thought-after

You are currently browsing the archive for the thought-after category.

Adobe CS2 + Macromedia Studio 8 = Me Happy

August 14, 2006 in Flash, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, developer tools, thought-after by Lafinboy | No comments

A number of months ago I entered a competition on the Builder AU website to win an Adobe Web Bundle. After a protracted delay in taking delivery of the prize I am now the very excited owner of the absolute latest versions of Adobe CS2 Premium and Macromedia Studio 8.

This is a big step for me. My current design tools are Photoshop 7, Illustrator 8 and InDesign 1.0. The new CS2 package looks very funky, with a whole load of new features, tighter inter-product integration, and the capabilities of Version Cue and Adobe Bridge look set to blow my current workflow out of the water. It looks like I will be heading back to the numerous tutorial sites to get the lowdown on all the new features. If you have any favourites, let me know.

The web development bundle, Macromedia Studio 8, is almost totally new to me. I'm a hardcore hand coder – Notepad2 is my friend. I have, in earlier times, used FrontPage and GoLive, and quickly learnt of their inherent evilness. Since then, my feelings towards such development tools have been somewhat jaded. But with the latest version of Dreamweaver there does appear, on the surface at least, to be a whole lot more flexibility in the setup of the software and how it is used, to get the best of both worlds. Hand coding in a structured, project based develpment tool. It may take me a while to get to using Dreamweaver as my primary development tool – there are a lot of things to learn, and psychological hurdles to get over.

Again, if you have any tips, trick or tales of setting up and using Dreamweaver to aid in the creation of bloat free, standards compliant websites, then let me know.

Another huge change will be from my current Flash 5 (how retro), to the all new Flash Professional 8. I'm not a huge user of Flash. As enhancement to a site, yes. As major elements (navigation, content, forms, etc), NO. But the latest version will give me the flexibility to produce more compact, interactive Flash elements.

So that's me set for the next few weeks, setting up new software to my personal requirements, learning what's new and how to use them. I'll let you know how things go.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Malarkey inspired mini-biography

August 9, 2006 in thought-after by Lafinboy | 3 comments

Andy Clarke opened up and gave us a bit of his new biography, which inspired me to give a little of my own in response.

Well don't tell anybody in the Australian government, but I am the son of a man who emigrated from the UK in the early 70's, who misbehaved so badly he was quickly deported back to England. Oh the irony!

My mother, being the old fashioned type, dutifully returned with her errant husband, only to divorce him and hook up with a knife throwing Romanian. Life was a whirlwind of glinting steel and candy floss, which I quickly tired of, and so moved out of the horse drawn caravan we called home, and into the wide world.

After several years stowed away in the depths of a P&O cross channel ferry I set foot on Australian soil. By good forging fortune, I now call Australia home.

Scott Swabey, aka Lafinboy

The truth, embelished truth, or false truth? A bit from each pot maybe. Buy me a beer and I'll let you know which bit comes from which pot.

Tags: , ,

Firefox and Java JRE update problem fixed

May 24, 2006 in Firefox, browsers, thought-after by Lafinboy | 61 comments

This article was originally published on 28/03/2005.

Firefox browser could not display Java applets following a recent upgrade to the Firefox browser and the Java JRE. A simple solution found.

A little background to this story. As a devout convert to the Firefox browser, I immediately upgraded to the latest release, Version 1.0.2, when it became available. Shortly after upgrading the Firefox browser I found I was unable to access my internet banking account, and was displayed a standard message from the internet banking service that my browser did not have Java installed. Necessity forced me to use IE, which worked with no problems. I had also accessed the internet banking account through Firefox only a few days previously, so there was something wrong with Firefox!

I dutifully checked my browser settings and Java was enabled. I then checked the Java control panel and noticed that the option to use Java with Mozilla/Netscape was unchecked. Found the culprit? Unfortunately not. After checking the option and pressing apply, I was informed that the action could not be completed as I did not have sufficient rights to change the browser settings. Now this was a concern, as I am administrator, super-administrator, and any other kind of controlling power over my pc, or so I thought.

Time to start on a solution, so Google in hand I went on a wild search for others who had faced the same problem. It would seem that this is a reasonably new problem (at the time of writing), as very few results were returned. Those results that were on-topic offered a selection of causes/solutions, none of which worked for me. As a result of trying each solution in turn, and scouring through the folders and files associated with both Firefox and Java, I did find what was the apparent cause of the problem in my case. On the latest update to the Java JRE, the Java Plugin dll had not been updated in the Firefox plugins folder. On a whim I renamed the existing Java plugin dll and fired up Firefox again, and hey presto, everything was working. Now I don't know why the original dll had not been updated, but it hadn't, and I don't know if this solution will work for everybody, but it did for me, and I offer this advice in the hope that it can help somebody in the same position as I found myself.

Symptoms:

  • Unable to view Java applet content in Firefox browser

Cause:

  • Upgrade of Java JRE to version 1.5.0_02 does not update Java plugin dll in Firefox plugins folder

Solution:

  • Delete previous Java plugin dll file NPOJI610.dll from Firefox plugins folder.
  • Prior to deleting the file I would suggest renaming the file (zz_NPOJI610.dll) to test that this solution works for you.

Machine Spec:

  • Windows XP Pro SP1
  • Firefox 1.0.1
  • Java JRE 1.5.0_02

Tags: , ,

CSS Naked Day

April 5, 2006 in CSS, thought-after by Lafinboy | 1 comment

Wondering where the fancy site has gone? What happened to the layout, the images, the niceties? Fear not – this is a temporary change to support CSS Naked Day, a push to encourage web developers to open up their sites to the harsh glare of public scrutiny. Will your site stand up to being naked for a day? Go on, give it a go – in cyberspace nobody can see you blush!

Reading this after 6th April 2006? The nakedness has passed, and the site is fully clothed again.

Tags:

DST and the Commonwealth Games 2006

March 26, 2006 in thought-after by Lafinboy | No comments

Ahh – what a way to start a Sunday! As most of my home/office is controlled by Internet time, and the standard rule for determining the end of DST in Australia is that the clocks go back 1 hour on the last Sunday of March, today caused a little confusion for me. On waking I found that all of my PC connected appliances told the time as 1 hour less than my non-PC linked appliances. A quick check found that indeed today should have been the day that DST ended and clocks should have wound back 1 hour at 3am in the morning. Alas, due to the Commonwealth Games taking place in Melbourne, the Australian government had decided that the end of DST for 2006 should fall 1 week later on 2nd April 2006. While this arbitrary decision may have been well advertised in Australia (though I had no personal knowledge of it), it has not been accommodated by any of the world time services. So the upshot is that my PC will be 1 hour ahead of time for 1 whole week. I would have thought that in an age where a lot of things are controlled by internet timing mechanisms, it would have been easier to reschedule the Commonwealth Games to start 1 week earlier, or at the very least have all of the major SNTP servers alerted to the arbitary change in the end of DST. The only good thing – I had a whole extra hour of coding today, as my alarm woke me 1 hour earlier than expected!

Tags: ,

« Older entries § Newer entries »