I’m moving from MovableType to WordPress – Please excuse any temporary breakages.
So far – so good. Alas it doesn’t seem to make me a better blogger- but the install and import from MT was silky smooth and nice and easy.
Very amusing and accurate.
Ever wanted to know which English word contains 5 vowels in a row? or What a collection of Cats is called?
A Fascinating FAQ about English from the Oxford Dictionaries has the answers you seek.
MicroSoft has rather a nasty habit of trying to buy quality and talent.
They bought Bungie – and Halo went from a Mac game to the XBox game.
They Bought Connectix’s Virtual PC – and the new version is delayed (again) to October.
Then they bought Rare Games – who wrote the famously brilliant Goldeneye on N64.
Now it seems that the curse of being acquired by MS strikes again: Rumours of Walk-outs at Rare abound…
How to install the W3C HTML validator on your own mac.
“Arise, Sir Tim!”
The Internet Explorer team at Microsoft have a blog. And they want feedback about (Windows) IE….
If you have any interest in Web development, Please give them feedback about IE’s (lack of conformity to) standards – I have.
But please don’t go all frothy-mouthed – be polite and logical. 
My top IE irks:
.lack of Alpha Support in PNGs.
.broken Box-Model
.< object > tag that either doesn’t work, or needs nasty hacks to work.
They’ve had a lot of feedback so far – and I think they’re beginning to realise that outside their team not everyone thinks that IE is a shiningly brilliant app.
There’s also a wiki about IE.
Very cool Flash journey through a Jet Engine.
£180 – not bad – although 4Gig isn’t enough for me – and because of the microdrive that they use the minis aren’t bootable. (I sometimes wipe my iPod and use it as a test install volume for developer builds of Mac OS X.)
If a site doesn’t appear to publish an RSS feed – it doesn’t always mean they don’t have one.
It’s always worth emailing them – even if they don’t have one – they’ll realise that there is demand for one.
I managed to discover that both PennyArcade and TheJoyOfTech have feeds:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/RSS.xml
http://www.joyoftech.com/joyoftech/joyoftech.xml
TomP and Danny O’Brien have made the same observation about Tiger’s new version of iChat – which means obligatory Genral Zod link.
The torrent fairy left me a copy of the Developers’ Preview – and am busy digesting it. The thing that impressed me most was the ease of developing Dashboard Widgets. I’ve never been a big JavaScript nut – but I managed to hack a web JS insult generator into a widget faster than I thought I would.
Another bit of software, but this time for the PS2: HDLoader. I bought this recently – and it’s quite impressive – you bung a normal hard disc into your PS2 (check compatibility here) and it allows you to rip games to the HD – turning your PS2 into a games jukebox. Load-times are improved as HDs can read faster than optical drives – but there are two down-sides:
1 – The HD is formatted in some HDLoader-specific way, which means that the HD cannot be used as a “normal” PS2 HD. Since the official HD hasn’t even been released in Europe this is not such a big deal.
2 – The more annoying downside is that On-Line components of games will not work — this is because when they connect they use Sony’s Dynamic Network Authenication System (DNAS) which checks the validity of the disc in the PS2 at network login. Of course you can always boot from the original disc when you want to go online – but that rather defeats the point.
Ars has another great article that explains hardware in a way that mere mortals can understand – this one’s about PCI Express.
