Author: westi

Firefox 1.0.1 released

On By westiIn Firefox, Useful Links

A nice surprise this morning a new version of Firefox, the browser we all love.

It’s nice to see that the main reason for the release is to fix the IDN bug (which didn’t affect IE – because it doesn’t support IDN without a 3rd party extension.). Firefox now displays the punycode representation of the domain name by default like so:

idn fix demo

The is the option to display the Unicode representation if you want instead of the puny code to revert to the old behaviour. It is also nice to see that the disable IDN option now works successfully as well!

The about:config options

Something new for google to chew on

On By westiIn General, Web dev, WordPress


A screen shot of the new site

I’ve spent a long time today trying to create a simple website to replicate the content in a 3 page handout describing a fundraising bike ride being organised by a charity I help. I got involved in the development of this site after volunteering to become the webmaster for the “The Pompe’s Disease Page” – which at present is not easy to maintain and is back in the dark ages of table based layout.

I have great plans for updating the main site to use wordpress and make it easier to add new information and get people able to comment on the information and maybe setup bbPress as a forum. However the development of a theme for the main site has been lagging a bit and waiting on v1.5 of wordpress to be released.

Now that photomatt has done the deed and 1.5 is released in a fit of energy today I sat down and started on a theme for the Bike Ride site. After a few hours of work I now have a layout that I am happy with and I’ve started uploading the content from the leaflet – but as I’m having to type this all out by hand this is taking some time!

Anyway the new site for google to chew on is here – The Costa Rica Bike Ride

wordpress v1.5 released

On By westiIn Useful Links, WordPress

Woot! It seems that as expected v1.5 was released last night.

The upgrade went like a charm for me following the instructions in the codex.

Including keeping my 1.2 style theme for the moment. Now I need to get round to creating a proper theme for this site (and giving it a better name too!)


Release Announced on the dev blog at last!
Well done to Matt and all the rest of the wordpress dev team.

What does the beta in “beta software” really mean?

On By westiIn Development, General1 Comment

The is an interesting article on zdnet today entitled A long winding road out of beta. In the article Paul Festna comments on the fact that a lot of companies are now performing the Beta stage of software development in public and for a long period of time.

I think that Paul is missing the point here about what the Beta in “Beta Software” really means. I do agree that in the classic software development process the beta stage could be described some what like this:

The beta version, named for the second letter of the Greek alphabet, typically refers to the second stage of software testing. Traditionally distributed to a limited group of testers, it follows the alpha version, which is tested in the lab

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