design
A very geeky Holidays break
Was your break as geeky as mine? Come on, admit it: you’ve done at least one incredibly unsexy thing in the last couple weeks. I know I have. Well, in fact, I had to take a four weeks-long break and it shows in the number of silly things I’ve played with.
In no particular order:
- I improved this blog’s look — well, I like to think that I have:
- I finally created a personalized Twitter page:
- I also created a Twitter page for Twitterified:
- I created an icon set call “More Blaqua“:
- I added a drawer to the Twitterified client - you will see why sometime in January, hopefully!
(Oh, and I finally mastered transparency in Flex, too! Yay)
- I started separating nextBBS v2’s components so that the framework can be used on its own and the message board part is now a module.
It is the first MVC PHP framework that seamlessly support plug-ins.
- I added to nextBBS v2 a limited amount of compatibility with Wordpress plug-ins.
I re-read Getting Things Done by David Allen and made a new year resolution to stick with the program, this time.
So far my Inbox is empty and my tasks list still is a manageable size…
I have installed Medialink on my iMac and use it to stream Divx movies to my PS3. Works flawlessly.
I have also installed PlayOn! in Parallels to stream Netflix. I wish there was an equivalent program for OS X. Well, I “kind of” wish because Netflix’s streaming choice is not that exciting. Not to mention that Netflix innovates by being, to my knowledge, the first company to proudly blog about letting go 50 employees.
- I setup an old P4 with Nexentra. The project bills itself as “The land of free and open source distribution combining OpenSolaris kernel with Ubuntu userland.”
In fact I installed it because I wanted to create a ZFS array. Unfortunately the clunky old PC is way too noisy. Fortunately I realized that a read-write implementation of ZFS for Leopard is available at Mac OS Forge.
- I cancelled XM Radio. They had been annoying me for quite a while, inserting their stupid advertisements in talk radio channels, and now that they merged with Sirius they got rid of some channels I happened to like so, good riddance XM, welcome free radios on my iPhone! — and ironically but quite logically I have better reception in tunnels.
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More Blaqua
A couple years ago, some lad going by the pseudonym of @binderskagnaes, at DeviantArt, released a set of icons on a dark background lovingly named “Blaqua.”
Then, he ventured to a great forest and got devoured. Or something.
Whatever the reason, he never created more icons, which frankly is a pity.
I am still using his icon set in my Dock, unfortunately the set was created before Twitter got popular, uTorrent or Evernote were released on OS X, etc.
So, I took a few hours to re-create an original dark PSD and put together a pack of 24 new icons.
I will create more packs if my beloved readers suggest more applications.
In the meantime, go get it!
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IE7: Not Much Better…
Joel Webber posted about the supposed fix-all security update released by Microsoft for IE.
Of course, it doesn’t fix all, as demonstrated here. Shock!
This totally jibes with my recent misadventures with IE7, when I found out that one of Microsoft’s “clever” workarounds is to add an artificial limit to 32,767 Javascript statements in a given scope - yes, I managed to generate this many statements as the result of including Javascript generation in a template system.
Also, note that their arrays are limited to 32,767 elements. I’ll bet that there is more of this stuff in IE7.
In a nutshell: Microsoft fights memory leaks by breaking existing scripts and doing a bunch of hasty cleanup when unloading a page.
But that’s not even what’s annoying me the most. No, it would be this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/933873
In this knowledge base entry, Microsoft acknowledges the issue and informs us that a hotfix is available; all we need to do is call them and maybe they will even wave the support fee, should they “determine that a specific update will resolve your problem”.
So, what are we to do? Call our customers and instruct them to see if Microsoft is willing to send them a patch, for free or not?
***
We recently stumbled upon a couple bugs in Java 6. More specifically, in rt.jar. Sun wasn’t exactly in a hurry to fix them. So, we fixed them ourselves.
As developers, do we really need more reasons to embrace open-source? I do not think so.
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