It’s been a long haul getting this site going. The project ran into several problems on the development side. Still a few outstanding bugs, but should be able to work through them. This is one site in a series of 22 total dining sites (22 other states).  There is still a fair amount of work to be done to the UI, so this should probably be considered a soft launch.

Dine Out Massachusetts is a dining guide offering listings of Massachusetts Restaurants   categorized by city and cuisine, featuring maps, directions, menu’s (for restaurants who participate) and user created restaurant reviews. I will probably be adding more functionality as time goes on.

Pop on over and take a look at dineoutmassachusetts.com !

Tonight I noticed that several of my sites with flash were getting the error message “Click to activate and use this control” while being viewed in Internet Explorer (all is fine with firefox, opera etc).

The problem stems from a recent Microsoft Update http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/912945/en-us This update has to do with the EOLA patent lawsuit that Microsoft recently lost.

As a work around I used the Unobtrusive Flash Object (UFO) from Bobby van der Sluis, replacing the standard macromedia object code.

This is going to start affecting A LOT of websites. As internet explorer users perform windows updates, sites that use flash will have this problem. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Finished my wife’s new personalized Easter Bunny Letter site tonight. Hopefully I will have enough time before the Easter holiday to properly SEO it. I have coded it out as a valid tableless layout. Actually, the site is sitting pretty good at # 3 #2 for the phrase “easter bunny letter” on Google. I am no where to be found on Yahoo! and MSN #1 on MSN.
This should be a nice addition to Sandi’s other site Letter From Santa.

Have you experienced slow performance with Photoshop CS2? I have a reasonable development machine at home, P4 3.0 ghz, 1gb ram, ATI 9550 256 mb etc, but when I installed CS2 months back it was so sluggish, I switched back to CS.

Today on a whim, I decided to do some searching and see if I could find a solution or workaround. After a few searches, I found a solution where you’d never think to look…. Adobe.com

The slowness of CS2 comes from certain video card’s drivers not properly implementing the 2D API.

Adobe recommends the following solution:

1. Choose Start > Control Panel > Display.

2. Click the Settings tab.

3.Click Advanced.

4. Click the Troubleshoot Tab.

5. Do one of the following:

- To disable hardware acceleration, move the Hardware acceleration slider to None.

- To reduce hardware acceleration, move the Hardware acceleration slider to a setting between None and Full.

(I only moved the harware acceleration back 1 notch on my system and that was enough.)

6. Click Apply and then click OK to accept the new setting and close the dialog box.

7. Restart Windows and Photoshop.

Now I am as speedy as I was with CS or even PS 7.

The coding for the my new directory has been completed. Now it’s time to do the personal trainer section. This should be fairly simple since I’m using the same code, just some pathing changes and setting up a new MySQL DB for it.