Archive for January, 2007

WordPress 2.1…and announcing a new Blog!

Sunday, January 28th, 2007

Had some fun last week installing the latest and greatest version of WordPress – version 2.1. And in related news, I’m announcing a new blog!

So, the technical details first – the installation was a snap. Just like the 2.0 series, a quick unzip and point your browser to a particular page, and minutes later the blog is up and running. From the admin perspective it feels like an incremental improvement – things seem a bit snazzier and smoother, but its hard to put your finger on any one “knock-your-socks-off” feature.

One item worthy of note is that the editor is much improved, so you can do your posts in the WYSIWYG editor reliably (I found the earlier incarnation a little flaky – so much so that I turned it off, and did my posts “manually”).

In terms of the new blog, this setup was all about bringing the latest incarnation Low Impact to life. A while back, I’d noticed that more and more of my posts had an environmental leaning which, while not clashing particularly, were starkly different from my tech-related posts. So, as an experiment, I setup a blog on Blogger called Low Impact.

I got a lot out of the experience – enough to know that:

  • I liked the setup of having a specific blog for environmental topics, freeing up dasman’s World for more tech-related postings, and
  • While Blogger is a great site, nothing beats having full control of your own website!

So, the domain was registered, a webserver setup, and WordPress 2.1 installed.

Low Impact’s purpose is to provide postings specifically about reducing our impact on the environment. If that’s a topic that interests you, you might want to check it out!

Posted in Environment, Green, IT Stuff, computing, general | 2 Comments »

3 months of news

Saturday, January 20th, 2007

Certain nameless colleagues have been curious as to whether some sort of terrible car accident had severed my fingers, thus preventing me from writing blog entries over the last 3 months, so this post is all about the incredible things I’ve been getting up to since then on the computer front.

Hmmmm. Let me think….. *scratches head* There must be something….

  • I’ve continued to spend far too much time cursing at J2ME. When it comes to UIs, you either have full, low-level control where you draw every single pixel yourself, or you have almost no control where you populate a Form with Items and wonder what on earth it will look like on the various platforms. If only there was a happy medium… :( And yet, despite my complaints I can’t walk away – the lure of knowing your program can run on potentially so many devices is too much!
  • I gave NetBeans another shot for my J2ME development with version 5.5, and decided all is forgiven. It feels way “snappier” than version 5, and I haven’t had it hang on me while using the Visual Designer part of the Mobility Pack (which is the killer feature for me). Good work guys!
  • I’ve upgraded Wordpress around 50 times to cope with all the dot releases that have been coming out. I’m actually getting a bit excited about the big 2.1 version due out soon – I have a sister working overseas who has been a blogger in the past and toys with getting back into it – perhaps a snazzy new piece of software will be the impetus she needs!
  • I finally decided to sit down and tick off something thats been on my To Do list for about 6 months now, and upgrade the search page at www.asman-it.com.au to use the new “inline” Google search results. And, like all things you put off for ages, it took around 10 minutes (although admittedly my page won’t win any prizes for aesthetic or robust web design!).

So, we’re back up to date. Perhaps my next post will be a little more on-time! :)

Posted in IT Stuff, computing, j2me, java | 1 Comment »