical, but he’s already been to see one film for free and had a number of emails about others showing locally. I’m yet to get any notifications but I haven’t given up hope yet. I’ll post an update if it works out.

Cinema tickets certainly aren’t cheap but the power of word of mouth seems to outweigh the price of a few cinema tickets for production companies that give out these free tickets. I’m guessing the cinemas don’t lose but, with the price of their food, they’d probably make a profit from most people that attend anyway.

I did a quick ‘google’ for see film first and it appears that the movie tokens they send out are posted all over the web on “free stuff” and “hot deals” websites. If I start getting to see films for free I might see what else I can stop paying for (legally).