Items in Oct, 2002
Filters: Year: 2002 × Month: Oct × Sorted by date
Lots of iCal links
I’m writing a simple events calendar system at the moment, and since I always seem to end up making things more complicated than they should actually be I’ve been investigating using the iCal standard as the file format for storing events (I need a flat-file format due to hosting requirements). I’m particularly interested in the XML flavour of iCal, although it seems to be a lot less popular than the semicolon deliminated original standard. Mainly for my own reference, here are the sites I’ve trawled through this afternoon:
[... 146 words]Mozilla small screen rendering
Yesterday I blogged Opera’s impressive looking small screen rendering technology. Now take a look at this (via Blogzilla). Daniel Glazman has created a Mozilla bookmarklet that does everything Opera’s implementation claims to achieve using a combination of a custom style sheet and the DOM, and the results are impressively similar to Opera’s demonstration. The difference?
[... 104 words]Blogrolled
Via Adrian Holovaty I discover Craig Saila has an excellent weblog, and is now pinging blo.gs whenever he updates. A welcome addition to my blogroll.
[... 36 words]Validation on the fly
Douglas Bowman’s weblog is making very interesting reading at the moment. Douglas is responsible for Wired’s exciting new design and since the launch has been updating with observations and lessons learnt from the new look. On Friday he described how changing a problem with a design element took less than 60 seconds (thanks to global CSS files), but the post that caught my attention was this one:
[... 266 words]Qube
Qube looks pretty cool—it’s an open source first person shooter engine (and simple deathmatch game) designed specifically for mod developers. The client runs on both Windows and Linux, but the game server is Linux/BSD only. Spotted via this article on the O’Reilly network.
[... 55 words]More CSS layouts
I’m not sure when it happened, but Opera.com has been redesigned (since the last time I checked the site). The new layout is done with valid XHTML and CSS but is decidedly tabular in appearance, demonstrating that using CSS does not (as some people have claimed) make it impossible to achieve the same kinds of layouts as table coders have been creating for years. It also degrades quite nicely in Netscape 4 (losing most of the layout but maintaining a crisp look and feel). In related news, Jeffrey Zeldman is currently redesigning The Daily Report with CSS (replacing his old transitional tables/CSS layout). No menu yet, but it displays in Netscape 4 almost exactly the same as Mozilla and IE.
[... 122 words]Advanced PHP resources
HarryF on the SitePoint forums has compiled a fantastic list of Advanced PHP Resources, with links to sites covering object orientation, general application design, n-tier layering and using PHP with XML.
[... 32 words]Terminal Services vs WinVNC
Joel Spolsky explains why Microsoft’s Terminal Services performs far better than the open source WinVNC. Stuart points out that simple economics can make VNC a far more viable option in many situations.
[... 46 words]Generating HTML with XQuery
Generating XML and HTML using XQuery (via More Like This). I had been confusing XQuery with XPath—it turns out XQuery is a fully featured scripting language which can be used to do all kinds of things with data from XML documents. The article explains how XQuery can be used to build a web photo gallery application and compares XSLT and XQuery using a Docbook transformation example.
[... 74 words]CD Zapping
CD Zapping: Take one CD, Microwave at full power for 5 seconds, and place on top of tesla coil. Enjoy!
Easy routing with Linux
I spent the last few days setting up a home network. I’m living in a student house with 4 other people and we recently shelled out for a 1 Mbit cable connection fron BlueYonder. I had never built a network before but neither had anyone else so the task of putting it all together fell on my shoulders.
[... 317 words]Dictionary of Linux commands
One for the bookmarks: O’Reilly’s Alphabetical Directory of Linux Commands. 379 commands complete with a description and list of command line options. Found via an advert on the Internet Bookmobile story (and I usually never click on ads).
[... 39 words]Lessons from the Bookmobile
I first read about the Internet Bookmobile last week on Aaron Swartz’ Weblog. Lessons from the Internet Bookmobile is a new article on the O’Reilly Network by Richard Koman, who spent the week preceeding the opening of the Supreme Court Eldred vs Ashcroft case travelling with the bookmobile as it made it’s way up from San Francisco to Washington, stopping off at schools and libraries along the way to demonstrate the importance of the public domain. The article discusses the potential effect cheap book printing technology combined with the internet and the public domain could have on schools, libraries and even commercial publishers:
[... 234 words]Tricking browsers and hiding styles
Eric Meyer on CSS: Tricking Browsers and Hiding Styles. This bonus chapter which was not included in the book explains the various techniques that can be used to hide CSS rules from browsers, including the high pass filter and the infamous voice-model hack. Eric has also published Picking a Rendering Mode, a comprehensive guide to DOCTYPE switching and the effect it has on modern browsers.
[... 67 words]50 XSLT tips
50 XSLT Tips. I particularly like Tip 13, whish shows how you can use a recursive template call to print things out multiple times (for example, 5 asterisks for something with a 5 star rating).
[... 36 words]contentEditable in Mozilla
ContentEditable for Mozilla is a hot topic at the moment. The main focus of the debate is this bug on Bugzilla, which gets pretty heated. Blogzilla has a good explanation of the principles behind the disagreement, while Scott Andrew makes an excellent case for copying IE’s implementation:
[... 111 words]Where PR flacks come from?
Dorothea Salo skillfully explains her theory of where soulless PR flacks come from.
[... 17 words]Mozilla prefetching
The Mozilla Link Prefetching FAQ (via Blogzilla). Prefetching is a browser mechanism, which utilizes browser idle time to download or prefetch documents that the user might visit in the near future
. Web page authors can turn on prefetching for their pages using a <link rel="prefetch"> or <link rel="next"> element (or the corresponding Link: headers).
Python e-mail features
Python 2.2.2 is out. It’s mostly bug fixes, but they have also included the latest version of the Python email package. I’ve been playing with Python’s email features recently as part of an experimental idea to import all of my mail (from various accounts) in to a mySQL database and build my own web mail / mail application program. Working with email in Python is beautfully simple, thanks to the aforementioned email package and the powerful pop3 and IMAP classes in the standard library.
[... 88 words]Scam the spammers
Here’s a fun new way to waste time on the internet: Scamming Nigerian spammers. This guy has a whole bunch of entertaining email exchanges with Nigerian scam artists, but the best has to be the Cthulu themed scam. Watch the Nigerian scam artists get slowly sucked in to a world of cults, demons and unspeakable horror.
[... 58 words]List o’ Links
Paul Freeman has a clever new feature on his blog: List o Links, a list of links that he wants to record without writing up a full blog entry. I’m tempted to borrow the idea (which originated with Anil Dash) but I’m slightly put off by the problem of integrating it with my existing blog archives. For the moment I think I’ll borrow Mark Pilgrim’s technique of occasionally posting “catch up” entries with a bunch of blog-worthy links.
[... 83 words]Google Answers uncovered
Information for Sale: My Experience With Google Answers is a fascinating insight in to the world of Google Answers:
[... 100 words]Wired Redesigns
Wired have redesigned, and now boast one of the snazziest CSS layouts on the web. The redesign is explained in A Site for Your Eyes, and has already drawn commentary from Jeffrey Zeldman and Mark Pilgrim (with plenty more certain to come). I think the title of Mark’s entry pretty much sums it up—this could well be the high profile redesign the web standards movement has been waiting for.
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