libertus

Having a mate who works in a game store is a real bonus when it comes to play-testing. I took my Wii to the shop and we spent some time checking out all the games we could get our hands on (the ones returned for exchange mostly), so that I could figure out which ones I wanted to buy. Hey… there’s no such thing as a free lunch and not making your customers feel ripped off is good business!

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We demonstrated theDiveBuzz.com, met some interesting people, drank beer and generally had a jolly good time. It’s nice to be a geek, sometimes.

Find out more on the BarCamp Sheffield wiki.

I was recently informed of the existence of Baxters Online Newsagent, from which I ordered a copy of Scuba Diving Magazine - an American publication that I have never seen in a shop. The magazine duly arrived within their promised timescale, at a charge of £1 over the cover price.

The site is well-designed, the product range is impressive, their feedback is responsive and the service works. Recommended.

They do adult magazines as well.

I was in two minds as to whether I should watch “Apocalypto”, primarily because the director, Mel Gibson, appeared in the TV adverts for it, which is a real turn-off for me. In its favour, I thought it would look gorgeous, probably contain some innovative movie-making and we had free tickets!

Simply, it does look gorgeous. The scenery and costumery is top-notch. There are some innovative scenes, mostly related to making blood and gore more realistic. Unfortunately, prettiness does not make a movie good. Apocalypto has a muddled plot that depends too much on deus ex machina, some over-long sections and little to empathise with in the over-passive main characters.

On the other hand, it is thought-provoking. What is civilization? Had the Mayan civilization already destroyed itself from within before the Christian Conquistadors arrived? What makes modern society more civilized than the one portrayed in Gibson’s movie? Have we learned from our past or are we repeating it?

My recommendation: rent on DVD.

Last night I received one of my usual junk mails; “Microsoft Download Notifications: August 25, 2006″. Normally I skim then delete but this one caught my eye. Something I’ve been waiting for is now in a state I can download and use - the first “Release Candidate” of Internet Explorer 7.

I’m not fan of Microsoft, having had a long and occasionally arduous relationship with their products. On the other hand, I’m sure the majority of people using the internet do so thorough Microsoft’s magic window, so as a professional web developer I am obliged to investigate and support it as best I can. IE6 was dreadful - it worked but lacked support for some important web standards. IE7, I am told, is standards-compliant, so I am expecting it to work as well as, if not better than, the competing standards-compliant browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Konqueror.

Here are my experiences.

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Or, in this particular case, a futile attempt at outright deception.

Menu and plugin tweaks indeed! If I believed that, I might never have noticed the ever-so-vital change to line 364 of admin-functions.php.

Yes, indeed. Praise where praise is due. Microsoft has made available for download a Truetype scalable font designed for programmers. It is monospaced, clear, readable and anti-aliases well. I’ve been using it for a while now on both Windows and Linux.

The kicker for programmers is that the punctuation glyphs are oversized, so avoiding the common problem of having to squint at the screen to tell the difference between a comma and a full-stop,

Behold, and download, Consolas. A picture tells a thousand words.

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I’m a sensitive soul with computers. Whilst I appreciate the incredible power and capacity that modern computers provide, I cannot help but remember those hazy days during my youth when I learned how to program. My first computer was modest by today’s standards - a Sinclair ZX81 with 8Kb of ROM (including a built-in BASIC interpreter) and 1Kb of RAM. That was enough for some but I didn’t really get started until I had 16Kb of RAM. That was enough for me and my skills at the time. I proceeded to write computer games.

WordPress is a personal publishing system designed to work on modern servers. Servers are enormous. The server that hosts this blog has 125,000 times more RAM than my first computer. My blog may use only 8MB, a limit enforced by the programming language that the blog uses; PHP.

So how does WordPress fill this tiny pocket of the big machine? Today I’m looking at the memory footprint of WordPress 2.0.2. How efficiently does WordPress use its most precious resource?

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They’re new and they’re all the rage! Widgets for WordPress are here and they have something to do with the sidebar of your blog. Well, what exactly?
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By far the most important component of WordPress, as for any CMS, is The Loop or engine. The purpose of the Loop is to select from the available content that which the reader has requested then deliver that content, item by item, through the rest of the processing system. In short, the Loop decides what posts can be seen.

The WordPress loop is to most blog owners, I suspect, a few lines of barely-comprehensible code in some of their theme files. This is a good thing. Most blog owners, like most car owners, prudently avoid disaster by going nowhere near the engine. Other blog owners however, like some car owners, are intolerably curious as to how things work and don’t mind breaking things for fun.

I won’t go anywhere near a real engine, but a software engine poses no threat to my fingers, so in I go.
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