Ronda, Spain, Spanish, Themes, and Everything Else

Yesterday I finally found the time to play with my MAMP install again, its working just the way I like it now, even down to reinstalling my various test serendipity installs.

After I'd done that I tested the mac versions of Opera, Firefox and of course Safari with all my templates. A couple of small things need fixing in some of the templates which Safari seems to struggle with, but these are older templates that don't seem to be widely used so I think I can probably delay updating them for another few weeks.

The real shock came when I reconfigured the Windows XP VM in Parallels so that instead of using WAMP, it now directly connects to MAMP on the OSX host system. I had to configure dedicated IP's on the local network but once this was done it worked really smoothly.

So, what was the shock? IE7! A couple of my templates have small errors in them that I remember spending days fixing for IE6 only to discover that on the XP guest they seem broken. Which is really odd, most problems in IE6 that work differently in IE7 are because IE7 actually works properly, but in these templates its totally screwing small things up. I doubt that most users would even notice, but to me its annoying.

On the other hand, there are also a couple of things where I may have screwed up which I've just found, for example, the Be Nice template has a small arrow positioned to the left of the entry title, but when the title wraps onto multiple lines IE7 is positioning the arrow so that it sits left middle instead of left top. I haven't checked the CSS yet, but every other browser positions it left top so the CSS is probably correct. And of course that means more hacks to get IE7 working. Argh!

Also, the template I'm using now seems to have some Safari glitches, the contact form occasionally renders incorrectly, and since I planned to release this template I think I better get cracking fixing it. Also I made some bold statement about releasing 50 templates this year, and the clock is ticking. Fortunately I have several incomplete mockups waiting to be coded, and there are some really nice open source templates that I want to port.

For any readers of this site who are also following this thread in the Serendipity forums, you'll be pleased to know that the bulletproof template Matthias and Dave have been working on is in fact bulletproof. I couldn't break it.

I don't have time to writeup a longer entry about the last few days in Brisbane, but for those who are interested check out my Brisbane set

This week in Brisbane has been interesting, the city has changed so much in the last couple of years, the biggest change has been in the people. Apparently several thousand new residents are moving in every month from Sydney, Melbourne and Asia. In fact the old Brisbane which seemed like a big country town has been replaced by a cosmopolitan city where almost every language or skin color seems to be represented.

The number of tourists has jumped substantially, we went upto Mt Coot-tha the other day and the carpark must have had about 10 coaches of tourists. And big groups as well, at least five of the coaches were Korean tourists. The interesting thing about all the changes that are happening is that we love it and hate it.

We hate the fact that the city is becoming a big city where people are less tolerant of each other, where traffic is worse, where there are more apartment blocks etc. But we love the new cultures that are calling Brisbane home. New restaurants, interesting people to look at, new fashions, and because we are effectively tourists in our own town, we also get great conversations with people we would never usually get the opportunity to talk to.

Mt Coot-tha, which is a hill overlooking the city on the northern side of the river hasn't changed. The day was overcast and smog filled the air around the city so our photographs were a bit disappointing. We borrowed a car to get there so we aren't able to go back while we're here, but Ceejay has been able to get some nice shots of the city, she even had her first night shoot.

The photos I've uploaded today were taken in South Bank, which is parkland across the river from the city. It used to be one of our favorite spots to meet friends for lunch. The southern end has a small maritime museum, while the northern end is where the cultural centre is. The cultural centre is where I've been coming to get my net access.

The small maritime museum used to be the old dry-docks at South Bank but I don't think they needed it for that anymore so it was sitting around looking like an eyesore and somebody came up the the idea of turning it into this museum. A couple of years ago a pedestrian bridge between the university and the museum was built, that's where I got some of my best shots from, looking down onto the museum courtyard.

The arbour at South Bank is also well worth seeing, they built a steel skeleton laced with wires and planted Bougainvillea's all along the trellis. It really does look beautiful.

I've also added some photos of suburban streets to show you guys what the inner suburbs of Brisbane look like. Enjoy!

A quick update on configuring the MacBook Pro, MAMP is installed and working perfectly along with the Mac versions of Firefox and Opera. I decided not to install Camino or IE5. I've also now successfully installed Windows XP in Parallels and have installed WAMP along with IE7 and the windows versions of Firefox and Opera.

I decided to overwrite IE6 with IE7 rather than try to run the two versions separately. My opinion of IE6 has never changed, I hate it, it doesn't render pages correctly, and frankly I'm not interested in supporting it anymore. My belief is that IE7 will quickly become the standard.

My next task is to create a linux VM so that I can test the various KDE or Gnome browsers as well. Not sure which version of linux to install, I think I'd probably prefer to stick with Suse or Mandriva, but I don't have iso's for these. After visiting the local newsagent, I bought a magazine with Fedora Core 6 on the coverdisk. The installation went smoothly but for some reason KDE is defaulting to a very large screen resolution making it unusable. I'm trying the installation again but if that doesn't work then I'll have to default to Gnome and that would be a shame because I really want to test Konquerer. I wonder if that will work under Gnome? Hmmm, still didn't work, now its off to the drawing board to see if I can get the iso for Mandriva, Mepis or something.

As for the rest, I downloaded TextWrangler to edit my templates, it looks good but I can't seem to get any of the text editors I've installed to open the smarty tpl files. It seems the stickies program installed in OS X uses the .tpl suffix and I don't know how useful stickies is going to be so I'm reluctant to send it to the trashcan, meaning of course that I'm struggling to open all my .tpl files without manually opening them using the menu option to "open with another program". Any advice from other OS X users?

I was getting frustrated working out how to manage open windows on screen, with XP, all I had to do was click the tag in the taskbar to switch window, or I could press the desktop icon to clear the screen and get directly to my desktop icons to open new applications. Mac OS X doesn't work like that, and I had to go into Borders bookshop and hunt through a bunch of OS X books to find the solution. Expose!, wow, what a joy to use. I've configured three corners of my screen, one for dashboard, one for the desktop, and the most useful of all, one to see all applications. Now I understand why friends who have Mac's have been telling me to convert. The way Expose! handles multiple windows is awesome, automatically resizing every window so that they are all visible, and then simply click the window to bring to the front. This totally rocks my workflow.

Also, I'm looking for a replacement or update to Finder, xFolders looks promising so I've downloaded that and will test it later.

Only thing left to figure out is how to make the battery last longer. And I really need some advice on that one. I've set the energy saving config to maximise battery, dropped the brightness of the monitor and keyboard illumination, I'm not running CD's, but now I'm stuck, what else can I do to conserve battery? Are there any extra settings?

Yesterday we caught up with a friend for a BBQ on the Boardwalk in Brisbane. Quite a few of the parks around Brisbane have free gas BBQ's, simply press a button, wait a few seconds for the plate to warm up then start cooking. What a day, we found a covered table with benches right next to a BBQ, and it was right on the river bank, the wash from the ferries was rippling against the rocks below us. The sky had a few puffs of white clouds, and the cliffs behind us were reflecting the sun with the most amazing colors.

I've uploaded some photos to my flickr account, check out the panorama of the river taken from the Cliff's Boardwalk, which looks out over South Brisbane, then pans across to the city Botanic Gardens, and finishes over the city skyline.

I've also posted a picture of the citycat, which is one of the two types of ferry that run the length of the river from the University of Queensland down to Brett's Wharf. Ceejay had never been on the citycat, even though she's Brisbane born and bred, I guess that's the danger of relying on a car too much.

The weather is still playing havoc with our bodies, we were OK yesterday, but by late afternoon we were exhausted. The temperature was only 30℃ but we were pretty much out in the sun all day with very little protection apart from sunscreen. I think I need to buy a hat.

We saw some kayakers, they were a bunch of Japanese students, the person in the red kayak was an instructor, I waved hello when they came close enough, seemed like a friendly bunch, they all wanted their pictures taken. Apparently the water was a bit salty yesterday, a few of the kayakers weren't very balanced and went for a swim, and none of them seemed to like the taste of the river, and every one of them seemed eager to get back into their kayak. We thought they were a bit nervous about the sharks, but they're harmless, they only eat the fish.

This week we've made it back to Brisbane in Australia and I've finally upgraded from my clunky Windows PC to a 15" MacBook Pro. We also bought Parallels so I'm going to be able to run OS X, Windows XP, and Linux on the same platform without rebooting.

This is exciting for me because I'll finally get to test all my templates on all three major OSes, and all major browsers, although I will not be installing IE6 on the winXP virtual machine, nor will I be installing IE for mac. I installed MAMP so I could run my Serendipity test server, and also installed Firefox 2.0 and Opera on the mac, gee they look so much better than they did on the Windows PC. Almost seems like they were always designed for the mac and Windows was just an afterthought. Maybe its just the way the mac does things.

If anyone has any advice or links on maximising battery life on the powerbook pro Id really appreciate it. Charging the battery takes a couple of hours but seems to run down just as quickly. Are there any settings I should try to adjust to reduce power wastage. I've figured out how to reduce the brightness of the keyboard backlight and screen brightness but I'm sure there must be more that I can do.

Also, can I run the powerbook pro off the power supply without charging the battery? I don't want to reduce the life of the battery by charging it too often.

Can anyone recommend a good freeware text editor for OS X, I really need one that is capable of handling css files, and if possible I'd love to use tabbed windows just like firefox.

Can anyone tell me how I can use iphoto to browse my photos, and then click something to get the photo open in the gimp? I've actually installed Gimpshop but I guess the procedure will be the same.

Its been a little quiet on this blog for a week or so, we finally got the house sold and have made our way back to Brisbane in Australia. The plan is to get organised from here, catch up with friends and family who we haven't seen for a couple of years, and then get ourselves over to Europe.

I won't bore you all with the details of the horrible flight, or long queues at passport control, but I will tell you about Brisbane. The city has changed a bit since we were last here, several new buildings in the CBD have changed the skyline, and a lot more apartment blocks in places where there used to be houses.

The weather shocked us getting off the plane, we had been used to about 17-18℃ with low humidity, but Brisbane is warmer, above 30℃ degrees every day with humidity up around 98%. We are not coping with the change.

We got ourselves into a short stay apartment in the city with air conditioning which lets us sleep at night, and after we've done all the paperwork like sorting out bank accounts, renewing passports etc then we'll be ready to book flights to Europe. Still not sure when we'll arrive, although my horoscope says late March to mid April is when I'll be meeting a whole bunch of 'new and exciting friends'. At least that's what Ceejay read in her latest woman's magazine so it must be true :grin:

Next week we plan to be tourists in our home town, taking snapshots around the river and CBD, I want to shoot some video on one of the citycats (catamaran ferries that run the length of the Brisbane river. Might even upload it to YouTube - which I can do now, we each bought Powerbook Pro's, so as long as I can get a wifi connection - beauty, the State library in Brisbane has several hotzones, so I'm online, yay!

If any of my readers want to see any specific photos of things around Brisbane, now would be a good time to make a comment. Can't promise anything, but I'll make an effort if we're able to.

We'll be staying with friends about 50km south of Brisbane the week after next, so should have some time to relax although I promised them I'd help with some renovations around the house so maybe not. We won't have broadband there, but they do have a dialup connection on their own PC so should be able to update the blog a bit more. Where they live is surrounded by native bush, which is very different from anything in Europe so I'll post some images for you guys. We've been told we might even get some photos of the native birds if we're patient.

This one isn't really an entry, its a couple of questions for my German friends. We've been looking at motorhomes on mobile.de, sorry, you guys calls them reisemobile, and we know that we are not going to buy a really expensive one, our money isn't worth as much as the Euro, so we've set a limit of €10,000.

This of course means the vehicles are most likely to be early 1990's models, or even late 1980's models if we find one that is in exceptional condition. At this stage we are going to have to drive from city to city to see all the vehicles we want to look at, so can anyone tell me the following drive times, roughly, it doesn't need to really exact.

1. Dusseldorf - Cologne
2. Cologne - Hamburg
3. Cologne - Essen
4. Cologne - Frankfurt
5. Cologne - Berlin
6. Cologne - Munchen (in Bavaria)

Also, can anyone explain, when you buy a vehicle, obviously there is a fee for the registration, but what else, does the vehicle need to be tested for safety every year, are there other things we should be aware of? I know this is asking for a lot of info, but if you could just briefly tell me the basics, I can always do more research, but at the moment I don't even know the basics.

Thanks guys.

Today we went into town to pick up a copy of the "Canon EOS Digital Rebel Digital Field Guide" by Charlotte Lowrie for the other half. First glance looks like it might be an awesome book to learn about the intricacies of her camera, but I might take a look as well and see if I can pick up any hints on taking good photos, and this brings me to the rabbit.

Go check out my flickr page and you'll see a cute furry little fellow who popped his head out just as we walked by. We weren't actually on a bushwalk, we just wanted to stop and see if we could get any interesting postcards, but as we pulled up at the park rangers hut where they have a tourist shop we spotted him (or is it her).

Anyway he didn't seem too worried by our presence, I even managed to get within a couple of meters of him, its a shame my hand isn't as steady as it once was because a couple of shots that I hoped would turn out actually didn't, but at least I got this one.

Now, onto my site, I've finally decided to drop categories altogether and use tags for all entries. I'll be firing up phpmyadmin over the next few weeks and adding them wherever they're needed, and then I'll be deleting all categories. Any of my regulars who subscribe to my category feeds need to be aware that these will no longer be updated. I'm not sure if I'll provide the feed links for individual tags, probably not, but we'll see, it depends on how many angry emails I get.

Also, this template isn't finished yet, a few things are annoying me about it that I still want to fix but I think I'm going to be offline for a couple of weeks soon so might not get the chance to fix it this month, if you have any ideas please let me know. I also finally added the Hemingway template to my templates page, and in addition, I finally released the merged carl blue and green template, which in a fit of original naming I have called carl01.