Firefox 3 – code named Gran Paradiso is under development. It will use the Gecko 1.9 engine and the latest build released already is said to have passed the CSS Acid2 test. Although Opera, Safari have already achieved this it’s a big landmark for Firefox and a good sign of things to come.

Firefox 2.0 already features the most advanced CSS 3.0 support including CSS rounded corners and alpha transparency and Firefox 3 is set to have full support. Other features include improved graphic rendering and support for Javascript 2.

Of course we can expect there will be many bug fixes and tweaks making Firefox faster and more stable. It has been optimised to make better use of your systems hardware so if you have a good graphics card you should notice big improvements both in visual quality and speed for sites that take advantage of this.


Firefox 3 is still in Alpha 1 since december but is expected to reach Alpha 3 the first quarter of this year and Hopefully a full beta will be with us before end of the summer. Final release is still unknown.

By final release Mozilla expect to have near perfect web compatibility meaning nearly all pages and webapps you may struggle to use in the current firefox release should work smoothly. They also promise a reduction in system resources used. Currently my firefox averages 100-130kb of Ram.

On the agenda is also improved start up times for opening the browser and load times for actual pages. They will also be attempting to make as many as many of the existing extentions and themes compatible.

More details on what we can look forward to with CSS 3 and what is already possible will be featured here soon

Irish Airline Ryanair has recently been getting a reputation on being a rip-off with the many hidden charges that inflate a seemingly low cost air fair to premium prices. These increases in charges come with no increase in quality of service. An advertised price of £2-10 can soon escalate to £60 when taxes, baggage and credit card fees are applied.

Now Ryanair may have taken it a step to far. Customers that have existing bookings due to take place after 1st of Feb will have received an email today notifying them that their tax on their flight will be doubled! As a budget airline in many cases the tax on the flights is more than the air fair as it is, with the tax being doubled this makes a significant change to the value of the booking.

Ryanair offer no opt-out of your flight – just notify you that your credit card will be charged the extra fee automatically. They take no responsibility for the additional fees – blaming the fee entirely on MP Gordon Brown. The email is very unprofessional – no offer of further information, no option to cancel flight for a refund, no link to a customer service page or a contact number. Instead an email address to the government ministers to complain about Gordon Brown is provided.

This is simply unacceptable.

Calling their support number (at 10p/min) will get you into a long queue with no help or alternatives offered by the representatives when you get through.

When I finally did get through I spoke to a rep called “Anna” and requested my flight be cancelled and I be refunded. She told me “I will lose this ticket and this money” if I didn’t want to pay the additional fee.
Team Leader “Lisa” confirmed Anna’s comments and said that all airlines will be doing the same.

I contacted British Airways. They confirm they WILL NOT be passing this fee onto their customers. I am glad my summer holiday was booked with them.

With so many other airlines either offering better service or better prices it doesn’t seem Ryanair has a lot to offer.

*Please not this only applies to flights booked prior to the 7th/12th of December (depending on which airline you listen to). Additional fees apply to outbound flights only.

or Play Here:

Transcript to follow shortly. 2 Awards were given out during this interview – you can view them here

Add to iTunes

or Play Here:

Add to iTunes
or read the following transcript.

If you can drag yourself away from Burning Crusade for a bit or if the subscription fee or availablilty in your area has meant your not playing it then Nightfall is a great alternative.

I happen to play both which means I no longer sleep!

Check out the contest here

You won’t find the prizes anywhere else – they are exclusive to Gamespot so if you win you can really show off.

Meanwhile if your ever on Nightfall look me up – Marissa Tabago (SunSpear). If your a wow fanatic I’m on Deathwing – Hathoria (Draenei Priestess).

Have fun people.

This was to be expected as the launch isn’t until the 16th but I thought I’d login anyway to see if there is any changes. When loading up the game I am greeted with the new cinematic (as featured on gamespot) – although I’ve seen it plenty of times before it still exciting to see it when you’ve finally got the game. After this I agree to the terms, login and then… An update.
I go through the update process only to discover it is an update I already downloaded and installed days ago. I login and agree to terms again – and again it asks me to update. This time to 2.0.4. I have already been playing wow with this update. This means that the content on the Burning Crusade CD is version 2.0.2 so the BC has to be patched up to 2.0.4. (A 219mb patch and a 17mb update). I don’t think I had to actually download them again just have the existing download reapplied.

Thinking I’ve finally got there I logged in and agreed to terms again. Yet another update. This one is new – the 2.0.5 update address issues that some players on lower end systems were struggling with. I have to say on my office PC I’ve noticed a slow down due to the new fancy animated background at the login screen, as to whether there is any change in game I don’t know as at this point my lunch break was over. I did manage to get as far as the character screen and can confirm the two new races are still grayed out and unavailable. A character that I did a paid transfer on had arrived on my account though – not bad considering how busy wow must be today – I only requested the transfrer this morning.

I am sure there will be serveral more updates tomorrow as players on various obscure systems go through the dark portal for the first time and find glitches or slow downs as their system grinds to a halt.

I bought 2 copies at Amazon and 2 at Play.com just to make sure. So far the play.com discs with free delivery arrived (about 10am). I paid for express delivery with Amazon and still no show. Well done Play – very impressed.

I will be heading down to the HMV Midnight launch tonight (with a few other from gamespot) to get my copy signed – I suspect I’ll end up having to buy a HMV copy to – well you can’t have too much wow.

I have 2 wow accounts and the rest are for friends but I suspect a sell out and then the ebay frenzy will start. Anyway good luck to all those queueing tonight.

You may have read me rave about Mikons before – the fun tool that lets you create icons and logos online.
They have just improved the service by adding some great new features.

Most noteably – Colour. You can now be even more creative with colour Mikons. You can also type text giving you even more freedom.

To celebrate the launch of these hot new features they are running a contest for the best logo with a great prize for the winner.

Check it out a Mikons.com

Here’s some I made earlier:

Since been back at work after the Crimbo break I’ve had the chance to work on interactive maps for the first time. Having avoided javascript as much as possible during my time as a front-end designer I suddenly found myself wading in with Ajax.

The project was for the atlarge.com home page as previously mentioned on this blog. I had a look at several 3rd party APIs and settled on Yahoo! Maps as being the best option.

It was the easiest to implement and control, had the most features and I had working map with most of the effects I wanted in an afternoon. However, I had to stop using the Yahoo! API because of 3 major problems.
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1) The Yahoo map breaks if scaled to anything smaller than 260px high (if someone knows how to make is smaller I stand corrected)
2) You are limited to 50,000 hits per month for your API key.
3) It is strictly not for business use.

Due to the lack of features or stability or just the fact they looked naf I didn’t attempt some of the other 3rd party APIs I found and instead tried Google.

Google can scale down as small as you want, does not have an access limit only a URL restriction which means you need a different API key for each domain you want to use the map on. Google also states it is for non-commercial use but as long as your site is not charging for using the map or any of it’s features then this is not a problem.

Implementation – the Google API was far harder to implement. The documentation was example driven but not as thorough or detailed as Yahoo!’s. As a javascript novice it soon became clear that I would need outside help. Even then it was tough trying emulate some features that come as standard or require only minor tweaking in Yahoo! Maps API. This included things like mapping zoom functions to the scroll wheel on the mouse.

Google’s API is no doubt powerful and has a lot features under bonnet. Just getting at them seems to be harder than need be. In the end we manged to put together quite a handy airport finder.

You can view the finished homepage here: http://www.atlarge.com/

Comments and suggestions on further tweaking are welcome. Much credit to Alan Milford for doing the Ajax magic for me. The airport markers appear once you zoom in close enough to an area. Want to know if there is an alternative airport near the destination you are trying to visit – now you can.

This has forced me to consider learning javascript. I’ve put it off so long and had plenty or reason to do so. Back in the day when it was used to make annoying pop-ups, dancing scroll bars of nonsense etc. However, the web 2.0 uses of this tool and the standardisation of javascript 1.5/ECMAscript v3 makes it a much more attractive option.

In addition to web use the concepts and syntax used is almost identical to the style of action script in flash and the scripting used in Neverwinter nights world building tools.
I’ve purchased O’Reilly’s definitive guide – will I become a scripting wizard? watch this space…

Some links in posts were javascript pop-ups which get disabled on wordpress.com so if you find a link that doesn’t work you may have to visit the original post on the site it was orginally on.