Well we finally made it back to the UK, after our holiday was extended by 9 days. Flights started running the day after our original flight was cancelled, but we were caught up in the backlog.
Thankfully we were able to stay with family, despite SAA’s best efforts to get us to travel to Johannesburg. I’m very pleased we weren’t stuck there for 9 days 
We’re due to fly back to the UK at 4:40pm BST tomorrow. The latest on the volcanic ash that’s been wreaking havoc with air traffic into Europe is that they will reopen airports in North England and Scotland tomorrow at 6am BST and possibly in the rest of England later on in the day.
It seems that if our flight tomorrow is cancelled we’ll be on the waiting list along with about 150,000 other Britons trying to get back into the UK 
Wow big news – Nintendo have today snuck out a press release that announces a new 3D handheld that will be the successor to the Nintendo DS/DSi.
The new handheld has the temporary name ‘Nintendo 3DS’ and will feature 3D effects without the need to wear glasses. More details will be made available at this years E3. Despite working in the games industry for nearly 10 years I still haven’t had the opportunity to go to E3. Maybe this year?
I’ve been a big fan of the Battlefield series ever since Battlefield 1942, and can’t think how many hours I’ve spent playing it. So I’m particularly pleased that my copy arrived on my desk a few minutes ago, the day before it’s due out in the shops. Thanks Game!
Can’t wait to get stuck into this at the weekend!
Looks like if you own one of the old-style PS3s you’re out of luck as of yesterday – there’s some kind of bug in the calendar software that means it’s unable to properly handle today’s date, meaning if you even switch the console on it can leave to save-game loss, loss of trophies, inability to play online and various other shenanigans.
I’m interested to see how Sony will fix this – will they be able to push out a path over the network when people can’t connect in the first place?
Here’s one particularly unhappy customer who just wants to “eat cupcakes and shoot noobs on Call of Duty” – poor guy.
Edit: it looks like the issue has been fixed, about 24 hours after it started.
Ever since they’ve been launched I’ve been refusing to get an iPhone. I have to admit that they’re great, but they’re just too ubiquitous and I would feel like a sheep if I jumped on board . I was very excited when Google announced the Android-powered G1 back in September 2008, and was sure that an Android phone would be a great alternative.
I’ve been waiting ince then for a decent Android phone to come out with a hardware keyboard (something like the HTC Touch Pro 2?), but on Friday I finally got tired of waiting and ordered the recently released Nexus One from the Google.com page.
Unbelievably the phone arrived first thing on Monday morning after being dispatched from Indianapolis. I was very, very impressed. Props to Google and DHL for getting it to me so quickly.
After two days playing with the phone I am very impressed. The 3.7″ OMOLED screen is very clear and bright, and the 1GHz snapdragon CPU makes it very snappy. More technical specs are available here.
There’s a bit of a division in my office between the designers, who generally favour the iPhone, and the developers, several of whom have Android phones. Until now I’ve been fighting the Android side despite not owning one, so I’m pleased that I’m now practising what I preach.
Here are some pictures of the phone when it arrives. Apologies for the quality they were taken with my old phone
After months of rumour and speculation, the Apple tablet is due to be announced at today’s Apple event. Information that has appeared so far today are some grainy photos and rumour that the device will cost $800 on contract, or $1000 without.
Edit: well the event has been and gone and it looks like the rumour on the price was way off – it will be available from just $499. The iPad look like a scaled up iPhone. It has a 9.7 inch capacitative touchscreen, 1GHz Apple A4chip, 10 hour battery life and will come in a variety of disk capacities (16, 32 and 64GB), just like the iPhone. Wifi and 3G are available as options. There’s also been some interesting apps announced, like iBook (an e-reader application) and iWork (spreadsheet type stuff). The majority of apps on the app store will work on it – either in a window or scaled up to double size. It won’t be long before apps specifically for the ipad become available I’m sure, the iPhone SDK was updated yesterday to add support for the iPad.
In my years of developing for Internet Explorer I’ve been continually having to battle with it’s half-assed implementation of web standards and non existent debugging tools, but have to continue supporting it because so many people don’t know any better. A small ray of hope has emerged in the last few days off the back of the Google/China showdown. Apparently the Chinese hacks were taking advantage of an undisclosed security flaw in Internet Explorer. Because of the this on the 15th Jan the German goverment issued a warning to Internet users to avoid using Internet Explorer. They were followed by the French government on the 18th who issued a similar warning.
Now it seems the malicious code only targets IE6, and Microsoft released a patch for it yesterday (the 21st). Hopefully these security alerts will have caused some people to jump ship from Internet Explorer to one of the alternatives, and we can see those usage stats, particularly of IE6, start to drop off.
We had a sneak peek of this in the office yesterday and it’s looking really, really slick. There have been many Alien vs. Predator games in the past (The first Alien vs. Predator games was released in 1999 and was by the same developers – Rebellion) but I think this is the first that really does the franchise justice. It’s out on 19th Feb in the Uk on PC, Xbox360 and PS3. More details.
If you spend time building web pages, working with CSS, Ajax, javascript etc this plugin can be amazingly helpful. It allows you to inspect DOM elements on the page, see what css styles they have applied to them, where these CSS styles are defined and even preview changes without having to modify the source.
HttpFox allows monitoring of http traffic between your browser and the web server. Also allows you to inspect headers, POST data, cookies etc. Incredibly useful when working with Flash applications when you want to see what data is being loaded in, and also for easily checking for missing or broken page components.
Another tool for website optimisation. Developed by Yahoo, YSlow analyses various components of a web page and gives you tips on areas that can be improved based on Yahoo’s rules for high performance web sites. It also includes neat tools to do things like image optimisation. YSlow runs on top of Firebug and so you’ll need to have that installed before you’re able to use it. Yahoo’s Best Practises for Speeding Up your Website are a real goldmine of information and well worth looking into if you’re involved with making sure your getting the best possible performance from your website.
The benefits of having correct, cleanup HTML/XHTML markup are obvious. This extension parses and validates your markup using two tools from the W3C – Tidy and OpenSP. You are then presented with a list of issues, making fixing poor markup a quick and easy process. It also has a useful feature that allows you to view html source after javascript execution, which is useful when working with Ajax.
The web develper extension brings together stacks of different tools that are useful for web development, tools for inspecting web pages, validating, disabling components, resizing the browser window, etc etc.
Very useful if you work with Flash, this extension allows viewing of trace statements from a Flash movie when it is embedded in a web page. Requires you to use a debug Flash Player.
I use this in conjunction with Flash Tracer. As the debug flash players can be slow compared to the normal player, you ideally don’t want to be running it all the time. Flash Switcher gives you a quick and easy way to switch between different flash versions. It also allows you to test your flash under different flash player versions.
This extension doesn’t feel quite as slick as other extensions but provides some neat functionality. It gives you a quick and easy way to take a screengrab of the current page (either visible area or the entire page), and then carry out simple edits and make annotations to the grab before saving it off or sending it via email. Very useful when you want to send someone a screengrab highlighting an issue or area of interest.
A simple extension that tells you the IP address of the site you are visiting. If you maintain several servers this can be useful to tell you where a page is hosted
Allows clearing of your web cache without having to delve through submenus. if you find yourself doing this a lot, this extension is worth getting.
