Which is why, when I started the next “home made” Servo-Macs layout and website, I would not commit to a specific release date. To be as vague as possible, I simple stated that it ws “coming in 2008″. I still have enough faith in myself to believe that will hold true. But, in my mind, I had a specific date in mind - August 25th, or better known to me as the last day of summer before school starts once more, and development becomes a side project and slows down. Obviously, August 25th is here. And I have nothing for you, today, that’ll return Servo-Macs to it’s roots. That is, today, and tomorrow, and for the foreseeable future, when you type in http://servo-macs.com, the page you’re looking at right now is exactly what you’ll see.

But I do have something.

My development process on layouts has remained largely unchanged for the last couple of years - I would split it up into three “phases”, which I like to refer as milestones. Servo-Macs b4, the internal name for the upcoming site (you won’t see any nods to b4 on the actual site, though), is no different. Each “milestone” has a specific focus, and when I shift my focus, the phase I’m in also shifts.

Milestone 1: This phase begins with a .PSD mockup file of what I want the end project to look like. I then take that PSD file, open up Taco HTML Edit, my copy of Photoshop, and go to town duplicating the mockup as close as I possibly can, and figuring out a basic idea of how I want the navigation to work. What will the content of the site be? How will the users get there?

Milestone 2: After I’m done transferring the mockup over to an actual, functional website, with a basic idea of how I want the site to work, I refine my original mockup, refine the navigation system, and start implementing all the main features of the layout. This is what I’m currently on in Servo-Macs b4, and have been for around two weeks now.

Milestone 3: Now that the layout should be pretty much all done and settled, with all the features in place, I go ahead and include all the content of the site. A minor layout tweak here or there, though, is not unheard of (again, refer to me being a perfectionist).

Servo-Macs b4 at the end of M1 (left), Servo-Macs b4 today (right).

As you can see, the changes in M2 from M1 are what you’d expect - I’ve got the actual news system (FusionNews again, my personal favorite) all set up, and have just refined parts of the layout that I thought would be fundamentally better choices. In the M1 phase, I thought of having the Blog be a subpage, with the main page being something else entirely, but I could never figure out what I wanted exactly, so now the blog is the main page like it always has been. You’ll also notice that I’m toying with something pretty new - I’m going to be using categories in FusionNews to display the site’s content. “General”, “Photos”, and “Videos” will all appear on the main “Blog” page as I upload them, while the Photos page will only display the Photos, and Videos only the videos. One of the few things that’s keeping me from really pushing on to Milestone 3 is the sidebar - the thing’s got a lot of work ahead of it before I go move along.

Finally, as a cherry on this post, I’m offering you guys a preview of the whole entire webpage, so you can look at the actual thing for yourself. The link I’m giving you guys will be updated periodically as an ongoing “beta” program, so I’ll also be setting up a feedback page into this current site.

Check out the future of Servo-Macs here.

You know, there was once a day where the branding of products was predictable, and more importantly, logical. Let’s take Intel for example. The first major, mainstread processor most of you will remember is the Pentium - which was followed up by the Pentium 2, Pentium 3, and finally the Pentium 4, logically speaking. It was safe to assume that the Pentium 2 was better than the Pentium, and so on.

But somewhere along the line they decided that that was simply too boring. It wasn’t edgy enough - so hey! They thought. Let’s ditch the Pentium branding which most everyone knows (although it’s worth noting that they would later revive the Pentium branding with the new Pentium Dual-Core, completely destroying the established pattern that the Pentiums were their premium and mainstream chips), and bring in something new. So out of this idea came the birth of - no, not the Pentium 5, but the Intel Core 2 Duo.

So now, just two and a half years later, we find ourselves staring at the face of a new generation of Intel processors. These times are exciting, and Intel must realize this. The new processors, previously codenamed Nehalem, deliver up to a 33% increase on comparable Core 2 Duo processors. That’s a pretty great jump. So what do we need in a time like this?

A brand spanking new brand name, of course! Gone is the day of the Core 2 Duo (No Core 2 Duo 2? too many numbers, I suppose). Instead, help me usher in the brand new Intel Core i7. You can’t make this up. The Intel Core i7. Let’s ignore the fact that, as long as you’re willing to go out on a limb, logically speaking the name doesn’t even make any god damn sense. Using basic mathematics that most humans learn somewhere around the time they learn to stop sucking their own thumbs, this is actually the 6TH generation mainstream Intel processor, and not the 7th, as the i7 implies. Maybe the only reason I’m bugged about this is because of the major OCD I seem to have, but this is my blog. If you don’t agree with me, you are wrong.

First, as pointed out by Colin McNulty in amazing detail over at his blog (http://www.colinmcnulty.com/blog/2008/07/08/solution-to-wordpress-blank-screen-of-death/), the automated Wordpress upgrade.php script appears to add an extra line in the wp-config.php file. A single extra blank line causes most of these problems. Remove this line manually, and you can once again access your admin panel, where you’ll be able to fix the second problem, if you still can’t read the index of your blog. It may just be stupid of me, but I forgot to backup my theme folder when I upgraded - WordPress was still trying to use the theme I had on there prior to the upgrade, which was missing. So simply go to the Admin Panel, and revert back to the default wordpress theme. Or, I guess, you could just re-upload the old theme if you managed to back that up and all.

Why can’t you ship the damned thing? Why? We understand that there is a shortage of super duper 6-cell batteries that are delaying the high end model, but some of us will settle for the 3-cell versions. I don’t need an undistrial strength battery in mine anyways. But what in the world is delaying the 3-cell? You taunt us with this beautiful two pound, three ounce netbook, with all of it’s awesome OS X capabilities. You put up “Buy Now!” links, only to take them down two and a half minutes later. But you never, ever, ship them. Why? Why can’t you give me my wind?

Love,
Brian

But somewhere in the darkest corners of the internets, the first M1 build of Windows “7″, Build 6519, was  leaked on June 11th. It’s been wabbling around for a while, with many taunting videos and screenshots making the rounds, but now we have it, the full thing, untouched ISO and all. Exciting? Kind of. Just picture Windows Vista SP1, and then kill off some stability, like the ability to install video drivers (seriously - a bug in 6519 crashes the system when you try to install any 3rd party video driver), add some sprinkles, and you’ve got yourself 6519.

Now, where’s 6574?

Today was that day. Today, at WWDC ‘08, Steve Jobs announced and demonstrated for the first time the iPhone 3G (shocker! surprise! amazing!), which absolutely no one knew was coming. No one. The basic things which we all kind of expected - an all black or white plastic back, 3G, and GPS capabilities.

Also, which to me is more interesting (as much as I like gadgets and gizmos like the iPhone, my main interest lies in computers), is the announcement of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. What we’ve got here, coming sometime in 2009, is an optimized Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard with some snazzy fixes and a couple of core improvements. It sounds to me like this is a bigger deal than Apple’s letting lose - I’ve noticed that along with each version of Mac OS X, there’s been a slight decrease in stability. More force quits, more crashes, things of that nature. What they want to do with Mac OS X 10.6 sounds exactly spot on. This is something to watch.

The other day, I installed Ubuntu 8.04 x86 final on my desktop PC (a Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0 GHz, 2GB RAM, NVidia GeForce 7600 256MB) finally making it a tri-boot system between Windows Vista Ultimate, Mac OS X 10.5.1 (yeah, you read that right), and Ubuntu 8.04. Many of you are probably well aware of my stance with Linux, which I still believe is largely justified. I’m not quite sure why I’ve given it another chance. I guess it’s because it’s been such a while since I’ve tried it out, or maybe I just felt the impulse to be just a little bit geeky? What I’ve found isn’t surprising - it’s still extraordinarily confusing, relies largely or almost completely on buggy community driven applications (which just don’t work as well as more established ones), and frankely isn’t enjoyable to use. I feel like if you need to say “well, here goes half of my day” when you’re preparing to install an application, something just isn’t right. I spent about three hours figuring out how to setup my dual monitors, how to get Adobe AIR installed (which I’ll say more about in a bit), finding substantial applications for daily, average things, updating Firefox 3.0 to the latest RC1 version, and installing Adobe Flash. Fun.

The shining star in this whole process is Adobe AIR - a runtime that I never quite took seriously or as necessary before today. It works. And it works well. While looking for some application alternatives on Linux (specifically a working Twitter client), I found that it’s more than easy to install Adobe AIR applications, which is seriously a breath of fresh air, and that they, well… just work. I’ll definitely be looking more into AIR in the future, and I advise anybody, especially people new to Linux, to give it a try. It’s currently in beta form for Linux and can be found at http://labs.adobe.com, although your ability to actually get it installed may vary.

Back on the home front a bit, I’ve continued my slow, slow work on Servo-Macs 4B. It’s going along fine, and I aim on having it done before the end of August. Progress will most definitely speed up once June begins, and I’m out of school.

Hey everyone. Just small things for now. To everyone out there who’s ever asked me for my Wii Friend Codes in my Nintendo Wii games, I’ve just created a page with an easy to update list for me to update every time I get a new game, just to streamline things and make them a little easier for everyone. You can check it out on the sidebar to the right on this post.

Also, I’m not sure if anyone’s checked out Twitter, but I’ve just got into it and it’s pretty cool. Make sure you sign up and add me at http://twitter.com/derfbwh if you have one yourself!