Crumbs And Stuff

Recently the GMail team have been adding _little_ things to their product. It’s cool. The refined power in the engine I’ve read about, and you can see some of the signals (words and images changing).

I noticed this morning a new bit (for want of a better word, which you will no doubt have). The labels (tags, not folders, no folders here!) of the conversation (the email) are displayed just to the right of the Subject. You can then search for all messages with the labels, or remove a label from that conversation.

Cool.

In other news, the Firefox install on my laptop is still giving grief with the Nettalk Webserver / Ext  / Vista combination. Other Firefox installs on XP and Vista are the same. Extensions turned off makes no difference. Exactly the same extensions as working instances makes no difference.

It’s infuriating.

(Apologies for the width of this image .. for effect )

Haven’t worked on Jaymoe since last update. Well, not enough to count.

Discovered anew why I loved David Gemmell’s books. They were simple, straight-forward heroic fantasy. You could guarantee there would be a big strong bull fighter. There would be a tall lithe athletic leader who was amazingly skilled in weapons. Waylander. Druss. Even Skillgannon (spl) later on. Love it. I truly hope someone picks up that mantle. He didn’t have the depth that GRRM has, but I don’t always eat steak.

Okay.

Activision Blizzard? Is this for real? What kind of world are we living in?

We’re living in a world where the guys who make the companies great move on and start their own companies that turn out to not deliver the exact game millions of slavering fans were putting together in their own minds for the past six or so years.

And in other gaming news, some guy (Jeff Gerstmann) got axed from Gamespot. Huge. I know. Stop being so shocked. It just so happens that he did a video review of Kane and Lynch, giving the game a 6.0.

Burn.

Seems the Eidos gods (the money behind the game) were angered and caused fierce wrath to fall down from their cloud palaces.

Ahem.

Moving on, Jaymoe had some progress since last post.

Context Menus are in!

A beginning only, but it’s cool. Right-Click, or indeed "Any"-Click Context Menus can be overused. But for us Desktop guys, they can be underused. Or just used in one place and nowhere else. It’s time to break down those glass castles and storm the English!

What more you say? I’ll tell you .. Login!

That’s right. The Jaymoe Management System can now be logged into. Wunderbar!

So now, I’m off to get the Images and Forums done for the Management System. Then, once they’re done, the plan is to use the Feeds to populate the actual website pages. Public first, then Private.

Along the way, I’ll have to get User Registration underway.

Looking forward to cracking open the File Uploads for the Images. Shouldn’t be too hard, although I say that a lot. And get stumped a lot.

We finished - Pirates, At Worlds End - last night. What a blast. Was some seriously good storytelling. Although there really is something about Orlando Bloom .. something that smacks of not quite right. Maybe he’s destined to play fake macho men. I dunno.

Achieved a good milestone in the development of Jaymoe Version 2 last night. The Admin section has now full News functionality. I know this doesn’t sound like much, but with the db restructure, and the moving properly to Ext .. it’s a big thing.

Now I’ve got to get the Images and Forums working. These will have their own problems, Images means cracking open the File Upload wotzitstuff. Fun.

Also, testing out a new plugin from Christine, who created the awesomest of awesome plugins, Ultimate Tag Warrior. Unfortunately Wordpress 2.1 onwards give it trouble, and 2.3 has tagging built in. So I’m testing out Embedded Tag Thing.

I really like the "thing" thing that Christine is doing with her new range of plugins. Very cool.

We began watching the third "Pirates of de Caribbean"  movie last night.

(Picture snagged from the official site, here)

What a blast! I love these movies, the first two just got better (unlike the Matrix films, of which the first will always be some of the best filmmaking ever done)

One thing that became clear to me last night was the bits of "unreal" ness about the film. The way characters do almost silly things, like a monkey firing off a firecracker. It’s just a little bit left of center. And the whole film, well, the first two, and what we’ve seen of this one, are this. This world they have put together, this world of pirates and lords and death and kraken, it’s a _magical_ world.

Really, for me, they’ve nailed storytelling. I’m not an expert, but I know what I like. And this I like.

We had a pretty large weekend. When you’ve got 4 kids, that might only consist of going out three or four times .. heh heh. But still. It was tiring for an old old man like myself. Shoping for a present, party for friend giving said present, dinner with friends, election watching with friends, leading Church sunday morn, lunch sunday with friends, folks arriving sunday afternoon, birthday party for Dad .. ahhhhhh.

So we have a new government. Here’s to them providing strong and capable direction, wisdom and fortitude and all that.

Did a bit of work on a mini-app on friday night. Came up with the idea on Friday. Very small. Just a testbed really. Will post more about it sometime, if it gets finished.