Matthew has written a great little page on why Internet Explorer sucks. He’s basically just used a couple of examples to demonstrate the failings of the handling of CSS stylesheets and PNG images in Internet Explorer.
Why don’t you have a look and see for yourself 🙂
(Disclaimer: site may cause offense to those using Internet Explorer. No responsibility is taken for this, although please do send me flame mails about it so I can point and laugh).
Someone posted this link today on one of the blogs that I read: Create your own Dan Brown novel!
It generates the summary of a Dan Brown novel for you, and as the site says “each one as original and well thought out as a real Dan Brown best-seller”.
Oh the fun…
I’ve noticed a new “web trend” recently. People have discovered the <ABBR> HTML tag. It allows you to explain acronyms (as I did with HTML in the previous sentence; if you have Internet Explorer it won’t show up but it does in Firefox and other browsers. Hover your mouse pointer over it to see).
I was thinking today, on one of my friends’ blogs, it has the following text:
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Great. If you don’t know what “RSS” or “URI” means, you’ll be able to find out just by hovering your mouse over it. But surely, if someone didn’t know what “RSS” meant, finding out that it meant “Really Simple Syndication” wouldn’t help AT ALL? The same with URI. “Uniform Resource Identifier”? What on earth is that?!
Now, there are times when the <ABBR> tag will be handy. For example, when I’m writing an article sometimes I define an acronym at the top and use it throughout the article. Someone reading it might forget what I’d defined the acronym to be — I could use the tag so people didn’t have to scroll up to the top to find out what it meant. But using it for acronyms which don’t have an intuitive meaning in the context in which they are viewed isn’t helpful at all.
So, my plea to web developers everywhere is — please don’t use gimmicks like <ABBR> when it’s not necessary! I know that I’ve been guilty of doing it in the past, mainly because I think it’s cool 😉 But don’t use it when it’s unnecessary, because it doesn’t add any value to your pages whatsoever…
Firstly, I’d like to apologise for a slightly later “The Weekend” post! I meant to do it yesterday but I was rather busy. Anyway.
What did I get up to at the weekend? Well, on Friday evening Foz came up and we went to the “What?” bar. There was a hip-hop / breaks / dnb night on… it was a good evening! Philippa, Steve and Karen joined us as well. Afterwards, Foz and I dropped into Picasso’s to meet up with Deano, who is the manager of MyDJSpace.
On Saturday morning, Philippa and I went shopping: we had agreed to do lunch for the 42 weekend away (42 is the youth group at Fordham). It went well – we had plenty of time, and I think everyone enjoyed it! In the afternoon I didn’t do very much, and then in the evening KevvyB came round. We watched “Doctor Who”, and then went out to Waffles for a drink. Despite the pouring rain, it was an enjoyable evening!
On Sunday, in the morning we went to Fordham as per usual. Then in the afternoon we went onto campus to meet up with Alex and Chris J to practice a sketch we’re doing next Saturday. Afterwards, I went round to Chris J’s for a while, and then we met up with Alex and Matthew and went into town to watch “Mission: Impossible 3”.
MI:3 was actually pretty good. I think if you liked the previous two you’ll definitely like this one. I don’t know whether I’d buy it on DVD, but it’s certainly worth watching at the cinema if you like “action” type films.
While I’m on the subject of reviewing, I mentioned that my copy of “Best Kept Secrets” by Lamb arrived last week. I’d previously heard ‘Gorecki’, ‘Gabriel’ and ‘Angelica’ by them and it was interesting to find out what their other stuff sounded like. It’s quite diverse – some of their stuff is quite experimental and minimal, whereas other tracks are really melodic and more uplifting. To be honest, I don’t actually know how I’d be able to describe the album because their style isn’t like anyone else’s that I’ve heard. But it’s definitely good. I’d recommend it, but you’d probably have to be into more electronic music to appreciate it. Definitely an album which bears repeat listening.
Right, that’s it for the time being. I’m off!
I’ve done a new breaks mix 🙂 It starts off kind of funky and then gets all Nu-Skool towards the end. It’s even got an old-skool sounding kind of garagey track in there (see if you can spot it…)
You can download the MP3 from here (about 55MB, 128kbps, 60:34 minutes long).
Tracklist is here:
01. Locust – Plague
02. DJ Icey – Form & Function
03. DJ Isy vs DJ Rasco – Bad Beats (Future Funk Squad Remix)
04. Cut & Run – Loneliness
05. Baobinga vs Pablo Beatz – Together
06. Far too Loud vs Specimen A – Soldiers At War
07. DJ Icey – One Foot Skank (Autobots Remix)
08. Magnet Men – Square Hole
09. D-Ranged – Ambitions of a Ghost
10. Ctrl Z vs Screwface – Kung Fu Riddim
11. CNM – Outta Control
12. Autobots vs Screwface – Burn
13. Stormtrooperz – Coming Back (D-Ranged Remix)
Enjoy! Any feedback is appreciated, please feel free to leave a comment if you’ve downloaded the mix 🙂
This is the only day of the year I can make this joke, so I have to do it:
may the 4th be with you!
I’ve just read a great article on Linux (sort of). You’ll probably like it even if you don’t use Linux — it’s not at all techy. But be sure to turn your sense of humour on before visiting the website (if you’re a linux fanboy, anyway).
If you want to be entertained, read the article, it’s hilarious.
If you want to be scared, read the comments (how anyone could take that article seriously I do not know — I’m just hoping it’s mostly stereotypical Americans who don’t have a sarcasm detector installed…)
Anyway. Speaking of Linux — I spent some time messing around with FreeBSD last night. I installed phpMyAdmin (a fairly painless process using the ports system), as well as making a local copy of this website. I do like ports, it’s similar to Gentoo’s portage system — works by downloading the source code and compiling locally. I haven’t managed to find a dependency problem yet!
What did I get up to this weekend then? Well. I didn’t do very much on Friday night – I was shattered after a week at work! It was a particularly busy week last week. Well, I don’t know, maybe not so busy but very tiring for some reason. Anyway. Saturday morning I just pottered around doing various bits and pieces, as well as watching Futurama and some of Family Guy season 4 (which arrived last week).
In the afternoon I went to Asda (woo!), and then met up with Philippa for dinner. We had a take-away from the Kismet Balti house on North Hill (very nice, large portions, and very reasonably priced), and then spent the evening in not doing a whole lot. Sunday morning we went to Fordham as per, and then afterwards headed round to Philippa’s (and Karen and Steve’s) to watch all three Lord of the Rings films – the extended editions. We started just after lunch at about 2:00 PM, and we eventually finished at about 2:15 AM (we did take breaks in between the films). I did enjoy the experience but I have to say – it’s not something I’d want to repeat very often! I’m very glad I had Monday to recover, although I still feel a bit tired…
Yesterday, after lunch Philippa and I went back to my place for a few odds and ends, and then we went for a walk, then back to Philippa’s / Steve & Karen’s for dinner. All in all, not a particularly eventful weekend!
Having seen Steve’s PVR setup, I’m thinking about getting something similar. I was going to build one a while back with Freevo (an open-source Linux PVR), but actually I think my old computer’s fan is so loud that it would detract from whatever it is that you’re trying to watch. Currently the things on my wish list include:
All these things I want… unfortunately no money at the moment! Ah well, such is life.
One thing I don’t want anymore is “Best Kept Secrets” by Lamb (which is a “best of” album, 1994-2004). I’ve got quite into their stuff recently, and wanted to buy the “Best of” so I wouldn’t have to buy all four of their individual albums. It’s on order from Amazon and should arrive tomorrow or Thursday. I shall post up a review in due course, but I’m looking forward to listening to it 🙂
The past couple of evenings have been pretty good. Tuesday evening we had our Christianity Explored course. Philippa and I (well, it as mainly Phil actually) made a Haddock dish with a sort of pesto and yoghurt sauce. The haddock had to be skinned beforehand (according to the recipe), and we didn’t know how to skin haddock (doh!) but we got there in the end and despite looking a bit messy it tasted alright!
Yesterday evening we went over to Matthew’s house to celebrate Matthew and Ellie’s engagement. There were quite a lot of people there… I spent quite a bit of time chatting to Chris J, I haven’t spoken to him in a while. Actually when I say “chatting”, I really mean “alternating between quoting Spaceballs and other random films / TV programs”. But still. It was a really enjoyable evening, good to catch up with some people I haven’t seen in a while, as well as see a lot of the regulars 🙂
And the best of luck to Matthew & Ellie 🙂
So… what have I been up to this weekend then?
The short answer to that question is, “not a lot”. On Friday night I went round to Matthew’s to sort out some publicity for Fordham. We managed to get a couple of flyers done, so it was quite a productive time 🙂
That was the most exciting thing I did all weekend. On Saturday I went into town in the morning and bought a new t-shirt / jumper type thing. In the afternoon I went to Asda. And in the evening I did some Java programming (working on a game of Pong which I’ve called JPong. There is one with that name already, but only an applet, I think as some kind of demo. It’s not like I’m going to release it anyway).
On Sunday morning I went to Church, then spent most of the rest of the day alternating between watching episodes of Futurama and working on JPong!
Speaking of which, I will probably upload it sometime soon. It’s not a great game, but I used to find when I was in the earlier stages of learning that stuff like that used to help me, so maybe it will help someone else! I’ll probably create a new page for random Java stuff at some point, actually.
That’s all for the time being!