The next version of the browser we all love and cherish has been released. FireFox 3 (Beta 2) is currently available to download and testing. Features include:
You can download it at Download
Bullet for My Valentines new album is finally out and in all honesty it has felt like an eternity for this album to be released! Being the hard rock fan that I am I had to get the album and get it I did!
I’m going to get the negatives out the way first, this album is not as good as the poison. I know that Matt Tuck had some issues with his vocal cords recently and as such they can’t perform the way they used to but as my brother pointed out, its sounds like they trying to emulate Trivium. This is by no means a bad thing but I liked B4MV’s style on the previous album. This albums feels like its aimed at the younger teen crowd. This album also has heavy underlying political themes.
Onto the positives! The album starts off with “Scream Aim Fire” which I must admit is one of their best ever songs. As in traditional B4MV styles the riffs are fast and intricate and generally sound awesome. Matt’s voice isn’t as heavy as it was but it still sounds brilliant, Padge and Jay support with great backing vocals covering the heavier vocal parts. “Hearts burst into Fire” is type of track you can except throughout this album, its catchy but at the sametime seems a little poppy.
Personally the 3 best tracks on this album are Scream Aim Fire, Hearts Burst into Fire and Say Goodnight. All in all, it is a nice addition to my collection and I’m really enjoying it. Now I just need to wait a few months for the Disturbed and Metallica albums.
Local web entrepreneur, social media strategist & blogger Tyler Reed is celebrating his 20th birthday today. For a guy so young he is already achieving a helluva lot!
So Tyler, here’s to an exciting year for you and your company Younique!
Happy Birthday Tyler 2.0 
Continuing on with my foray into the world of CSS I have started scrutinizing every webpage I find. Using the web developer toolbar for FireFox I check almost every website I visit to see if they’ve implemented CSS. The results are quite interesting and here I have included some website images with and without their CSS styles applied.
First-off, download the web developer toolbar here for FireFox and see things like this for yourself: Download it Here
Once you have the toolbar installed you can see a website without its CSS by doing the following:
1) Navigate to the website you want to see
2) On the WebDev toolbar click CSS –> Disable Styles –> All Styles 
www.Facebook.com
Naturally I wanted to show off a website that most of internet faring populace have visited at least once so I chose Facebook. The first image is the site with all its CSS styles enabled:
FB with Style:
Now heres what it looks like without style!:
Quite a difference! What makes this so amazing for me is the sheer power of CSS. Working with the HTML would be simple because it would be the straight forward content within HTML DIV elements which are easy to work with.
www.News24.com
The next target is South Africa’s most prominent news website. I was actually horrified when I saw this. I can’t even imagine what it must be like when someone asks their team to change something, it cannot be a pleasant experience!
Site with Styles enabled:
Now, for this next image I have disabled the styles and highlighted any table cell borders on the page using the WebDev tool. Imagine needing to work on the following HTML document:
There way too many nested tables there to work with. The reason I decided to highlight a news website was because of the disabled members of our community. If they have to try and use a screen reader on this website, the screenreader would be reading useless information to them and they would have no clue about what was going on in our country. Besides that fact, making just one small mistake in a nested table could the entire design of the website to fail!
If you now have the WebDev tool installed, go and test the following websites with AND without their CSS styles enabled.
1) twitter
2) jaiku
3) pownce
4) picknpay
5) BBC
6) CNN
My personal opinion is that the CNN website is probably the best CSS driven news website out their so kudos to them! If I had to choose betweening maintaing CNN.com or News24.com purely based on the HTML, I would choose CNN.com any day as my life would be so much easier!
For at least 4 weeks now I have not been able to log into digg.com! This is driving me insane, I enjoy my time on digg, especially a lot of the political links. Whats more frustrating is that I cannot digg anything! Everynow and then it gives me false hope and says that I’m logged in, until I try digg something or submit something!
I have tried multiple browsers even, nothing works! I am not the only person experiencing this though. Here’s a fellow South African blogger who’s not getting any digg love: Whussup with Digg?!
So Digg, sort your shit out please.
So 350 Credits are up for grabs and ofcourse I will oblige Not only is entry card an awesome idea but entrecard entrepreneurs are popping up all over. Check out the post here: HERE
Imod.co.za has become one of the highest rated blogs on our local www.amatomu.co.za feed aggregator and Christopher always has very interesting posts. Really worth the RSS feed subscribe!
I am by nature a web developer, not a web designer. So when I have been asked to design websites they honestly look like a 9 year old created something using frontpage. I recently decided that learning how to design websites would be a good idea because I can work on the performance of my web apps while designing them instead to trying to communicate this point through whichever random person gets contracted to do the actual design of the web application.
Over the next while I will focus on CSS in my blog posts and I thought it relevant to write to first post about the benefits of CSS design.
CSS (Cascading Stylesheets) works as a method to present content on a website, which content should be shown where and how. Up until now I have always just used HTML Tables to design the pages I have worked on. This becomes quite tricky after a while especially if you are working with a complex page. I am not saying that tables are never to be used but using tables to set the layout of your page is incorrect. I will go into more details concerning this in a later post.
Benefits of CSS:
1) Your website will download faster to client machines:
A) When using tables, the browser reads your content twice. Once to layout the tables and a second time to fill the content of the tables.
B) Generally, using CSS design instead of Table based design requires less code
C) CSS styles can be stored in a separate document so that it can be cached.
D) With CSS you can set the download order of content on your page, so text will download first and then the larger images can be downloaded
2) Your webpage will be more Search Engine Friendly as CSS content driven spiders can detect more content on better structured HTML code
3) Making your website more accessible becomes easier. If for example you need your website to be viewed on a mobile device, simply create a Stylesheet that caters to a mobile device. This way you only need to swap stylesheets instead of recreating whole web apps.
There are a quick few reasons as to why you should start looking at CSS driven design if you do not already use CSS.
So I don’t post a lot of game related stuff but this you just have to see! Is a video review of The Witcher for the PC. I cried with laughter, best ab workout I’ve had in weeks.
Please not that you need to be a gamer to understand this and should not be easily offended. Enjoy!
I have been trying to implement LiNQ to SQL where ever and whenever I can. It just saves so much time and effort with standard CRUD applications and especially for little import utilities. The company I work for gets multiple daily updates from numerous companies in .xls format and I’ve found that moving the import utilities over to the .Net framework 3.5 is saving me a lot of time and effort.
LiNQ is so easy to understand and quick to implement so its basically become the office benchmark. No more stored procedures for updating records and/or inserting records. Now I’ve heard about the Entity Framework for quite a while but haven’t really looked at it much. Since I am off work sick today I decided to have a look at it.
To be honest, it hasn’t immediately grabbed my attention. It seems to be very similar to LiNQ to SQL. I realize that its a rather broad generalization but in my case its true. So far all I’ve seen that the Entity framework basically just provides an abstraction layer for your database model so that when you make changes, you don’t need to rebuild your DBML structures. Please keep in mind I have only looked at this for an hour or so.
The biggestest benefit I can see is the interaction with databases other than SQL Server. This obviously has huge implications for those developers who don’t use SQL but since the company I work for purely works on SQL Server it doesn’t hold much appeal to me yet. There seems to be a massive overlap between LiNQ to SQL and LiNQ to Entities so my guess is after a year or two LiNQ to SQL is probably going to fall away quickly. I firmly believe Microsoft had their exceptionally lofty ambitions for LiNQ to Entities but they knew they would not be able to deliver on time so they pushed out LiNQ to SQL for the meantime to developers used to the LiNQ syntax.
From what I can see, the database modeling in LiNQ to SQL seems to be closer than that of the Entity Framework. The entity framework provides numerous other functions but I’ll include that in a later blog post.
Mark my words:
“LiNQ to SQL will give way to The Entity Framework withing 2-3 years”
Just a follow up on my previous post. here are some stats from http://www.amatomu.com/ to show Entrecards Influence on the traffic to my blog:
