duncs

Quick browser comparison from the new SunSpider JavaScript benchmarks:

Safari 3.04b - 8079.4ms +/- 0.5%
Firefox3.0b2 - 10017.0ms +/- 1.2%
Opera 2.5b9721 - 6977.4ms +/- 1.5%
IE7 - 27583.6ms +/- 23.2%

These were done on my PC - which is an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 2.4GHz with a gig of ram - these are results from my machine only, so your results may differ; graph is in milliseconds, so smaller is better.

As expected, there’s a longer and better article at CodingHorror with a better breakdown for each browser, although they’ve use Firefox 2, not 3beta - and different hardware, naturally.

Thought you might like to know that AllOfMP3/AllTunes seems to be taking payments again and have added a new option of paying by bank/wire transfer (hmmmm).

Just open AllTunes, go to the Balance tab, then click the Refill balance button.

Then select your payment option. I only tried the Credit Card one which only takes MasterCard:

That’s it - seems to work fine - now you can just sit back and wait for the record industry to kick your door down.

Update: Seems like they might start taking Visa again too  - http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070716-russian-court-rules-that-visa-must-process-payments-for-allofmp3-com.html 

These are the simpsons versions of Frances and I - me from the simpsons movie site. Bit like the Wii’s Mii’s. The clothing options are a bit limited - still fun though.

Can’t cook? Have no money? A pathological fear of all things Fanny Craddock? Cook along with Caswell is here to help. This is to make good food, easily, with no scary recipe books, a pinch of saffron, or that smug git on the telly who can chop vegetables way faster than any normal human, and doesn’t even have to do his own washing up! In short, this is real homemade food, that’s good for you, straight-forward to make and “fun” (that’s not “fun” in a “mad-cap, zany kinda way)… Up for it? Then lets go! P.S. All these recipes have been double-blind tested on my brother and sister, and they’re real numpties in the kitchen, and they survived with no visible scars or (more) mental issues than they started, so that’s encouraging, isn’t it?

These recipes can be sorted or searched for by ingredient, ease, cost or time available, so you list of excuses will be running pretty thin (unless you’re very creative, in which case your talent will earn you vast sums of money, so you can pay beautiful people to cook for you), so in the mean time, strap on a pair, grab your potato masher by it’s ergonomically designed handle, and crack on…

What’s for tea? How about…

Bean Casserole

Tomato and lentil soup

Tuna pasta bake

Mmmn Omlettes…

Spaghetti bogolentilnase

Three bean salad

Salmon fillets with Pesto

Chickpea and vegetable curry

Dead lush pasta sauce

Update: Cook Along with Caswell now has it’s own website!

This a bit on the big side, for a printer driver, don’t you think?

Where are the ‘Custom - Just installs what I tell it’ or the ‘Minimal - Just install the bare minimum required to print stuff’ options? A ‘Custom’ option certainly used to be a requirement for the installers of ‘Designed for Windows’ logo’d software. I did a quick google/MSDN search, but I’m not sure if it still is or not.

Anyway, I really don’t want to install 450Mb of unknown junk just to use my new printer.

Alternatively there’s the ‘HP Deskjet Basic Feature Software/Driver, version 1, 26.06M’ available on www.hp.com. In the end I just used the Add New Printer Wizard and pointed it at the CD to find the driver (and nothing else). Took about 20 seconds to install and seems to work fine:

Fortunately the printer itself (an HP Deskjet 6940) is really great.

Since I started at the new job I’ve been thinking about this problem.

Some of the work that I do involves creating sites from scratch, some of it involves taking an existing website and re-developing it - usually converting it to the excellent CMS we’ve been using, MODx. All of it requires producing time estimates and schedules.

So far I’ve been guessing, basically. I’m not too bad at this - and I’m learning fast - but it’s not a very satisfactory method. I want something more empirical, rigorous and reliable. Ideally it would produce figures that I could feedback into the next estimate and something that I could use in discussions with clients and other people involved in the projects.

I want a tool that I can point at an existing website which will produce a nice information rich diagram of the site, along with a breakdown of what the site consists of: how many pages, how many images, how many forms and what the HTML/CSS code ‘smells like‘. I can then apply a weighting and a time to each of these numbers and come up with an estimate of how long it would take to take the site apart and put it back together again.

I’m not sure if it’s me, but I can’t find an off the shelf tool to do this. I’m quite surprised by this. I can’t be the only person to be doing this kind of work and I know from experience that producing estimates for development work of all kinds is pretty tough. Maybe it’s my google-fu failing, or I’m not looking in the right places. Anyway, this is a link dump of what I’ve found so far:

• The R-Project for Statistical Computing: http://www.r-project.org/
• GraphViz: http://www.graphviz.org/
• GraphViz Site Map Generator: http://urlgreyhot.com/graphviz/
• Large Graph Layout: http://lgl.sourceforge.net/
• What Does Blogspace Look Like?: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/blogviz
• Websites as graphs: http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/
• Peters Page Graphs: http://blog.peter1402.de/pages/page_graphs.html
• Peters Validation Graphs: http://blog.peter1402.de/pages/validation_graphs.html - hmm, just found this and it’s nearly there actually.

Looks like I’ll be using the code from Peters Validation Graphs as a starting point to produce what I want. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Frances made the (pretty huge) bottom layer of our wedding cake today - now it’s just got to be periodically soaked in brandy until August!

More photo’s here.