Defending England… with iPods

For 605 million pounds, what would you expect a modern Royal Navy warship to have? Modern weapons systems, and all the latest technology certainly. The HMS Daring has the best crew quarters ever on a British warship. The individual cabins have CD player, internet access, five channel audio and yes iPod charging stations. The new ship with enter service in 2009. Hopefully the iPod connectors will still be the same in three years….

Internet Explorer 7

I just installed IE 7 Beta 2. Very minimalist approach, almost too minimal. You can add toolbars to the interface, but adding things in destroys the look Microsoft is going for. IE 7 also appears to introduce more CSS bugs instead of fixing them. Or maybe I have a hack in my left side navigation that IE 7 doesn’t like.

Delicious Library news

In case anyone is confused (or hungry) I’m talking about the personal library software for the Mac, Delicious Library. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a good article about Delicious Monster, the company behind Delicious Library.

I’ve played around with Delicious Library, I’m not that good with scanning barcodes with my iSight camera. For the article it sounds like iSight scanning is really difficult with the built in iSights on the newest Macs. I’m eventually going to register the software and get a wireless barcode scanner.

One problem I have with Delicious Library is that you are pretty much stuck with data from Amazon. Booxter, from Deep Prose Software, allows you to get data from many sources, including the Library of Congress. However, Delicious Library is a much more user friendly piece of software.

New semester and problems solved

Well, my first class seems like it will be ok. It’s Quantitative Research II, Analysis of Variance. The texts are good, much clearer than last semester’s regression analysis class. The instructor seems good, he actually took time to explain things until everyone understood, and has a very different teaching style than last semester’s professor.

There are no tests or papers to write, just exercises and problems to do every week. Sounds fine to me. I’m also taking this class with a group of people from SISLT, so hopefully things will be easier than last semester when I was a bit lost. One interesting thing about the class is we are using SAS from the Unix command line, no GUIs here.

I figured out the problems with Stephanie’s blog and now WordPress and Gallery are playing together nicely. Unfortunately, I’m having to rebuild Stephanie’s gallery from scratch. In my attempts to make things work I choose to delete instead of reassign pictures to a new user. That was a painful, click-happy error. In an effort to not put all my photo galley eggs in one basket, Lisa now has her own site.

In other news I decided not to go with Bluehost. I couldn’t get any partial refunds on my current hosting contracts and I found out I had some free (with ads) hosting with GoDaddy. So hobbitandmonk.com is living on GoDaddy for a while. I’ll revisit hosting options once my current contracts are closer to expiring.

On old browsers and operating systems

I know someone who insists on using Netscape 4.7 on Mac OS 9.2. Not only that, they insist on telling other people how good Netscape 4.7 is and telling people they should design their sites for Netscape 4.7.

For those of you doing the math, the Netscape 4.x line started in June 1997. The last of the 4.x versions, 4.8, was release in August 2002. More history is available from the Netscape Browser Archive. Depending on the exact version number Netscape 4.7 was “current” anywhere from September 1999 to November 2001. In early 2003 Apple stopped shipping systems with the option of OS 9.2.

Don’t get me wrong, older technology is great if it’s all you have and it does what you need. I still have Lynx installed on my Windows XP box for testing accessibility. I know the limitations of using a text only browser in 2006. Netscape 4.7 wasn’t even a good browser when it was current.

How do you get someone stuck in the last decade to see the light. There are scores of reasons to move on and sometimes a line must be drawn . So how do you get someone out of an outdated technology rut?

Upgraded to WordPress 2.0

Well, I upgraded to WordPress 2.0. Other than some admin bells and whistles (the new visual rich editor can be helpful and annoying at the same time, thankfully you can turn it off) there is no major reason to upgrade. I’ll wait until WordPress 2.1 before I upgrade anything else.

While I was updating I also installed the latest version of Spam Karma (2.1 beta). I’m waiting until it’s out of beta to upgrade other places.

Hate the WordPress 1.5/2.0 Dashboard? Replace it with this hack from Angsuman. Loads much faster than the stock Dashboard since it doesn’t wait on useless RSS feeds to load.

The iMac lives

Well, earlier this month I reported that my iMac was dead. Well it’s alive again. Turns out that it wasn’t dead after all. Joe at MMCS had it for a week and it ran rock solid. He defragged the drive and fixed a few disk permissions but he didn’t find anything would cause a kernel panic.

Turns out the problem was my keyboard. I had spilled fruit punch in it a few months ago, I don’t really remember when. I flipped it over as fast as I could and the keyboard still worked, so I thought it was ok. I figured I’d buy a new keyboard eventually, but I was in no hurry. I could live with a nasty, sticky keyboard for a while.

When the iMac kernel panicked I unplugged everything but the keyboard and mouse. It never occurred to me that the keyboard was the problem. Well it was. So $81 dollars later I have a iMac with a clean bill of health and a new keyboard. Much cheaper than it might have been. Thanks Joe.

Oh, and Merry Christmas everybody!