Random Arty Post: Skeletal Holly Leaf

This is a scan of the skeleton of a holly leaf.

(Click to zoom)

Scanned on 25 January 1998, 11:39:06.

Switched to Chrome. Bang, and the crashes have gone!

For many years, I've had Firefox as my primary browser. Recently though, it's been letting me down and crashing three of four times a day.

I use my browser a LOT in my work, and it's important that it can stay open without falling over randomly, and without consuming all of my PC's memory.  This is why I switched from IE to Firefox in the first place. 

Now, it seems that my Firefox installation has become a bit bloated and unstable.  Perhaps it just needs reinstalling, but I decided to try Google Chrome for a while anyway. 

Since I switched - no browser crashes.  

Yes, I realise this post reads like a bad infomercial. It wasn't even deliberate - I think I must stop watching QVC. 

Google to turn off web change tracking in Reader

Google has announced that it's going to remove the support for tracking changes on non-RSS feed web-pages. 

While it's apparently not a massively used feature, I've used it a bit to track when sites have been updated, and it did prove really useful. 

They recommend using an alternative, like page2rss.  From a quick search - other another alternative appears to be WebRSS or FeedBlitz

To be honest though, I don't really want to sign up to another 3rd party site just to feed the google feed. 

I think I'll just check those sites manually. 

Krazy Kart Racing - Cross platform multiplayer!

Last night I discovered that Krazy Kart Racing by Konami was available on my Android based Samsung Galaxy S, so had a few games, then we had a few multiplayer games over the local wifi.

The game is a pretty good Mario Kart type game, controlled by the tilt sensors, and by tapping the screen to release powerups and weapons.   It's good fun, and has all the things you'd expect from this kind of game - unlockable levels, power ups, good choice of kart and characters.. 

Today, I realised it's also available on the iPhone iOS operating system, so I downloaded it on my iPod to see if they'd actually done multiplayer that was cross-platform compatible.  At this stage I really didn't expect it to work.

Handy Facebook Event tip!

If you want a facebook event in your non-Facebook calendar, go to the event in Facebook, scroll right to the bottom and press export. 

Transfer data from Microsoft Entourage to Microsoft Outlook

I made an assumption earlier today that transferring data from one Microsoft email product (Entourage on the Mac) to another (Outlook 2007 on Windows) would be as simple as export / import.

Wrong.

I also wanted to transfer the mail back onto the mail server rather than local storage, and thought I could just drag-and-drop the folder structure from the local copy to the IMAP server

Wrong again!

PHP & Salesforce API - get email address from ownerId

I'm blogging this because it took me nearly a whole day to find the answer on how to do this, as it doesn't appear to be well documented anywhere.

All of this is assuming you already have a script that connects to the Salesforce API using wsdl.

Why choice is sometimes a bad thing...

So, Microsoft have been forced by the EU to give users a "choice" of which browser they want installed. 
Of course they always HAD a choice, so basically all they've forced them to do is let people know there's a choice. It's like when the BBC have to say "Other [whatevers] are available"

Now. There are several things wrong with this:

New beginnings for the blog

Ok, I've decided that this is worth-while in it's own way, and I'm going to post links to interesting stuff and mini reviews of things.

First up - here are some t-shirts I designed.