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I made the decision to wait sometime around April 2005. I started coding in late December.

Actually it was December 25. Xmas Day. And it was probably the most productive day I had all year (when it came to doing personal stuff). By the time I went to bed that night I had a working prototype that generated output that was actually useful.

It was so CPU-intensive that it was causing my PC to automatically switch off to stop the CPU suffering heat-damage (no, really – I had to give it an hour to cool down between test runs!), and it crashed a lot. But it worked.

I worked on it intermittently over the next few days, and made it more efficient and less crash-prone. But it still crashed, still used massive amounts of CPU power and still used massive amounts of RAM.

But in January, I released it anyway as version 0.1. The first few people to try it had problems, but minor fixes in 0.1.1 and 0.1.2 improved things considerably. Of course a 0.1 is hardly a finished product, and lots more changes were to come…

So – having made the decision to develop a tool, I needed to decide what platform I wanted to use. Having developed DVDFolks as an HyperText Application I decided that I didn’t want to go down that route again – but I did like writing an application using HTML and JavaScript. I like beign able to skip the ‘compile’ step before running what I create.

My favourite browser (Firefox) is primarily written using XML and JavaScript. So why not do the same thing?

Having made that decision, I was left with 2 options – develop the tool immediately as a Firefox extension (but that would require that all users of the tool used Firefox), or wait for Mozilla to develop XULRunner. XULRunner for Mozilla, is what .NET is for Microsoft – a ‘library’ of functionality that applications use as a foundation. For my as-yet-unnamed-tool, that primarily meant an XML processor, and file reading/writing functions. Although long-planned, XULRunner was (and still is to an extent) not a very high priority amongst core Mozilla coders.

So I waited.

So on the off-chance that Ford updated their website to show the new colours available on Foci, I had a look tonight. And found nothing on the UK website, but then I decided to check the website of Ford Germany. Assuming that ‘Ocean’ for Germany is the same as ‘Ocean’ for the UK I now know what colour my car is going to be!

From left in the picture below: 3D rendering of Focus in ‘Jeans Blue’ (the colour I ordered) from ford.co.uk, low-quality graphic from the dealer to show me what ‘Ocean Blue’ would look like, 3D rendering of Focus in ‘Ocean Blue’ from ford.de.

I’m still trying to decide if I like it or not – the 3D model is in a completely different shade of blue than the dealer graphic!

Apparently I should be able to take delivery on September 23rd.

Me Happy

Apparently I had 96,145 visitors to my site last month.

That means that the total number of visitors since I launched the site has now passed 500,000.

That’s a quite a lot of people.