Entries in Apr, 2004
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CSS-Discuss Wiki Spam
The css-discuss wiki has pretty much looked after itself since its inception a year and a half ago, thanks to a small but active community of wiki gardeners. Unfortunately, recent months have seen a rise in the amount of SEO spam hitting the site. Spam gets deleted pretty quickly, but there’s always room for more help to provide a faster turnaround. If you run an aggregator and don’t mind spending a minute or so a day tending the wiki you can sign up for the RecentChanges RSS feed and help check over new changes as and when they are made. Your assistance will be greatly appreciated.
[... 112 words]Curious Javascript in .NET
I’ve never had the opportunity nor the inclination to do anything with .NET; at work we use open source tools for all of our web development, and I prefer open source tools for my own personal experiments as well. At any rate, the javascript:__doPostBack links I’ve seen on .NET powered sites such as Channel 9 and Orkut plain give me the willies.
Kansas City web developer meetup
The last one was fun, so we’re having another. This time we’re shooting for Thursday April 29th at around 8pm, probably at a venue in Kansas City. If you’re interested in coming along drop a note to myself or Adrian and we’ll add you to the impromptu mailing list.
[... 59 words]Mozilla 1.7 RC 1
There are some interesting tid-bits hidden away in the release notes for the new Mozilla 1.7 RC 1 release. The following in particular caught my eye:
[... 196 words]Python in Mathematics
Python in the Mathematics Curriculum by Kirby Urner is something of a sprawling masterpiece. It really comes in four parts: the first is a history of computer science in education, the second an appraisal of the impact of open source on education and the world at last, the third a dive in to the things that make Python so suitable for enhancing the mathematics curriculum and the fourth a discussion of how computer science and traditional mathematics are likely to play off against each other in the field of high school education.
[... 319 words]Fixing sequence problems in PostgreSQL
This one’s mainly for my own future reference. The following error message in PostgreSQL:
[... 77 words]AntiRSI for OS X
OK, so I have to admit I gave up on WorkRave after about two weeks—it got on my nerves. Onne Gorter just dropped me an email about his free AntiRSI program for OS X and I’ve decided to give it a go. It draws a pretty icon in the Dock with a live updated timer for how long until your next rest break, and the source code is freely available. Let’s see if this one lasts longer than WorkRave did.
[... 86 words]Bookmarklet request
Anyone know if it would be possible to create a bookmarklet that emulates an EyeDropper style application: as you move it around the page it shows you the hex colour code for the pixel directly under the mouse pointer? I’m pretty sure it can’t be done but I’d love to be proved wrong.
[... 54 words]McGraw Hill sold me out
Like everyone else on the internet, I get a fair amount of spam. I tend to keep my main work as clean as possible, while skipping over the spam in my lower-traffic personal account and cleaning it up every week or so.
[... 587 words]A myriad of markup systems
It’s hard to avoid the legions of custom markup systems out there these days. Every Wiki has it’s own syntactical quirks, while packages like Markdown, Textile, BBCode (in dozens of variants), reStructuredText offer easy ways of hooking markup conversion in to existing applications. When it comes to being totally over-implemented and infuratingly inconsistent, markup systems are rapidly catching up with template packages. Never one to miss out on an opportunity to reinvent the wheel, I’ve worked on several of each ;)
[... 614 words]Missed opportunity
Apple are missing out on a huge opportunity. I’ve bought 198 songs through the iTunes music store now, and iTunes has access to the other music that I’ve imported from my own CD collection. I want to discover new music—why doesn’t iTunes look at what I listen to, match it against buying habits tracked through the store and give me an Amazon style “people who like the music you listen to also liked...”. Privacy concerns could be avoided by having the recommendation feature off by default—I’d turn it on in a heart-beat.
[... 99 words]Glastonbury screw-up
I went last year, I went the year before, I’m pretty sure I went the year before that, but this year I’m staying home. The muppets running the online ordering system apparently decided that a couple of Windows 2000 servers could handle 130,000 ticket sales in 24 hours. They got hit by 2,000,000 hits in the first five minutes. Admitedly, that’s going to be tough for anything to handle (maybe it’s a job for Google’s super-platform) but after last year’s 23 hour sell out anyone could have told them this year was going to be a whole lot tougher.
[... 201 words]What is Google?
Via John Battelle, Rick Skrenta’s remarkable piece on what Google have actually built. They don’t just have the world’s best search engine, they have the world’s largest and most scalable platform for developing huge web-based applications.
[... 172 words]Personalisation? We’ve already got it
Vin Crosbie, a highly respected commentator on the online news industry, recently published his long awaited essay What Newspapers and Their Web Sites Must Do to Survive. It’s long but captivating and well researched; if you have any interest in the role of traditional newspapers on the web you should take the time to read it.
[... 350 words]Microsoft “get” blogging
Who would have thought a year ago that Microsoft would be the company that took corporate blogging to the next level? Say what you like about the company itself, you can’t fault the quality and quantity of bloggers coming out of Redmond at the moment. Yesterday I stumbled across this fascinating blog that provides an insight in to Microsoft’s recruitment techniques. If you’re looking for a job at a high-tech company you can’t afford not to read this—they already have a bunch of resume advice, tips on what to wear to interviews and posts on subjects such as employee referrals, international recriting, phone screening and more.
[... 266 words]Thanks a bundle, HP
I needed to scan a couple of signed documents at work, as a cheaper alternative to locating a fax machine. The office scanner is an HP scanjet 4570c. I plugged it in to the back of my PowerBook to see if it would work straight away, as pretty much everything else I’ve plugged in has. It didn’t. Fair enough, I can’t expect Apple to pre-install drivers for everything. So I headed over to HP’s site to grab the necessary software.
[... 415 words]1GB of webmail from Google
Provided this story about a new 1 GB webmail service from Google isn’t a lame early April fool, I’m really psyched about it. A decent amount of space combined with Google’s search technology could really help me keep up to date with my email. Just off the top of my head, here’s my ideal hosted webmail feature list:
[... 245 words]