I tried out the latest Firefox 2 beta 2 today and honestly I’m shocked. The tab behaviour I disliked in the Internet Explorer 7 beta has now been mostly copied to Firefox. I say copied because it’s almost entirely the same. Also, on Windows at least, unless you are running the XP Luna theme, the tabs are all white and telling the difference between the active tab and the inactive tabs is very difficult. It also doesn’t try to fit all the tabs, it has IE7’s annoying scroll buttons. On top of that the navigation buttons are bland and don’t stand out at all. It includes some of the most ugly button borders and UI design I’ve seen since X-Windows window managers in the 90’s. I’m almost lost for words, I really don’t know how they could have done this any worse. The only good thing I can say is the options dialog is much more sensibly laid out. It’s a damn shame, the previous beta was so nice. What were they thinking?
Archive for ◊ September, 2006 ◊
I’ve been on-call for work for 12 hours today (although only actively working for about 2 hours of that) but while sticking around waiting for calls I managed to spend a little more time working out how to get the Livejournal music and mood tags working through Evan Broder’s LJXP plugin for Wordpress. I now have a lot more understanding how both external Livejournal clients and Wordpress plugins work. 
But yes, I’ve now got it working. Moods could use a little more work to get the LJ mood pics displaying correctly but the core support is there.
Any Wordpress users who would like a copy of my modded LJXP 1.5 plugin can get it here. Just copy it to the “plugins” folder within the “wp-content” folder inside your Wordpress folder. If you run into any problems, I’ll try to sort them out but yeah, no warranty’s blah, blah, blah. Also please don’t hassle Evan Broader if this doesn’t work, if it’s broken chances are it’s my fault. I am using it though so at least you know it passes the “dog food” test…
I’ve been digging around in the Livejournal crossposter for Wordpress, LJXP, trying to figure out how to get music tags working. They used to work in the past but that was with a different and overcomplex Wordpress plugin that broke with every release and eventually was abandoned. With some time digging and reading through the Livejournal developer documentation it seems adding support for music and moods, etc is reasonably straight forward and I’ve already got the posting code working. Now I’m focusing on the Wordpress plugin interface to make the user interface workable. It would be very easy to just hack something that would post the tags but I want proper text boxes and pull down menus! 
I’ve picked up quite a few CDs in the last few weeks. One was the new Stellar* album “Something Like Strangers”. People who know my thoughts on music probably know I don’t like to cut albums any slack just because they’re New Zealand made. I feel there is a bit of a trend for people to do that here but if it’s not up with the best of what the world has to offer I’m not going listen out of some odd kind of patriotic duty. Having made that position clear, when I say I loved Stellar*’s previous album “Magic Line” I mean that wholeheartedly and feel that statement somehow holds more weight given my aforementioned stance. I suspect I was in the mood for something similar to “Magic Line” when I bought their new album but it is quite different and a bit more laid back. I definitely have to listen to it more in the right frame of mind to get a real feel for it. There are definitely some good tracks on there, I’ll have to see how my thoughts develop.
I also picked up the Lily Allen’s “Alright, still…”. Lily seems to be one of the first Myspace protégés to truly break out into the mainstream music industry at large. The album has dabs of profanity and raunchy themes but really it’s just a lot of fun with echos of “The Streets’” style of flowing witty and cynical lyrics. Lily has the voice to pull it off. The songs are backed by some addictive tunes, with elements of pop, ska and reggae. I’ve found it throughly enjoyable and would certainly recommend it to those who don’t have issues with radio friendly tunes with some more “adult” themes thrown in. It’s a short one at around 40 minutes but the quality consistency is kept high throughout.
Caught some more of the anime Maboraho, this time DVDs 5 & 6. It still can’t quite shake the odd filler episode but it’s making some decent progress towards a conclusion and manages to entertain. I also thoroughly enjoyed the first DVD of Mai Hime although I highly suspect that their creature designers were on crack given how completely random their designs seem to be.
I had a really busy time over last week, I hope the next one isn’t quite so insane. I’m mostly just trying to relax at this point and thankfully I can take monday off work.
So anyway, here I am listening to Carl’s Sennhesier HE60 Electrostatic headphones and HEV70 amp combo which he kindly lent me. The more I get to know them, the more I get a feel for what I’m looking for in a headphone. These are easily the best headphones I’ve ever heard and it’s because they satisfy my need for speed and precision and my enjoyment of unrestricted frequency reproduction. By speed I mean that the time these take to react to changes in the music is amazingly low so you can easily pick out every instrument and the slightest bit of detail. These headphones go both so high and so deep without forgetting any of the frequencies in the middle unlike most other headphones. There are areas that could be improved, but I feel it’s getting into the area of diminishing returns. I want to ensure though that whatever home headphones I end up with are have these characteristics although I would still prefer a little more bass and a tad richer midrange. It’s not that I consider the HE60s weak in this area, they most definitely aren’t, but this is definitely getting into the area of personal taste as opposed to the black and white “good” and “bad” sound.
From what I can see, the closest in-production headphones to what I’m looking for are the Stax Omega II electrostatic earspeakers. These cannot be driven from the Singlepower Supra amplifier I was originally looking at getting though, so I feel I really have to change my plans here and get an amp suitable for electrostatic headphones instead. I haven’t done any research here yet and am pretty much open to anything so who knows what I’ll end up with. Most likely valves/tubes though. No hurry though. ^_^
