News archive
TagCanvas 1.5
This new version of TagCanvas doesn't have any new options or features to get excited about, but there have been some quite large internal changes to allow multiple instances to run on a page.
If you only want to run one cloud on a page, then this update will not make a lot of difference. Updated files are on the TagCanvas page.
SVGGraph 2.1
I have updated SVGGraph with three new graph types: StackedBarGraph, GroupedBarGraph and MultiLineGraph. To make it a bit easier to see how each type of graph works I've split the SVGGraph page up - details of the new graph types are on the bar graphs and line and scatter graphs pages.
Snow
Just in case you don't have snow falling outside your window, I've made a simple Javascript file that adds falling snow to a page. It uses the canvas element which means that its performance varies between browsers a bit, but it's just a bit of fun. Take a look at the snow page to see it in action.
TagCanvas 1.4.2
This is a very minor update to TagCanvas, changing a couple of functions to support the Internet Explorer 9 beta's updated way of handling events. The tag animation sometimes locks up completely, but I'll put that down to IE9 still being in beta - hopefully the finished product will have ironed out that kind of thing.
I've been pleasantly surprised by IE9. Not only does it support the canvas element, but SVG is now handled by the browser without the need for a plugin.
The updated stand alone and jQuery plugin files are available from the TagCanvas page.
Windows 7 first impressions
I finally got around to installing Windows 7 on my PC, having skipped over Vista altogether. It was quite interesting, so I thought I would share my experiences here.
First, a bit of background. I have been installing operating systems on various computers for a long time - from Amiga OS to MS-DOS, Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, XP, Mac OS X, various Linux distributions and many different versions of FreeBSD. Installing a new OS for the first time still makes me quite nervous though, as I do not know if anything is likely to go wrong.
My hardware is an Intel Core 2 Duo with 2GB of DDR2 memory and a 256MB NVIDIA GeForce 7300GT graphics card driving two monitors, one a DVI-connected ViewSonic and the other an analogue Daewoo using a VGA connector. I added a spare 160GB hard drive that I had lying around to install the new OS on, splitting it into two partitions.