Do mac laptops still have longer battery life than PC equivalents (now Intel versions of both are available)? Does OS X use less power than the various versions of Windows, or does it depend on what software is running? I find running Parallels on my apple laptop, to use Windows XP, drains the battery pretty quickly - probably due to running 2 operating systems on one machine.

With a quick search, i found a comparison of various Unix operating systems, and Windows XP - on the same hardware - here. It’s not that thorough an article - but interestingly Windows uses less power. I wouldn’t be surprised if OSX (Leopard) with all it’s fancy flying windows uses more than XP (SP2), but i’ve not really used Vista. XP can appear to work more quickly if you switch off all the visual effects, and probably uses less power without them. Some testing required, though not much time for that at the moment.

I’m sure someone out there will be comparing this soon, and maybe we’ll all be optimising our code to reduce power consumption in the future

We’re currently looking for 2 experienced freelancers, a .NET/MSSQL Server specialist and a PHP/MySQL specialist. For more details, see This page.

Long term clients of ours Manners Mcdade commissioned a reworking of their old website in a more modern content management system.

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I had an unusual experience in the summer while visiting the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth. My wife had some problems walking long distances, and we both wanted to look round the aquarium, so we asked the reception on the off chance if they had a wheelchair we could borrow. They did, and next thing i knew, i was pushing my wife round to see lots of different fishes.

The experience made sense of some of the user accessibility issues we deal with day to day on the web and how important it is to get it right. If a visitor to a website can’t easily get to the content with or without a virtual wheelchair (aka screen reader), we’re not doing our jobs properly. If the buttons and links can’t be reached from the ‘wheelchair’, the visitor might miss important parts of the website.

We also visited the Lost Gardens of Heligan during the summer, and again borrowed a wheelchair to help with the amount of walking. Unlike the aquarium, there were parts of the garden we couldn’t access with the wheelchair. I suppose the Victorian designers had other things on their minds.

We’ve not afraid of embracing new technologies at Loopo, and right now this seems to have reached fever pitch. The time was ripe to try some Python development, and we’re now running both Plone and Django projects back to back.
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Loopo is pleased to announce we’ll be working with EMI Classics to improve and extend their website. We’ll be making a number of changes to the existing website, and also doing some back office integration to allow streamlining of the release process.

We’re very pleased to welcome Triarchy Press as a new client.

Over the next few months, we’ll be building an exciting new website for Triarchy, which should launch in early 2008. The new site will feature an online bookshop, community features such as blogging, tagging and commenting on publications, and a whole load more besides.

More news, as we have it!

Fred and I spent two very enjoyable days at the XP Day conference, last week. As you might guess from its name, XP Day started out as a very specialised event for the Extreme Programming community, but over 6 years it has blossomed into a convention for all things Agile - and a very good one at that.

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In order to create a Rules Engine to fit our needs, some planning was needed. The first thing to do was to read up on rules engines in general - Wikipedia provided some answers. Their description of Forward Chaining sounded like what we wanted. It’s basically just a list of IF condition then action END IF statements that gets executed in sequence, although we opted to be able to run each rule as a IF condition then actions else otheractions END IF.

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We rather like our TRAC system. It’s simple, loads really fast, and doesn’t confuse our clients (too much).

Since migrating it to our new server, we’ve been able to play around with the functionality a little more. First, we looked for a way to have a more integrated login feature - something a bit nicer for the clients than the ugly old “challenge/response” box.We found the AccountManager pluginon Trac Hacks, which did the job extremely well.(Here’s how the login page looks now).
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