Monochrome screenshot from the wget mailing list featuring Emacs and Supercite circa 1997.

Just remembered that I was ‘shocked and ashamed to discover’ that my father (Silver Surfer) was using IE7 when I last took my laundry home so I felt obliged to upgrade from IE6. I also took the opportunity to upgrade to Firefox 2.0 RC2 from 1.5.0.7. No detailed, lengthy reviews, I’m afraid. I did notice some changes to the user interface (IE now looks like Firefox 1.x) but most importantly, all my Firefox extensions still appear to work.

After my recent move from the community of WordPress.com, once again I truly feel like a ‘Blog in Isolation’. There are a few features I missed from WordPress.com: Dashboard - I can still check the WordPress blog, Top Blogs and Top Posts independently. Forums - While I can still participate, I don’t really feel like a member of that WordPress community any longer. Comments - signed up for coComment that tracks all comments (not just those on WordPress.com) Tag surfer - can create Technorati feed(s) to replicate this but this was a nice, dynamic feature. New WordPress themes - If I like them, I simply download and experiment on this blog. Latest WordPress posts - an occasional diversion. No real equivalent (unless I login to my placeholder WP account) Avatars - Not bothered but favicon is your friend.

The Barthelme theme for WordPress is close to absolute perfection. My only minor reservation is that elements of the sidebar (Pages, Categories, Recent Comments) and the title of the Next/Previous posts appear in UPPER case. This is one of my pet hates as it looks like SHOUTING which is RUDE and, IMHO (sic), is completely at odds with the minimalist, understated feel of the theme. However, a quick edit in ‘style.css’ to change two occurrences of ’text-transform: none;’ to ’text-uppercase: none;’ fixed that. ...

Just installed and configured Drupal 4.7.3 and noted an announcement asking for volunteers to test newly added support for the Oracle database. Most open source, content management systems (WordPress, Joomla et al) use MySQL so it will be interesting to see whether there is much demand for a CMS running on an Oracle database. On a similar note, Oracle are likely to confirm that the next major release of Siebel (8.0) will be available on the Linux platform. The official announcement is expected at Oracle OpenWorld later this month. This isn’t wholly unexpected as support for Linux in Siebel 8.0 was included in the public Statement of Direction (May 2006). ...