Some of my avid blog readers were a bit confused when adding comments - it's not obvious how to format urls, images, etc.

So - the first step was to add a live preview! It should at least show you what your comment will look like before you post it.

The next step will be to add some buttons to insert the codes for you - around any selection. For now though, the supported UBB codes are:

[b][/b] - bold, [i][/i] - italics, [u][/u] - underline
[list][/list] - for lists, which must surround [*][*/] list items
[center][/center] - to center align
[url=][/url] or [url][/url] - hyperlinks
[img][/img] - to link images
[code][/code] - for preformatted source code
[quote][/quote] - for quotations

I haven't tried all of these, so feedback is welcome (Will).

Another extension:

• RSS Subscription - this one should be built in.

I've also finally found a theme I like:

• Smoothie (AERO)

I thought I'd dig out my Virtual Boy a few days ago. I thought the kids might be interested to have a go on something a bit different to the Wii. Unfortunately, one of the displays had started playing up which spoilt the effect somewhat. A quick bit of research latter and it turns out that the trick is to take the display out, stick it in the oven for a couple of minutes, and then rub your finger on it for a bit. Book.

Except getting the thing open is a bit tricky. The security screws holding the unit together need something called a gamebit. I found one on ebay and got ready to go, but some of the screws are so deeply set that the gamebit wouldn't reach them! So I had to dremel the hex section to make it circular and cut a slot in the end for a screwdriver. Eventually the case was opened and the offending display was removed. Two minutes in the oven later, a bit of rubbing and we're back in business!

The kid's interest lasted about 30 seconds.

How on earth did they ever convince John Malkovich, Colm Meaney and Steve Buscemi to be in this film? Even John Cusak should have avoided it. Still, it's one of those films I can't help watching every time it's on - along with Starship Troopers...

I've found two more chromium extensions which I'm finding useful:

• csscan which is an ultra simple CSS inspector.
• Wayback Machine for single button access to the internet archive website when you get a 404.

I've also found a RSS feed for the latest chromium extensions.

I've been forcing myself to use Chromium recently - it seems much faster and less bloated than Firefox, but it still lacks some features that I really would rather not do without - namely, a vertical tab bar and icons only on the bookmarks bar. Most other things can be got round more or less, and I do love the way you can add and remove extensions on the fly.

So far I'm running with:

• AdThwart
• Extensions Button
• FlashBlock
• Font Size Increase and Font Size Decrease (to do text only zoom)
• MK Undo Close Tab
• XMarks Bookmarks Sync

Vertical tabs are in development apparently...

So Blogger decided to stop supporting FTP publish blogs, leaving me a bit stuck. I had a play with Wordpress but it didn't seem to be very easy to customize, and doesn't support arbitrary scripts.

So I decided to roll my own in perl. It should publish a valid RSS feed (please accept my apologies for anyone who received multiple updates during development!) and supports comments with via logging in to a local account. I had a look at some code to implement OpenID, etc. but it all looked a bit too tricky...

We've been using Bugzilla at work for a while now and it does it's job reasonably well. It works even better as an SSB (created with Fluid).

However, it does have a couple of small niggles - for some reason the columns in the search results are truncated, and you can only click the defect number to visit the defect. Luckily both of these can be fixed easily with some Userscripts: Click Row and Expand Columns.