There’s just one stumbling block. You see, I own Adobe CS3 and Lightroom. Adobe very ‘kindly’ allow users to install copies on two computers, so long as they’re not both used simultaneously (clause 2.4 in the license, for those who are interested). This means I can run Photoshop on my desktop and laptop as required. Great!

However, for some unknown reason Adobe only allow this between computers running the same operating system. That’s right - I can’t install on a Mac and a PC and switch between the two.

Which puts a block on buying a Mac. There’s no way I’m prepared to license even individual Adobe products a second time, and with the number of comps I slice-n-dice being without Photoshop isn’t an option.

There is the option of installing Parallels or VMWare on OSX, an XP guest, and then running CS3. I doubt the feasibility of that - Photoshop runs like a pig on natively, so how much worse would it be under virtualisation!

Any options I’ve missed?

* Not that I want to lock into another proprietory platform. But I dislike Vista and XP is coming to the end of its life-cycle…

Now I’ve always had a PC, and (save for servers and Virtual Machines) that PC has always run windows. 3.11, 95, 98, XP. A lot of XP. And I’ve been happy with it - it’s stable, annoyingly slow sometimes, but works. I have a lot of Windows-only software; some free, a lot of it bought. When I feel limited by Windows I switch to Ubuntu, or (cunningly) Win32 ports of all the useful Linux tools

So looking at laptops, I stand and consider what I’d gain. An expensive purchase, a new Operating System to learn, shedloads of software to buy (either that or run Parallels/VMWare and end up using Windows half the time), and something just slightly different from the Linux I’m used to - different enough to make things annoying (like the parameters for reloading apache - why do so many distros have different ones? Anyway, I digress…)

Lots of people are Mac users now, and in the web development world they seem very popular. Simon Willison is an example; the PHP conference last year was pretty Mac’d up.

Others don’t. I have a theory a lot of people don’t use Macs, but they’re unnoticed because they don’t spend so much time talking about how wonderful thei computer is And having watched a colleague’s Mac crash more frequently than I’ve ever made XP crash, and need rebooting just as often, I’m not overly impressed.

If I go to a Mac, aside from the extra initial cost (Macs are expensive) I need to take into account I have over £1000 in Windows-only software, plus Adobe Creative Suite 3 for Windows. My desktop PC will continue to run Windows, so I would be switching between platforms during the day.

Listening to Mac freaks raving about their computers I’m wondering if a Mac is something you only ‘get’ by owning one - or if people just forget that Windows ever did the job once they buy one

So I throw out the question to all of you. Why should I (or should I not) go for a Mac? What is there that, as a long-time PC user, I’m missing which makes Mac users so… overwhelmed by their Macs? As a web developer, have you found a Mac has made you more productive? Does it do anything you couldn’t do with a PC running Windows or Linux?

Quickly it became clear that Plusnet was adequate but not great. Traffic shaping made working on a couple of servers at evenings and weekends impossible (we run ssh on a non-standard port, which led to an 8-10 second delay between typing and seeing the result on-screen - sure I could tunnel via another server, but it’s effort). I live in the middle of a city and the broadband (ADSL Max) was set on a 2MB profile. Try as I might, I couldn’t get Plusnet’s technical support to agree to get the line profile reset in order to see what the line would handle. I knew this profile had been in place since 2004 - and given friends living in the middle of nowhere get faster broadband I figured we should!

Anyhow, a culmination of things led to me arranging a migration to ADSL24, an Entanet reseller. Getting the MAC code from Plusnet was painful but nowhere near as bad as getting one from BT Broadband Everything was going smoothly with migration set for 10 December until…

…at quarter to 1 on Friday morning (7 December) our broadband account was deleted. I didn’t know that at the time, or even that it had stopped working. I was asleep. Waking the next moring I first thought the migration had gone ahead and tried the new connection details. Nothing.

Because of my work having working broadband is critical. Especially as on Friday I was supposed to be doing a rush job (actually the client didn’t get me the necessary information, but still…)

So at 9.30am I phoned Plusnet. Sat on hold for 10 minutes listening to dreaful music. The support technician looked at our account and said “The tag on your phone line is set to Entanet, the migration must have gone ahead. Talke to them”.

So I phoned Entanet. And sat on hold for 10 minutes listening to slightly better music. I got through to a very efficient lady who explained that the migration wasn’t yet underway, it’s normal for the tag to change early (so Plusnet are at fault), and would I like BT’s number to talk to them?”

So I phoned BT. And got through to an extremely friendly and helpful chap. Say what you will about BT, but they know how to train their customer service operators. He looked up the line and the migration status, confirmed what Entanet had told me, confirmed that a migration should be seamless.

So I phoned Plusnet. Sat on hold for nearly 15 minutes listening to some dreadful music. Just as the Elton John came on I got through to an operator (doh!) who probably didn’t know what hit him. I stated everything BT had said and this time he agreed that the service needed re-instating. Which he did. Unfortunately Plusnet’s system wouldn’t let them reactivate my account without billing me for another month’s broadband, but I have been promised a refund. I wait with baited breath…

You’re working for a client on an hourly rate.  There’s no allowance for expenses.

For a particular task you know it’s cheaper for the client if you buy some software to do the job (even taking the software cost into account).  It’s unlikely you will use the software for any future work and there’s no expenses allowed, so the price of the software comes out of your pocket and not the clients.

Do you:

1. Not buy the software and charge the client for all the time it takes?
2. Buy the software and lie about the hours spent on the job, inflating them to cover the cost of the software?
3. Buy the software out of your own pocket and bill the correct hours taken?

What would you do?

As I noted in a comment, markup is a framework.  We don’t need a CSS framework with special attribute names to give meaning to the document - the markup should be doing this.

The role of markup is to convey information, in human or computer readable form.
This could be presentational information or content - I have no problem with either (I do have problem with mixing both in the same document… although HTML works)

Thus the fuss over Blueprints CSS framework and the level of separation - well yes fuss all you like, but many (most?) ‘valid’ ‘CSS-based’ websites are nothing more than presentational tag soup - the result of tables based designers jumping on the buzzwords and bastardising it to get their results.

I like things to be perfect and so want perfect separation, and my pragmatic friends have been telling me to get a life since 2003.  I have, and have left that approach at the theoretical level - I see no fun in compromising by transforming the XML to something meaningless.

But in fact you have to.  HTML is a presentational layer, with some semantics built-in.  When we type <p>…</p> we are saying the contents is a paragraph (supposedly), but subconsciously we are also saying we want it displayed as a paragraph, with the margins that entails.

Had HTML elements never had styles built-in then the situation might be different; we however are used to it.  And I think we wouldn’t want it the other way round - our minds work on concepts like paragraphs.

Defining an abstract tag name and a set of rules to style it into a paragraph wouldn’t be done frequently - we’d probably call it <para> and have a global style system we used on all documents which made it display just like <p> does.

I would say that adding class names like span-4 is the least of our worries.  If we’ve got to this stage of degradation, what harm does a little more do?

By the time we add one wrapper div, or a clearing div, we’ve polluted the page.

In itself a class name has no semantic meaning.  No text has semantics, save for those we give it.  What the use of structural class names lack, as Simon Willison has already pointed out, is memorability and a clear meaning for when we read through the code later.

There again, when you define new tags in XML, it is the human to whom they have semantic meaning, the human who empowers them.  To a computer they are just characters to process.  Any attempt to argue otherwise is to imply the computer has intelligence.  I detect this when people argue over whether to wrap form elements in <p> or <div>.  In the situation either has a valid meaning (but only because of the presentational styling applied to <p> by default).

[[Define semantic??]]

I’ll end by saying I don’t entirely grasp the meaning of semantic, when something is semantic and when something isn’t.  I’ve used words here which if you understand a narrow meaning for then may not fit.  Have a broad mind, and if you want to educate me on the real meanings (or an alternative word that would fit more accurately) go for it!

I’m no expert on what semantics really are - if you want one talk to Steve Hesketh or any member of the webdesign-l mailing list

So is HTML a semantic (structural) level, or presentational?

How does it differ from RTF, LaTeX etc, in its outcome?  Every format developed has description associated.  The ‘modern’ XML-based forms are certainly my favourites (see above re: perfectionism) but all these previous ones worked.

Is there a difference in semantics?  I’d say LaTeX (and possibly RTF, which I don’t know well) transmit as much meaning as HTML.

=======

Now to move onto the Blueprint framework which has been receiving so much attention.

It doesn’t deal with two important problems:
1. Source ordering
2.  equal-height columns

The first is the more serious of the two.  When I have a standard 2 or 3 column page layout, I want the contents to come first - this is after all more important.  Using absolute positioning this can be done, however I’ve found that to open up a whole new set of problems.  Which leaves floats… so I give up and put the source code in the order needed to float the elements as needed.

I tried using Blueprint on a new simple 2-column site I was doing it proved too inflexible - the grid sections were too wide. Admittedly I didn’t spend long reading the documentation, but dived in with the grid and examples.

I chose the wrong column widths at the start and when I needed to go back through my mark-up and change span-3, span-8 to spen-2 and span-9 I gave up and wrote my own CSS.  A flexible-width system, based on the size of the container would be acceptable, but now I have widths defined in the CSS *and* the HTML.  (After all, changing widths in the framework defeats the object - I could write my own CSS instead!)

I did appreciate the grid support for Blueprint - we all know that the typography on a well thought-out grid looks gorgeous.
=============

Does it matter if semantics are preserved in HTML markup?
——————-

To some yes, but in the end the web and web design today are commercial occupations, and what matters (in 99.9% of cases) is that the technology and approach used gets the job done, works for people, and pays back the investment made.  If that can be done faster without worrying about ‘academic’ matters like semantics of the markup (lets face it, only technical people bother about) and how elements pollute the DOM, then that’s how it’s going to be done.

I’ve just reached the end of a long week dealing with CSS inconsistencies and browser bugs, so I’m not my most positive about web technology.  Clients don’t understand why it can’t be pixel perfect (they also don’t understand that it takes time to convert a Photoshop mockup to a web page - “It’s all laid out nicely and the graphics are there, what’s the problem?”) and I can’t blame them for that.  If a printer delivered 4 boxes of brochures with the contents of each box looking different, and blamed it on using 4 different printing machines and “nothing he can do about it mate” I’d be pretty darn annoyed.

What do we mean by semantics?  I’ve just spent an hour trying to create a CSS-thumbnail gallery with definition lists (because I believe these to have more suitable semantics than an unordered list or divs) and failing, due to the odd size images and caption requirements I have.  I’m certainly not ruling out lack of skill on my part, but if I can’t do it why should most people be able to?  And does bending HTML to display an image gallery destroy the semantics, no matter what tags are used?

Semantics will always give way to ease of use.

======================

And (the million dollar question) where is the line between pragmatism and being slovenly and letting anything that’s easier be done?  Which side of the line does a wrapper div go?  A div to clear floated elements?

=======================

“if I have the tech-savviness of a guy who is barely able to program with html, will I be able to do simple things like add new designs and modify existing ones without pulling my hair out?”

We may say that people shouldn’t have such unrealistic expectations, but they do and we need to work with that.  Microsoft Word has made them expect they can do everything they want themselves.  Once that mindset’s in place, it’s incredibly difficult to go against the flow.

Saying “If they can’t write HTML they have no place on the web” is fine, and a view I’m sympathetic with, but for information sharing it limits people with valuable information who don’t have the technical skills (it also limits the people with junk, but that’s by the by…).

A two-teir web would be great, if the distinction can be enforced (”to be a pro you have to do it this way, everyone else can do whatever they like but can’t charge for it”). 

I build a lot of content management systems, and am frequently asked by the more savvy users to enable TinyMCE’s table support, so they can lay out pages.  When they do that in MS Word and there is no alternative toolbar in an online WYSIWYG editor, it’s very hard to explain to them that I won’t/shouldn’t because it doesn’t match up to web standards pipe-dreams — even though this is something they want in order to gain control of their website and serve their business needs! 

‘Purity’ and ‘Practicality’ have nasty edge cases like this.  (And a more granular CMS is not always a solution - neither are they technical enough to work with HTML directly)

=======================

What does it mean for something to be semantic?  When is something semantic and when isn’t it?  What defines if it has a semantic meaning?Markup cannot be semantic - it transmits the semantics(???)

“For example, with HTML and a tool to render it (perhaps Web browser software, perhaps another user agent), one can create and present a page that lists items for sale. The HTML of this catalog page can make simple, document-level assertions such as “this document’s title is ‘Widget Superstore’”. But there is no capability within the HTML itself to assert unambiguously that, for example, item number X586172 is an Acme Gizmo with a retail price of £199, or that it is a consumer product. Rather, HTML can only say that the span of text “X586172″ is something that should be positioned near “Acme Gizmo” and “£ 199″, etc. There is no way to say “this is a catalog” or even to establish that “Acme Gizmo” is a kind of title or that “£199″ is a price. There is also no way to express that these pieces of information are bound together in describing a discrete item, distinct from other items perhaps listed on the page.”
Source - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_WebReferences:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_HTML#Semantic_HTML

Summary questions:

1. Do semantics have anything to do with code cleanliness?  Does polluting a page with unnecessary structural markup (wrapper divs…) remove the semantics?
2. How can any markup have semantics?
3. Why is <div id=”content”> any more semantic than <div id=”s876rts”>?
4. How does (X)HTML semantic markup (at the level of <p> vs <div> vs <table>) make any difference to anyone?

Changelog:

29 Aug, 9pm: Added summary questions, cleaned up (some) muddled writing that was clear to me but no one else!

The motherboard ships with a floppy containing drivers to load during the Windows installation process.  But even after I borrowed a floppy drive, they didn’t work for me.

The solution, as noted in the ebuyer reviews, is simple: upgrade the BIOS.  However, this is easier said than done.  If you have a floppy drive or can make workable floppy boot discs then great - I didn’t and when I borrowed one, couldn’t. Having spent somewhere over five hours trying different approaches, here is a writeup of my approach - hopefully it will help someone!

My penultimate attempt was using a DrDOS bootable CD burned with Nero 7, with the BIOS files burned to the CD.  I figured this would work, and indeed DrDOS booted and loaded.  However, due to these IDE access issues (the problem I needed to upgrade the BIOS to cure), I couldn’t cd to the CD-ROM drive in order to run the BIOS update files - DOS didn’t know any CD-ROM drive was attached to the system.

The solution came in the shape of the Ultimate Boot CD, which contains amongst many things a copy of FreeDOS… with support for USB (if you fiddle around with the options when it’s loading - the dialogs which pop up for ~3 seconds are very important!). 

Don’t be distracted by the fact FreeDOS says it can enable CD-ROM drive support - it can’t due to the ABIT BIOS problems!

Once I’d got the USB support enabled (Tip: every time a dialog appears as FreeDOS loads, go to “Configure” in order to have time to read it) I was able to plug in a FAT formated USB drive with the BIOS update on it, cd to the USB drive and flash the motherboard’s BIOS.

After that Windows installed without any problems.  And I now have a fast computer!

Thank you Jonny & Robin for letting me use your CD burner in order to get this far!

Alex posted a comment saying:

History fulfills my thirst for knowledge, my curiosity. I’ve always just wanted to know why things are the way they are.

Now it was a throw-away remark so I’m not pillorying Alex for it, but I’ve heard this uttered before and it cannot be true!

Or rather I don’t see how it can be true.

Our life is relative.  Our experiences are relative.  We are shaped by our previous experiences, our upbringing, our surroundings.  Thus our interpretations of events, of history, are shaped by our background (our worldview).

This is a problem in

• Theology.  It’s a vital question because without an answer how can we determine what is (more) right (than other views)?  The problem can be seen just by looking at the development of Christian theology over the past 2000 years (I know nothing about the time before).  Views have changed as the world-view of the time changes.  Does that make one more right than another?
• Life itself.  Is there any such thing as a right or wrong decision any more?  I’m not thinking of morality in this case (others can tackle that one) but of mundane, every day decisions.  Should I drive to X, should I do better on this piece of work?  [weak examples, will revamp - please suggest some]
• Analysis of history, events etc.  I’m not going to talk about this, as it’s similar to the impacts on theology.

All this is fairly depressing.  If we don’t know why things are the way they are, or what is true, how can we make sense of things?  Does life have to be a confusion from which we hide, carving out our small world of sense, burying our heads every time something comes along (or being buffeted with the flow of others’ thoughts)?

Why is understanding how to handle this relativism important, for me and for others?

• It affects every aspect of looking at the past, and the present.  For example: I am English, so my reading of colonialism will be very different to that of someone who lives/lived under colonial rule.  My thoughts about colonial rule will also be less positive than they would have been 60 years ago.  In 400 years time people will view it from their own perspective.  Which will be different, and because they won’t be living now may be more ‘correct’.
• As a Christian, grown up in the Western Protestant tradition, I know what is taught as being correct.  Yet basic investigation shows that very different views were frequently held before the 16th century (the reformation), and have changed throughout history, including this century. If the views I hold are right then I want to be able to explain, both to myself and others, why it is and why I hold these beliefs.  If they are not, I want to understand why, and what is (or more likely to be) right.
• I am the kind of person who is bothered by such questions.  I’ve thought about the nature of truth for about 4 years.  I need to reach some kind of consensus so I know what I think, and I dare to handle texts, opinions and statements I make with some kind of certainty.  I don’t like uncertainty but I have to think my way through to a position where I can handle it.[To be rewritten - what I mean to communicate has slipped my mind] It impacts on every day life.  Can decisions still be made?  Is there any such thing as a correct decision?  Helga Drummond would say not (the ART of DECISION MAKING is a fascinating book - in the uni library)

I don’t like the notion that everything is experiential, that nothing is totally right.  It may be that many things are right (”Who can know the mind of God” after all - perhaps we see different facets of the same truth).  Some things must be wrong, purely because the interpretations are too separate - eg “Jesus was a good chap who unfortunately got killed in a local power struggle” vs “Jesus was the Son of God who followed his Father’s will to the cross as a sacrifice to atone for our sin”.

(I’m excluding anything that’s known to be wrong from the existing evidence and background, such as the Gospel of Judas being a Christian gospel hidden by a jealous church.  There have to be facts around, otherwise we’d live in a world comprised solely of conspiracy theories.)

The pragmatic approach is to say ‘we can never know everything, but we can use historical facts to define what we know, use reasoning, logic and intuition to reach our own conclusion, and then we can live with that as “our truth”.  Others will disagree with some of it but as we have reached the decision ourselves that’s OK - it’s ours and it cannot be wrong.’

One issue relativism appears to impact heavily is whether all religions lead to God.  Need to write this up…

From teaching programming to physics students I have some knowledge of Python, so that’s a good start.

When doing quick or small projects I don’t design the database fully beforehand.  I should, but often that would take longer than building the app.  Instead, I set it up with the perceived needs, and refactor as I go.  This is fine for my usual PHP development, and refining and syncing from MySQL Workbench or similar is fine.  However…

Django trumpets the benefit of not needing to write SQL to create the tables, as they’re defined in the Python code.  I am skeptical because as I’ve already mentioned I use graphical tools to do all this; but hey, it’s always good to try a new approach.

So I defined my model (yeah just one - let’s keep things simple first time round!) and it created the table for me.  Nice.

Inserting data, I discovered I’d forgotten to add a postcode field to the model.  No sweat, add one extra line to the model and… and what?  According to the Django documentation, the two options available are:

1. Drop the table (and any existing data) or
2. Alter the table structure by hand.

As I was only inserting the first record I went for option one.  However I wasn’t happy - the benefit of ‘not having to write SQL!’ does not stand up to scrutiny when it comes to modifying tables.  I’m lazy, and so dislike losing data (even when building a test application).  At the same time, changing the structure in the model AND going to change it in the DB doesn’t appeal either.  Hand-editing MySQL tables is asking for trouble

With that out of the way, I was impressed by the ease of creation.  As I’ve commented in a feature request report a while back, Django’s admin isn’t as flexible as I’d like.  But for what I need for this site I think it will do it well.

Now to see if I can set up users with permission just to edit ONE record in this DB table - any way to tie their permissions to a record ID?

Perhaps my understanding of what is meant by an ‘experienced PHP developer’ is different, but all who I’d put into the experienced category (ie their life revolves around PHP development) are crap at Photoshop or any kind of graphic design.

Either developers in Newcastle are a lot more flexible than everywhere else, ‘Experienced PHP developer’ means all-rounder, or HR have entered the wishful-thinking mode
Whichever, I’m looking forward to seeing the resulting application.

[ Incidentally, I undertake freelance work, specialising in PHP applications and troubleshooting, and also offer full web application development through Maple Design Ltd - in case you hadn't realised!]