Month: January 2004
IT giants criticised for running third world sweatshops
New York to San Francisco mile Marker photos
A picture for each mile of the way. (Requires Flash)
[Listening to: Delicate – Damian Rice – O (0:-1)]
middle aged shredders
now being a spring chicken of merely 30, I object to the term "middle aged" but this site for 30/40 something skateboarders is more relevant to me than friends re-united.
There is a good guide to some of the old skool concrete parks I used to frequent in the late 80’s/ early 90’s, including playing place near Truro and Market Harborough. Browsing through some of the pages and seeing pictures of those parks gives me warm feelings of nostalgia….
I also liked one of the comments somewhere in there "A cheaper mid life crisis than a ferrari"
People never could get their heads around the concept of grown men on skateboards. Even at the age of eighteen I used to frequently get the remark "aren’t you too old to be riding around on a skateboard?". As a sport it certainly has an image of being for younger people. Now compare this to golf or football – how often do you hear footballers being criticised for being too old to be chasing a ball round a field or a skiier too old to be riding round on a pair of skis? Exactly how are skiing and snowboarding so different to skating?
come back broadband I didn’t mean it
only 4 days until I get broadband reinstalled and frankly I can’t wait. It just goes to show that after me reverting back to dial up back in August, it felt like a step back to the stone ages. Not so much the lack of speed, but the pure tedium of having to dial up…
[Listening to: Tramp – Buddy Guy – (6:47)]
carphone warehouse product spec blues
Yesterday my mobile phone died. I was in one of those weird situations where i could hear the other person but they couldn’t hear me and they were getting spooked out.
Anyway, i’m not much of a mobile phone user – I might carry it everywhere with me and feel insecure without it but I hardly ever use it, so I went over the carphone warehouse website to see what clearance bargains they have. I picked a couple costing less than £50 and went to have a look at their technical specs and it drove me round the bend, because the categories don’t match for each phone making it difficult to compare them.
For example, where one phone might have something like:-
Triband: yes
The other one would have something like
Triband: dualband
And another might have
Dualband:yes
and another one the category was missing altogether leaving you to guess whether they left it out or just presume they mean no….
I wonder whether they deliberately leave out the categories where the features don’t exist so that the listing doesn’t look too negative or whether they made the system so flexible that it is almost impossible to have any consistency.
If I was building it I would have a standard set of categories which would be listed against every phone and if a new category was added it would automatically be listed against all phones – this obviously makes more work for the administrator who then has to go through and update the status of the new category against all the old phones.
This has to be the most boring post i’ve ever put on this site.
This is definately the most boring post I have ever written
[Listening to: Rest Your Saddle – Alvin Youngblood Hart – (2:41)]
The logical progression to asp.net
I’ve been doing some more asp.net stuff recently as it seems the logical technology to concentrate on having made a living using asp for the past 4 years. As far as adoption goes, i’ve seen it creeping into commercial use over the last couple of years and it seems to have made it onto most commercial hosts now too, so those two hurdles are falling out of the way.
This leaves just one hurdle: asp.net is not cross platform, it can only be hosted on a Microsoft server. So am I cutting myself out of the market? In theory yes, in practice no. I remember a similar dilema when I started doing asp stuff – shouldn’t I concentrate on php instead? I took the precaution of learning the basics of php and mySQL just in case. Over 4 years working in a commercial environment no-one ever asked us for something written in php.
My situation is the similar now – I have improved my knowledge of php sufficiently that I can handle commercial php projects when they land on my desk, but more commercial interest seems to be coming in for asp.net stuff.
Frankly I can’t wait – php seems like a toy when you compare it to the power of asp.net. This statement i’m sure will wind up thousands of php users the world over, but I stand by it as a user of both technologies. As with linux versus microsoft arguments I refuse to let prejudice obscure the facts.
Oh and then there’s that political slashdot ranting teenybopper anti-MS thing. Even though I like, use, and see the benefits of open source I would be a hypocrite to slag off Microsoft, whose products I have used virtually every day for over a decade, the past five of which earning me a living….
There, i’ve said it – I sold my soul to bill gates!
[Listening to: If I Had Possession Over Judgement Day – Robert Johnson – (2:37)]
trouble logging into bloglines
after upgrading to mozilla 1.6 I had trouble logging into bloglines, I emailed support and they suggested logging out by browsing to http://www.bloglines.com/logout and trying it again. it worked. cheers mate.
MP3 player with built in wifi and FM transmitter
The Aireo. I doubt it will be sold in the UK as "personal" FM transmitters are illegal in this country unfortunately (yep even the iTrip). It also only has a 1.5gb hard drive.
The Behaviour Layer
Article over at Digital Web Magazine discussing the "Behaviour Layer" of a website.
In summary, a typical web page has three layers: Content, Presentation and Behaviour. In this context, XHTML is the content Layer, CSS is the presentation layer and Javascript is the behaviour layer. The article argues that it is important that the site functions with various combinations of these e.g (content + presentation + behaviour), (content + presentation) or (content + behaviour). Essential behaviour such as form validation that has been added client-side using Javascript should also be replicated server-side ("belt and braces")..