Archive for December 2003

Thanks to everyone who provided advice on buying a Mac—it provide incredibly helpful in making my selection. I placed my order this afternoon for a 15" 1 GHz PowerBook with a SuperDrive, backlit keyboard and 60 GB of Hard Disk space. I went with the minimum possible memory (256 MB) and plan to buy an extra 512 MB from Crucial (for less than half the price Apple charge) in a few weeks time.

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11:31 pm

XML highlights for PHP 5

XML in PHP5: An in-depth look into advanced XML features (via Keith) does exactly what it says on the tin. Here are the bits that caught my eye:

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11:44 pm

Dec. 21, 2003

Experiments with wide images in a variable width column. The most useful thing to come out of the recent spate of fixed vs liquid

# 3:51 am

Execute Javascript every time any page loads. XUL technique for building interesting browser extensions

# 3:53 am

The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing (via) Hiring tips from Joel back in 2000

# 8:35 pm

Journalistic jargon (via) Seeing as I work for a newspaper now, this site is indispensable

# 11:04 pm / journalism

Dec. 22, 2003

The WGET and CURL blog. This guy has no social conscience, at least when it comes to other people’s bandwidth

# 3:55 am

Antichristmas. Great Christmas joke

# 4:01 am

Dec. 23, 2003

Muppet character list. The hecklers are called Statler and Waldorf

# 12:48 am

Nielsen watch 2003

Jakob Nielsen’s Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003 make interesting reading this year, covering topics including undated content, incomprehensible thumbnails and overly specific forms. In previous years Jakob’s complaints tended to center around far more obvious problems such as horizontal scroll bars and fixed size fonts. Either the field of web usability has matured to the point where the common issues are less glaringly obvious or Jakob is running out of low-hanging fruit.

3:05 am

Dec. 24, 2003

DocIndexer (via) Full text search indexing for Windows files, powered by Lupy

# 12:54 am

Dec. 29, 2003

A belated Merry Christmas

I’m back to work after enjoying that most precious of things: a holiday without computers. Comment spam has been deleted, email spam has been saved in a special folder (for rapid training of bayesian classifiers in the future) and the few emails of actual importance have all been flagged for follow up. Oh, and my Mac’s shipping date has slipped to the 2nd of January. If haven’t received it by Macworld and Apple drop the price I’ll be understandably upset.

2:28 pm

Is planned obsolescence socially responsible? (via) All in the name of strengthening the economy

# 2:32 pm

Donate to Wikipedia (via) Now this is a cause worth supporting

# 2:40 pm

this email is: [ ] bloggable [x] ask first [ ] private. Great idea

# 2:46 pm

Newspapers US and Worldwide (via) That’s a lot of online news

# 2:52 pm

Learning Python, 2nd Edition (via) It’s finally finished

# 2:56 pm

Entries in Life: Nice Trojan. Another way of tricking people in to executing attachments

# 5:55 pm

Windows XP Box (via) A Win XP box in a Win XP box

# 6:21 pm

Javascript from Python

In a way I’m disappointed to see python-spidermonkey released. It’s a Python wrapper around the Mozilla project’s SpiderMonkey Javascript engine which allows Python scripts to execute Javascript code in a rock-solid, battle-tested embedded interpreter.

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11:47 pm

One-page C# intro (via) If you know Java, this shouldn’t take too long

# 11:50 pm