the life and times of a code monkey
I’ve been working on a theme for wordpress over the last few weeks (on and off), it turns out to be really quite simple, you just need to find out where to get started…
Here’s some pages that I found most useful (linking for future reference):
Read this post and it just made me chuckle to myself…
Packard Bell is set to reposition itself as a trendy design-focused lifestyle brand, following its acquisition by Acer last year.
Speaking at Acer’s Global Press Conference, Emmanuel Fromont, Vice President of Packard Bell Sales and Marketing, said:
“It’s not a totally new positioning. We’ve always differentiated ourselves through design, but as a smaller company and having to do the design in-house, it was more difficult.”
“Now with Acer behind us, we want to create aficionado fans of our products. We want people to have real desire for our brand.”
Pocket-lint spoke to Acer UK country manager Bobby Watkins, and he told us that the new designs for Packard Bell were something we should look out for when they become available sometime next year.
Here’s what happened last time I saw a PB that was trying to be “trendy”:
Those things were a piece of crap, (and fuuuuugly) always falling apart and loads got returned… Let’s hope these are much improved - if not, it will always give us a laugh! 
via Pocket Lint and Engadget
(1)This is a worthwhile install if you’re a Wordpress user (or any other gears enabled system) on the mac - great to see some Safari lovin’.
We’re really excited to announce the official release of Gears for Safari on OS X (minimum requirements are Leopard 10.5.3 or Tiger 10.4.11).
You can download it today from http://gears.google.com.
This means that you can now access all the Gears-enabled sites (such as Zoho office, WordPress, the new YouTube uploader and Google Docs offline) in Safari.
via Google Mac Blog
(0)Go get it!
Great news for any virtualization junkies out there (I know I’m not the only one). VMWare Fusion 2.0 has just been released! Fusion 2.0 is a free upgrade for all existing 1.x customers, and it adds more than 100 new features and enhancements.
via TUAW
(0)I like…
I’ve heard some great things about the tiny little eeePC, but this is the best thing I’ve heard so far: it can be a Mac. Twitterer Gregory Cohen has pictures on Picasa of his completed eeeMac, an eeePC transformed (perhaps in similar fashion to this previous attempt — details please, Gregory) into an OS X-running ultraportable, complete with a tiny little lit Apple logo on the back.
via TUAW
(0)I’ve only done user-agent string sniffing once and I remember it gave me a headache… This post explains why it gave me a headache! 
And then Google built Chrome, and Chrome used Webkit, and it was like Safari, and wanted pages built for Safari, and so pretended to be Safari. And thus Chrome used WebKit, and pretended to be Safari, and WebKit pretended to be KHTML, and KHTML pretended to be Gecko, and all browsers pretended to be Mozilla, and Chrome called itself
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13, and the user agent string was a complete mess, and near useless, and everyone pretended to be everyone else, and confusion abounded.
via Daring Fireball
(1)Looks like KDE apps just got a whole lot more appealing to Gnome users. I like a lot of KDE apps (Kate being a particularly cool editor when I’m on the Linux box), but I just never used to use them much as they looked too out of place with the rest of my Gnome desktop (yeah, I guess I’m a GUI snob…) - this will most likely change that!
(0)QGtkStyle made it’s way into the Qt snapshots this week, meaning it will become part of the Qt 4.5 release. Technical users can already compile and use it on their own desktop, but once Qt 4.5 is out it will simply replace Cleanlooks as the default application style Qt uses on GNOME desktops.
An interesting article over at Wired discussing a recent study into how kids are using their brains and scientific reasoning to beat video games…
One of the reasons kids get bored by science is that too many teachers present it as a fusty collection of facts for memorization. This is precisely wrong. Science isn’t about facts. It’s about the quest for facts — the scientific method, the process by which we hash through confusing thickets of ignorance. It’s dynamic, argumentative, collaborative, competitive, filled with flashes of crazy excitement and hours of drudgework, and driven by ego: Our desire to be the one who figures it out, at least for now. It’s dramatic and nutty and fun.
And it’s pretty much how kids already approach the games they love. They’re already scientists; they already know the value of the scientific method. Teachers just need to talk to them in their language, so that the kids can begin to understand the joy of puzzling through the offline, “real” world too.
via Daring Fireball
(1)It’s got friggin’ Unity for Linux!!! This looks good…
The VMWare team has just released the second beta for VMWare Fusion 2.0, the company’s popular virtualization program for the Mac.
The new beta adds a TON of new features, as the video above demonstrates. I got a chance to talk to VMWare today about the new beta and it is HOT. I’ll be posting a more in-depth overview tomorrow, but until then, here are some of the highlights:
- Unity 2.0 - The newest version of Fusion is really focused on better Windows-Mac integration. You can now launch Windows programs from the dock or access Mac programs from within your virtual machine. You can also link folders like Documents, Pictures and Music on your virtual machine with those folders on your Mac.
- Multiple Snapshots VMWare has worked really hard to bring a Time Machine-like ease to backing up and protecting your virtual machine. You can now designate how often you want to take full system snapshots of your VM, whether once an hour, once a day or once a week, and how many copies you want to keep.
- Better Video and Graphics Graphics and shading support has been improved for Macs that have higher-end graphics cards, and even integrated Macs can now play 1080p HD video in virtual machines with considerably less CPU overhead.
- Support for more client OSs, including Leopard Server You can now run Leopard Server as a VM in OS X 10.4 and 10.5, even on client machines (virtualizing Mac OS X client is blocked by Apple’s license terms). Support for the latest version of Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) is also available right out of the box with Unity integration. Power users can now designate up to four virtual CPUs per virtual machine, which is great for anyone wanting to take an XServe or Mac Pro to the next level.
VMWare Fusion 2.0 beta 2 is available for Intel Macs running OS X 10.4 or OS X 10.5. New users can try the beta for free and the upgrade path (including future betas and the full version of Fusion 2.0) is free for all existing Fusion 1.0 customers.
via TUAW
(0)Looks like people better get playing the original Gears leading up to November!!! (I know I will be… 
)
Gears of War 2 will feature ‘linked Achievements,’ meaning that Achievements earned in the original Gears will help unlock bonuses in the sequel.
Epic’s Cliff Bleszinski took the stage at Comic-Con to demonstrate to a live audience the E3 Sinkhole level and describe a new “linked achievements” feature for Gears 2 where achievements unlocked in the first Gears game would open features in the upcoming sequel.
He offered three examples of how the system would work:
- Complete Act One in Gears Of War and receive a playable Anthony Carmine in Gears of War 2
- Find 10 COG tags in Gears Of War and get Minh Young Kim in Gears of War 2
- Kill Raam in Gears Of War and earn a playable Raam in Gears of War 2
Questions such as whether all Gears of Wars achievements will be linked to the sequel and what other goodies can be grabbed besides characters won’t be answered until closer to the game’s November 7 release.
via The Escapist
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