United Kingdom | Technology Tales

Twelve months of WordPress

18^th September 2007

It was on this date several months ago that I moved my hillwalking blog into the world of WordPress. It's a self-hosted WordPress instance and has been for all that time. Because of the move, I was taken into the world of MySQL, one that intrudes still to this day. Most of the time for the migration was spent setting up a theme to fit in with the rest of the website, of which it forms an essential part. The matter of importing all the old posts took up time too, especially when it came to fixing glitches with the XML import. Still, it was all done within a weekend, and my website hasn't looked back since. More people now have a reason to visit, and the blog may even have surpassed the photo gallery as the site's main attraction. I kept up the old blog for a while but have dispensed with that by now; I was keeping both blogs synchronised and that became a tiring manoeuvre. Another upshot of the whole experience is that I have become more aware of the UK outdoor scene and learnt a thing or two too. It might even have encouraged me to go from day tripping to multi-day backpacking, a real-world change that is well removed from the world of technology.

Ditching PC Plus?

28^th June 2007

When I start to lose interest in the features in a magazine that I regularly buy, then it's a matter of time before I stop buying the magazine altogether. Such a predicament is facing PC Plus, a magazine that I have been buying every month over the last ten years. The fate has already befallen titles like Web Designer, Amateur Photographer and Trail, all of which I now buy sporadically.

Returning to PC Plus, I get the impression that it feels more of a lightweight these days. Over the last decade, Future Publishing has been adding titles to its portfolio that take actually from its long-established stalwart. Both Linux Format and .Net are two that come to mind, while there are titles covering Windows Vista and computer music as well. In short, there may be sense in having just a single title for all things computing.

Being a sucker for punishment, I did pick up this month's PC Plus, only for the issue to be as good an example of the malaise as any. Reviews, once a mainstay of the title, are now less prominent than they were. In place of comparison tests, we now find discussions of topics like hardware acceleration, with some reviews mixed in. Topics such as robotics and artificial intelligence do rear their heads in feature articles, when I cannot say that I have a great deal of time for such futurology. The section containing tutorials remains, even if it has been hived off into a separate mini-magazine, and seemingly fails to escape the lightweight revolution.

All this is leading me to dump PC Plus in favour of PC Pro from Dennis Publishing. This feels reassuringly more heavyweight and, while the basic format has remained unchanged over the years, it still managed to remain fresh. Reviews, of both software and hardware, are very much in evidence while it manages to have those value-adding feature articles; this month, digital photography and rip-off Britain come under the spotlight. Add the Real Word Computing section, and it all makes a good read in these times of behemoths like Microsoft, Apple and Adobe delivering new things on the technology front. While I don't know if I have changed, PC Pro does seem better than PC Plus these days.

Do we surf the web less at the weekend?

21^st May 2007

Looking at the visitor statistics for both this blog and for my main website, I have noticed a definite dip in visitor numbers at the weekends, at least over the last few weeks. Time will tell whether this is a definite trend, yet it is an intriguing one: fewer people are reading blogs and such like when they might have more time to do so. It would also suggest that people are getting away from the web at the weekend, not necessarily a bad thing at all. In fact, I was away from the world of computers and out walking in the border country shared by Wales and England yesterday.

Speaking of walking, it does not surprise me that my hillwalking blog received less attention: many of my readers could have been in the outdoors anyway. And as for this blog, it does contain stuff that I find useful in my day job, and it appears that others are looking for the same stuff too if the blog statistics are to be believed. Couple that with the fact that technology news announcements peak during the week, making it appear that the weekday upsurge is real. I’ll continue to keep an eye on things to see if my theorising is right or mistaken…

Outdoors enthuasiasts blogging in the U.K.

10^th May 2007

What we call walking or hillwalking in the U.K. goes under the banners of hiking, tramping and yomping in other parts of the world. One term that we share with other parts is backpacking and this is much bigger in the U.S. than it is in the U.K. My hillwalking blog has come to the attention of members of the hillwalking and backpacking community and WordPress’s logging of who visited my blog has alerted me to this and allowed to find other similar blogs.

Why have I mentioned this here? The reason is that it has allowed me to see what blogging software others have been using. Blogger seems to be a very popular choice with a number using Windows Live Spaces, in the process making me aware that Microsoft has dipped its toes into the hosted blogs space. Other than this, I have also seen Typepad being used and one or two self-hosted operations to boot, mine included. Intriguingly, I have yet to encounter a fellow hillwalking fan in the U.K. using WordPress.com to host a hill blog, but I do know of a German backpacker having one. Video blogging is used by some, with the ever pervasive YouTube becoming a staple for this, at least for the ones that I have seen.

It’s an intriguing survey that leaves me to wonder how things develop…

Adobe CS3 Launch

28^th March 2007

Last night, I sat through part of Adobe’s CS3 launch and must admit that I came away intrigued. Products from the Macromedia stable have been very much brought under the Adobe umbrella and progressed to boot. One of these that attracts my interest in Dreamweaver and Adobe is promoting its AJAX capabilities (using the Spry library), its browser compatibility checking facility and integration with Photoshop, among other things. Dreamweaver’s CSS support also gets taken forward. In addition, Dreamweaver can now integrate with Adobe Bridge and Adobe Device Central. The latter allows you to preview how your site might look on a plethora of WAP-enabled mobile phones while the latter, unless I have been missing something, seems to have become a media manager supporting all of CS3 and not just Photoshop.

Speaking of Photoshop, this now gets such new features as smart filters, I think of these as adjustment layers for things like sharpening, monochrome conversion and much more. Raw image processing now has a non-destructive element with Photoshop Lightroom being touted as a companion for the main Photoshop. Speaking of new additions to the Photoshop family, there is a new Extended edition for those working with digital imaging with a 3D aspect and this is targeted at scientists, engineers, medical professionals and others. It appears that data analysis and interpretation is becoming part of the Photoshop remit now as well.

Dreamweaver and Photoshop are the components of the suite in which I have most interest, while I also note that the Contribute editor now has blogging capabilities; it would be interesting to see how these work, especially given Word 2007’s support for blogging tools like WordPress and Blogger. Another member of note is Version Cue, adding version control to the mix and making CS3 more like a group of platforms than collections of applications.

Unsurprisingly, the changes are rung out for the rest of the suite with integration being a major theme and this very much encompasses Flash too. The sight of an image selection being copied straight into Dreamweaver was wondrous in its own way and the rendering of Photoshop files into 3D images was also something to behold. The latter was used to demonstrate the optimisations that have been added for the Mac platform, a major selling point, apparently.

I suppose that the outstanding question is this: do I buy into all of this? It’s a good question because the computer enthusiast seems to be getting something of a sidelining lately. And that seems to be the impression left by Windows Vista, it gives the appearance that Microsoft is trying to be system administrator to the world. There is no doubt but CS3 is very grown up now and centred around work flows and processes. These have always been professional tools, with the present level of sophistication and pricing* very much reflecting this. That said, enthusiasts like me have been known to use them too, at least for learning purposes. The latter point may yet cause me to get my hands on Photoshop CS3 with its powerful tools for digital imaging, while Dreamweaver is another story. Given it doesn’t fit what how I work now, this is an upgrade that I may give a miss, as impressive as it looks. For a learning experience, I might download a demo, but that would a separate matter from updating my web presence. This time next month may tell a tale…

*Pricing remains the bugbear for the U.K. market that it always has been. At the present exchange rates, we should be getting a much better deal on Adobe products than we do. For instance, Amazon.com has the Web Premium CS3 suite from Macromedia Studio 8 priced at $493.99 while it is £513.99 on Amazon.co.uk. Using the exchange rate current as I write this, £1 buying $1.96605, the U.K. price is a whopping $1010.53 in U.S. terms. To me, this looks like price gouging and Microsoft has been slated for this too. Thus, I wonder what will be said to Adobe on this one.

Weather gizmos

7^th February 2007

With a good amount of snow forecast for parts of the U.K., one’s mind does turn to weather matters. Interestingly, AccuWeather is now powering browser plug-ins for all the major PC browsers and not just Firefox: Internet Explorer and Opera also get a look in. I have already tried out ForecastFox, the offering for Firefox, and had a brief look at the others. The IE add-on, I tested it with IE7, slots in neatly into the browser’s toolbar. Unlike ForecastFox, only the current weather and the forecast for the next day are shown for the selected location, with a link to AccuWeather for a 15-day forecast. The Opera widget is not docked with any toolbar, a bit of an irritation to put it mildly, but it does offer similar information.

These gizmos do highlight differences in the units used for weather information around the world. The U.S. is very much old school in its use of Fahrenheit (means next to nothing for me, I have to say) for temperature and miles per hour for wind speed. Other parts of the world measure temperature in Celsius (also called Centigrade) with wind speed measured in either metres per second or kilometres per hour. I find m/s strange for wind speed, but mph or kph are fine; while I think in terms of miles, my hillwalking is causing me to become more and more conversant in kilometres.

Cheaper retail Vista?

2^nd February 2007

Brain Livingston has described an intriguing way to go using the retail Upgrade editions of Vista to do a fresh installation without having either Windows 2000 or XP installed in the latest edition (free – there is a paid version, but I veer away from information overload) of the Windows Secrets email newsletter: install it twice! After the first time around, it cannot be activated because there is no previous version of Windows installed, yet it is possible to do a Vista to Vista "upgrade", the second installation, and that can be activated. While it is strange behaviour, I suppose that it placates those who think that the full retail packages are far too expensive. They even think that in the U.S.; but "rip off" Britain is getting a lot worse deal because we are not seeing the benefits of the low dollar at all. If all was right, we should be getting Vista at half of the price that we are paying for it. It's enough to drive you to going the OEM option or not upgrading at all, especially since XP will be supported until 2011 (I have seen 2014 mentioned in some places). Livingston will cover the whole OEM discussion in the next edition of Windows Secrets, and I, for one, will be very interested to see what he has to say.

Camera tales

20^th January 2007

Anyone who has ever been on HennessyBlog will know that I enjoy walking in the countryside and that I always have a camera with me when I do. Like many digital SLR owners, I am beginning to see the tell-tale spots in my photos that are caused by a dirty sensor. And it isn’t that I am continually changing lenses either: I rarely remove the Sigma 18-50 mm DC zoom lens that I use with the camera. Rather than trusting myself with the cleaning (I have had a go already without much success), I am giving serious consideration to letting the professionals take care of my Canon EOS 10D, my only digital camera. I have already been quoted something of the order of £35 by a Canon service centre not far from me and am seriously considering taking them up on the offer.

Of course, sending it away to them means that I will have to forego the ability to include photos with posts on HennessyBlog describing my walks in the kind of timescale to which I have become accustomed; of course, this is where digital really scores. I will still have a camera with me as film remains my mainstay, even in this digital age. The camera in question is another Canon, an EOS 30 that I acquired used from Ffordes Photographic. While taking a recent peek at their website, I have just spied a used EOS 1V going for £399, a song for what remains Canon’s top of the range film SLR. Yes, I am tempted but I must stay real. In fact, I did not pay full price for my EOS 10D. That was part of the run-out stock that 7dayshop.com were selling off at next to half of the EOS 10D’s original asking price in the wake of its being superseded by the EOS 20D (itself since replaced by the EOS 30D: digital is a fast-moving world).

Sending a camera away for attention is not new to me as I also acquired a used Minolta X-700 manual focus SLR, again obtained from Ffordes, and that needed a spot of maintenance after a year in my possession. There was a problem with the shutter that cost me £75 to get Minolta to fix. Now that Minolta as a camera maker is no more, I was wondering who would attend to it in the future. That question was answered by a recent look on the web: in the UK it is JP Service Solutions, a division of Johnson’s Phototopia. Konica Minolta retain this information on their website. Konica Minolta’s failure to capitalise effectively on the digital revolution in its early days, particularly in the SLR area where they gifted their competitors a massive head start, cost them their future in the photographic business and now Sony continues the mantle, a sad end to one of camera manufacturing’s great innovators.

Returning to my digital-less dilemma, I suppose that I could get another digital for backup duty; I have to admit that a DSLR is a bulky contraption to be carrying in airline luggage. The camera that has made it onto my wish list is Ricoh’s GR Digital, a highly regarded offering that follows in the great tradition of its film forbears, the GR 1 and GR 21. Given that my first 35 mm camera was a Ricoh, and I have it still, this would be a case of returning to my roots. Of course, having it on a wish list is very different from having it on the to-do list and finances will certainly dictate if the purchase is made, though a finance deal offered by Warehouse Express does make it more accessible. Maybe some day…

Ricoh GR Digital

TechNet Plus subscription

19^th January 2007

I have a free subscription to Microsoft's Microsoft Learn but with the onset of Vista and the latest issue dangles a carrot in front of me: the idea of a TechNet Plus subscription. The trouble is that it is £283 per annum in the UK, not cheap. Nevertheless, that does rather neatly compare to the price of Windows Vista and that comes as part of the package. I think that I'll revisit the idea when upgrading time comes, and that will be a while after the Vista launch date of 30/1/2007. Given the security changes in the latest Windows incarnation, I'll wait to ensure that I will not be put out too much before making the jump.

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