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Skype Annoyances

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Ok Skype, I finally caved in and installed your poxy app. Thing is though, you also allow calls to non-Skype numbers so I’d really appreciate it if you allowed it to be set as the default application to open href="tel:" links. Y’know, RFC 3966? Because believe it or not, some people still use those old-fashioned telephone numbers.

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Localhost slowdown: cracking poor performance in TortoiseSVN and Zend Server

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Continuing from my previous post on troubleshooting SVN setup on Windows, I’ve recently encountered (and solved) quite a serious performance hit that’s been affecting my main development machine.

Since I spend a lot of time on the move, I do most of my development on my laptop, a Dell Latitude D430. It’s a fantastic little machine, but suffers from a storage bottleneck due to the PATA interface and 1.8″ disk, exacerbated by the requirements of a development environment – a web server, database server, IDE and SVN server & client place a lot of demands on the storage subsystem.

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WordPress Multisite table hell

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With the release of WordPress 3.0, the multisite functionality of WPMU was rolled into the main WordPress codebase. Before this, I hadn’t done any work with WPMU, so I was utterly dumbfounded to discover that when adding a new site to a WordPress network, WordPress adds another set of tables for each blog. That’s right. Rather than doing what you or I would do – adding a blog_id field to the existing tables – it creates an unwieldy mess of tables. As an example, one site I’ve been developing currently has 32 blogs, which all together add up to an astonishing 318 tables.

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On Interfaces, Plugins and the finer points of Application Design

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I’ve been thinking a lot about interface design recently. Around client projects, I’ve been working on a premium WordPress theme called Bauhaus, which I’ll shortly be releasing on ThemeForest. I’ve spent a lot of time wrangling options in the WordPress admin interface, done a lot of research across the web and I’ve come to a startling conclusion: a lot of people are doing interface design wrong.

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