BeMused

Running Wordpress 2.7 now. First impression: nice! The dashboard has a new clean look, everything seems to be working great and the upgrade, thanks to the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin, worked splendidly! Just don’t forget to re-initilize your plugins, especially the Askimet Spam protection.

So it looks as if Google is entering the browser market with their new open source browser, Google Chrome. As the cutesy comic they released indicates, it sounds as if they have some good ideas concerning browsers. All I see out of this, however, is another version of the browser wars. I can see a time in the futures where not only will designs and layouts be different in Chrome, IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc… but apps won’t work either. I guess that happens now, to some extent, but it’ll be worse.

I honestly think it’s faster to design and build a new site, than to tweak it into working across platforms nowadays.

It’s no secret that I’m a Mac fanboy, and have been for several years. I use a Windows machine at work, and it gets the job done. I honestly have very few complaints about Windows boxen (assuming it’s not Vista. Don’t get me started on Vista). I think my biggest gripe is lack of aesthetics in your typical Windows computer.

Dell just might change that though. Their new Studio Hybrids are quite sexy.

I think any of these would be a compliment to any room of the house. Nice.

Assuming I can install XP or Linux on it.

Wordpress 2.5 is out. I’ve updated the site here to it - it was quick and painless for the most part, however I did forget to re-activate the Askimet spam plugin and in the space of less than 24 hours, I had 50+ pieces of comment spam. That quickly got activated!

Wordpress 2.5 also has galleries now. I’ve talked about it for years, and it’s finally a reality (though I’ve been using smugmug to store my photos and I’m completely happy with them). I hope to have more photos here soon.

I’ve also been really digging into Expression Engine on my Harley site and have accomplished a lot. Hopefully I’ll actually get that launched sometime in the next millennium. No foolin’.

Have I mentioned how much I’m looking forward to Firefox 3 and its improved memory handling?

Well - that went swimmingly.

/sarcasm

Somedays, Windows Vista just irks me to no end.

 Guess I’ll check back tomorrow…

I’m having a wonderfully frustrating day. The kind of day where every turn you make you run into a wall, and the most positive thought you can conjure is that at least the half-hour you just spent banging your head on the desk is good exercise.

Because we do online banking, it’s policy here that I cannot see certain types of information. Fair enough. Let me give you an example of how this works; Let’s say we have a form that has some personal information on it. I can create the form, create the display template the bank will see, and a ‘thank you for filling out our form’ page. I can create all three of these, but I can’t view the results of the display template. That’s where the sensitive info might reside. So the normal SOP is to create the form, send it to my boss, she uploads them, fills it out, and then checks to see if the results are as expected. Because some of these forms have lots of different fields that all have to match up, it’s not uncommon for me to miss something. She takes a screen shot, let’s me know the problem, I take a stab at fixing it, send it back to her, she uploads it again…you can see  how this can frustrate a developer who is used to being able to see the results right away with a simple reload of the page. And she has other things going on sometimes, so there are times when it takes half-an-hour, up to three hours to get to it.

Now…take my boss out of the equation (She’s off getting married this week). What do I do? Normally, I’d send them to a second person and he’d take care of it. However, he’s off watching my boss get married.

So now what? I sit, twiddle my thumbs, try to find a way around this silliness. Quite a frustrating day I’m having and it’s not even two…

I’m so close to grasping EE. I was thinking about it in the shower this morning and it slowly dawned on me (must’ve been a lightbulb with a dimmer switch attached), that I needed to use categories to sort the over view pages from the individual models.

I know that probably means nothing to anyone but me, but hey, it’s here to remind me.