So the resurrection of TT hasn’t gone to plan, I’ve had too much happening IRL to give any time to writing and I’ve been far too absorbed in twitter in the little patches of time that have arisen.
I let the site go dormant for a couple of months unintentionally, I’m happy to say that today I was able to resurrect it in a matter of minutes, upgrade Wordpress and the plugins in a few clicks and I’m back in the writing seat.
Lets see how long it lasts this time!
Windows 7 RTM’d a few hours ago, build 7600.16385.090713-1255 to be precise. Should be on TechNet/MSDN from the 6th August.
There’s a post on the Engineering Windows 7 blog about it here.
Tower defense games are all the rage at the moment and for good reason, the idea of having the bad guys line up to be passed ‘through the grinder’, wandering aimlessly though weapons you’ve lined up to chew them into itty bitty pieces turns is quite a lot of fun.
With the touchscreen interface the iPhone has several great tower defense games, the most popular probably being FieldRunners although personally being a sucker for the old neon/vector graphic style I’m personally partial to geoDefense.
At WWDC yesterday ngmoco, creators of Rolando showed off a new game, a 3d Tower Defense iPhone title called Star Defense.
I’ve been fairly skeptical of many 3D games and their claims but ngmoco did such a great job with Rolando I’ve given Star Defense a shot and to say I’m impressed is an understatement. Star Defense literally adds a new dimention to Tower Defense 
only problem now is all the hours it’s going to eat up trying to beat it!
I’ve had the same chat several times with people so thought I could kill several birds with one stone (or in this case one post) to list the fairly minimal number of plugins I use on this site.
In its previous incarnation TT used about 15 plugins for various things, since rebuilding it a couple of months ago however I imposed fairly drastic limits on myself as to what faffing I could do to try and get me writing (and look at how successful that was…).
Anyhoo, the list in full:
And that’s pretty much it! The only other functionality I’d like is to be able to write/embed and parse hashtags within my posts. One of the evils of twittering so much I guess someone is bound to do something alone those lines eventually…
I had certain fears regarding yesterdays WWDC keynote. Specifically that Apple would compromise on the greatest of the iPhones strengths with a cut-price handset which lacked some of the key hardware features.
I’ve always maintained that one of the big advantages Apple have over the competition is the ‘known quantity’ the handset represents. One screen resolution, multi touch, the accelerometer, etc. When developers are faced with that kind of standard platform versus the variety of devices running Android, WinMo or Symbian it’s a bit of a no-brainer…
Sure, handsets have to evolve, the 3G for example added GPS and high speed data, which for me were must-haves at upgrade, but the really important stuff remained unchanged.
I expected the 3GS, the improved camera, video capability and magnetometer are all decent additions and they don’t mess with the core of the platform which make it so appealing. The new features aren’t enough to make me want the upgrade but knowing they’ll be there when I upgrade to a 4th gen device is also nice.
What I didn’t expect was the shift in iPhone 3G models, rather than producing an iPhone lite, Apple have simply made the 8Gb 3G a $99 offering. Really reassuring for a developer I can tell you
So, you broke Safari 4 but kept the mobile device platform consistent, guess I’ll let you off the hook for now Apple!
I’ve been so busy lately I’ve a heap of half-written posts, including one for yesterdays WWDC Keynote.
One of the announcements yesterday was Safari 4 making general availability. Without a great deal of thought I fired up software update and ten minutes my beta copy was gone and Safari 4 final installed.
Having used the beta since the original previews I’ve really grown to love the new interface, tabs in the top bar make much more sense, after all the address bar is owned by the tab and the title bar only served to duplicate what was in the active tab title.
Unfortunately Apple have really let us down, tabs once again appear at the bottom of the toobars, it’s not even something which can be restored, previously possible by toggling “com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop” to TRUE for the new style bar, FALSE for the old. Why Apple, why?
Sure, some users may have disliked it, but not even presenting the option in preferences? Bad show 
Looking at the Safari 4 Tweaks page (already updated for the final version) consensus seems to be that we’re not going to get the option back. I’m really disappointed.
… and I’m an App Store addict.
It’s true, since 2.0 landed last year I’ve probably faffed* with my iPhone more than when I first got it.
Sure, like most other geeks I dabbled with Jailbreaking but I always concluded the trade-offs just weren’t worth it. Additional functionality came at the price of speed and performance. If I was ok with that I’d have stuck with WinMo.
We’re not talking total fanatacism here, but I recently realised I had to address my “problem” when I was unable to download any more apps due to insufficient space on the springboard.
That’s nine screens worth of apps, games and other assorted timesinks.
Aside from gnawing more than a gigabyte of the 16gb total capacity having so many screens of icons is just plain unwieldy. I’m sure apple were worried about negative reactions if springboard capacity were the limiting factor in downloading new apps (and lets not forget the cut they take of every sale there) but I can’t help but think that had it been only 5 or 6 pages I’d have identified my “problem” a little sooner.
Just to be clear, 9 screens is 100 icons (96 plus bottom row) I don’t think I use that many apps across all of my macs. I don’t know if I could name that many mac apps.
So, today I’ve done the unthinkable and wiped my phone. I have no apps, no games and until I get home no music. I’m going to ration myself to five apps today and to add one a day at most for the next week.
Which should be a nice way to determine my top 10. Something for a future post
*not to be confused with fapped. I’ve never been that excited by technology…
Skype for iPhone was released today and is now on the app store. I’m going to faff with it today and post some thoughts later.
So my first graze box turned up today. More on it later but I thought I’d post a pic.
If it’s of any interest you can get your first graze box free by entering J77RYYRC at www.graze.com
Ok, so maybe one of my posts needs resurrecting, but mostly for my own reference
Since early wordpress 2.x I’ve used this technique to keep my installation up to date. I appreciate there are more elegant approaches now but way back when there wasn’t, and I’m a creature of habit.
So, if you have SSH access to your blog like me and want to skip manual upgrades give this a whirl:
(The below presumes that you’ve ssh’d into the server and are in the root of the blog directory before you begin)
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar xfz latest.tar.gz
rm -rf ./wp-includes/
rm -rf ./wp-admin/
cd wordpress/
cp -rpf * ../ (—-reply=yes may be necessary on some hosts)
cd ..
rm -rf ./wordpress/
rm -f latest.tar.gz
Then just log into your admin pages and the upgrade scripts (if any) will faff with the database, etc.
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