Gearing Up For Cheer

It’s Christmas time. Winding down. Getting ready for great piles of "not as good as a good roast" food, long afternoon naps interrupted by new kids toys, and basically letting it all hang out for a couple of days.

Except I’m winding up. I’m releasing a new version of my Freight system. While away on holidays, I had some thinking time. Bad move. But it clarified a few things. I need a product done, minimal work. Jaymoe Version 1, while crappy, is out there. It’s working as is for the moment. Version 2 was taking too much time, I had to learn too many new things.

So I’ve set myself some closer goals. A new website, a 30-day free trial version, and a Web System integrated into the Freight System. There are other more concrete plans, but I need to not be blabbing them around.

So I’m not winding down. But am still enjoying the Christmas cheer.

Have to preach on Sunday at Dad’s church. Going to look at the birth of Jesus from the perspective of the Shepherds. Their fear, their searching and finding, and our response to the truth of Christmas, which is that Christ is Saviour and Lord. Salvation and Kingship.

Okay, we’ve got breakfast being cooked for us this morning at work. Mmmm. Bacon. Have a great holiday and God rest ye merry!

Conchords and Phones

flightconchords-001Flight of the Conchords are .. "buy it if you find it" stuff. Took a day of watching a couple of their songs with a "they’re okay" shrug before the awesomeness hit.

Very very cool. Very. Funny as. When you hear stuff like "Love is like a roll of tape ..", and see the film clip in your head, that’s gold. Ha ha, it’s already created so many little catchphrases we use in normal conversation, and it’s only been a week since first watching.

 

1741241My phone recently decided the speaker wasn’t good enough, and so I hooked up with a new one.

 

It’s a pretty cool one, nice camera, has apparently 8 Gig of space, and has the biggest screen i’ve ever owned on a phone. Which probably wasn’t that hard.

We just tonight got back from 7 days away, driving 10/12 hours down to and back from a lovely little city called Melbourne. If the opportunity knocked, I’d think very seriously about moving down there.

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This thing made the deepest notes I’ve heard in a long time. Crazy deep, vibrating the pews at the wedding. Crazy. Very cool. Good to sing along with.

Little Things

Recently the GMail team have been adding _little_ things to their product. It’s cool. The refined power in the engine I’ve read about, and you can see some of the signals (words and images changing).

I noticed this morning a new bit (for want of a better word, which you will no doubt have). The labels (tags, not folders, no folders here!) of the conversation (the email) are displayed just to the right of the Subject. You can then search for all messages with the labels, or remove a label from that conversation.

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Cool.

In other news, the Firefox install on my laptop is still giving grief with the Nettalk Webserver / Ext  / Vista combination. Other Firefox installs on XP and Vista are the same. Extensions turned off makes no difference. Exactly the same extensions as working instances makes no difference.

It’s infuriating.

(Apologies for the width of this image .. for effect :) )

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Haven’t worked on Jaymoe since last update. Well, not enough to count.

Discovered anew why I loved David Gemmell’s books. They were simple, straight-forward heroic fantasy. You could guarantee there would be a big strong bull fighter. There would be a tall lithe athletic leader who was amazingly skilled in weapons. Waylander. Druss. Even Skillgannon (spl) later on. Love it. I truly hope someone picks up that mantle. He didn”t have the depth that GRRM has, but I don’t always eat steak.

Actizzard, Lynching The Enemy and Context Menus

Okay.

Activision Blizzard? Is this for real? What kind of world are we living in?

We’re living in a world where the guys who make the companies great move on and start their own companies that turn out to not deliver the exact game millions of slavering fans were putting together in their own minds for the past six or so years.

And in other gaming news, some guy (Jeff Gerstmann) got axed from Gamespot. Huge. I know. Stop being so shocked. It just so happens that he did a video review of Kane and Lynch, giving the game a 6.0.

Burn.

Seems the Eidos gods (the money behind the game) were angered and caused fierce wrath to fall down from their cloud palaces.

Ahem.

Moving on, Jaymoe had some progress since last post.

Context Menus are in!

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A beginning only, but it’s cool. Right-Click, or indeed "Any"-Click Context Menus can be overused. But for us Desktop guys, they can be underused. Or just used in one place and nowhere else. It’s time to break down those glass castles and storm the English!

What more you say? I’ll tell you .. Login!

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That’s right. The Jaymoe Management System can now be logged into. Wunderbar!

So now, I’m off to get the Images and Forums done for the Management System. Then, once they’re done, the plan is to use the Feeds to populate the actual website pages. Public first, then Private.

Along the way, I’ll have to get User Registration underway.

Looking forward to cracking open the File Uploads for the Images. Shouldn’t be too hard, although I say that a lot. And get stumped a lot.

Late To The Party

I know, I’ve come very late to the party.

Back in May, Bob Foreman posted http://www.softvelocity.net/community/blogs/clarion_news/archive/2007/05/03/1635.aspx this little wonder on Vista and Clarion 6.

Both things I had never bothered to try and fix, because I figured Vista was magical and I’d heard these things were just the way it was. I’m very inquisitive .. not.

1. The massive borders in Vista, Aero-Glass styling. This is obviously changeable. Makes a big difference. I changed them to a 1 size.

2. The Help file issue. This has miffed me no end. Turns out, following the steps Bob lays down allows me the glory days of F1 in Clarion 6. For the times when I needed it, i really missed it.

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Compare This

Reading my ClarionMag feed this morning, I noticed that Mike Hanson has knocked up a chart, "Clarion Sharp Comparison". Tis here.

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Nice and meaty, but more than a comparison, it’ll no doubt be a good reference for just working in the Clarion# language.

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I still haven’t got myself onto the .Net subscription. We have until mid December now to get in on the Discount act.

Not sure I can justify it at the moment, having a very small income from the business. When Jaymoe is done, and four hundred gazillion Sporting Clubs sign up, then I won’t have to worry about missing the discount.

Pirates Are Just Cool!

We began watching the third "Pirates of de Caribbean"  movie last night.

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(Picture snagged from the official site, here)

What a blast! I love these movies, the first two just got better (unlike the Matrix films, of which the first will always be some of the best filmmaking ever done)

One thing that became clear to me last night was the bits of "unreal" ness about the film. The way characters do almost silly things, like a monkey firing off a firecracker. It’s just a little bit left of center. And the whole film, well, the first two, and what we’ve seen of this one, are this. This world they have put together, this world of pirates and lords and death and kraken, it’s a _magical_ world.

Really, for me, they’ve nailed storytelling. I’m not an expert, but I know what I like. And this I like.