Testers needed
If anyone out there gets a few minutes, could you drop by Bio Nutrition? We’ve just launched a new website (the first one ever for this brand, can you believe it?) and we’ve used a new piece of software (X-Cart) to create it. Well, I say “we” - Simon’s done 95% of the work on it (well done, Simon). What we need now is for a bunch of people to visit and look for stuff that doesn’t work, typo’s, etc.
While you’re taking a look at the site, if you feel like placing an order please feel free. (No test orders, though, please - all orders will be treated as ‘live’ ones).
If you do find anything amiss, please either leave me a comment here or drop an email to errors[at]bionutrition.co.uk. Cheers!
Brief notes
Just a quick round up of things that have caught my attention over the last few days:
1. There’s a new diet drug that’s been approved for use in the UK, despite fears that it can cause depression and an increased risk of suicide - especially for anyone already taking anti-depressants. So, when you feel down about being overweight, take Rimonabant and feel really bad about how fat you are! But provided that a drug is approved by NICE it doesn’t matter how bad the side effects are - or how many other drugs you have to take to cure the side-effects! We all know that there is no miracle cure for obesity; if you want to lose weight, you’ve got to change your lifestyle and diet permanently.
2. Apparently, the US have said that they won’t recognise Zimbabwe’s elections this week, and Mugabe’s knighthood has been stripped. Even worse, England have cancelled the 2009 cricket tour of the country. Is it just me that thinks that none of this is going to make any difference? Let’s face it, Mugabe is prepared to kill the opposition to make sure that he stays in office. Why does he care if a cricket tour doesn’t go ahead?
I seem to remember a few years ago that the US and the UK decided that they needed to intervene in Iraq because of the human rights record of the country’s leader, Saddam Hussain. Mugabe’s human rights record is worse than Hitler’s, yet all we’re now doing is taking away an honorary knighthood? Could it be that Zimbabwe doesn’t have anything the West wants, so we just leave them to get on with it?
3. As well as being in trouble with race stewards for his mistakes over the last couple of Grand Prix, it seems that Lewis Hamilton is now wanted for burglary.
4. File this story under “There’s no smoke without fire”: Once again, John Leslie (former Blue Peter TV presenter) has been caught up in allegations of rape, dating back to an incident in 1995. He hasn’t got The Titmuss to stand by him this time, so how will he cope?
5. When I first read this story, it went into a bit more detail and I promise you that the driver was a woman, who’d put the automatic transmission into drive when she meant to put it into reverse. The current version of the story leaves out those details, but I think the pictures say it all. And I love the fact that the driver of the Toyota wasn’t in the mood to give interviews!
Lewis, where did it all go wrong?
This weekend’s French Grand Prix was not a good one for Lewis Hamilton. Following on from his disastrous mistake in Canada (running into the back of Kimi’s Ferrari, which was stopped at a red light on the pit lane exit), this weekend Lewis was deemed to have “gained an advantage” when he straight-lined a chicane as he tried to overtake Vettel. Hamilton is now fourth in the Championship, ten points behind leader Felipe Massa.
These things happen; Formula One is a fast, high-pressure sport where split-second decisions are required constantly and where even blinking at the wrong time could cause you to have a big accident. You can put them down as just racing incidents - just wasn’t having a good day. But after the promise of last season, which ended so crushingly with poor tactics in the second-last race and an attack of the nerves in the final race, it seems that Lewis is (already) in danger of doing a Coulthard (or a Button, in fact). Promising so much and not quite managing to deliver.
At the moment, Lewis’ problem seems to be that he thinks everyone is out to get him, saying in an interview this week “You can keep on giving me penalties, whatever you want. I’ll keep battling, and trying to come back with a result.” Lewis, they keep giving you penalties because you keep breaking the rules. You ran into the back of stationary car - in the pit lane, no less - two weeks ago, and didn’t have the grace to apologise properly for it (”I saw the red light but it was too late to stop. I don’t think it’s a racing incident. It’s just unfortunate when this stuff happens… I apologise to Kimi if I ruined his race”). Now, you straight-line a chicane because “I couldn’t turn in on the guy, or we would have crashed”, which seems to indicate that you hadn’t overtaken him until you went straight on.
I want to see Lewis win the Championship (it’s about time another Brit did) but I’ve got a horrible feeling that his chance this year is not as good as it was last year.
On FireFox and the new Browser Wars
Well, did you join the multitudes (somewhere round the 8.2m mark) that took part in “Download Day”, the amazingly successful marketing angle that’s helped get FireFox 3 onto even more computers across the world?
As could be expected, initially download day was a bit of a bust - when several million people try to download something at the exact same minute, you’re bound to get some problems. On the whole, though, it looked like Mozilla managed to get it fairly right.
I’ve used FireFox (and variants like Flock) for a while now because I like it’s functionality, the fact that it’s quick and all the add-on extras that you can get for it. For the past few months, though, its been my secondary browser while Safari has been my primary one. But I started using FF3 when the last Release Candidate was published and since the official release I’ve gone over to FireFox as my only browser.
I was reading a post by Rory Cellan-Jones on the BBC blog dot.life asking whether FireFox 3 was a triumph or a disaster. While his post doesn’t really answer the question he asks in the title (although he does make reference to broken add-ons, server crashes and security holes), it was the debate that it sparked in the comments that really sparked my interest. Whilst I’d always assumed that most computer users would use the browser that came with their system, so it would only be the nerds and the geeks that would get excited about a new browser, I didn’t realise that they could get so heated over such an innocuous subject.
Most people seem to be firmly in favour of one browser or another - most commonly Firefox or Opera (Internet Explorer doesn’t really get a look in, except to get roundly criticised) - although a bunch of developers have commented that they use as many browsers as they can, so that they can make sure the sites they author look and work the same across all the different models.
And that’s where another bugbear comes in - standards compliance. I’m not much of web historian; I don’t know when the HTML standards were first written or how much they’ve changed over the years. I don’t know whether the standards existed before IE or whether they came after. What I do know is that standards compliance seems to be the new Holy Grail - unless you’re Microsoft. But, as has been pointed out to me on a number of occasions, if the majority of web users are browsing with IE, doesn’t that create a standard in itself? Yes, IE is not standards compliant but if your site doesn’t work properly in IE you’ll miss out on the vast majority of visitors. Because as much as FireFox, Opera, et al would like us to believe, most ordinary users still use IE to do their web browsing.
Someone even went so far as to suggest that by refusing to render things in the way IE does, other browsers were being bullheaded. That might, on the face of it, seem to be a bit a stupid statement but most people’s first experience of a browser is IE: when they start to use one of the others that is more standards compliant and their favourite sites don’t look or work right, they get put off. And go back to IE.
It was interesting to see, as well, the way the debate opened up from being a discussion of FireFox and whether the new version was any good, to being an argument about Windows vs The Rest. One commentator made several references to Linux / FireFox (seemingly unaware that FireFox, while Open Source, is not limited to Linux) and how they don’t stand a chance when the world is dominated by Windows. Someone else suggested that public sector businesses should be forced to at least trial Open Source software, rather than paying money to Bill Gates. The two problems with the large scale uptake of Open Source are legacy and compatibility. As Microsoft has been so dominant for so many years, there’s a lot of stuff out there that needs to be accessible and needs to be able to be shared properly. I love Open Office, but from my experience it doesn’t play well with Microsoft Office files and I wouldn’t want to have to convert all the documents I use on a daily basis to .odt or .ods so they worked; I don’t have the time. Likewise, I’d love to get away from Windows, but the other (non-Office) software I need to use every day isn’t available on another platform. And even if there are alternatives, you’ve got more file conversions and a steep learning curve. It just isn’t possible. And that’s in a small business; think about the scale of the task for a public sector company.
The final issue that got everyone riled up was that of security. Apparently, a security hole has been found in FireFox 3 already - although, technically, it was there in FF2 so isn’t new - and that was seen as very bad by those in support of IE. Who then got trounced when it was pointed out that IE has more holes than a Swiss cheese colander. It’s a web browser - to my mind that means it’s an inherently insecure piece of software and you should treat it as such.
I think FireFox 3 is a good step forward; it is faster than the previous version, I’ve always liked the extensibility of it, it seems to be fairly easy on system resources and it does everything I need and want it to do. If you haven’t tried it, I’d recommend it but if you don’t like it… well, there’s plenty more out there.
[Just as an aside: in one of the comments on the BBC piece, someone used the phrase "large minority". They need to be shot.]
All a bit psychic
Came across this page on Mahalo, reporting on the six severed feet that have been washed up on the coast in British Columbia. The bit that struck me as odd is the psychic who’s been quoted as saying that there may be some illegal activity involved.
Really? I’d never have guessed!
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