Tech Thought

The great guys at WordPress have announced today that WordPress 2.5 has been released.  This features a huge number of upgrades and improvements, particularly to the administration side of the blogging platform.  These include:

Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard
Dashboard Widgets
Search posts and pages
Tag management
Concurrent editing protection
Few-click plugin upgrades
Friendlier visual post editor
Built-in galleries

The improvements are to numerous [...]

AppleInsider has reported that Apple has released Mac OS X 10.5.3 to Beta-Testers.  This update will be the third for the Leopard operating system since its release, and includes a number of fixes around 75 bugs and a variety of security fixes as well.  More information is at the AppleInsider site.

I have been lucky enough to get a hold of one of the new MacBook Pro’s that have just been released by Apple (Feb 2008).  I’ve only just installed Boot Camp/Windows XP on it as I’ve been busy using VMWare Fusion - however now it’s time to play some games, and VMWare is no good [...]

Finally someone has worked out how to use Time Machine with a Network Drive.  Hooray!  Point your browser here for instructions on how to set it up:
http://smangal.wordpress.com/2007/12/10/time-machine-with-network-drive/
Now if only Apple would make this a ‘feature’ of Time Machine, rather than forcing us to by the Time Capsule…

I recently purchased a new Mac and have been progressively setting it up with all my favorite Mac applications.  Google Notifier for Mac is one of these, which monitors my Gmail account and lets me know when I have mail.
Unfortunately, on my new Mac I have not been able to Sign-In to my Google Account [...]

Okay, this happens to my iPod all the time and I always forget how to unfreeze it.  So here are the simple instructions to reset your iPod Classic (< 5th Generation), iPod Mini and iPod Nano:

Cycle the hold switch switch a couple of times and leave hold off
Hold down the Menu and Middle Button for [...]

We have been using Fusion Charts for a number of projects. They provide very nice slick looking animated graphs and widgets (now available as Google Gadgets too incidentally). However as they are Flash based they can cause problems when you place other elements in front of them - for example a “modal dialog” [...]

You can connect two Mac’s together via a firewire cable to maximise transfer speed between them.  Say you have a really large file on Mac 1 (source) and you want to copy it to Mac 2 (destination).  Do the following:

Ensure the source Mac is turned off, and the destination Mac is turned on.
Connect them together [...]

I am an avid mobile phone user, however I don’t yet have the joy of owning an iPhone as they haven’t been released yet in Australia (and I can’t be bothered imported a cracked one from the US).   So i’ve been putting up with the usable, however limited, built-in browser on my Sony Ericsson.
Enter [...]

I use the prototype.js javascript framework daily and as a result having an update-to-date API reference is essential. Thankfully, you can view the entire API online at the prototype.js website in an easily accessible form.
Personally I find PDFs a bit easier to manage for API references.    Josh Clarke at GlobalMoxie has put together [...]

Safari 3.1 was released today, and I (along with many others) have noticed problems with GMail.  When typing a message, if you press either the “Shift” key or the “Command” key on the Mac, focus jumps to the subject or the addresses of the message.  I haven’t confirmed this behavior on Windows yet, however it’s [...]

Apple have just released Safari 3.1 which includes a host of new features and blisteringly fast Javascript. From Ajaxian:

JavaScript performance improvements
Standards: Adds support for CSS 3 web fonts
Standards: Adds support for CSS transforms and transitions
Standards: Adds support for HTML 5 <video> and <audio> elements
Standards: Adds support for offline storage for Web applications in SQL [...]

I’ll admit I’m a recently reformed windows user, as I’ve really only been using a Mac for the part 8 months. One thing I really missed as a developer when switching to the Mac was a nice integrated SVN client like TortoiseSVN.
Thankfully, there is SCPlugin - a Finder plugin for Mac OS X which [...]

Recently I upgraded to a new Mac. I like to install applications from scratch when I upgrade, as it allows me to clean out all the garbage that I didn’t need in the first place. So I’ve compiled a list of all the best free applications I like to have installed on my [...]

I use Gmail for all my email and love it.  I’ve gotten used to using the conversation based layout of Gmail and have recently moved all my email across to Google Apps, which allows me to use Gmail for my own domain.
After doing this however, I was unable to access my Gmail from my mobile [...]

Google today released Google Sky, an inverted version of their Google Maps/Google Earth creations.  Whilst this feature has been available for a number of months in Google Earth, it has now been released as a standalone website ala Google Maps.

The great people at the Mozilla Foundation have just released the Beta 4 of Firefox 3 for download.  This is the latest incarnation of the now hugely popular Firefox browser and is a major milestone as this release is likely to be very close to the final version of Firefox 3.  It contains a heap [...]

I’ve just discovered a fantastic weather widget for Australian residents called TheBom Weather Widget.  It utilises detailed information from the Bureau of Meteorology to provide relevant and up to date Australian weather information and looks great:

Landcare Australia today launched their CarbonSmart website allowing Australians to purchase Carbon Offsets directly from Landcare:

I was involved in the development of the calculator that is used to determine your CO2 emissions.  It utilises a number of Web 2.0 technologies, mainly AJAX using prototype.  Glenn McGrath (aussie cricket legend) was involved in promoting the project [...]

Google released Google Calendar Sync today allowing full two-way communication between Outlook and your Google Calendar. This is a major step forward for Google Calendar and allows you to control your calendar from the web and within Outlook:

Here’s hoping that Mac OS X gets more support in the near future. If you haven’t [...]