Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Last night I thought it would be a good idea to check out OpenSuse, so I downloaded the DVD and burned the only DVD I had with the image. As soon as I got home, my vulnerable laptop was begging to keep windows at its heart, but in the end, after putting the OpenSuse DVD into the drive, it took complete control of the laptop and started the installation process.
The OpenSuse installation was very easy and did almost everything for me, apart from filling out my name etc. It shrank my windows partition, and created a load more to use itself. When I booted my laptop up in the morning, I got straight into my new operating system and started playing. When I realised my wireless card was not installed by default, I thought I should switch over to windows and get any drivers I needed. I restarted my machine and got the boot loader, and selected Vista. Much to my horror, I was thrown straight back into the OpenSuse installation.
After hunting around online for solutions, I finally found the app bcdedit.exe stored in the system32 directory on my windows install (I was running repair mode off the Vista CD). Running this, I could see all of my boot options and the paths they were using. I noticed that the path for windows was still “\grldr.mbr” instead of the windows default “\windows\system32\winload.exe”.
Using the following command in command prompt, I managed to restore my Windows Boot Sequence.
bcdedit /set {default} path “\windows\system32\Winload.exe”
{default} should be replaced with the Guid of the loader you need, however {default} should work for most windows installs.
The tag clouds below were made for me by Goose a friend who I met in the early years of business when I was still living in Torquay.
The image was made in Illustrator and content from with a script, the cloud has been automated from site content > graphic. Looks pretty cool I think, much better than anything that can be done in CSS 
BAJB Tag Cloud
From a very young age, everyone has an imagination. Seeing a spoon of food infront of you, full of the most horrible thing in the world (probably mash potato) you really dont want, and refusing to eat it. Suddenly, your mum, or dad makes the noise of a train and your mouth is a tunnel. You eat whatever was on the spoon and forgot that you didn’t want it. Without your imagination, you would just have looked at your parents in horror of what they were trying to do to you, and not given up. Our imagination is the thing that drives us to conjure up wild ideas.
Back at school, most people have a vision of what they want to do when they grow up. Some people grow up doing exactly what they wanted to do when they were in school, some people change their mind when they have new experiences, from a new lesson at school, or a hobby you may have. Being able to stick to your vision is the one thing you need to make sure you achieve your goal.
Every time I have a new project, I have a vision of where that project is going to be in 5 years time. Being able to see that project years down the line gives you your goal, where you want that project to end up. As with any goal, you need to know how to get there, you need to make a map to its success, in your head, on paper, or on a whiteboard, it really doesnt matter as long as you have a plan. Without your vision, you cannot begin to think about the things involved. If you take facebook as an example, Mark Zuckerberg saw facebook as a website that would revolutionise social networking, he didn’t start the facebook project thinking, its a great tool for my friends to use, he knew it would be big, it was just a matter of time and commitment. Looking at facebook today, you can see Mark’s vision became a reality, and he will always be extending the horizon of his vision, afterall, as soon as you reach your goal, you always want more. Don’t you?
If you want to succeed, make sure you keep your vision on the horizon and don’t let anything stand in your way or sidetrack you. The last thing you want is for your vision to be clouded and years down the line you never achieved what you setout to get, and you are back to square one. Make your plan, work all the hours you have to make sure it works. The hard work will pay off, and you will be greatful you stuck to your plan, your vision.
Did you have a vision 5 years ago, looking ahead to where you wanted to be now. Did you make it? did you change your plan?
Having a vision will only get you so far, you need to work hard at it to achieve your goals and to make your vision reality.
IE 6 is definitely the most painful browser for developers and designers to support – it’s seven years old and doesn’t even fully support the CSS 1.0 standard created in 1996. We are now in the age of Web 2.0; CSS, Ajax, JavaScript and Transparent PNGs are all becoming more popular and required to make applications function and look as customers should expect. It shouldn’t be any surprise that IE6 does not support anything as standard, and many people including myself have had to resort to writing custom CSS and JavaScript files just for this browser. There are a few scripts out there which can make things a lot easier, Dean Edwards came out with a script named IE7, which attempts to fix many of the issues with HTML and CSS in the browser. It’s not perfect, but if you start your application with the script, you will have a lot more success.
Internet Explorer 8 is now in Beta release and from the looks of it, its going to cause another bunch of headaches for developers. However, Microsoft, because they know that they are never going to get it right, added a great new Meta Tag ‘X-UA-Compatible’ This tag will allow you to force IE to render to the preferred IE Version, it even has ‘edge’ which allows you to risk your life with Microsoft and always render in the latest version. You can find more information about this latest Microsoft HACK on Aaron Gustafson’s blog.
I’m sure there will be thousands of people out there that think Microsoft should have done more to get users to upgrade their browsers, there are at least 16 people at Just Develop It that agree. We all look forward to the day where the % of IE6 users drops below the critical point and the browser is not supported as standard. 37 Signals has already posted a blog announcing the phasing out of IE6 on all their products. It’s the actions of the big players online that will eventually have users upgrading in the fear of being unsupported, and not Microsoft which many believe should have done more.
Keeping it traditional, I thought I would start my blog with the famous “Hello, World” text, the output many people produce from their first experiences with programming languages.
At the age of about 12 on a ‘Windows’ PC in my bedroom, I started my life on the web, playing about with space backgrounds in frontpage and horrible sounds and fonts. At the age of 16, I had my first hosting company. Back in the day when 100Mb was a lot of web space, I had 20meg.co.uk, which offered 20Mb of FREE Web Space (You can see the remains of it on the WayBack Machine here). 20Meg was, at the time part of the “Just Bring It Home Network!”, which all theses years on is still with me in the new “Just” network – “Just Develop It“.
I will keep my blog updated as often as I can with source code, life in the world of Just Develop It, my desire to burn all Apple Macs and upgrade all IE6 users to the world of the living.