Technology

You can tell summer is one the way, outside my window the lovely green grasses of a week ago have given way to a yellow colored grass that I'm sure will be brown next week. The heat seems to be heading toward being described as stifling, and the humidity is rising.

Sadly, most buildings I go into seem ill-equipped to deal with this heat, at times I wonder if it is better to stand on the sidewalk and shout to the shop keepers rather than enter their hothouses, and yet it needn't be like this, a simple foil insulation that reflects the heat away would do wonders.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about, Reflective Insulation, and my understanding is that this stuff is easy to install, so why do so many buildings not have it? Today is a perfect example, I'm walking around from shop to shop trying on shirts, and I honestly felt cooler in the street.

I just know the local water company is going to warn us to be careful and not waste water, the power companies are going to experience brown outs in the height of summer as air conditioners are used, and I'm going to be inconvenienced, all because most of the buildings around me don't have adequate insulation.

Perhaps installing insulation should be mandatory any time a building is renovated, just like it seems to be mandatory for new buildings. So many of the shops and offices around here have been renovated recently, but I don't think insulation has been installed, but many of them do have air conditioning now.

Isn't it strange that people would rather pay a high installation cost and monthly cooling costs, instead of just fit foil once and then have minimal ongoing costs.

In my offline world I'm building a small business producing audio media that can be played back by a student, at home, in the classroom, at the office, and considering I'm selling the discs I need to make sure the quality of the recording is good, but so too the packaging and the disc.

Anyone can make a recording these days using the software included with your PC, in my case using Garageband and the built-in burner, then if I wanted to I could easily print the disc and sleeve, but buying good quality paper to do the printing isn't cheap.

Ideally if you have an idea you'll be creating discs in some sort of volume the effort of doing it yourself becomes too expensive. I'm at that point now, my time is worth too much, and I can't afford to sit at a printer feeding in paper or discs. I just can't. Read More

Righto people, let's be honest, how many of you have a secret desire to be the next Madonna, Serge Gainsbourg, or Buddy Holly? And how many of you have been to a Karaoke bar, had a few drinks, gurgled your guts out to Tammy Wynette, and then told everyone the next day you didn't enjoy it and won't go back, but secretly you didn't mind and probably will go back?

Yeah I thought so, I'm the same, karaoke generates a love/hate feeling inside me, I love the idea of pretending to be a superstar, on the other hand I hate the way people sound who can't sing. Read More

I've been playing around with RapidWeaver, a Mac web authoring application that works similarly to iWeb but produces standards compliant code and allows me to easily change the template from page to page by simply selecting it from the themes pane whilst editing a page.

The more I get involved with it, the more I love it and can honestly say it beats the pants off software like Joomla or Wordpress for my needs, which is mostly 5-10 pages static websites, although I'm using it to develop a 300 page site as well.

Are any of you guys Mac users? Have you tried RapidWeaver? It's shareware, and costs about $79 to buy a license but seems well worth the money. There is a reasonable range of plugins available and a few people have produced third party themes, but the most exciting part of it is integration with the iMedia browser so I don't have to export an image from iPhoto to use it.

I've tested the code it produces and whilst I can't show you a test site yet I can tell you it produces XHTML strict in every page and they validate!

RapidWeaver has some really nice functions like built-in meta tags and titles for each page, and complete control over filenames and permalinks simply because the pages are static HTML pages to begin with.

Adding javascript is a simple thing to do, and can be added in two places, either into the page inspector, or hard coded into the theme, for one of the sites I'm creating I've actually inserted a news ticker into the space normally reserved for a navbar.

If I can find the time to create a new theme for RapidWeaver rather than just butchering one of the existing themes to do what I want then I'll release it here, I was thinking of porting some of the great open source themes to begin with, then work on premium themes later.

Have you noticed how our language is changing to accommodate new technologies? It seems more and more these days that phrases are being constructed, such as business intelligence, that a direct literal definition wouldn't make sense, yet in today's high tech world they say so much more.

I like this example because business intelligence refers to the software used to help run a business rather than saying a business is intelligent when clearly this is nonsense since a business is made of people and doesn't actually exist in itself. Read More