Owls Count

Microsoft released IE7 last week and it seems likely that Firefox 2 will be released tomorrow. I have been running the Firefox 2 development branch nightly builds for a while now and on Friday I fired up a virtual machine, running WinXP, and installed IE7 to give it a try.

The first thing noticed is that I dislike the visual themes for both. I do, however, like the was M$ have given the user more screen real estate for the website by moving the menus around.

Feature wise the two seem to be fairly level. Certainly I could see nothing obvious that I would use in one that is not in the other. There are a couple of features I gain with extensions in Firefox that I could not see an obvious parallel to in IE7 - but I did not fully check through the IE add on site to see if there was something similar available.

I’ll be sticking with Firefox - moving to IE7 is not an option, as I use Linux - but it is good to see M$ finally waking up their web browser development and also seeing them working more closely towards web standards.

A struggle.

The Compass Sport Cup/Trophy Final was yesterday at Greenham Common. In a change to usual even those of us belonging to clubs who had failed to qualify were allowed to run - though either before or after the main competition.

With it being the CSC/T there were a large number of people competing (around 1000 in total), including quite a few of the top runners. One of the top runners, Graham Gristwood, has posted part of the brown course.

Running fairly late meant that there were elephant tracks around parts of the course - particularly noticeable from the start through to the second control. For most of my run I was out on my own and I saw very few other orienteers. I did see a few large dogs, but the owner stopped them chasing me!

The area was flat and runnable, leading to very fast times. My own run was fairly good. I lost a couple of minutes with a bad route choice to 9 and a minute when I overshoot 19 and circled back round off the control on the hill beyond. Overall I kept running well, even when tired towards the end.

I have been making web sites (again). Each time I end up doing this I remember why finding a good designer is important. I can chuck a pile of data/information back at a user, but making it look good really does require someone who knows what they are doing.

For one of the sites I have been doing, we have a design, from a professional designer. From the design it was a simple task of applying the various elements to the site.
For another site I had to do the design myself. Spent rather a long time messing around with different colour possibilities. I am reasonably happy with the final result, but it took too long to do.

More designing, and coding, the systems behind the sites next week. The part of the job prefer