Firebug - For web designers

With my Windows 7 RC running out in the near future I decided to switch to a retail copy and start the process of reinstalling everything. One of the first things to get setup was of course firefox and with it firebug.

firebug

For those of you who don’t know firebug, it is a web development tool that allows you to inspect HTML and modify style and layout in real-time. This superb tool allows you to see the effect of any changes you make to a website on the fly without making actual modifications to the code. You can also debug and profile javascript and pause execution at any time. As with most of the best bit of software it works really smoothly, is incredibly powerful and saves us hours of development time.

For you web designers out there who don’t use firebug, get it now!

There is also chromebug to integrate with Google’s browser should that be your choice. For you IE users there is some sort of version that can be used by adding code to your site, not tried it but it looks like it’s a PITA. Just use firefox, it’s simply better.

Pyrenees Weekend

Headed to the Pyrenees this weekend and thought I would drop a few photos in here.

Starting with of course the mountains themselves, once the cloud cleared there really was some spectacular views on offer.
The shear scale of what is in front of you is quite hard to comprehend and to be honest very hard to do justice to in a photograph.

pyrenees

After staring at the Pyrenees mountains for a while we moved down to the snowboard park to see some xtreme sports in action, photos after the jump.

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Messing with speedlight gels

Just having a bit of a play with a couple of Nikon speedlights and a CTO gel. A toy dino that sits on my desk was the victim model, apparently it’s a Deinonychus if your interested.

Deinonychus

Sales Reps

You try to help out a sales rep taking photos  for their competition and this is the thanks you get…

thanks

The show was the Brasilia Barista Challenge which was a great success and a lot of fun.

For you coffee geeks you can have a go at the barista quiz with questions from UKBC judge Paul Meikle-Janney and put together by yours truly.

If it ain’t broken….

broken

Just a bit of a moan really, being a bit of an old school xbox gamer, I had been looking forward to a bit of shooting and driving with Call of Duty MW2 and Forza 3.

Now I have both of these games and I will state they are both great and improvements from the their respective earlier counterparts.

However, they have both changed one simple point which although is not game breaking, really manages to piss me and my gaming colleagues off.

Starting with COD MW2, as the lesser of the crimes, they have stopped you using party chat in TEAM deathmatch.

The reason stated is it to combat cheats who party together and spot for the opposite team, fair enough, but I don’t think the ends justify the means.

It’s a like the old adage of trying to crack a nut with a sledgehammer, I think THEY need to remember that it is just a game that we play for enjoyment and personally one I don’t prefer littered with the various racists, idiots and screaming kids we now suffer in game chat.

Surely a simple solution would be to not allow parties to be on opposite teams, therefore eliminating the ability to cheat and allow myself and my friends to return to our more serene(ish) party chat.

For Forza 3 I have to admit to being a little bit more annoyed.
Keeping an eye on the various hype and news prior to Forza 3’s release, one of the promised features was the custom game settings for multiplayer, which is all I’m really interested in, allowing to you set the game how you want and race it against the world.

These setting are there as promised, but only available in private games, not public like Forza 2.
Why take this out??

Sure they have added multiplayer hoppers, those these seem to not have a huge amount of choice and definitely don’t allow me to set the game how I want and let the world come and play.

Having only 5-6 people I regularly play xbox with (stop having kids you fools!), getting a group together is not entirely easy and genuinely looks like this game will find its way from my desk to The Shelf™ where games do not return from.

What this also means for Turn 10 the games producer is that I am unlikely to purchase any of their Downloadable Content (DLC) at its generally ridiculous prices and will think twice before buying Forza 4.

If they had left these popular features in I would be singing their praises and would have my credit card to the ready when the next car/map/track/gun pack became available.

Of course if they fix said issues in a future patch, then I sure all can be forgiven. nudge; nudge;

ps: the comments below were before I had tried to set up a public race as we had a full party online, see how much better that made it…