Aldona’s Web Lounge

A few people might remember me going on about my computer crashing about a year ago (I can’t remember exactly). Well after that huge scare I bought myself a portable hard-drive (hardrive??) to prevent me from losing stuff in the future. Well last week sometime my computer crashed once again and aside from my fault at not syncing my portable hard-drive with my computer it saved my butt!

My aim now is to work on my personal flaw. Does anyone know of some good software which helps sync a folder with a folder on a portable hard-drive or even a thumb drive? I’m aware that the first thought might be windows briefcase however I’ve tried that in the past and whilst it updates files when you press the ’sync’ button it doesn’t copy over new files. Does anyone have any alternatives? Something free of course and nothing which will clog a computer.

Well I’ll be on the lookout and well say something if I find something good. Until then happy manual synching.

December Note: In response to a question, yes the audio converter is totally free. No trial, no cost. (at least at the time of this comment and post. This may change in the future).

Ever since I used Odeo as part of class in 06 I’ve been trying to find an equivalent. Odeo was altered after we used it to disable an upload option meaning that audio had to be directly recorded on to their website. Well I’ve finally found an alternative.

Houndbite is a website which allows the user to upload up to 8mb or 5 minutes of audio and then embed it much the way youtube does with video. The length limit means that there are some limits but does work for short podcasts or song intros. Below is my example of a random audio track chosen from the site.

That said my largest song is Justin Timberlake’s ‘What Goes Around Comes Around’ which is 10.2MB and the longest is Halcyon & On & On from the Mean Girl’s soundtrack which is 9:25 so most songs will fit. However the Timerlake song does have a 192bit rate (higher than my 128 average) so many things could be brought down easily.

My feedback for the site is to make the interface clearer so you can see how much of the song has loaded, like the colour change odeo and youtube have.

Quick extra note. Because I have what seems like 600 browsers installed on my computer I didn’t want to install yet another huge program so I searched for a MP3 converter. Finally I found the Free Mp3 Wma Converter which converts most audio formats in to most other audio formats including WMA, M4A and OGG. It can also reduce the bitrate and the album/artist information in the song is not lost during conversion so it’s a great program and totally free. Not trial, not limited…free. So if you are not trying to edit audio then have a look at that. For me it get’s a 10/10 rating.

Well it’s finally happened. Google has gone and made software that they didn’t invent from scratch. They’ve gone and made a browser and I am writing this post from their lastest software - Google Chrome.

As far as I can see from the last 10 minutes of random browsing the name is the most interesting bit of this software. Chrome? Why chrome? Anyway back to the software.

The new browser itself isn’t that bad. Hasn’t crashed yet (although until I actually manage to save this post I make no promises because IE8 crashed as I was saving my review), seems to load things normally and fairly quickly. There is no Mac or Linux version out as of today but I’ve heard promises that there will be.

I’ve heard bugs of pages not loading (like Google pages lol) but haven’t come across that. I’m just left wondering if the Google toolbar will be able to be installed in this browser???

One thing I’m impressed with is that it passes the Acid 2 test (see my review on IE8 for more info on that) perfectly and quickly. One thing I don’t like is the ’speed dial’ thing (which can be overridden) and the remarkable similarity to IE7 and 8. It has the file and options to the side instead of at the top. Call me old fashioned but I like Firefox because it leaves them where they are and doesn’t mess with yet another feature which leaves you frustrated and trying to find out how to change your home page.

The TOC for this browser seems weird according to some (Google TOC concerns) and I have a message for them. This post is mine. I wrote it. I own it. They can display it for you lovely readers but that’s it.

That will do for now. Providing this post saves correctly the only thing I’d suggest to Google is to enable ctrl+s to save web pages. This is a huge one for me and I can see it being incredibly annoying not to have it.

I hope this works. I’m happy with anything that squashes IE but I still have reservations. Firefox still is, and always will be, my favourite browser. With all their add-ons how could they not be.

Google Chrome Download link (windows only)

Acid 2 Test Link

First of all I must apologise. This blog was hacked sometime in the last couple of months and I am horrified by this fact. Any warnings from Google should soon disappear and all offending links have been removed!

However…this is my only thankful thing about this embarrassing incident…I feel that being hacked is an argument against PHP standards. My stuff doesn’t conform to standards (at least not some of them) and therefore don’t use the normal things. I reckon this is plus in terms of hacking. Normal processes wouldn’t work because I use different names, different methods. They aren’t slower and I still put all the possible security checks but because they are different I argue they are harder to hack.

Anyway now that the offending links have been removed from this site I hope that this doesn’t happen again. Apologies to anyone who has been affected by this.

I write this post in shock (and a tad of horror) from IE8. If you’ve read just about any post of mine in the past you’ll know I’m not much of an IE fan and have yet to meet any web designer who is. However I’m a curious person and so when I heard about IE8 being released as a beta I wanted to know what it looked like. After all this is the browser which (if Microsoft has it’s way) will take the world by storm. Obviously I don’t really want that to happen because I like Mozilla (Flock and Firefox depending on what I’m doing) however the sooner we tackle new browsers the better coders we become so, with a little apprehension, I downloaded and installed the brand new beta of IE8.

Remembering back to 2006 and the release of the then much awaited IE7 I had a little sense of dread when I finally completed the installation and fired it up. I doubt there is a person out there who makes sites with cross browser compatibility who wouldn’t feel the same.

At first glance IE8 is much like IE7. Not a bad download size and after some updates it insisted I get and a restart it installed and loaded without a problem. Some of the features include a ‘emulate ie7′ button (although why anyone would want to do that is beyond me) and a lovely overwrite of IE6. Other than that the interface is much like IE7 other than it comes with more toolbars than you can poke a stick at.

I am relieved to report that there is a ray of hope for developers and the rest of us crazy enough to take on this anarchic world. I was recently introduced to the Acid2 test which is a lot less dangerous than the name implies. For those of you who’ve never heard of it the Acid2 test is basically a test for browsers to see how they handle CSS and even CSS3. When looking at this page (http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html) you are supposed to see a smiley face and depending on how a browser interprets CSS then it will appear either close or way off to that. Firefox 2 comes up with a fairly good representation of a face however the now archaic IE6 honestly sent me in to fits of laughter at the result which was a yellow mess on the screen and the brand spanking new IE7 wound up with a red mess (although how it found so much red I’ll never know). All of this round-a-bout explanation comes back to IE8. Its result, I’m almost embarrassed to admit, was flawless. One perfect round CSS smiley face.

This test gives me hope at the very least. However being IE it does have flaws (and I’m quite relieved really-how could IE not have flaws?). It is currently only a beta and not a bad size for a download but it does require certain updates to your computer before it will install so if you are picky about windows updates (some can be nothing but a disaster) then that might annoy some. The main flaw I’ve noticed after only about 15 minutes of use is the amount of memory it requires to run. Firefox has never been a trim browser and if you add extensions then it can crash even the most efficient computer but Firefox looks positively tiny compares to the amount of memory my current system is using to run it. My computer is by no means a dinosaur but where Firefox, with many, many extensions installed, takes 55,000k of Memory usage (according to ctrl+alt+delete). IE8 takes about 69,000k. This text is also coming in in bursts, so it will pause as I type and then put in 10 letters in a millisecond. This pausing is particularly evident if I try to backspace.

Now I realise that compared to some bugs web designers have faced over the past few years this memory usage is probably not much however Microsoft markets itself as making software for the general public and having a browser which is too powerful for Windows XP (pro) probably isn’t the best place to start. However since it is only a Beta version I’m using I will admit that I’m impressed with it’s pass of the Acid2 test and say that I live in hope.

Click here to download IE 8 beta.

Click here to take the Acid2 Test