We were moaning about the lack of CSS bug fixes in beta 1 of IE 7 at work the other day. Reading the IE blog on msdn it’s nice to see that they have actually fixed the majority of CSS bugs, but these will only be fixed in beta 2 for some reason. Lets just hope everyone upgrades.
archive for July, 2005
Dreamhost are doing a crazy discount deal at the moment where you get $110 off any hosting plan. So, if you sign up for their “Crazy Domain Insane” deal for $120/year, you pay…$10! For that 10 bucks you even get a free domain, shell access and all the cgi/php/perl stuff you’ll ever need. I signed up and registered ollyjackson.com, just for the sake of it :).
Wow, Michael Palin has all of his travel books available on his website to read, for free. I’m currently reading (a hardcopy) of Himalya and it’s a very pleasant book, factual yet entertaining aswell.
Spent some time at work tearing my hair out today as IE was rendering a page bizzarely. I eventually tracked it down to the fact that the very first line in the HTML was not the DOCTYPE definition. If IE doesn’t see this first I think it reverts to “quirks” mode AKA “render stuff where every I want” mode. Handy to know.
I was reading defense tech the other day and noticed this in an article:
…of the 12,500 targets in the SIOP at that time, one of them was slated to be hit by 69 consecutive nuclear weapons.
69!? for one target! How on earth did they work that out?
…the highest kill probability for the United States’ best weapon against deeply buried, sprawling, hardened command posts was less than 5%. Blair got out a calculator, assumed a kill probability of 4% for one weapon, and started multiplying. To attain a 50% confidence in destroying the target required 17 weapons. When Blair got up to 69 weapons, the “kill probability” had reached 94%.
wow, that’s some real smart thinking!
Last Sunday we had a “tourist day” with my parents, away from the shops. We went along to the Bo’ness & Kinneil Railway, unsurprisingly, in Bo’ness. My Dad is a bit of a train fan and I think I’ve still got some of it in my blood :). Of course, I wanted to a be a train driver when I was small. Not sure when that phase ended…
Anyway, we rode the train along the line to to Birkhill where the clay mine is. The mine was as good, possibly better than the train journey. There are miles of big tunnels to explore and we were given a tour around just a small section. Our family and especially my Dad as a Director of the NPHT have become quite the mine-tour connoisseurs and we all thought this one was a beauty. The guy who led us around knew his stuff and it was well laid-out and timed well. Just long enough to feel like you’re not getting ripped-off and not too long so you get bored. There’s a gallery up in the pictures section of the days sights. Taking photos underground is always tricky but I tried with a couple.
On Friday night Kerry and I met my parents, who were up for the weekend, at Fishers down on The Shore at Leith. Now, I’m not normally a sea food fan but hey, you gotta try something different now and again. I had a wee haggis thing to start and then spicy grilled monkfish with pitta bread salad. The starter was tasty but very small, the monkfish was gorgeous. I’ve never had it before but I’d certainly have it again. To finish off I had a lemon and ricotta cheesecake which was obviously home made and great after the spicy monkfish.
Saturday was shopping day and we hit the sales early. I got a couple of shirts in Next, some jeans in H&M and Kerry bought me a denim jacket in Gap. We were pretty knackered by lunch time so we went for lunch in No 28 Charlotte Square, a National Trust property that has a bistro and restaurant. Out the back, in between Charlotte Square and Princes Street it also has a secluded courtyard with tables. This was great to get a break from the hustle and bustle of the sales. It wasn’t bad value either. You could get soup and a sandwich or panini for about £6. We did a bit of non-clothes shopping in the afternoon and lurked around in waterstones before getting a taxi over to the south side and sitting around in Assembly for a bit. We then went to Khushi’s for Dinner which was aces and certainly an experience. The atmosphere is very friendly, the food is great, service was quick and it’s great value. Definitely recommended.
$ cd Afghanistan
$ ls
bin Taliban
$ rm Taliban
rm: Taliban is a directory
$ cd Taliban
$ ls
soldiers
$ rm soldiers
$ cd ..
$ rmdir Taliban
rmdir: directory "Taliban": Directory not empty
$ cd Taliban
$ ls -a
. .. .insurgents
$ chown -R USA .*
chown: .insurgents: Not owner
$ cd ..
$ su
Password: *******
# mv Taliban /tmp
# exit
The new version of Windows will be called Windows – Vista. Hrm, Microsoft suck at the naming game.
Browsing through delicious popular links tonight I spotted this new forum software “Vanilla” which looks very, very nice. It’s very Apple inspired in design and looks to be on the same design-train (all aboard) as the chaps at 37 signals. It’s got some super neat features. Such as, in your profile page, instead of having a million different input fields for various obscure IM formats they just have a “Label & Value” system. You write a label and then assign it a value e.g. “Milk In My Tea? – Yes Please!” or “Favourite Colour – Yellow”. They’re a bit like Tags for blog posts, you can dream up any Labels you like. Vanilla in general seems a nicely thought out piece of software. Hopefully something will crop up that I can install it for :).
So I did that Flickr thing I was muttering about. The pictures area now has a flickr section which shows my photo sets from flickr. I’ve only got one up there at the moment but it’s pretty neat.
Here you go:
- crotch shot – err, ok
- selkirk common riding and selkirk common riding 2005 – woo, popular
- drunk – me? never!
(If you’re wondering what the heck these are, click below)
read on…
Jed pointed out yesterday that Serenity, the Firefly feature film, is premiering at the Edinburgh Film Festival. This is a good thing, I would even go so far as saying this was a very shiny thing. Tickets went on sale today and the Film Festival website descended into a steaming puddle of slag under the weight of Firefly fans trying to get tickets. As a last resort I zoomed along to the Film House box office to be granted with a huge queue and lots of anal film fans buying 20+ tickets very slowly. Not good. I spotted both Pete and Erin in the queue. Erin was cheeky enough to pretend I was there to meet her so I “joined her in the queue” (pushed in). I completely ran out of time though, so I stuffed some cash into Erin’s hand and told her to get as many tickets as possible while I ran back up the road to work. She texted me in the afternoon to say she’d managed to get me three tickets for the Wednesday showing which is not the premiere-premiere showing, but still a kind of premier. Winnar!
Updates: Glad to see that Matthew and Neil managed to get some. Also, they’ve aranged two more showings due to the extreme demand!
Even More Updates: The Wednesday extra showing apparently sold out in ten minutes 🙂 Hope you guys grabbed some tickest. I also heard from Brad that if you were trying the website on the Friday some bookings actually went through so check your bank statement.
Great site devoted to Crates & Barrels in games. You won’t “get this” unless you’re a gaming geek, sorry.
API‘s are great. The more web services we have the better the Internet gets in my opinion. I’ve been playing with the Flickr API of late and it’s pretty neat. I like having a personal gallery on cyber-junky but then I like uploading stuff to flickr and playing the tag game and the sense of community you get. The best of both worlds would be for me to integrate anything I upload to flickr into my gallery here. Which doesn’t look too hard with the commands available. It also uses a REST interface which I’m liking more and more. It’s so much easier to debug and test stuff with.
“The Inside” is a new Fox drama created by Tim Minear & Howard Gordon who between them have directed and written for Angel, Firefly, X-Files, 24 and, er, Lois & Clark. Anyone involved in Firefly, 24 & X-Files gets my vote and the first episode is pretty good as first episodes go. The series revolves around a small team inside the FBI’s serious crimes division. The people that track serial killers, murderers and profile psychos, that kind of thing. It’s sort of a mix between CSI, Without A Trace, Seven, Silence Of The Lambs & X-Files with a dash of the Joss Whedon-esque humour thrown in. Of course, as it’s a decent Fox show not getting multi-trillion digit viewing figures they’re already threatening to cancel it. It’ll probably never see the light of day on UK terrestrial so you’ll just have to use the Internet’s various resources.
It’s all pretty horrendous although compared to Madrid we got off lightly. Also, when put in the context of what happen every day in Iraq, this is nothing. Also, I’m glad to see that Alex is alright.
Nice read over on Wired by William Gibson about the remix, cut ‘n’ paste creative culture of today.
It is shiny.
It also has a much better camera (2 megapixel!) than my old one, which will handy for super quick snaps about town.
Just a quick one. Technorati, blog indexer extraordinaire had a redesign a couple of weeks ago. It’s ok, more clutter than their old one, but man do they love those curvy boxes. They’re everywhere!
I’ve had an evening of wading through the Google Maps API. It’s good stuff though and I’ve managed to convert my Travel Data map and the map on Google Sightseeing over to the “official” method. The new methods and objects allow for much easier expansion and flexibility. Plus, now that there is an actual API the maps no longer break whenever Google update their code.
Kerry and I did a bit of the Make Poverty History march on Saturday and then mooched around the meadows for a bit, soaking up the atmosphere. It did feel good to part of something big, the amount of people involved was huge. When we got back to the Meadows (thinking we were the last to go around) there were still five huge queues of people waiting just to start off! I took lots of photos, which are available to view in pictures. We didn’t see any of the “trouble”. Although when we were waiting for the bus home, five police vans screamed past us towards Buccleuch street, probably something to do with this.