Welcome to a fresh look on netfactory.dk. I’ve never been quite satisfied with the old look, and stumbled across the WP_Premium theme which looked quite nice. It’s now live in a lightly hacked version.

Therre are quite a few things I’d like to hack further but in the spirit of the Internet Way of doing things, it’s probably best to release something slightly broken - and let updates happen “when I find the time”(tm).

One of the hottest sites on the web for more than a year is twitter, but what is Twitter?

• I’ve tried a few times to explain it, and while it may be a fun task, it has often become quite a mess. This is an attempt to capture the most successful explanation of twitter.

The core of Twitter is a combination of three different characteristics:

• Twitter is like a blog - An author publish content. It may be personal, it may be themed, it may be interessting - there are no set rules for the contents except those set by the author.
• Twitter is like an SMS - There are a 140 character limit on each piece of content. If you need more, you need to split contents in several “twits”.
• Twitter is a network - It’s no just a website. Through build in services and APIs you can connect with twitter through SMS, desktop clients, Instant messaging and many other ways. Besides a technical network, it’s also a social network where you can follow other interesting users, communicate with other users (private or in public).

That’s pretty much the core.

How many cookies do you neeed and how many does the browsers support? - It seem to come up all to often, so after a bit of digging in search engines, here are (for my own convenience) the findings of what the limits are on cookies in the currently used browsers.

The cookie standard (RFC2965) specifies a browser should be able to handle at least 20 cookies per domain, but one thing is a standard - who does the real world look?

A new wordpress has been released (2.6). I’ve upgraded - took 60 seconds and caused no issues what so ever (- so far anyway). There isn’t one big new thing, but a fair number of improvements in many different areas. Get the latest version from the Wordpress site.

The iPhone (3G) was launched in Denmark today. I’m not quite sure how great a success it was, but Telia was apparently sold out here on the first day. While I probably should be urging for an iPhone, I’m not - I’d like one, but frankly I wouldn’t spend money on one currently. It’s a cool phone, but it seem to suffer from many of the same problems other smartphones has.

Modern computers contains al lot of software. A fully updated fresh windows installation contains well over 50.000 files - and before it being “usable” with the most common applications, plugins, addons and extensions for the software you use on a daily basis, you’ve probably added so much more, that you’ve completely lost count of what’s been installed.

It’s a pretty bad situation in terms of security and software maintenance/updating.

WindowsUpdate has come part of the way. It’s easy and simple for even common users to use and stay fairly current with the core windows system, but it only covers a small piece of the puzzle. While most windows machines I’ve encountered seem to have Office installed, WindowsUpdate doesn’t cover it - OfficeUpdate does, but how many people know of that? - and run it on a regular basis?

It seems to be very modern to outsource thse days, and I’m trying to keep up. A while back I switched my RSS feeds from Wordpress Build-in services to FeedBurner. It was a win-win. Has a lot less load and feedburner does a lot of work to make sure the Feeds are in top-notch shape.

Yesterday another little change happended. All the website commenting were outsourced to Disqus. The signup procedure was a breze and they had a nice plugin available for wordpress making the switch a 5 second job. So far it seems to work well and once again the server hosting the website should have a smaller load in the future.

Firefox 3.0 has been released - though the website hasn’t been updated at the time of writing. Get it from the FTP-servers. After a few hours of use the new firefox seems faster and much less memory-hungry. So far I haven’t seen any issues. Go Get It.

It seems many developers get stuck in the same systems maintaining the same code for years and years. While it may be a common phenomenon there are a few things you can do as a developer to avoid being trapped in your own code forever.

First make things readable.

While your brain may be wired to a system of only using single character variable and function names or naming global variables after your cats, no one else will get the system. Try to make all names as logical as you possible can. Making it easy to read the code

There are some fundamental differences in how Microsoft and Apple does things. If you haven’t been aware of them before switching from a Windows based computer to a Mac, you’ll probably notice some of them pretty fast.

One of the first things I discovered is that things are more “binary” in the Mac world. If you have an external device it either works with the Mac or it doesn’t. There isn’t that middle ground from the windows world where it almost works, but not quite - or worse it works in even week numbers but not when the sun shine.