I’ve been seriously neglecting my blog over the past few weeks, and this is due to work i’ve been doing on my Lyrics Site and my new blog design.

Lyrics On ælabs

The first of which, lyrics.aelabs.net has been totally rewritten to employ a cache that I wrote that serves up a text file with previously downloaded data if a page is asked again, and other tweaks to make it run better. I’ve also sorted out the URLs, to properly use URL encoding so that both the lyric wiki and last•fm can both understand the song request the same, so stuff like Angels & Airwaves works when you type it in.

The New Alan Edwardes

My new blog design over at beta.alanedwardes.com has undergone many changes since I last posted about it with a screenshot, and after some prompting I have written in different daily colour schemes and the ability of the user to set a theme themselves. I kindly you to take a look yourself, and leave a comment if you have any constructives.

Grand Theft Auto IV

Finally! Yes! I preordered GTA IV for PC on game.co.uk a few weeks ago, and it will be arriving on the 21st. I hope it’s worth the longer wait.

There is a way to do it without hacking your theme - Settings -> Reading - > Blog pages show at most [X] Posts. The downside to this setting is that it affects archive pages and search pages too, which is mega suckage.

To just display the latest post on your homepage, change the “while” statement to an “if” statement. So, instead of:

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

[ Post Stuff ]

<?php endwhile; ?>

…with:

<?php if (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

[ Post Stuff ]

<?php endif; ?>

I’ve changed the “while” on the first line to “if”, and to close it i’ve changed the “endwhile” to “endif”. How does this work? Well, the while statement continues to print posts on your hompage until it exhausts the post data it’s given from WordPress with a loop, the if statement just prints the first post it’s given from the data because it’s not told to carry on; there is no loop.

My blog has moved through a number of themes during its time on the internet - and i’ve managed to get through 3 web hosts on the way. The first theme I used was the discontinued Theorem theme from Oliver Beattie. This introduced me to basic XHTML concepts, and as I pulled apart the theme and basically ruined it with my own stuff I collected enough knowledge to give WordPress themes a go. The first result of this was the putrid Crisp, followed by the slightly better design of Lime Juice, then “Stripey Pink”, which I didn’t deem good enough to release to the WordPress community. The theme you are looking at, “Grey Grey Grey”, is one of my best themes yet. I’ve been tweaking bits of it since I released it, and, as I visit my own site a lot, have grown tired of looking at it.

I started the new theme back in July, in the caravan on a holiday park in Filey. The initial idea was to have the design change according to the day of the week. But, as this would mean I had to create 7 different colour designs for the theme, lazyness pushed me to just make the one static design. In continuation of the sucky names, “Red World” will be rocking my blog sometime before Christmas, with dedicated pages for my gaming and music habbits and a much improved post navigation system.

I could only get about 7kb/s from my NDP over the WAN port, both using SSH from this very server and unsuspecting people from my Windows Live Messenger contact list to test the download speed from my drive - and I hadn’t a clue what was wrong. I’d spent ages browsing through the Freecom forums, and the Freecom Storage Gateway site to find an answer to the most annoying problem ever. I even emailed Freecom support who didn’t know what the hell i’d done - and all it took was a little thinking.

No, it wasn’t a setting on the drive itself, but my Netgear DG834G’s Maximum Transmission Unit setting was set to 1492, instead of 1500 which it was set to on the network drive. I found this out by running the ifconfig command on the drive using SSH, only to have a small eureka moment shortly before kicking myself quite hard.

My drive is now chugging along happily at about 90kb/s when people download from it - which is quite substantially more acceptable than the speed I was getting before. Damn router.

I guess Chrome still is in beta, but after all it is still designed to be safe and secure. A few months ago a glitch in Safari was noted that made the browser automatically download whatever an iframe was pointed at in a page. If several iframes were put into a page, Safari would download every single file that they pointed at all at once, covering the user’s download folder (probably the desktop) with potential viruses.

Well, I did a bit of playing around and it turns out Chrome does it too. I’ve set up a little test for people who are using Chrome to test here: http://live.alanedwardes.com/chrome-download-bomb/.

It is also interesting to see how other browsers handle it. Firefox 3 just asks if you want to save the first file in the first iframe, 1.exe, and Internet Explorer 7 blocks it with an information bar asking if you want to download the files.

I have submitted a bug report to Google, but I doubt it will get looked at.

I’ve been using the Chrome browser since yesterday’s release, and I still stand by my initial thoughts of the app itself: It is totally awesome. In this post I want to offer non-chromers a justifiable review of the beautiful app itself, and why they should be using it instead of their current web browser.

Granted, it is just another browser. You want it to load pages, allow you to use advanced AJAX sites and render pages correctly - and Chrome does this. It passes as a web browser, but then again so does IE6.

Read the rest of this post »