Oh, wow. If it hooks into Telecom's new network I might be going to have to get one of these....

I'm having a quick "group test" of these things because I have to put together a webpage and I'm terrible at HTML, CSS and design in general - NOTE: This page now edited seven months later.... Some thoughts:

• Freeway express is an awful awful clunky piece of crap. The very first thing I did was delete something, regret it, and not be able to undo it again. It's not WYSIWYG but thinks it is. Claims to be modelled on DTP software ... from the late 80's, I assume.


• Rapidweaver is far too limited for a client side app. It has templates (hundreds of actually very good commercial ones are available) but other than that it's literally like just filling in the gaps in a form. EDIT: AHA! There's a plug-in to put general CSS div's on a page. This is more like it!


• Sandvox looks to be a more flexible Rapidweaver, and it may be, but it's till too form-filly for me. Drag a picture from the browser onto the page .... get a file:// URL dumped on instead of the picture. Fail.


• beta of Flux 2 is everything I could want in an HTML editor. It uses CSS, is fully WYSIWYG but is rendered almost totally unusable by bugs. I had real hope for these guys.


• iWeb I had initially dismissed out of hand because it used to not upload to anything other than .mac. Not any more, it seems, it even managed to publish to sftp without me having to change a single thing on the server. The UI is intuitive and actually works. The produced HTML is actually not too bad - it uses style sheets, sends images of in an appropriate format and size. The real problem is that it forces a forces a curious directory format on you and doesn't seem to have any interest in working with externally provided CSS.


• Kompozer like a really ugly Flux. Fewer bugs, terrible usability.


• "Web Design"Initially optimistic it was then more than happy to produce HTML that didn't actually work, rendering bugs, all sorts.


• Goodpage is a text editor with a quasi-WYSIWYG ... thing on it. I was going to describe it as a valiant effort but then I realised it wasn't.


• ShutterBug - oh my god. No way. I'm not even dowloading that


• Create - see above. Actually click on the link and see for yourself. Urrghh.


• I even, finally, tried bloody dreamweaver. Oh my god, I feel your pain. How much????

So there we go. An interesting exercise and, well, eye opening.

BTW, the resulting site. Twenty minutes in iWeb including thinking what to write and making a cup of tea.

The package maker delivered as part of the developer tools for OSX 10.5 is awful. Just doesn't work, go see the mailing list archives for a world of pain. Thankfully there is an alternative: Iceberg has a weird UI (add files to the package by right clicking where you want them to go then selecting "Add Files") but builds installer packages that work and appear to have all the features of a "proper" Apple package. Even better, an Iceberg project can be built off the command line - and hence in the "Run Script" build phase in XCode - just by calling "freeze" and passing the name of the iceberg project. Love it! Thank you, Stéphan!

I had no idea there was so much. The ZFS project is interesting too....

Today I finally admitted defeat and put myself on the larger and (gasp) 80 bucks/month broadband plan. I phone TelstraClear, announce that I would like to give them more money, they smile sweetly and tell me it should be a goer by the end of the day.

Half an hour later the net goes down and stays down. I phone support and get put on hold for AN HOUR after which they fail to debug the problem for another ten minutes or so, including the following conversation:

Them: "OK, can you press the start button"
Me: "What?"
Them: "Can you press the start button"
Me: "I'm on a Mac"
[silence]
Me: "What is it you're trying to achieve?"

They wanted to know that I'd set my IP up correctly. Because, y'know, that always magically changes underneath you on a tuesday morning. Finally, as they guy is staring at the screen blankly I jokingly ask if this is what happens every time someone pays for an upgrade. He says "Oh! You've changed plans? That'll be it, then". I kid you not. An email is sent to the back end team, presumably saying "you've broken it again, customer number 123456" and they promise to have it fixed within an hour.

Now, I've taken to not taking local copies of the Internet, preferring instead to just shortcut, say, the Python library reference and so this basically boils down to two hours out of my day. I ask to be connected to customer care so I might have a minor bitch to them and try to get let off my over charges for last month as a sort of "yeah, sorry mate" thing because some companies like to go the extra mile to please customers, particularly huge enormous 10yr+ broadband consumers (I had a bank call me to reverse a charge once). But not TelstraClear who consider themselves above this sort of thing. Right. Fine. Gotta ask though, eh?

All I can say at this point is that a very shiny new box, probably owned by Telecom has appeared halfway down the street and if they want to make me an offer involving VDSL then TelstraClear have just opened my grand-a-year wallet significantly. Dipshits.

TechRadar have put a couple of good tweakers articles out over the last few days. This one was first (all praise number 8) and this floated over today (number 4 can be a lifesaver). I don't normally go for these sorts of things but some of these have been really useful.

As described by Landon Fuller, allows arbitrary execution under the logged in user's account. This is all getting a bit out of hand....

Awesome, a one click installer. About time.

I'm liking "Enterprise DB" more and more and more :)

Edit: Forgot to show some love for pgAdmin.

Is absolutely jaw dropping. I'm tempted to say it's the first genuinely new piece of technology I've seen on the web since Google. I wonder how this is going to pan out....

One of the things I hate the most about doing business, or otherwise being employed in New Zealand is the reverence granted to big companies purely because they're big. Now, granted, it's probably the same everywhere.

Case in point: Contact energy have employed big-ass consulting firm Beca to design a 184 turbine wind farm, a billion dollar gig (the build, not the consulting .... thankfully). Beca put one Chris James in charge of the project, a man whose many talents do not include civil engineering. Or a civil engineering qualification. And I quote:

Perhaps the most telling question of the day came from Mr Lumsden. "Do turbines require a power supply to operate?"
"I am not sure," Mr James replied.

So, next time your big name consulting firm screws something up, don't say you weren't warned. Regardless of who they work for, there really is no replacement for talented and experienced people.

Hmmmmm. So, this guy buys a Dell. It has a one year warranty and three years after he bought it, the motherboard shits itself. Dell refuse to fix it, strangely, and he buys the stuff, fixes it himself and then hauls Dell off to the disputes tribunal.

This is where it gets interesting. The disputes tribunal agreed that a computer should function, at least, for five years after it's purchase date, being a reasonable period as defined by the act.

I have, sitting next to me, a MacBook Pro with a shot fan, a shot battery, and whose hard drive has already been replaced. Hmmmm.

I checked my email this morning and for the first time in years had dozens of spams. Oh well.

64 cores, each with two hardware threads, each with a new vector engine that works on 16 floats at once. But best of all each core is an ordinary x86 core - so this could be a rocket ship server processor as well.

Are we going to see some enormous change in the performance of computers?

There are dangerous drugs and there safe drugs. OK, safe-er drugs, I suppose. But Morphine? Heroin? And now, people dying from home made Heroin? $120 for two, apparently.

OMG. Whatever next. Oh, this:

At 11pm the woman found he was not breathing and spent 40min texting her sister before calling an ambulance.

OK. If you find me not breathing, call an ambulance. Now. Right now. And google CPR. Do not, under any circumstances, text your sister FFS.