I’ve been wanting to redesign this place for ages, but I’ve never really found the time or indeed motivation to do it properly. I needed to change the look with absolute minimum effort for me: I figured a new header image was probably the easiest way to do it, so that’s exactly what I’ve done (it should look like this – you may need to hit reload or clear your cache if you’re not seeing it).

G-Dog gets his five minutes of fame this time. You can tell the pictures are quite old – he’s riding an Orange 222 (You’re my bike now Dave!). They were taken back in July of last year up on Leckhampton Hill , then amalgamated in Photoshop. Yes, I know it all needs a bit of tweaking – especially the navigation. I’ll get around to it at some point.

Oh and a completely unrelated HAPPY BIRTHDAY BAGGUS!

I felt I had to point this one out: Joe Clark’s excellent Failed Redesigns.

When teenagers’ hobbyist blogs (short for “Web logs”) have better code than brand-new Web sites, somebody’s doing something wrong. And that somebody is you, the developer. In a just society you would simply be fired; in an Orwellian society you would be sent to a reëducation camp. Failing either of those, you could at least read a fucking book and upgrade your skills to a point where you are no longer a total laughingstock.

100% of brilliant, and absolutely right. If you’re making money from building websites (i.e. you’re a web professional), bloody well do it properly you lazy sods.

I bought myself a Sony Walkman A3000 shortly before christmas.

It’s a really good bit of hardware: The sound quality is great (especially with a decent set of earphones), looks lovely, is nice to use, line-out mode is handy for plugging it into the stereo, I could go on.

Alas Sony have largely ruined it. How? Well, they’ve gone and bundled it with the wonderful new Connect Player v1.0.

Now, to look at it’s quite nice. All dark colours and smooth edges – very Sony. Alas to use it is a complete nightmare.

It uses up shedloads of memory and CPU time (how does 674mb and 97% sound?). It takes upwards of five minutes to start up. Despite using all that memory and CPU time it’s slower than a snail climbing Everest. On top of all this it’s not even stable: It usually crashes when you try to import a lot of music at once. Nope, I wouldn’t reccomend that anybody even tries to use it.

Instead, march straight over to the Sony Website, grab a copy of SonicStage 3.3 and use that instead. In terms of looks it’s the complete antithesis of Connect – being an ugly thing. On the other hand, it’s loads faster, a lot more stable, uses less memory and will quite happily transfer music over to your new player.

Alas this means you’ll lose some of the extra functions of the Walkman (the Artist Link and some of the intelligent shuffle features), but to be honest I don’t think you’ll miss them. The joy of being able to finally put music onto the new player without tearing out your hair ought to more than make up for it.

YOU NEED TO SORT YOUR BLOODY SOFTWARE OUT, SONY!

Thankfully, it looks like they’re making steps in the right direction. ATRACLife reports that they’re taking a leaf right out of Apple’s book (quite literally) by poaching Tim Schaaff and making him Senior Vice President of Software Development. Still, that doesn’t help those of us using the software right now…

…you’re not the only one getting to the end of your tether.

We had a major website release to put together the other day. We’d fixed every possible bug we could find in the C#, HTML and JS code, bar one: A CSS bug in Internet Explorer was breaking something vital.

I don’t get visibly angry very often, but on this occasion I was absolutely steaming. People were waiting on me to find this fix so we could do the release and go home, but I just could not figure it out. I tried margins, padding, heights, widths, overflow, even obscure positioning techniques. Everything I could think of – all to no avail. I was getting more and more frustrated as time went by but that wasn’t helping either. The handy developer toolbar wasn’t helping – it pointed out that element had the right amount of margin, padding and their wierd hasLayout property.

Ahhhhh, all of them except that seemingly completely unrelated one. I hadn’t fed a specific height to one element and the whole thing came crashing down.

Once I figured it out, that anger faded away to relief and we got the release out of the door. But it made me think: a CSS designer/developer’s profession requires that they pander to a product that despite being vastly technically inferior, is the most popular on the market.

Despite all of this though, I could never contemplate going back to the old way: Using <table> and spacer.gifs to lay out and style a page. I’d need to retrain all over again for a start – I really can’t remember most of the old tricks we used to use back in the day. There’s one particular (internal) website at work that’s horrendous in that regard – it uses every trick in the book so the slightest change takes hours. What’s more, it limits you in so many ways: Would Sir like to position this box over there? Or perhaps Sir would like a slightly different layout when he comes to print, or when serving to a handheld browser? Sorry Sir, no can do.

Yes, the pain of pandering to Internet Explorer is definitely offset by the advantages that the standards-based methodology offers.

I want a music player with a gert big hard drive in it again. I’ve seen the adverts for the new Sony Walkman and really really want one. Or at least I did.

You see, I wandered over to Amazon to see how much they are. Not a lot more than an iPod Nano and 16gb bigger! It looks ace!

Then I started reading the user reviews. Everybody seems to think the player itself is fantastic – which is no surprise. Sony have traditionally been the daddies when it comes to portable music hardware.

Unfortunately, it would seem that software is not their strong point. Phrases like “the Connect software does its best to wreck your PC and prevents you loading any more than a handful of albums” kept popping up. I googled around for some more reviews and the same thing comes up over and over again. One review summed it up:

“It’s the broken software that lets this product down, not the player – it’s such a shame that Sony haven’t been able to get it right. They’ve put so much effort into getting a great MP3 player out for Christmas – and they’ve forgotten to finish the software.”

Bah humbug.

I was self-googling earlier, just to see to myriad places in which I appear these days. It’s amazing what you can dig up doing that.

Years ago, back when I used to work in the CBT industry, I spent a lot of time copying and pasting graphics things in and out of Photoshop. You know, things like For this diagram, turn on layers 1,3,6,17 and 20, then when use user clicks the button, turn on layers 2, 5, 6, 14 and 21. Eventually I tired of this and put together a series of Photoshop actions to make these things easier. Turn on the layers you need, click the button and you’ve got a finished graphic to put into your multimedia thingy – that sort of thing.

The thing is, I had entirely forgotten that I’d even made this thing, let alone that I’d uploaded somewhere. So as you can imagine, it was quite a surprise when I found that it’s still floating around in the Adobe Studio Exchange. What’s more, 3365 people have downloaded it over the years. Bonkers. I’ve no idea if it even works with a modern version of Photoshop.

OK, so it’s not that amazing.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before. Internet Explorer 6 is quite possibly the worst bit of software I have ever encountered.

The thing is, from the front end it’s not really too bad. OK, so it’s looking a bit dated, but as far as the user can see, it renders web pages without complaint, it’s not too slow, it’s got a fairly easy to use bookmarks system. It’s simple. We can’t get people to upgrade because (as far as they know) it does the job perfectly well. They simply don’t know that they can do so much better.

From the other end though – the point of view of the developer – it’s a complete nightmare. I’ve sure already covered the myriad ways in which the HTML, CSS and caching parts of the engine are fundamentally broken. Now, it seems, the Javsacript engine is completely borked aswell. I won’t go into the details (I’ll only end up getting angry and dumping a truckload of slurry on Micorsoft’s doorstep), but suffice to say that it runs like a dog on IE6, though every other browser executes it like it’s Thrust SSC on speed. Great. Some resources to help if you’ve in a similar situation:

• Optimizing JavaScript for Execution Speed
• A compendium of JavaScript optimization techniques
• Javascript Closures
• JavaScript Memory Leaks
• PPK on Javascript memory leaks
• DHTML leaks … not so much, actually
• Fixing JavaScript memory leaks for good.
• BeeByte’s JS Links

Someone remind me, just how did IE6 get through Microsoft’s quality control program? Roll on IE7, I say.

Can anybody think of a way to make the Adobe Acrobat PDFMaker progress bar move across the screen a little bit quicker? Or perhaps even progress at all?

I’m getting a bit bored of waiting for it now. It’s taking up most of my system’s resources so I can’t really do much else while it chunters along. Gaaargh!