RC2 has rapidly replaced RC1 over the weekend. I have downloaded RC2 to have a look and really for mine its probably not ready for release yet. There is a few little things to be tuned out of the current build

Issues I have encountered are that some Google gadgets in my iGoogle page are not functioning properly. Possibly its a vendor issue, but none the less it could be that there is an issue with FF.3.5

I do agree however that over the 3.0.xxx predecessors there is a definite speed improvement. Menus on some sites are blindingly quick. Flash rendering is really fast and overall I would rate the speed as the single biggest improvement. It is really amazing as to how fast it is in some cases. I will be testing a bit more  but I am pretty happy. I am a little disappointed that some extension owners haven’t as yet made the grade with updates for their extensions. A number that I find very useful are no longer working with RC2. Hopefully these will be updated very soon. What else can I say, it seems very stable, Scribefire still works, writing this blog with it now. It has had a few delays getting of the production line due to a few bugs that cropped up, however, that was better than releasing a product with those issues within it. Well done team it is looking good and will only get better from here. If you are looking for a release candidate to run then its here

Game on again in

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Browser Wars

See ya round

Peter

Technorati Tags: Firefox, speed, 3.5RC2

Sun Is Said to Cancel Big Chip Project – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com So I wonder what Larry thinks of this, is it part of his plans or has Sun pulled to pin too early or is it a smokescreen that Oracle is putting about to take attention away and allow the team to do what it needs to do whilst sorting it out. I am not sure Larry would be too happy writing off the effort unless it really is so bad that they cant possibly produce a working reliable unit. Maybe this is what is needed to shake Sun up when Oracle does come on board. If this baby isn’t too bad, I wou

Image via CrunchBase

ld say to Larry to make it happen as it would be a major coup and show the Sun hardware business isn’t dead yet. It just needed better funding to light its way.

I am certain this will be one of Oracle biggest hurdles when it finally takes over Sun. It is going to have to fine tune the existing hardware lines and add to the future. If Rock isn’t all bad then maybe it is something Oracle needs to drop a wad of cash into so that Rock gets the life it was to have had. I am sure there is a lot of Oracle customers that would like to see those ships go.

On another note the Niagara based servers CMT  are screamers and perhaps Larry will have them optimize them as Grid is the future and potentially they are the basis of the Grid. A Quad CPU Niagara 2 has enormous thread processing power and if your application is based around short sharp bursts of processing, with very short transactions and the ability to run them in parallel when suitable then they will fly on a low speed CPU, only 1.2GHz. It is the threads that give these boxes there enormous throughput, but from my experience older applications are less likely to show these servers in their best light and bad queries in an application, basically if you serialize things you are shot on performance, else stand back. Another interesting feature of these servers is they seems to have a very flat and stable performance characteristic as you load the system with processing requirements. The overall time for tasks when plotted shows that the time ramps up a little then it is constant event though the usage is increased say tenfold and finally you get to flood it out and the response times rapidly deteriorate, unlike older CPU architectures which exhibit a fairly consistent exponential graph for users to degrading performance.

Image via CrunchBase

Anyway it will be interesting what Oracle makes of it all once the deal is done and they have had time to get a real good look at what they bought. I am expecting some interesting stuff,  that is Oracles way.

See ya round

Peter

Wow yes its true, Dainis Graveris has created the following blog to show what is a good set of plugins to use on a blog. I am not sure they are all you might wish to have. I do agree with a lot of them, however some seem to share a common purpose, so might have issues co-residing on your blog. Is it a good list yes, I think for someone who is starting out then you are staring at a great collection,

130 WordPress Plugins You Could Ever Need: The Best Of: Part 1 | 1stwebdesigner – Love In Design

What I have installed is some of these with some not mentioned Nofollow Reciprocity – it identifies if a blog has nofollow on and then blocks its follow links. You can check it out and download it here Advertising Manager, everyone needs Google ads or from some other ad network this is the update for Adsense that is listed in the 130 list Related Websites is another good one, initially you can only see other sites that are related, once you are of a suitable size then you can apply for a API key, you will need at least 30 blogs depending on activity and quality, thats not my call. Once you have an API key then your blog will show up in related websites elsewhere.

Another one I use of which Dainis was not likey to list is GWA Autoresponder for a newletter manager, the free one is great I use it for this site and the Pro version is a bargain which I use for another site.

I would say to anyone with a blog that they experiment with this list and see if you can utilise any or all, and then blog your own list of amendments to the list and why they are useful. Just take your time and understand each as you add them so that you dont have any really unexpected behaviours, that become a problem as you have overloaded your blog

So I am sure all the wordpress experts are going to say, what the H#$3 did you do that for, and well it seemed like a good thing at the time. Ok this is one i did as a stuff up while trying to resolve issues with this site over the last few days. I found how to really screw up without actually breaking a thing. I had edited a couple of files simple enough, but failed to see the effect it was having or would have. If you change the setting define(‘WP_USE_THEMES’, true); to false in the index.php, the site works fine but you can’t see a damn thing. Lesson learned,  and now I know a bit more about wordpress and its activities

So in the end I am finally upgraded to the latest WP 2.71 and can get down to making things work, and writing more in my blog.

See ya round

Peter

Just reading in the latest IEEE Spectrum online about the new disk technology that Seagate is working on; Heated Hard Drives. The use of heat is allowing them to experimentally reach to new levels of storage. Current technology that allows storage at 500GB per square inch is delivering us up to 1TB on a single hard disk ,this looks set to double to 2TB for the same size disk in the near future. Read the rest of this entry »