mkjones

This site is happily no longer hosted with PowWeb.

I can now start my new happier life as part of the Dreamhost family.

It happened. I got Sky+. It was installed only 2 days ago. I am pleased, of course, I finally have a decent Sports Package! Its also truly wonderful to have Discovery and Sky One back in my life.

Sadly this means that the era of Satellite based HDTV in my living room is not meant to be - just yet.

The Cost of HD
SkyHD let me down tremendously a few months ago when I tried it out in my local Sony Centre. Read why here.

In the end £300 for a SkyHD box and an extra £10 on top of that per month as well as a £60 install fee just didn’t make good economical sense for the measly array of HD channels you actually get (around 5 standard and 2 sports). No matter how good the football looks on it.

The SD Alternative
In contrast I got my Sky+ box free and it was installed free. I also got 6 months half price on the package. All of this was gained simply by calling up and doing some very mild bartering with a member of the Sky sales team. (Keep reading)

You’d probably think that there would be a Home and Professional version of Vista like there is for XP, but that would be too easy for us to understand. Instead, we’re faced with Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate.

After the Origami fiasco. Microsoft manage to do it again.

I fully understand that users may not need all of the functions available in Vista. But hell, put them in anyway! And charge a simple £100 for it.

Leave the version modelling for businesses, where it belongs. Home users, pro or basic, want simplicity.

read more | digg story

Whilst in Germany at this years World Cup my friend and I were interviewed by a number of English media outlets. This was mainly due to the fact that in a lot of cases we were the only 2 English fans in a sea of Germans. The BBC was such a media outlet and for 4 months now I never found out if any of our interviews made it to publication or broadcast.

Today however I found this on the BBC News website:

The story goes into more detail at the bottom:

English fan Kimb Jones, from Barnsley, summed up the day at Olympic Park: “We don’t need tickets because of the fan fests.

“We’ve come for the football but also for this - for the crowd, it’s amazing, it’s brilliant.

“All I can say is, get a flight and get over here. You don’t need a ticket to enjoy the football.”

(Keep reading)

This was on Digg this morning. Its been a LONG time since I heard anyone speak up about the lack of W3C standards when using embedded Flash:

I found this to be helpful while coding one of my clients site’s in that I had never been required to make Flash fully compliant by W3C Standards. Hopefully this can help some others too =D!

A pretty good read overall. The solution is rather messy but until the W3C accept Flash as a real part of the (X)HTML standard this will have to do.

read more | digg story

Take a look at the frankly crappy YouTube error page (click for larger version):

I got this a few moments ago when I tried to visit the homepage. The site is working fine now.

Oooo, they run Apache.. Oooo.. You can email the administrator, how very 1997!

Come on YouTube guys! Put some effort in!!

You may have noticed a small update to my sites Theme. The logo is the main change, lets take a look at it without the bottom sliced off:

Surprisingly the theme update wasn’t that much work. Took me about an hour for the new logo, header and footer design then another hour to modify the CSS/HTML.

Actually, the biggest piece of work was adding those crappy corners to each post! It took me around 2 hours last night to get around the CSS issues involved and I wouldn’t say I love the final result, but they can stay for now.

Another new feature is the News & Interest category. This is intended to house links and articles from other sites that I feel the need to archive here. It also houses any submissions from my Digg account I decide to post as a Blog. (Keep reading)

A nice page from the BBC that shows a detailed view of the 4 planes involved in the 9/11 attacks. It has terrorist profiles, seating plans and graphics to show where planes took off and eventually crashed.

read more | digg story

The much publicised spat between Andre Vrignaud (Ozymandias weblog and Microsoft developer) and Mark Deloura (Satori weblog and former head of Sony Developer Relations) was recently brought to my attention thanks to Major Nelsons blog.

The large hazy post has some very interesting points, if you care for that sort of thing (and sadly I do). But for Mr Joe Nobody on the street who occasionally likes to knock back a few video games there is only ONE real point of interest:

Sony announced that PS3 uses a 2x BD drive, which is 72Mbits/second or 9MB/second. The Xbox360 uses a 12x DVD, which should give it about 16MB/second. That is significantly faster for games and will result in shorter load times. And that 12x DVD drive should be a whole lot cheaper. (Note that the PS3 drive will do 8x DVD, and even that is faster than 2x BD.)

• Read the whole article here

??!? Yes, BluRay on the PS3 will makes your games load SLO-W-ERRR than regular DVD! ??! Now, I don’t plan on getting PS3 (not right away anyhow) but for the Sony Fanboys it cant be getting much worse.

I have no idea why Sony haven’t balked at the idea of using BluRay yet. Its caused them delays, price hikes and now technical shortcomings!

The PS3 seems to be doing for Sony what “New Coke” did for Coca-Cola - drive their customer base totally insane!
(Keep reading)

Today I finally registered the domains:

• kimbjones.com
• michaelkimbjones.com

They are set up to redirect to this page. I am currently trying to think if its worth investing in .net, .org, .info etc addresses. But I cant see it happening unless I can find a site that does registrations incredibly cheap.