I got a new printer today. Actually, it’s a printer and scanner and copier, All-in-One sort of device. It is the HP DeskJet F2180, found for £30.

It’s replacing my ageing and rather incompatible Lexmark Z45. The Z45 was bought a very long time ago, back even before I started using Linux. Back then, compatibility with alternative operating systems wasn’t a priority and ever since I have been dogged with issues printing from my own machine.

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I’ve just got back from my college‘s Celebration of Achievement Awards Ceremony.*

The general idea is to give awards to selected students from the past academic year for various achievements.

I was nominated for the Principal’s Award, described by the college as:

… [to be] presented to a student who has demonstrated an outstanding achievement or contribution to the college.

I’m delighted to say that I won the award!

Unfortunately, the official photos from the event I won’t likely be able to republish here on the blog, due to good old copyright being held by the professional photographers.

I should of course take this opportunity to thank everyone at the college for the nomination and selection for the award and for letting me work with them.

This is the citation I get for why I was nominated (link added by myself):

Peter has a mature attitude to his studies in IT and college life. He consistently demonstrates a willingness to contribute his learned skills within the Department. One example was the support he provided during the configuration of hardware and software in a new Networking room. He was nominated as a mentor in the Aimhigher Mentors pilot and successfully raised the grades of the learners he supported. An outstanding achievement that must be identified is his development of a software program that support the Aimhigher Mentors pilot. The intention is to use this program throughout the college, providing managed mentoring web portal for all mentors and lecturing staff, thus allowing access to a learner support e-portfolio.

The reference to the ‘software program’ and ‘managed mentoring web portal’ is a web application I built to help organise and automate the reporting and feedback elements of the Mentoring Scheme that was running.

I will likely share more details on exactly what it is and what it does in the future and with any luck it should be implemented in Andover College for the future participants in the scheme. What I will say is that Django is awesome.

Anyway, I am again delighted to receive the award!

* Shameless self promotion alert.

There has been a considerable traffic spike here, since Google announced their new web browser, Google Chrome.

Not because I’ve spoken about it until now, but because it sparked interest in my thoughts on Gecko vs WebKit.

Google Chrome is considerably ‘buzz’-y at the moment, so I thought I would fire up an internet-connected Windows machine and give it a try.

While from a technical point of view much of the browser seems very interesting – and a very good idea (separating each tab into its own individual process, the new V8 JavaScript engine), at the moment I can’t see it offers much unique user-visible functionality.

Regardless of whether something is technically awesome or not, you won’t get the masses to use it unless they can see a killer feature – something that is visible to them and benefits them.

There are some unique elements to Chrome’s interface – specifically the single address/search bar (Omnibar), but I can’t help feeling underwhelmed at the lack of ‘killer-ness’ about the browser at the current time.

It is early days, though – and Chrome does show some promise.

Another one of my completely random, and probably uninteresting observations about the MobileMe preference pane in Mac OS X System Preferences. It’s also an excuse to try out a very short screencast with Jing and its Screencast.com hosting.

If you can’t, or don’t want to watch the video, if you search for iTools (.Mac/MobileMe’s original name) in the search box of System Preferences, it highlights MobileMe as a search result. Just as you’d expect from an intelligent search tool, it realises what you really mean.

However, that functionality hasn’t been replicated for if you search for .Mac, now MobileMe’s former name. It does highlight Back to my Mac as one of the results, but just as with iTools, MobileMe should be highlighted straight away.

Due to some work that is happening to our house (hot water here we come), the electricity supply will need to be turned off at some point. This means that there will be some downtime for this server during the period of Monday 11th – Wednesday 13th.

Unfortunately, I will not actually be here at the time and it is not yet clear when or for how long the downtime needs to occur. It should, however, be a relatively short downtime period; I am not expecting the server to be down the whole three days.

In any case, the machine will be safely powered down before the supply is turned off and will come back up as soon as possible.

UPDATE: In the end, it didn’t need to go down at all! Everything is still running smoothly.

Like many, I use FeedBurner to handle the RSS feeds for this blog, which gives me the benefit of all of FB’s special features, including detailed statistics on my feed’s usage.

I also make use of its email subscription service to allow people not familiar with feed technology to subscribe to the blog and have updates delivered to their inbox (Publicise > Email Subscriptions in your FeedBurner account).

My recent redesign means that my pages are now served as XHTML 1.1, rather than 1.0 Transitional*.

The code that I use in the sidebar to show the email subscription box (the code provided by FeedBurner) won’t validate under XHTML 1.1, though, which annoyed me. So, I fixed it.

You may wonder why anyone in their right mind would care if a little snippet of code doesn’t quite validate, since it doesn’t make any user-visible difference. Aesthetics are one reason and also some mobile browsers can be really fussy about validation.

So here’s how to use my fixed code if you want to have the email subscribe feature – but also have valid XHTML 1.1 markup.

First of all, log in to FeedBurner, click the relevant feed and go to Publicise > Email Subscriptions. Under Subscription Management, there should be a box with the default code, which should be something like this (line breaks added by me for readability):

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SleekTabs still often has a bit of a learning curve to implement for many people. It is a bit, well, quirky, in the way that it has to be implemented. It could be better.

I have previously put together a video tutorial explaining with a good example how to implement it, but there has still been confusion, partly due to the old example/tutorial that ships with the download.

I’ve now put together a text version of the video tutorial (just Part 1 for now), which is easier to consume than the video if you’re pressed for time or just want to quickly look up a detail.

I’m also considering removing the old example file as part of the SleekTabs download, to avoid future confusion. The problem stems from the fact that implementation is approached two different ways across the old and new examples.

I am concerned, though, that because it is a much simpler example, removing it could be a problem for those who want to get up and running as quickly as possible, without digesting the more detailed tutorial.

I welcome all comments on SleekTabs and the documentation, so if you have ideas on how to make things better, or want to feedback things that you think are working well, please do let me know!

It’s been quite a long time since my site and blog have seen any major visual changes. I thought it was about time to give it a visual refresh, so over the past few days, I have put together this new design.

Hopefully, it retains much of the visual identity of its predecessor, while giving a welcome refresh, making things visually cleaner and making it a little less bland than previously.

I particularly like the new main navigation bar, which I think is more attractive and clearer than it used to be, while also removing the old hack I used to get the ‘button’ effect (there is no more ‘button’ effect)!

There are also a lot of changes behind the scenes to make the integration between the non-WordPress portions and the WordPress blog a lot easier.

Anyway, let me know what you think of the new design. Comments and suggestions for improvement very welcome!

Just a quick post to cross-post the fact that I’ve just put out a new printable guide, designed for Linux beginners which details installing software on Ubuntu.

It’s posted at FOSSwire – here’s where you’ll find it.

The idea is to bridge the knowledge gap for the person literally just starting out with Linux. Installing software is one of the big areas where there are differences, so this double sided guide covers that.

Yeah, so, I just released some Windows software.

My program for converting and splitting Mac OS X .dfont files into TTF files, DfontSplitter has been a pretty popular route in to my website for some time now.

While the original program is written for OS X, it became apparent from my website statistics that many people who needed to convert .dfont to .ttf were Windows users.

So, today, I have released DfontSplitter for Windows, version 0.1. This program is, again, simply a wrapper script for fondu, which does the real work. It has a completely unique GUI, custom built for the Windows platform.

There is also a brand new project page for DfontSplitter, with links to both the Mac and Windows versions of the software and the documentation too.

Hopefully this can serve the need of Windows users who need to convert those filetypes, and don’t want expensive or spyware-ridden software. Enjoy!

A quick footnote – this is a bit of a licensing quagmire. There are lots of different licenses that apply to different bits of DfontSplitter for Windows, including GPL 3.0, GPL 2.0, BSD and Creative Commons. That’s all explained on the project page, and in further depth in readme and licence files in the downloads.

Oh and it’s also slightly ugly, in terms of how it interacts with fondu. But it works. 🙂