Month: August 2006

link preservative

Posted on | by Rick Hurst

I’ve cleared out a bit more of the remaining pages of the old site, just as a decluttering exercise. Nobody has complained so far of missing content (well in fact nobody has commented on anything at all so far, and there was me worried about having to deal with loads of comments.. hmm.. better check that they actually work!), but if you have found yourself on this site following a listing on google and you can’t find what you are looking for, even with the search, please let me know and i’ll try to retrieve it.

obsessing about a mobile web device again

Posted on | by Rick Hurst

once again, I have been obsessing about the idea of owning a mobile web device. I’m not sure what my business case is for owning one, other than the desire for something that can be carried around with me most of the time to use for email and full web browsing, smaller and lighter than a laptop and with better battery life than a laptop. The device needs:-

  • wifi
  • full featured DOM supporting web browser
  • decent battery life
  • small and light enough to not be noticeable when carried around in my bag (i’ve always got one with me, to carry various wires, adaptors, chargers, wet wipes, nappys etc. not quite a “manbag”, but close.)
  • at least 800 pixel width resolution
  • integrated qwerty keyboard

Only the nokia 770 comes close at the moment, but doesn’t have a qwerty keyboard. I keep seeing other devices crop up, such as sony’s forthcoming mylo, but the screen resolution lets that one down. I’m quite tempted by some of the clamshell smartphones, but I don’t want a phone that big, valuable and breakable.

wifi breakfast (or at least coffee) nirvana in Clifton

Posted on | by Rick Hurst

latte boston tea party

I have hatched a plan to satisfy both my urge for expensive coffee variations and the idea of wifi breakfast nirvana on park street in clifton, Bristol. Or near park street, as it seems that there aren’t actually many places to get breakfast on park street at 8.30. My plan is to do this once a week (because of time and money constraints)
Here are my criteria:-

  • On my route to work (or a slight diversion of)
  • Free Wifi (streetnet should cover most of the area, but in-house even better)
  • nice coffee
  • Somewhere to sit with a laptop preferably away from the gaze of passing pedestrians

Today I find myself in Boston Tea Party. Upstairs is a room with plenty of space, tables, sofas etc. Nice atmosphere – although a bit quiet and library like this time of the morning. Wifi wise I am currently connected to streetnet. I did notice a WEP protected network called BTP, with a much stronger signal than streetnet, but when I asked the staff for a password I was told to use streetnet, they didn’t admit that BTP might stand for Boston Tea Party, but I didn’t push it. Shame because for some reason the streetnet signal seems to vary and i’ve already had to reconnect once.

I won’t do any ratings because I need to try some other places first to compare it to, but it is definately a contender.

UPDATE: Actually, the streetnet connection in Boston Tea Party is very flaky – I wanted to correct my misspelling of “definately” in the last paragraph, but got booted out (of the wifi, not Boston Tea Party) for the third time. I’m now correcting this from work. The flakiness could possibly be because I was running over an ssh tunnel (too paranoid about transmitting my passwords on a public network), so I was authenticating in one browser, then using another web browser running through a web proxy on another browser, maybe it saw me as inactive and logged me off or something? Either way – park street cafe bars take notice – if you want my massive £2 a week business, get yourself some wifi for customer use 😉

JSON – JavaScript Object Notation

Posted on | by Rick Hurst

Another abbreviation(?)/buzzword that i’ve been hearing for months but I have only just understood what it is. From All in the Head (Drew Mclellan’s blog):-

if you’re not familiar, JavaScript Object Notation is a method of describing data structures such as arrays and objects and their contents in plain text. On receiving a chunk of JSON you can eval() it to recreate the data structure within your script

Read more about JSON here

CompositePack drawer overlap plone 2.5

Posted on | by Rick Hurst

I’m experiencing a problem where the Kupu drawer used to select content when in design mode on a compositepack page gets overlapped by elements from the underlying page. I thought it was something I had done with a custom skin I was building, but when I switch back to plone default skin, the problem still exists. I don’t think I have come across this before, so my conclusion at the moment is that this is something unique to Plone 2.5

I am seeing this on Firefox 1.5.0.6 (PC & mac) and IE6 PC. CompositePack 1.0 Final

screen shot here (Firefox)

If anyone has a fix for this please let me know!

UPDATE: Fixed

I have now fixed this (thanks Emyr!).

I applied the following to my style sheet:-

.kupu-drawer {

z-index: 3 !important;

}



#region-content .contentActions {

z-index: 1;

}

(the !important is only necessary because of a precedence thing somewhere along the line)

Trying Flock – as a blogging tool

Posted on | by Rick Hurst

This is just a mandatory “i’m just trying out another desktop blogging tool” post. I’ve just downloaded flock, mainly to see if the built in blogging tool is a suitable solution for OSX. So far so good – not sure whether this thing supposts categories, although I haven’t actually got any categories yet so…



edit: yes it does support categories.