Category: Uncategorized

No, unfortunately, not on Safari in Africa. On Apple’s Safari browser for Windows.

Seeing as Matthew wrote a few thoughts on it a couple of days ago, I decided to try it myself, so I’ve just downloaded and installed it.

I haven’t really used it much yet, but here are my first impressions:

It’s not really a cross-platform browser. This is evident from the fact that Apple haven’t used any of the Windows GUI… they’ve basically taken the Mac OS X GUI, and ported it directly across to Windows. I haven’t used OS X much so I don’t know if all the menus etc are the same, but they’ve even gone as far as porting across the font rendering! It’s like using OS X when you’re in Windows, it’s quite strange.

Now, I do like the OS X look and feel, but I’m not sure that using non-native widgets for Windows is always a good thing. For example, one of my favourite shortcuts on Windows is not available: pressing Ctrl + Backspace when you’re in a text box. This deletes the last word you wrote. You wouldn’t believe how many times I use that when writing a blog post! Unfortunately that is not available in Safari.

The dynamic resizing of text boxes is a nice feature, although it does has the potential to break pages. Not a biggie really.

For some reason, if you minimise the window and then restore it, it will resize itself. I believe this is what happens on Mac OS X – not sure if that’s the ideal behaviour though, it’s not expected if you’re a Windows user (there’s nothing to explain why your Window is being resized) and I fear it might be an annoyance if you’re used to windows staying the size that you set them to! Update: I think Safari restores itself to the non-maximised size. This is just annoying, especially if you previously resized the window (which you can only do, by the way, by dragging the bottom right-hand corner. None of this modern ‘drag any edge of the window’ rubbish) because you need to fit in another window which you don’t need anymore…

The page rendering seems pretty good in general. My site renders OK, and as that is the most important site on the internet then I’m happy 😉 I’ve just checked a site I’m working on at the moment (not as a designer, I’ll hasten to add), and for some reason Safari inserts scroll bars in the main body of the page where IE, Firefox and Opera don’t. That’s a bit strange, but probably easily fixable…

One thing I don’t like about Safari – and this is pretty nitpicky – is the text selection model. When you select text, the selection boundary is a little bit strange. Let me show you an example:

As you can see, Firefox neatly selects the text at its boundaries. Safari extends the text selection across the whole available area. This, to me, looks ugly! It’s really just personal preference, but still. The other thing to mention on text selection is, in keeping with the OS X look and feel, Safari ignores any Windows colour preferences you have re: text selection. Again, not a biggie, but another little thing which might be annoying or confusing for people used to Windows.

Another thing Safari doesn’t do which many Windows apps do is tooltips: if you hover your mouse pointer over the buttons at the top, there are no tooltips telling you what they do. On my screen at the moment, for example, next to the address bar is a button which looks like a spider or something. I have no idea what it does, because it has no tooltip. I could click on it, but I’d rather have an inkling of what it does first! Ditto with a button marked “+” next to it. I’m guessing that means “Add Bookmark”, but without tooltips I don’t know! It also doesn’t seem to popup “Title” tags in HTML… Firefox, Opera and IE do this.

The other thing to mention is speed. I haven’t noticed pages loading particularly faster than other browsers… it’s pretty responsive, but there’s not a massive speed increase over other browsers.

In summary, Safari is OK… I wouldn’t choose to use it though. Having said that, the Windows version is technically a beta so it’s probably a little unfair to review it. If you’re a Windows user, for now, and want something different then have a look at Safari. Otherwise, stick with Firefox or Opera – I think they currently deliver a better overall user experience (to coin a phrase…)

I use Eclipse Internet for my ADSL broadband connection. It’s only been switched on for a few days (since last Wednesday, in fact). It seems to be going well so far – better than my old provider at least (it’s quite a bit faster). The only problem was, sometimes web pages didn’t load up completely – if it had a lot of images, half the page would load and then just stall.

I also noticed a problem yesterday – I was trying to upload the latest Fordham sermon via FTP, and it wouldn’t work. It just stalled, and then the connection timed out. I then tried to upload something smaller, and that wouldn’t upload either!

I checked on the Eclipse knowledge base, and it brought up some information on the MTU Size. MTU means ‘Maximum Transmission Unit’, i.e. the maximum packet size in bytes that can be transmitted across a connection. Anyway, Eclipse recommend that you set this to 1458 (well, that’s what I set mine to – your mileage may vary. See the Eclipse knowledge base article for more info).

On Linux, specifically Ubuntu, you can change the MTU for a network interface by typing:

sudo ifconfig eth0 mtu 1458

Once I’d run this command, I checked again some of the websites which weren’t loading properly and it had fixed the problem. I was also able to upload files!

In order to make the change permanent, have a look at this article.

Hopefully this will help a few other people who migrate to Eclipse!

I’ve just signed up for last.fm. This means that, amongst other things, you can see what I’ve just been listening to on my profile.

At some point I might put a little “last.fm” box on this site to show the same thing, I don’t know about other people but I find it quite interestnig when browsing to have a look through someone’s playlist 🙂

Last week, I had a ham sandwich. I also had some jam with my toast for breakfast one day. On Saturday, I went to see “Spamalot” (do you like the way I linked that in there? 😉 )

In order to celebrate Jon B’s birthday, a bunch of us met up on Saturday morning and went down to London. Before lunch, most of the guys went to the Star Wars Exhibition, while most of the girls had a wander round in London. I quite enjoyed the exhibition, it was great to see a lot of the props etc used – some highlights for me were Darth Vader’s costume, the bridge of a Star Destroyer, and a Yoda model / puppet. It didn’t take that long to go round though, so if you go don’t expect to spend the whole day in there!

Afterwards we all met up, and had our lunch whilst sitting in Trafalgar Square. It was a beautiful day, London was heaving with people! After lunch we went to the Palace Theatre to see Spamalot.

There’s not really much I can say about it, other than – it was fantastic! They used most of the best bits from the film, but there was plenty there which was new for the musical. If you haven’t seen it yet, go! It’s definitely worth it.

Aaaanyway. On Saturday evening we came back home and I installed OpenTTD (yes, they do a Linux version) after reading Matthew’s latest blog post. I spent the evening messing around building railway junctions and things… it’s great fun! It’s a very addictive game though, so if you download it then be warned – you could end up spending hours on it!

On Sunday we went to church in the morning, and in the afternoon as it was such a lovely day we went for a walk. I wish I’d taken the camera as well – we went up to Bourne Mill (New Town / Old Heath kind of area in Colchester) and it looked so picturesque in the September sunshine.

In the evening we watched “Shadowlands”, which is a film about C.S. Lewis’ relationship with his wife, Joy. It’s a very sad film (she died of cancer), but well worth watching. The only thing I wish they’d done was include a bit more of his writings on the subject (namely from “A Grief Observed”), but I suppose in a film it’s more difficult to go into that kind of thing.

Well, sorry this has been a long post! I didn’t even mention Esther’s “finishing dissertation” dinner at Pizza Express on Friday night and it turned out pretty long. I’ll stop now…

I mentioned the other day that I was looking at different content management systems for the Fordham Church website. I’ve decided to stick with MODx because I already know it, and it would take ages to migrate everything over to another system!

I’ve used the NewsListing snippet to generate a News page, and I’ve created an RSS feed using NewsFeed. I did find a couple of bugs in the NewsListing snippet, which I’ve now fixed (although I’m not sure whether I was using the latest version. And the NewsListing snippet has now been deprecated in favour of Ditto!)

Anyway, the website now has a nice working ‘News’ page with accompanying RSS feed, so I’m happy 🙂

In other news: if you’re a web developer, “You’re Probably Storing Passwords Incorrectly” is an absolute must. Security is becoming such a big issue these days, I think it’s vital that all developers who may have to store passwords on a web server do read it.

I mentioned a while ago (for example, here) that I was reading a few books about the cross. I can’t remember whether I’ve mentioned it much on this blog before, but basically the reason I’ve been reading about the cross is because of the various different views on Jesus’ death I have come across recently. There seems to have been a real backlash against penal substitution (for example, Steve Chalke’s infamous comment about “cosmic child abuse”) and I wanted to look at both sides of the issue and come to a conclusion myself.

So, I’ve now read the following books on the subject:

• Consuming Passion – Why the killing of Jesus really matters (edited by Simon Barrow and Jonathon Bartley)
• Rediscovering the Scandal of the Cross: Atonement in New Testament & Contemporary Contexts (Joel B. Green & Mark D. Baker)
• Evil and the Justice of God (N.T. Wright)
• Pierced for Our Transgressions: Rediscovering the Glory of Penal Substitution (Steve Jeffery, Mike Ovey, and Andrew Sach)
• The Cross of Christ (John Stott)

I would just like to point out (before anyone else does) that not all of these books are exclusively about the cross, but all of them have at least some relevant points to make.

Anyway, now I’ve read through all of those books, I think my conclusion is that penal substitution is definitely Biblical, and definitely very important in terms of Jesus’ death! This is not to say that other ways of looking at Jesus’ death are unhelpful. For example, some people see Jesus’ death as overcoming evil by taking everything that evil could throw at him and coming back to life again. It’s ‘turning the other cheek’ to the point of death, but still God / good overcomes the Devil / evil. I don’t think this is incompatible with penal substition – I think the problem only comes when you try to see that as the only reason Jesus died. A lot of things were accomplished on the cross.

This is not to say, of course, that penal substition has never been caricatured / misrepresented – I’m sure it has. In fact, I think this is what a lot of people have reacted against – the idea of a vengeful father punishing an innocent son. This is not penal substitution at all.

I don’t really want to ramble on about this, but John Stott mentioned this passage in “The Cross of Christ” and I really think it sums things up for me:

This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. (1 John 4:9-10, NIV)

In other words, penal substitution is the supreme act of God’s love, not God’s wrath. I see why Tom Wright, in his article “The Cross and the Caricatures“, said that he approved of churches changing one line on ‘In Christ Alone’: replacing ‘the wrath of God was satisfied’ with ‘the love of God was satisfied’. The cross was God’s supreme act of love towards us.

So… there are my thoughts in a nutshell!

As some of you may know, I am the webmaster for the Fordham Church website. It is currently using the MODx CMS. I quite like it – it’s quite flexible, easy to edit, and customising the look and feel is very easy.

However, it does have one drawback: the pages are all fairly static in nature. It’s not so easy to create a page which has regularly updated content (blog-style).

Recently I’ve been thinking about moving to a different CMS. MODx has been fine for now, but I want something a little more powerful. Basically, I’d like the front page to appear more like a blog, and also I’d like to publish an RSS feed of sermons etc. There are a couple of options here: Joomla, WordPress, and Drupal.

• Joomla is a very powerful CMS. I’ve tried it before, and there were plenty of things you could do with it. The problem is, I think it might be a bit too powerful for what I want. If I was building a more complicated website this would be a good option, but I don’t think it would be so good for the Fordham site as it stands at the moment.
• Drupal is another powerful CMS, although I think it’s a little less complicated than Joomla. I downloaded it and installed it on my machine at home last night… the problem is, I can’t help thinking that it might be overkill! There are a lot of options and features, most of which I probably wouldn’t need.
• WordPress is what this blog is currently running on. The advantage to WordPress is that I know it. The disadvantage to WordPress is that I’m not sure it’s quite up to being a full-blown Content Management System just yet! You wouldn’t get all the advantages of something like MODx or Drupal with it. Having said that, I probably wouldn’t need all those features…

So, decisions, decisions! If anyone has any suggestions I’m always open to ideas 🙂

As usual I’ve left it too late after the weekend and I can’t actually remember much of what I did last weekend. On Friday evening we didn’t really do much… on Saturday, Philippa’s parents and her aunt & uncle (who live in Australia) came round for the day. It was really nice to see them. We had a tour around Colchester Castle (very interesting), and as it was heritage weekend went and had a look round Peake’s house in the dutch quarter as well.

In the evening, after they’d gone we watched “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”. It was a rather surreal film, very clever, but I’m not sure it’s one which I’d like to see again.

On Sunday morning, we went to church and then came back for lunch. In the afternoon, again due to heritage weekend, we went and had a look at St Leanord’s Church at the Hythe. It’s not used very much at the moment – it’s managed by the Churches Conservation Trust – but it’s a very beautiful church albeit in need of redecoration inside!

In the evening we went to see “Run, Fatboy, Run” at the cinema with Esther and Alex. It’s a really good film… Simon Pegg does well, and with Dylan Moran very very funny!

Ok, I think that’s all for now.

Rule Number One: When committing a burglary, DO NOT sign your name at the scene of the crime…

See this article for more info.

This weekend was quite a busy one! On Friday afternoon, Andy C gave me a ring to say that he was in town for his sister’s wedding, so in the evening Philippa and I met up with Andy and his girlfriend (Rika, I hope that’s how you spell it!) and went for a few drinks at the Purple Dog. It was a nice evening – the third time I’ve seen Andy C in the past month, which is amazing considering I hadn’t seen him previously for well over a year!

On Saturday, we went shopping in the morning, and then did a few odd jobs in the afternoon. I assembled a BBQ my parents had given me for my birthday, I hope that we get a chance to use it soon, the weather’s been so bad this summer there haven’t been many opportunities for barbecues!

In the evening we watched Mission Impossible 3 as Phil hadn’t seen it. (We’ve just signed up for easyCinema, which means we get cheap DVD rentals via the post… it’s quite a good system!).

On Sunday morning we went to Fordham as per usual, and afterwards Andy C and Rika came round for lunch. They had to go fairly soon after lunch as they were flying back to Germany that evening, but shortly after that our next-door neighbour came round for a cup of tea, which ended up taking us til about 6:00.

After that, Alex, Esther, Anne-Marie, Steve and Karen all came round to have pizza and watch “Zoolander”, which was very enjoyable (the evening, not just the film).

Right, I think that’s just about everything for the weekend. The only thing I wanted to mention is that I am changing my internet provider, mainly because I’m not too happy with the service I’ve received (the internet connectivity hasn’t been particularly reliable – a couple of months ago the internet was down for a whole weekend! It came back on the Monday, but still). I’m not going to name names though, because I think the company is geared up towards businesses and not home users — I only had the internet with them because Paul (my old flatmate) was signed up with them previously to us being flatmates. Anyway.

I’ve just about decided to go with Eclipse, as a couple of people have mentioned that they’ve been good. They’re actually a member of the same group my company is part of — unfortunately I don’t think that qualifies me for a discount! Ah well.