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Well, baby still hasn’t turned into the right position that is safe for natural birth, so we are booked in this week for a sunroof job at the Ulster Hospital.
Think we have mixed emotions on the whole thing, between Excitement and Fear. This is a standard, everyday, procedure, but it’s still an operation with risks that is apparently about four times more dangerous for the mother than a natural birth – probably because the risk of infection is higher with being cut open and all that. Although the statistics are also probably a bit skewed because a lot of the women who need C-Sections need them because of other health concerns etc.
But I think our excitement is far outweighing our fears. Can’t wait to see and hold our little baby now. Gutted the house over the weekend cleaning and getting nursery a bit more prepared.Nursery is full of toys and books now.
Think we’re pretty much ready to go!
WordPress 2.5 – long awaited, delayed, but still probably the best and most popular Open Source Blogging platform, designed by Happy Cog and built by Automattic, has been released. Download, install it on your server, and enjoy.
I had tried a few different options including Google Blogger and Microsoft spaces before making the final decision to adopt WordPress as my blogging platform. WordPress is simply design better… no shadow of a doubt…. easy to use, is open source, and has a really wide set of features. If you want to get up and running with a wordpress blog of your own really quickly, you can sign up at: http://wordpress.com/. It literally just takes a few minutes to get up and running.
After 6 months development based on user feedback, the improvements in WordPress 2.5 are numerous, including: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG from TinyMCE that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.
Click Here for a demo video showing some of the new features
Think this deserves a big thumbs up.
OpenOffice.org is the leading open-source office software suite, sponsored by Sun Microsystems, for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computer operating systems including Windows, Linux and Apple OS X. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose. It can also open and save files in Microsoft Office format too although it’s not the default.
If you are a home user and you’re wondering where to get £300 odd smackers for a copy of Microsoft Office, you might want to swing by the OpenOffice website and download your freebie.
If you are a business user with limited legacy Microsoft Office integration that would be expensive to replace, then this is a really good option for you too. Do the aggregate maths on license costs on this versus Microsoft Office.
I use Microsoft Office 2007 in work and at home on my Windows machines, I run Microsoft Office 2004 on my Mac, but am also running OpenOffice on my OpenSuse Linux boxes. Have been messing with OpenOffice since it’s first release. It’s really good alternative to Microsoft Office on a standalone level.
Where this falls down a bit is whenever it comes to integration into document management systems. Obviously Microsoft Office glues together with SharePoint like… well like glue… but OpenOffice doesn’t really have a dedicated server counterpart… not so great for business from that perspective…
Anyway… lots of nice new features in this version…
I have played every GTA game ever released. I know my way around San Andreas better than I know how to get round the city I live in. Don’t really care how sad that sounds to some of you… I have no remorse over putting in 100s of gaming hours into this… I wouldn’t change a thing…
This series of games has been, by and far, my favourite PC games of all time… which is why I am unbelievably dissappointed over the fact that the new GTA IV – which currently has preview boxes lining the walls of every GAME store in the country, and is currently the number 1 pre-ordered game – is only being released by RockStar for XBOX 360 and Playstation 3 consoles next month… there are some unconfirmed rumours that they might release it for the PC in October this year… not good enough! Not nearly good enough!
I have concluded that I need to procure an XBOX 360 A.S.A.P! My birthday is in the not too long distant future and I’ve been dropping hints left, right and centre to friends and family to buy me one.
Anyway… there’s lots and lots of GTA IV movies on you tube… and this is the latest!
Baby is officially due on the 7th April… and is still in the wrong breech position for easy natural birth.
My wife went to the Ulster Hospital at Dundonald last week to see if it was possible to move the baby round into the correct position using External Cephalic Version (ECV) technique which apparently can be quite painful.
They scanned her and decided they weren’t able to do the ECV because the baby’s umbilical cord was in the way and it would have been too risky.
Because this is our first baby, the hospital does not allow vaginal breech delivery – so she’s going to the hospital this week again to get an appointment for a Caesarean Section instead.
We are kind of hoping that it will be this Friday, mostly because my wife is just so uncomfortable now, struggling to get any sleep. As well as that, the anticipation and excitement is now killing us!!!
In the meantime, we have spent yesterday and today (Easter holidays) catching up on lost sleep and resting up as much as possible in bed. Chances are that once the little one arrives we mightn’t get too much more sleep for many many months… thought we’d take the chance to get rest while it was going!
Aside from this, we are all ready to go. Bags are packed. Got clean miniDV tape in the camcorder and digital camera is charged. I have put nursing area together in our bedroom including crib, nursing chair, night-light, room thermometer, and have also started putting nursery together including changing table and place to store baby’s clothes and toys and stuff, and have new car seat and buggy bought.
Will wait and see what date the section is going to be. They usually schedule it to be about one week before the official due date – so chances are pretty good that by this time next week we should have a baby!
Take-Two Interactive have announced that BioShock 2 is officially in the pipeline.
BioShock, designed by Ken Levine, released in August 2007, was one of last year’s biggest XBOX and PC first-person “genetically-enhanced” shooter games, with over 2 million units sold. This game came from nowhere and received an extremely positive reception, now voted as the 13th best ever game, so it’s no wonder they’re investing in a sequel.
I’ve been playing Crysis and Call of Duty 4, and have to say that BioShock is the best – very possibly has been the most original, immersive first-person shooter I’ve played since Far Cry.
Set in 1960, BioShock places the player in the body of Jack whose plane crashes mid sea. Making your way to a lighthouse, you find your way venturing into the vast Objectivist-dystopian underwater city called Rapture – once a truly amazing underwater city, but now neglected, creaking and leaking like an old submarine – it is truly like being in a horror movie where have to survive against a population of mutants and robot drones.
It’s the first game I’ve ever played were I actually found myself sitting for at least 2 minutes trying to make a moral decision on whether to pull the trigger or not… the first time you kill a Big Daddy you are faced with the choice of saving or harvesting one of the little sisters… I couldn’t bring myself to pull the trigger!
One of the really cool elements of BioShock that differentiates it from all other shooters at the minute is the ability to completely improve your weapons and other abilities.
I’m still really enjoying playing this game on the PC… fantastic gameplay, fantastic theme, amazing sound. The sound in the game really makes it… it is totally creepy from fx to background music… and totally suits the art deco theme in the game.
The game actually scooped 8 G.A.N.G Audio awards presented by the The Game Audio Network Guild. “Every now and again, life provides one of those great moments of satisfaction for which words are really inadequate to describe,” said BioShock composer Garry Schymann.
If you haven’t played BioShock yet I highly recommend you take a trip to your local game store and procure a copy… like now… like why are you still reading this blog post???
The sequel, planned for a fourth-quarter fiscal 2009 release date, is actually rumoured to be a prequel which focuses on the fall of Rapture, is apparently being developed by newly formed 2K Marin studio.
BioShock 2 should be totally awesome! Of course before all that I’ve gotta play Far Cry 2!!!
This week Microsoft landed a pretty substantial deal with Nokia to put Silverlight on their phones.
In the same week, Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs, tells Adobe there won’t be Flash on the iPhone… now there’s a decision that’s going to have just a few ramifications! Now developers will need to find some other means of getting games, movies and rich applications onto the iPhone.
Adobe Creative Suite running on Apple’s OS X operating system is currently the de facto industry standard for designers and arty types to work on. Apple has profited heavily from Adobe’s dominance in this space. It was really Adobe who helped to solidify the macintosh’s role in the world of desktop publishing, fonts and postscript technologies.
This small move suggests that the Apple-Adobe relationship may be starting to falter a little, and also gives Microsoft a huge opening to downplay the proposed importance of Adobe Flash/Flex/Air, instead promoting Microsoft Silverlight/Expression/Visual Studio products. Apple’s move today is really a crippling blow for Adobe’s newly announced Rich Internet Application strategy.
It’s also potentially bad news for Apple if Adobe choose to take this the wrong way and perhaps start focusing their product development towards Windows and Linux… unlikely! It could be argued that Adobe suite runs just as well…. if not better…. on Windows than it does on the Mac these days and the old ideology of serious designers only working on Macs now irrelevant.
Adobe bulked up its suite of creative applications in the last few years by acquiring web software company Macromedia… bringing into its fold key products including Dreamweaver web development environment, and integrated Flash development environment for rich content. Flash is currently the standard for web based video – as currently used on YouTube.
Within the last fortnight, Adobe announced the release of Adobe AIR,Flex and Flash for building Rich Internet Applications with some fanfare…
Today’s announcement by Apple, however, suggest that Adobe are starting to slip a bit, and I could suggest a few reasons why…
As a developer I can safely say that I have no interest, whatsoever, in Adobe Air or Flex… the development tools are overly complex to configure, install and then try to code against, and in this day and age I simply don’t have the time or patience for “overly complex”… Flash is a complete disaster from a developer perspective… again overly complex… this comes more from Flash’s history as a bit of an amateur animation product, and then hacked and hacked over the years to try to be more than that… It’s no wonder that they released Air as open source… shifting away from their trusty commercial model… they are desperate to get adoption… frankly I don’t think it’s going to happen and I’d advise developers not to waste their time with this…
Now let’s do a compare and contrast with the Microsoft equivalents. Microsoft Expression Suite is gaining ground quickly as alternatives to Adobe’s Creative Suite… and I think it will be better because on either side of it you’ve got Microsoft Visual Studio and Silverlight…
Microsoft Visual Studio is now recognised as the preferred commercial integrated development environment… it’s just gorgeous and unbelievably well designed for coders to concentrate on writing code instead of trying to figure out how to get their programming environment installed in the first place. In second place is Eclipse… well respected, cross-platform, extremely flexible, and very popular… but just not as nice as Visual Studio in this developer’s opinion…
Silverlight is winning over developers at a phenomenal rate. Microsoft Expression Blend provides designers with all their traditional tools, but also integrates with Visual Studio so, for the first time, developers and designers can work with tools that really meet their needs.
I think today’s announcement is an an early sign that Adobe is going to be up for sale soon.
Apple could have an interest in this acquisition – if they were smart they would pull Adobe’s products in house and make them only work on Mac OS… thereby attempting to ensure that designers stick with Apple Mac’s…. but I think that strategy would fail with the product line through the clear lack of cutting off that amount of income and potential market share…
The more likely candidate to acquire Adobe would seem to be Microsoft instead… they could bring Adobe’s product experts in-house to help improve the quality of the Expression Suite. Couldn’t see them having much use for Air/Flex/Flash…
Anyway… small announcement… potentially large ramifications…
Today, Nokia signed a deal with Microsoft which will bring Rich Internet Application technology ‘Silverlight’ to millions of mobile phones.
I posted about new rich Microsoft Silverlight user-interface technology in the context of Microsoft Surface last week… now we see mobile device vendors beginning to sign up for this rich experience…
Silverlight is a very-much up-and-coming competitor to Adobe Flash which is already used by popular web sites such as YouTube… only Silverlight is better including better HD video support, and better, easier and more logical programming model – built from the ground up for fully-functional, cross-platform rich internet applications.
Nokia will initially make Silverlight available on its high-end smart phones, specifically the S60 model running a Symbian operating system, as well as for Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablet devices.
Microsoft demonstrated Silverlight on the S60 during the keynote at MIX08 conference today. The Windows Mobile version on Silverlight will be available later this year.
