Sonet Journal

I recently got in touch with a few more old friends, all of us had similar interest when we were younger and its interesting to see how we have grown up and pursuing the ideas and the influences now we are older.

Steven Von Kampen a great guy who had always been into music now a composer Steven Von Kampen.

Sueraya Shaheen a very talented photographer and pursued her dreams of image greatness: Sueraya Shaheen

Alex Newhall another photographer who is talented and now runs a artist agency Alex Newhall Management

Manou Marzban one of my oldest and dearest friends, now a marketing director at Microsoft. No website for Manou but you can check out his villa here Manou Marzban. I knew Manou when both of us were getting our feet wet in technology in the early 1990’s.

The above friends left an impression which I never forgot and I am glad I got back in touch with them.

Ed Merritt has reopened his blog which I am glad to see Ed Merritt

Now back to work, we are in the third phase now of Search and Go with building the news system and home page…

On Tuesday evening Opera Software the developers of the world fastest browser held it’s Opera Backstage event in London. Southbourne Internet had invites to attend and listen to Jon von Tetzchner the Director tell us about the new upgrades to Opera and some other good stuff. Jon was being joined by other speakers that included Jeremy Keith from Clear Left and Ajit Jaokar from Futuretext Publishing. Unfortunately due to unforeseen circumstances I didn’t make the event. I hear it went really well and Thomas Ford Opera’s Global PR sent me some of the points what was discussed at the event. The new upgrade to Opera 9 will be released in two weeks time, dubbed as Opera 9.1 it will feature the following:

Fraud Protection (anti-phishing)

A whole set of web developer tools integrated including:

Live CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) inspector
DOM inspector
view source
view live source (generated code)
cool colour picker/inspector: lets you hover over any colour on the screen and get the code for it.
windows resizer to common sizes for devices, mobile phones and pcs

That’s good news all around when you consider that IE7 with its anti-phishing tools and Firefox with it’s really neat developer tools and developer plug-ins have put themselves ahead of Opera, it now puts Opera on even ground with the other two. Hopefully, Opera will continue to build on this and start a momentum as a browser for choice. We have been using the browser since version 2 and still it’s the fastest full-scale web browser. At times it gets to be a chore and slows down site development time when you’re getting a site to be cross-browser friendly and various modules of the build keep breaking in the various browsers.