Summing my thoughts up and dumping them as quickly as possible:

• Snow Leopard. Why do I always hate Apple’s product names, then warm to them eventually? It’ll have to grow on me. Looks relatively boring. Apple ran out of ideas - lack of innovation.
• iPhone 3G - nice.
• iPhone 2.0 software - looks solid. Nothing earth-shattering that wasn’t really expected. $9.99 + UK VAT + mild extortion will be leaving my bank account soon.
• Mobile Me - reserve judgement. I’d like to give it a try. Not sure I need yet another email address. Probably too expensive.

Any other thoughts? Accepted in brain-dump format or more eloquent versions.

I’m going to be generally less available than I am usually, probably over the next couple of weeks, or at maximum up to the end of June.

It’s crunch time in terms of my college work and assignments, so I’m ramping up my productivity levels with that to go for a final coursework push to get everything finished and at the highest grade I can get it (yeah, I’m all coursework and no exams, so that’s my only focus ).

If I take a while to get back to you or fail to at all, I do apologise in advance, hopefully I will be able to pick back up towards the end of June and start of July when I should have a lot more spare time.

This will also affect my FOSSwire post frequency, so it might be a little bit quieter than normal over there this month. Don’t worry, things should return to normal soon.

And, with any luck, I’ll have a BTEC National Diploma at DDD (That’s equivalent to three UK A-levels at A grade by the way).

Now, I’m off to bed.

It’s been a while since I last did a video tutorial explaining how to use SleekTabs, so I thought I would dig up the project again and try to explain how to use it a little better.

The result has been my day’s work today. It’s a two part tutorial, showing you how to first set up a simple three-tabbed static web page with Ajax support, and then moving on into part two to show you how to configure fallback support (something that I never touched on previously).

Part 1

Part 2

More info about this tutorial, including the source files for this demo project, and a link to a live working completed version, is available on my documentation wiki.

I am aware that the audio quality is far from good - there is quite bad noise on the audio track and some obvious audio transitions that I really could have done better. However, I still think it’s a good resource for explaining SleekTabs and I’d love to hear any further feedback on either this or the program itself.

The one time I actually go for installing a distro on a physical, real computer, rather than in my MacBook-powered Parallels virtual machine environment, it won’t work.

In attempting to install Fedora 9, Sulphur, on standard PC hardware (than runs Fedora 8 just nicely), I’m getting this after choosing to install from the DVD as the package source:

Admittedly, I haven’t yet checked the image checksum (I usually do before burning), so I’ll do that when I get back tonight and see if I can get to the bottom of the problem.

Ultimately, I’ll have to fall back to Parallels.

I’m not usually that much of a gamer. Apart from a brief stint playing World of Warcraft, which, incidentally wasn’t really for me, I generally don’t have (or make) the time to play lots of games.

That wasn’t always the case. Back when I was at school, I used to be a lot more of a gamer than I am now, and one of the games that I grew up playing was the Civilization series.

I wasn’t ever particularly skilled at it - mostly sticking to the lower difficutly levels and playing it more for fun than seriously, but I enjoyed playing the turn-based strategy game.

I lost interest in it, but recently went out and purchased Civilization IV thanks to a random urge to come back to the series (playing it on my games-only Windows installation which dual boots with Kubuntu on my desktop PC).

I’m really enjoying it. Again, I am nowhere near skilled, but Civ IV seems to get it right and go back to the series’ roots while introducing new elements, in a way which for me wasn’t done so well in III.

If, like me, you used to play the Civs, but sort of grew away from it, I would definitely recommend giving Civ IV a try (there’s a 100-turn playable demo for the Windows platform).

If you haven’t played the series before, you could very well enjoy it, but beware there is somewhat of a learning curve to get into the mindset of the Civ player. The lowest difficulty levels are a lot easier than in III, though, so I’d imagine it would be much less challenging to pick up and play than it used to be.

I’ve been a developer in PHP for quite some time now. I don’t honestly remember when it was that I first got a working WAMP setup, which kickstarted my interest in web applications with PHP, but I certainly remember how rewarding it was to finally get it up and running and be able to start with PHP.

Since then, I’ve embarked on a fair few projects in the language, and it has served me well for a lot that I’ve done with it.

I think the time has come, though, to expand my web application and programming horizons and look at something else.

I meant to blog about quite a long time ago, but I’m now investing time into learning Django (and therefore Python as I go along).

I bought Sams Teach Yourself Django to give me some direction in my learning of the framework. From what I’ve gone through (up to Hour 10 out of 24), I’m finding it a very useful tool to help me have a project in which to learn. I might follow up with a more in-depth review of it (either here, or on FOSSwire) if I think it worthy, once I’m done with it.

I’m also liking Django. While it lends itself more to larger projects than to small one-time scripts, it is an impressive framework on top of Python that automates lots of the things that you have to micro-manage in PHP.

Having said this, my ventures into the realm of Django and Python do not mean I’m abandoning PHP. Just as I’ve done with running Mac OS X alongside Linux without abandoning Linux, Django will become an addition to my repetoire, not a replacement for PHP. As always, it will be about the right tool for the job.

No, not 25 posts in 30 days here. That would be something.

Over on FOSSwire (where I write about all sorts of Linux and open source stuff for those who don’t know) we’ve hit a goal of bringing monthly posting frequency back up to 25 or more.

You can see the frequency of posting over every month of FOSSwire’s history on its archives page. As you can see, we’re back up to an impressive level compared to recent months, which have been difficult.

The major reason why we’ve managed to hit this goal has been my fellow writer and editor at FOSSwire, Jacob Peddicord. His increase in posting frequency (plus an extra two posts compared to last month from me) have allowed us to get back on top of things.

Also his articles always get the big traffic.

I’m looking forward to hopefully being able to keep a solid posting frequency up on FOSSwire to make sure we’re always delivering fresh content.

When you have several thousand RSS subscribers and more than a thousand uniques a day, you have to stay fresh. Not that I’m boasting about numbers or anything…

One year ago today I announced that I would be moving my site here over to a new hosting provider. Me.

Therefore, today marks the one year anniversary of this hosting arrangement! I’m very happy I’ve had an opportunity to do this. I have learnt a lot about running a server and all the different things involved with it and doing everything myself gave me complete freedom and control over every aspect of my personal site.

There have been issues along the way, but most of those minor. A brief security scare (which I now am pretty sure was nothing, but it was all reinstalled just to be sure), a hard drive failure and one occasion where my database backups failed for a couple of months without me noticing, to mention a few!

Overall though, I’m really glad I did take the step to self-host. It is undoubtedly more work, but it is rewarding as you get complete control and I have gained very useful experience of doing things on the server end with Linux (or Unix in general).

Sadly, it’s not 365 days uptime, but as of writing the server reports “up 49 days, 3:41″ which I think is pretty good.

Here’s to the server. Hopefully much more service from it to come.

Also before I go, I’d like to thank everyone back last year who updated their links over to the new domain at the time. Your prompt action in taking that step allowed me to climb back up Google with formidable pace!

… not that I actually said on here that I was going anywhere. Oops.

But yeah, I’ve spent a week almost completely unplugged in South Wales, and now I’m doing the whole mad catch-up cycle to get back up and running tomorrow (there’s a certain FOSSwire target to hit this month and plenty of other offline stuff going on right now too).

If you do happen to be in the Carmarthen area, I can recommend a great little café type place called Time Coffee Bar in Nott Square in Carmarthen itself. Their website is rubbish, but the coffee is good and you can go sit upstairs and use their wifi (just make sure to ask specifically so you get the wi-fi key). Good price, good coffee, and an opportunity to get online. Can’t argue with that.

Today and yesterday I was tasked with representing IT and the IT courses that were available at my college; perhaps marketing them a bit too.

To do that, I did a couple of presentations on two topics that tie in nicely to some of the things that the courses offered do, one on operating systems (specifically, the differences between Windows and Mac OS X) and one which focused on mobile communications, with a Bluetooth demonstration. Turnout for the IT presentations was a little disappointing, but still, I think it went very well.

When you think presentation, you think PowerPoint.

Recently, I tried out the trial of Apple’s iWork 08, specifically because I wanted to play with Keynote and use it in a real setting, for these presentations I did.

I ended up buying iWork, mostly for Keynote. I absolutely love it - I think the results it makes can look more professional than the average PPT and the process of putting the presentation together involves significantly less screaming and hair-pulling (and once you’re used to it, almost none at all).

In my opinion, Keynote is the best program for making visual aids to presentations that you give that I’ve tried. Of course, using a great tool doesn’t mean you’ll have a great result, but it might help you along the way.