Media Centres - XBMC

Running a home media PC is always a bit of a challenge and unless you get the ease of use and user interface right, it's not long before you are sitting watching things at your computer again.

XBMC's Aeon InterfaceXBMC have done if right however. Head on over to their downloads page and give it a try on their live CD or an installed copy. Once you've done that - head on over to the android marketplace or apple app store and download a mobile controller. I highly recommend an app called "Constellation" which is free and does an amazing job of presenting your content.

It also supports AirPlay so should you wish to have a cheaper alternative to the Apple TV then give it a shot!

Memory Leaks

Further to yesterday's post, I have discovered Firefox still has some fairly major memory leaks. Once tabs have stayed open for over 24 hours, the whole computer slows to a halt and Firefox gobbled up a whopping 9.7GB of RAM!

Needless to say - Firefox, it was a good run but you can't compete like Chrome.

Firefox is back

I used to be a huge supporter of Firefox years ago, it was a great browser and had great extensibility. Chrome wasn't around, Safari was clunky and Opera didn't have addon support. It was a simpler time of a maximum of 2Meg download on ADSL.

Most browsers back then and Firefox was a breath of fresh air but over time and increasing memory and processor count in computers, it started to become unstable and as it ran as one process for all your tabs (I genrally have around 150 tabs at any one time) - it would crash.

With the release of Google Chrome, I quickly jumped ship and found it a lot better. With each tab running as a separate process (~150 little processes as appose to 1 big one) the stability improved and the speed picked up as not all tabs were in the foreground - only a couple so the rest lay dormant.

I now find myself in the position that Chrome is having so many little issues (crashing wise) I have actually returned to Firefox and it is a lot faster than Chrome is now. Im still surprised to see after all this time too that it stills runs as one process and its not making use of any excess processing power yet it still starts up faster and handles flash a lot better.

So what are peoples favorite browsers and why - comment below.

Selling Solutions

Clients shouldn't have to understand the systems they use.

Let me qualify that statement before people take it terribly the wrong way. I've found increasingly that people are being sold systems as appose to solutions. Now there is nothing wrong with this as such but when a non-technical client asks you if they can have an online shop, a key part of the role of the web designer/deveopler is to understand their needs.

Most clients in my experience don't buy systems, they buy solutions. When approaching a client, they may have an idea of what they want and ask for specifically that. The problem comes later down the line where they then realise "how are we going to do this" or "but we need this" and the whole system comes to comprimises over a fairly large points sometimes.

In my opinion, its the web developers job to go into the situation and first learn what the client wants out of the situation instead of instantly prescribing something like a homeopathic doctor. If you are a Drupal (brand of CMS) specialist, thats great - but keep an open mind to the fact that your client doesn't know what Drupal may be and that it may not be suitable or cost effective to use this solution.

All I'm saying is (I'm looking at you DNN and Drupal guys) dont just prescribe what is easiest or most convenient for you, take some time to really understand the clients goals and future plans and by developing a solution that works for them, they will make sure you are in their future roadmap

April fools

This year saw some great April fools

Google Maps for the NES - 8bit quest edition
YouTube offline edition, brought to you by truck... Weekly
Hungry Hungry Hippos for iPad
Google Chrome Multitasking Extension
Shreddie, the USB shredder and unshredder

And internally - Prompt has run out of pixels.

Thanks to all those who donated

Sadly, not all news today was happy. The BBC reported that a bill to allow all government bodies to effectively tap all emails, social messages and communications online is trying to be passed through. After all the awareness the Stop SOPA campaign raised, people are beginning to realise that the government is trying to get more of a grip on the Internet. Unfortunately in the UK, we already have our version of SOPA which is called the Digital Economy bill and it was rushed through parliament in 2010 after some dubious consultation. It is very one sided but I suggest instead of me talking about it, you can have a skim read if you are interested,

I'm all for governments protecting citizens but I feel that the Internet itself should not be censored.