I've finally got around to redesigning my bookshelf page. All of my latest purchases are on there and I've removed the old crappy books that I really need to take off my book shelf at home.

I got tired of the old design and it was a bit of a pain to maintain so I set about redesigning a new theme. Design isn't really my thing but I'm pleased with the way that it has turned out.

I've tried to keep everything CSS and XHTML valid but the blog has issues with IE versions less than version 6. I will at some point address this.

I'll be adding and tweaking various bits and pieces over the coming weeks. And if anyone knows why this happens:

on the last post in IE 6, please let me know.

I've made the jump from Linux to Windows hosting and in doing so have upgraded from CF7 to CF8. As ever, faultless service from hostmysite support had everything up and running very quickly.

I've noticed a few weird things happening, random null pointer exceptions and some other issues. It's probably time I started using the latest and greatest version of BlogCFC, which I plan to do soon. More on that next month....

I've been using Microsoft Office 2007 for about four months now. I didn't warm to it when I first started using it, but I positively loathe it now, especially Word 2007!

I've been having to write a fair amount of documentation of late so I've spent many hours hammering out line upon line of text in Word 2007.

Can anyone explain how the ribbon toolbar is UI improvement over previous versions of Word?

I find it baffling, where the hell has half of the stuff that used to be a couple of clicks away gone?

Amusing that there's software out there to bring back the old Office 2003 look and feel!

I've given up with del.icio.us and am currently trialling Ma.gnolia as a means of storing all of my bookmarks.

The del.icio.us service seems to be regularly unavailable of late and it's starting to get annoying when I want to tag stuff or hunt through my bookmarks.

Converting everything to Ma.gnolia is a piece of cake. I simply exported all of my del.icio.us bookmarks to XML and imported them into Ma.gnolia. The Ma.gnolia interface is going to take some getting used to, for instance, your tags aren't listed down the right hand side which makes searching slightly trickier.

There's a few other quirks that I need to work through, I'll see how it goes, I may even switch back if del.icio.us becomes more reliable.

I added a few titles to my book collection today:

Domain Driven Design

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture

Refactoring to Patterns

Beautiful Code

Once I've finished with Fowler's Refactoring, I'll make a start :-)

Dorothy Perkins have a nice viral campaign in order to help get 40,000 new trees planted within the UK. For every 100 virtual trees planted, they, in association with the Woodland Trust will plant one real tree. They're also launching a clothing range where a percentage of the profits will go to the Woodland Trust.

It's also a good use of Adobe Flash. Check it out here.

Yes for some stupid reason I picked up one of these whilst out shopping with my girlfriend a few weeks ago. Seeing as all the PCI slots on my PC are broken, I decided to purchase it as it was for USB and on offer for £25.

It's now sitting mangled up in my bin after driving me insane:

- The configuration software is so good that it forgets all of your preferences when you exit the application.

- You cannot edit channel settings correctly in order to fine tune channels. There are fields marked as optional yet they are greyed out and impossible to activate - even though the information should be critical in configuring channels.

- The TV viewing application crashes randomly. Its good fun waiting and wondering just when I'll get the Windows error popup.

- Teletext 'feature' crashes or just doesn't work.

- Not only does the software crash randomly, it crashes leaving ugly .NET stack traces visible to me.

- The software website is also a shambles.

Oh but the radio channels worked perfectly.

I *think* the blog layout is fixed in IE 6. The widths I had set on the list elements for the items on the right hand sidebar seemed to be breaking the layout in IE 6.

I still need to sort out the scrollable DIV that contains and formats code blocks. I had to scale their widths back to stop the layout breaking. The downside is the content is compacted and isn't very readable. I plan to write my own solution to output and format code blocks. Hopefully this will address the issue.

I've also tried to clean up the blog markup in general as loads of superfluous whitespace was being generated. I've made some improvements on this but it's still not as good as I'd like it to be.

The calendar was one of the biggest whitespace culprits; it's my own calendar custom tag and not Ray Camdens. I rewrote everything in CFSCRIPT and it's cleaned up the output nicely.

I also removed the recent entries pod from the sidebar. It occurred to me that it was kind of a pointless thing, seeing as all the recent entries are on the blog homepage.

A post to remind me to get my arse in gear and fix the site layout in IE 6. I know the main body content appears waaaaay down the page. I changed something a while back and haven't been able to pin down what is causing the problem.

Hopefully I'll get it sorted soon, or get someone with better CSS skills than me to fix it!