Safari On Windows

admin —  June 12, 2007 — 8 Comments

Apples Safari browser is now available on Windows.  

I’m under whelmed so far.

Yes it’s quick, but it doesn’t support Aero in Vista. And then there is the font rendering. WTF? Chris Pirillo tells me on Flickr that it’s something to do with settings so I’ll have to play with it some more but the first impression Windows users are going to get is terrible: fuzzy, hard to read fonts.

The real question is what is Apple trying to achieve with this? Steve Jobs did announce that Safari was the key to 3rd party support on the Jesus Phone so maybe that’s why, but if it’s a tool for people to see what running a Mac is like…well, suffice to say it may well be a hindrance than a help.

On the Mac front I’m about 50/50 moving towards 60% for on switching. Price is still my sticking point, but with tax time coming up at the end of the month the company might need to spend so money and given my monitors and other bits and pieces will work with a Mac it’s just a question of making the dive and buying a box. Time will tell I guess, it’s a lot of money and she who must be obeyed isn’t in favour if, and that’s the biggest hurdle of them all 🙂

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A Leader Who Gets Climate Change

admin —  June 11, 2007 — 1 Comment

Czech President Vaclav Klaus:

The environmentalist paradigm of thinking is absolutely static. They neglect the fact that both nature and human society are in a process of permanent change, that there is and has been no ideal state of the world as regards natural conditions, climate, distribution of species on earth, etc.

They neglect the fact that the climate has been changing fundamentally throughout the existence of our planet and that there are proofs of substantial climate fluctuations even in known and documented history.

Their reasoning is based on historically short and incomplete observations and data series which cannot justify the catastrophic conclusions they draw.

They neglect the complexity of factors that determine the evolution of the climate and blame contemporary mankind and the whole industrial civilization for being the decisive factors responsible for climate change and other environmental risks.

Why can’t Howard come out and say something like this? It’s right on so many levels.

For every person I’ve argued  this with, not one has been able to explain global warming prior to now, best represented to me by the Romans growing grapes and producing wine in Britain 2000 years ago. That things are getting warmer I think isn’t in doubt, what is in serious doubt is the cause and result.

via Tim Blair

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Paris Hilton Back in Jail

admin —  June 9, 2007 — Leave a comment

This YouTube clip has over 1million views, I’ll let it speak for itself 🙂

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Jericho Lives!

admin —  June 7, 2007 — 3 Comments

Hollywood Reporter:  Fans win battle for ‘Jericho’

You little ripper! CBS has back-flipped and decided to renew Jericho, although only for 7 episodes at this stage with a potential for more depending on ratings in the US. 7 is far better than none at all and at least we might get some closure.

I didn’t send nuts to CBS but tens of thousands of Jericho fans did and hundreds of thousands worldwide signed petitions and linked to the cause. Congrats to every single person who helped save one of the last decent shows left on Television and I look forwards to downloading watching the Second series later in the year.

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Movable Type 4 to be open sourced

admin —  June 5, 2007 — 4 Comments

Just had a post up at TechCrunch on Movable Type 4.0 and the fact that it will be open sourced.

I’m conscious of just running posts at duncanriley.com that link to stuff at TechCrunch given I’m writing there, but bugger it, this is a post worth writing about and linking to.

I talked to Anil Dash for about 45 minutes today (my time of course, AWST +8 GMT). Even in the darkest moments of my relationship with Mena and SixApart Anil was always the consummate gentleman. It was a delight talking to him, he admitted that SixApart had make mistakes in the past without naming them, and said that open sourcing MT was about going back to MT’s roots. If I was nasty I could say that it’s all too late, but Web 2.0 me isn’t quite as negative: it’s never too late to embrace your community, and although I’ve now spent years working under WordPress I’ll be giving the new version of MT a serious shot. I only just received the MT 4.0 source files, literally 5 minutes before the TechCrunch post so I couldn’t include a test, but it’s next on my agenda.

It looks cool and I really hope that it is as well. More soon, although first thought: I wonder if they have included a WP to MT tool?

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Ask Finally Gets it Right

admin —  June 5, 2007 — Leave a comment

 Techcrunch: Relaunch For Ask: Ask3D

I’ve been hard on Ask previously, their Algorithm campaign in the US and Information Revolution campaign in the UK is a joke. I may not be a marketing expert but in my own defense my Commerce degree included a major in Marketing and I’ve spun for a living for many years so I’m not totally without a clue: running an obscure campaign for a search engine that doesn’t include the product name is daft.

But that aside the new Ask is pretty damn cool. Layout is spot on, from the opening page through to results. Feeds or Wikipedia info is displayed to the right and the search results are above standard. I can’t measure them objectively but my initial feel is that they may be better that Live or Yahoo, Google may be not. As a complete package though its a competitive offering, nearly to the point that I’d figure them in when I’m using search in future.

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APC Magazine…what can I say?

admin —  June 4, 2007 — 6 Comments

Picked up a copy of APC Magazine on the weekend. I very rarely buy computer magazines, after all why would anyone want to pay to read news that is 2 months old?… but I am rather impartial to the DVD’s.

I met a few of the folks from APC Magazine at a conference last year. Short form, lots of attitude and they basically turned there noses down at me as nothing more than a worthless blogger and basically wouldn’t even speak to me. Of course ironically I’m currently writing for an audience elsewhere that is a thousands of times bigger than their little magazine, but this isn’t the point of this post 🙂

So I’m playing with the DVD and they’ve included Yahoo To Go, Yahoo’s PVR software. Immediate thought: great, it’s finally available for Australians, when Yahoo had originally released it about 18 months ago it was US only, and painfully you only found this out by installing it then trying to run it (it geo-blocks based on IP). So I install Yahoo To Go and what do you know, it is still limited to the US only. Basically the folks a APC didn’t even try testing the software they are advertising on their DVD. And these folks turn their noses down at me? Tell you what, a blogger would be a far lot more thorough than these guys any day.

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Embracing Facebook

admin —  June 4, 2007 — 1 Comment

image The more I use Facebook, the more I’m convinced that in 12-18 months Facebook will slay MySpace.

Anyhow, I’ve now switched to bookmarking via Facebook. I love Bluedot but having accounts all over the place seems a bit daft, and the whole Facebook as a Platform thing is going to make this even more so.

For those who want to connect on facebook, username is: duncanriley.

Now I’ve just got to work out the best way off pulling Facebook data into Google Reader. 

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Why Are Macs So Expensive In Australia?

admin —  June 4, 2007 — 22 Comments

Why are Macs so expensive in Australia

Continue Reading...
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Windows Live Writer Beta 2

admin —  June 3, 2007 — 11 Comments

Vista Day 4 and it turns out that my favourite blogging platform BlogDesk doesn’t work under Vista.

Microsoft released Windows Live Writer Beta 2 during the week so I’m giving it a whirl with this post.

First observation: wow! hasn’t this changed!

The typing space is laid over a frame taken from your blog, complete with default paragraph widths (image pops):

image

Cut and paste for images is now fully supported and there is inbuilt thumbnail creation. Image editing includes effects and a number of pre-set borders.

Insert features go further again, users can insert tables and maps, and the new version of Windows Live Writer has the MOST EXTENSIVE tagging support built in I’ve EVER seen in a blog posting tool.

Forward posting is supported for WordPress blogs and users are given access to edit html along with the usual preview options.

This is literally my first post using the new version of Live Writer so it’s difficult to make a final judgement (I’ll be interested to check the markup in particular) but on what I’ve seen so far, Windows Live Writer kicks ass big time!

OK, so maybe I can be easily impressed, but this is a phenomenal improvement from the lame version 1 released about 12 months ago. It has every single thing I’d want from a blog posting tool and more. If you’re running Windows or Parallels on Mac give it a shot.

Update: looking at the markup now, it’s clean aside from a div class for the Technorati tag. I missed in the review categories, which are now fully supported along with excerts, manual trackbacks, per post comment settings (on/ off over-ride) and even keywords. This literally have everything. Now if only Microsoft would fix my Vista problem 🙂

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