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Archive for the ‘Software’ Category

Friday, June 26th, 2009

Update: See Sage-Too is dead, long live Sage++ for links to a new version of Sage that works with Firefox 3.5!

So, I upgraded to Firefox 3.5 RC3 today. I was disappointed (though not at all surprised) to see that my second-favourite add-on (after the essential Oldbar) had stopped working. The Sage-Too Firefox RSS Reader extension is packaged to run with 3.0b5 to 3.0.*, it seems.

The good news is that manually repackaging the plugin and reinstalling it with 3.5 does work fine. As far as I can see the project is orphaned – a real shame in my opinion – so if anyone’s interested in a copy, leave a comment here and I’ll whack a page up with instructions (and perhaps even a copy if I can make sure the authors won’t mind.)

Posted in Software | 11 Comments »

Sunday, June 7th, 2009

One of the things that impressed me about WordPress was the out-of-the-box experience and the plugin ecosystem – you can do just about anything with the minimum of fuss possible, including upgrading and installing things. It’s A Good Thing, and something that a lot of Content Management Systems could learn from.

A particular part of said ecosystem is AnyFont, which does for WordPress excellently something that I’ve found myself hacking into various blog systems over the years – replacing headings with nice textual images. When I installed it I found that it didn’t do multi-line titles – which is why the first few blog entries on Shinypixel have short titles – so I got my hands dirty, coded it in and sent the changes off to the author.

My code has now made it into the 0.7 release, which as well as supporting multiline images now also supports OpenType fonts for your images. Many thanks to Ryan for being friendly and accepting my patches. Now you too can have multiline titles as premiered on shinypixel.co.uk!

Questions? Suggestions? Just drop me a comment.

Posted in News, Software | No Comments »

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

I’ve had Sony hardware for years. Various flavours of MiniDisc came and went – one of them got stolen, another got smashed – and now I have a couple of Network Walkmans sitting about the place.

I don’t use them as much as I should do. Why? Sony’s platform-itis. Whether it’s MiniDisc, ATRAC3 or UMD, they’re determined to lock people into their own software platforms as far as possible. Apple do this all the time of course, and although I don’t like them either, I will concede that iTunes does for the most part actually work.

Sony’s SonicStage/Sony Connect/OpenMG Jukebox has always been rubbish. Various grades thereof, but still rubbish. OpenMG Jukebox used to crash arbitrarily on any MP3 that wasn’t crafted by flaxen-haired audio angels using anvils of the finest mythical diamonds, Sony Connect was slow and only in recent releases has the experience become anywhere near pleasant.

So it was with some rapture that I stumbled across JSymphonic tonight. Aside from the usual open-source lack of visual polish, and some minor UI confusion (which reading the documentation fixed) it’s been plain sailing. If you’ve got some nice-looking but irritating-to-synchronize devices hanging around, then I heartily recommend using this to rediscover them – my Network Walkman is happily charging away for the first time this year.

Posted in Interwang, Music, Software | 4 Comments »