Martin @ Blog

Today Intel introduced the Centrino Duo platform which is the successor of the current Centrino platform, codenamed Sonoma and based on the Pentium M-processor with Dothan-core and i915-chipset. The brand new Centrino Duo platform comes with the much anticipated Yonah processor which is a dual core processor for laptops, but incorporates the energy efficient technology of the previous Pentium M processors. The codename of the new Centrino platform is ‘Napa’, and apart from the Yonah processor, it exists of the Intel Mobile 945 Express chipset and the PRO/Wireless 3945ABG wlan chip (don’t know if it is already supported on Linux, probably not).

Of course, the most interesting part of this new platform is the dual core processor. According to benchmarks of AnandTech is the performance of the processor better than its predecessors. Not only speedwise the processor is better, but despite its extra core and other enhancements, the energy consumption is lower in comparisation of the Dothan core.

The expectations are that Apple will introduce new systems based on the Yonah processor coming Tuesday. Rumours are that probably the iBook will be renewed, but also the possibility of a new Mac mini are discussed. The new Mac mini should be powered by the Yonah processor and include a iPod dock.

Today I did some work on a new design for my weblog, mainly HTML and CSS coding. First, I’m still searching for a decent HTML editor for Mac OS X. There are several freeware texteditors and even HTML editors, but these don’t even come close to the editors which are freely available for Linux, especially Gnome. Using Gnome, I normally use Bluefish or just Gedit for editting PHP and HTML files. Fortunately, it is possible to use Bluefish on Mac OS X, using Fink, however, this isn’t as integrated as for example Inkscape or The Gimp for Mac OS X. Maybe I should fix that when I have some spare time left.
My new design is mainly a new CSS file for the default Kubrich design which is used by WordPress. It turned out to be very simple to change the layout when you’ve become familiar with the CSS file. I also tried to get the design working on Internet Explorer 6. This turned out to be a little more difficult than expected. The Kubrick-theme for WordPress isn’t already working flawlessly on IE 6. This is caused by the crappy CSS implementation on CSS. Looking for a solution for my problem, I learned about ‘quircks’-mode and the lack of support for some CSS attributes on IE. Especially the missing min-width and max-width on IE is very annoying. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seems to be an easy solution for fixing this bug.

Obviously, the development of Gnome is still going on. This evening, I read a weblog article about search integration in Nautilus written by Alexander Larsson. The article contains some screenshots of a search implementation in Nautilus which is powered by the search code of Beagle. The new functionality implements ‘smart folders’, which enables one to save search queries. I think this kind of functionality is really essential in order to stay in competition with the other ‘desktop environments’ such as Mac OS X and the upcoming Windows Vista. Since I’m using Mac OS X with Spotlight, I developed the habit using Spotlight for finding files when I know (part of the) name of it. This is way faster than manually navigating to the folder in which the file is stored using Finder (or Nautilus or whatever filemanager).
Now, there only need to become a solution for the patent problems regarding Mono/C#… but didn’t I wrote that a year ago also?

Today Firefox 1.5 has been officially released. This is a major release for the Firefox project, because along with the new version of the browser, a new website is launched (http://www.mozilla.com) which claims to be more userfriendly for less customers with less technical understanding than most of the current Firefox users.
The most important new features of Firefox 1.5 include default support for SVG-images (which is very nice I think, and very important for the adoption of SVG as a general webstandard), improved support for CSS2 and CSS3 and of course the regular bug and security fixes. For Apple users, it is very intersting to know that support for the Mac OS X operating system has been improved.
I have just installed the latest version of Firefox on my Mac mini, and I must say that the improvemts are obvious. First, the rendering speed of websites seems to be dramatically improved. Additionally, there was a problem when filling out webforms. Previous versions of Firefox tend to become very slow when you were typing large texts (such as weblog postings), this seems to be solved. Finally the middle-mouse button now works again when you want to open a website in a new tab.
For Mac users, Firefox 1.5 is definately a big improvement!
I don’t have tried the browser on other platforms yet, because I don’t like to install it on Ubuntu without an official package for it. Because I hardly use Windows, the change that I will try the Windows version of Firefox 1.5 within a few days seems very unlikely.