You are looking at posts that were written in the month of March in the year 2008.
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Exactly one week after I finally got around to upgrading my blog to Wordpress 2.3.3, the guys over at wordpress.org decided to release Wordpress 2.5
Like last time, the upgrade went off without a hitch. The new admin interfaces look great too! As always, I was blown away by how the Wordpress software “just works”. Great work guys!
Adobe’s long awaited free, online edition of Photoshop is now released, and you can try it out here.
I had a bit of a play with it today, and it looks to be very well put together Flex application! There are a lot of very nice technical aspects, including the use of modules to reduce the weight of what would other wise be a quite heavy app. In my honest opinion however, it’s a little bit light on features. Scrapblog for example has more photo editing features that this first version of Photoshop Express.
I’m loving the new trend of ‘useful’ Flex application. Between Sliderocket, Buzzword and now Photoshop Express, Adobe is rapidly building a very compelling suit of applications. It’s a great time to be an Adobe Flex developer!
As I mentioned in my previous post, I recently upgraded my PHP installation to PHP 5, and the process caused me a lot of grief. I’m trying to document my experiences here so that in the future other people will hopefully be saved the pain that I went through.
The Problem
Once I had my PHP scripts running, I quickly noticed was that every time I stored a value into the session object, that value would be gone by the time the next next request to the script came through.
I did a lot of tests to eliminate any possibility that there was nothing else in the system which might be clearing the session variables or overwriting them etc. Eventually I tracked it down to the fact the php.ini file contained a path where session data would be stored, and similar to the previous issue I had with PHP, it was again DOS style file paths which were causing the problem.
Recently I upgraded my PHP installation to PHP 5. The process was fraught with issues for me, but hopefully posting what I learnt here will help other people get back up to speed faster than I did.
The Problem
The first thing I noticed after installing PHP is that every time I tried to access a PHP script, whether through my browser or from a Flex application, I would get a 404 error.
This problem really baffled me for a long time until I discovered that the problem comes from PHP referencing itself with IIS using a DOS path which means the PHP executable cannot be found.
Following the advice on the wordpress.org site, this is a brief post to congratulate myself on finally upgrading munkiihouse.com to Wordpress 2.3.3!
The upgrade went off without a hitch which was a huge relief. I know I know, everything from wordpress works faster and better than you expect, but I put a lot of myself into my little slice of the web and I didn’t want anything to get broken.
As far as you (my valued readers) are concerned, the upgrade should not be noticeable at all. If you do see anything which isn’t quite right, please let me know and I will fix it ASAP.
Long live the Internet Content Creators!
Safari is now officially the best browser! This post is bound to trigger some controversy, but I’ve been using the latest version of the Safari browser on my Windows Vista computer and I’m really loving it.
I know a lot of people hold strong opinions as to which browser is the best, and believe me, I’m one of them. Up until today, I would have jumped at the chance to explain to you why Opera is the best browser, and why everyone should use it. However, this latest version of Safari trumps Opera easily.
Previous versions of Safari have been a bit of a joke really, but the boys down at Apple have turned that all around and now, as well as offering a nice clean interface, they also manage to get the highest score of any currently released major browser on the Acid 3 test. To top it off, Safari renders pages faster than any other major browser! Like so many things Apple does, they just seem to have got this one right.
Personally I’m really excited by the new generation of browsers, and the competition between Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera and Apple is just fantastic!
For your taste of the future you can download Safari 3.1 here:
http://www.apple.com/safari/
Woohoo!!! My shiny new copy of Flex Builder 3 Professional came in the mail today!
Thanks heaps to Adobe, and to the members of the NZFXUG for making it possible for me to get a copy of FB3. I can’t wait to start trying out all the new features! 
It’s funny, but I’ve never owned a boxed copy of an Adobe product before. I guess that’s because we live in the age of software downloads and emailed serial numbers. Either way, this is getting pride of place on my shelf, ready to impress anyone who might ask me to code for them
A boy and girl are chatting in a bar. The boy is smoking and leaving smoke rings into the air.
The girl gets irritated with the smoke and says to her lover: “Can’t you see the warning written on the cigarettes packet, smoking is injurious to health!”
The boy replies back: “Darling, I am a programmer. We don’t worry about warnings, we only worry about errors.”
This video was shown recently in Korea, and provides the first look at the Zerg race as well as some interesting insights into the new story line. Check it out!
Edit: I removed the video because the embed code broke my site.
You can see it here: http://gamevideos.com/video/id/17918
Three years since they put out the Acid2 test, the guys down at the Web Standards Project have done it again and produced Acid3. This test is a major extension over Acid2 (CSS tests), to include DOM scripting, CSS3 and SVG (among others).
I’m a big fan of standards compliance, and I really wish someone would release a fully standards compliant browser. Is it true that the guys who wrote the acid tests must have a standard compliant render engine? If not, how could they test their test? If you did have a standards compliant engine, you’d think it would be quite valuable.
All major browsers fail the Acid3 test in their latest versions:
You can test your browsers by going HERE.
Then check out the reference render HERE.
Do you have any other browsers to run the test on? Let us know your results in the comments. I’d love to know what you get with the FF3 and IE8 betas!
