Not Very Flash

After mentioning quite a lot about the Pet Shop Boys recently, I was rather disappointed to find out that their new web site (which I won’t link to, for reasons which will become clear) has been “redesigned” by some non-standards-aware design company and requires Flash 8 to work. Not “requires Flash 8 for some parts of it”, but “requires Flash 8 for all of it“.

Which means that anyone using Linux can’t see anything on the site at all, because Flash 8 isn’t available for Linux; it will also fail to work in many handheld devices, mobile phones and so on, too Making the entire site dependent on a technology which is (a) proprietary and (b) not available for all platforms is short-sighted. Not impressed. I’ve emailed the design company in question to say as much…

And in other news, at work in the last few days I’ve been salvaging our database server which went tits up on Tuesday: I’ve been busily migrating all the database services to other machines, temporarily, prior to getting a new database server. I’ve got a quote open with our supplier for a twin dual-core Opteron system, Which Might Be Rather Nice. Migrating databases from MySQL 3.23 and PostgreSQL 7.2 (from Debian ‘Woody’) to MySQL 5 and PostgreSQL 8.1 (from Debian Sarge’s backports) is a big upgrade and takes some care. Hopefully not too much will break… My first impression of PostgreSQL 8.1, by the way, is that it is much friendlier and has a far superior query optimizer, meaning that queries which used to take a few seconds now return almost instantly.

So, it’s England v Ecuador on Sunday in the World Cup Last 16, and a win will result in a Quarter Final game against Portugal or Holland the following Saturday … go us!