I was fortunate enough to get a copy of 'Yes Minister', the 80s satire on UK politics from Jon for my birthday. Along with 'Blackadder' (which Jill has), this was my favourite comedy show from when I was growing up. We've watched two of the three series now, and it is scary how little things have changed. Similar issues are discussed and debated to those we see in the press today; for example, a national database and ID card scheme!

I've just dug out my PowerBook 190cs (from 1996) because I'm passing it on to someone via Freecycle. As it hadn't been switched on since 2004 (!) the battery needed to be recharged, so I've had it plugged in all day. As I was writing the last blog entry, I had my current PowerBook G4 next to it, so I grabbed a photo.



Both these machines were the bottom end units of the their times. Interestingly, they both take about the same time to boot up, and feel similarly snappy in performance!

So PB190 vs PB G4 12"
Processor: 68LC040 66MHz vs PPC G4 1.5 GHz
Memory: 20Mb (Maxed) vs 512 Mb (can go to 1.5 Gb)
HDD: 500 Mb vs 60 Gb
OS: 7.5.2 vs 10.4.7
Screen : Passive 9" vs Active 12"
Networking: serial port vs Bluetooth / Airport Extreme / Ethernet / Modem

The old PB keyboard is better than the current PB, but both are better than the iBook and the new MacBook keyboards. The new machine is lighter, thinner and slightly narrower.

I have a great nostalgia for the old machine because I wrote my first few books for BITS on it. It was also my first Mac, and the machine I bought when I graduated and started working. It was my work horse for a long time, and I built my first websites with it, initially with pure HTML and later with Adobe Pagemill (which I upgraded to GoLive 4.0 when Adobe bought the application from Cyberstudio). The 20Mb of RAM never gave a problem, nor did the processor. It's amazing how much operating systems have bloated since that time. A clean boot of OS X takes around 180 Mb of RAM initially vs 4Mb for system 7.5. Those were the days! But I wouldn't go back.

I like the new version of Rapidweaver. It shows significant progress from the previous one, and is even more powerful, plus it still allows you to use the old themes, which means that the Birkenhead History Society pages didn't need any significant update. The BITS website did need some more work, but that related to the complexity of the site and the theme. I had to change to the new version and manually change some of the default layouts. However, migrating all the sites took less than an hour tops.

What I do especially like is the increased flexibility built into some of the themes. For example, some of them support variable widths now. I did try that originally for this blog, but I think I will revert to the fixed width from now on, as it looks more aesthetically pleasing. I've also landed a more autumnal flavour to the site looks for a while!

Next thing (website wise) will be to develop the theme for the Power Projection website. It needs an update (especially with the new book) and it needs to move servers from the same one as this blog! Assuming I can sort out the sub-domain and parked domain stuff, I'll land it on the BITS servers as well.

Once this has been done I will have completely walked away from GoLive! How times change...

Well, RapidWeaver 3.5 is finally out of beta so I decided to give it a try. I'll change the BITS and BHS websites later, as the themes need some work first! So far, so smooth!

As the Burning Empires Wiki doesn't have a planetary web play aid up yet, I knocked one together with OmniGraffle and exported it as a PDF. You can found it on my download page for games.

I've just started to add some book reviews which I originally did at the Tavern to the Books section. I've also added a new Photo album with the baby pictures in.