Archive for February, 2007

Photoshop books

February 28, 2007 No comments

Having exhausted the trial time on PhotoShop Elements 5, I am now having a look at its big brother PhotoShop CS2. That has got me thinking about PhotoShop books so that I become more of the possibilities and how to use them. Having a Safari subscription as I do, that naturally became my first port of call and I seemed to find two that answered my needs. Both are by Scott Kelby and they now lie on my Safari bookshelf: The Photoshop Elements 5 Book for Digital Photographers and The Photoshop CS2 Book for Digital Photographers. Even so, I am tempted to get a dead tree version of one of them and that presents a chicken and egg dilemma: the books could help choose which software to buy and the software dictates which of them will be the more useful. That said, I suspect price and features will swing it the way of Elements 5; paying over £400 for software whose capabilities I may never need does not sound financially sensible.

Update March 5th, 2007: I have now got my mits on the dead tree edition of Scott Kelby’s The Photoshop Elements 5 Book for Digital Photographers as well as Brad Hinkel’s Focal Easy Guide to Photoshop CS2. Now for some reading…

Books, Graphics, Software

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WordPress plugins

February 27, 2007 No comments

On my other blog, a WordPress one that I have hosted myself, I have added the FireStats plug-in so that I can get some idea how many are paying it a visit. It has definitely been useful. It tells you referrer, operating system and browser information as well as what has been visited. I know that I can look at my server logs to get this information but this is so much easier and it can be extended to non-WordPress PHP-powered pages too.

Hansel and Gretel Breadcrumb is another plug-in that I have spotted but given that the blog is set-up, it didn’t look that useful. If it could be extended to my non-blog pages à la FireStats, that would be a much more useful situation.

Web 2.0, Web Development, Web Tools

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Wonders of the middle mouse button

February 26, 2007 No comments

My installation of Firefox seems to have stopped listening to the target attribute of hyperlinks. Thankfully, the middle mouse button comes to the rescue. Clicking on a link with the middle button opens it the destination page up in a new window or tab, depending on how you set your defaults. The behaviour goes even further than this: the trusty middle mouse button does the same for bookmarks and the Google search bar; all very useful. And its not just a Firefox thing either. IE7 does the same thing for web page hyperlinks and bookmarks while in Opera, it is limited links on web pages.

Web Tools

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New Firefox, new ForecastFox

February 25, 2007 No comments

Firefox 2.0.0.2 has made its appearance and the CPU usage bug seems to have gone away. We’ll see how it goes… Also, a new version of the Accuweather.com powered ForecastFox plug-in has come out. It was when I was using it that I noticed heavy CPU usage but the behaviour has yet to make its reappearance and I hope it never will. Now, I can get back to enjoying this very useful widget.

Web Tools

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Extra WordPress editor options

February 24, 2007 No comments

Solo Technology has posted about a nice extra available in the Visual Editor in WordPress 2.1. Hit ALT+SHIFT+V in Firefox and ALT+V in IE, gets you an extra row of buttons adding more editing options. He is currently trying add a button to the main bar for doing the toggling. P.S. While on the subject of blog post management, I have been playing around with w.bloggar and I have to say that it works well; with a spot of persuasion, it even edits WordPress blog pages. The only things attempting to spoil the experience are the odd instances where odd characters get added to blog posts or characters in posts get misinterpreted. I’ll try to add more in time.

Web 2.0, Web Development, Web Tools

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Posting frequency

February 20, 2007 No comments

If you have been here before, you may have noticed my posting frequency has gone down recently. Part of the reason for this is my taking on two big Vista-related issues that have attracted a lot of attention and wading through the various articles on the web has taken a lot of time. Finding out as much as possible about Vista licensing was certainly a challenge, thanks in no small part to Microsoft’s legalese, but it has been the DRM/HDCP issue that has really swallowed time on me; a passion-stirring topic that raises tempers is almost guaranteed to generate much discussion. Add to this the need to take care when considering such an impassioned subject and time really does fly by…

Addressing contentious issues that attract comments taking each which view has got me thinking about my blogging habits, particularly given that blogging is a hobby of mine and I have plenty of other things to be doing. As result, the post rate slowed down. If I wanted to continue like that, I could post more detailed entries once or twice a week and leave it at that. Or I could keep things short and frequent, say one post per day. Another idea is to have one long entry per week and shorter ones one per day for other days in the week. Now, that sounds like a good way to go.

Site News

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