Friday, 30 April 2010
Thursday, 29 April 2010
Its All Their Fault. Politics for the Facebook Generation
Watch the video, then visit the site. Idealist? Probably, but maybe this is the first general election in the UK where there is a real desire for change, and a means to influence it. The internet gives us all a voice and a way to educate ourselves about the issues, and to make informed decisions. Check it out.
An interesting DOCTYPE and JavaScript fix.
I've been working on a new project at work this week and found this interesting little bug. My JavaScript worked perfectly in a static page on my local server, but when it was moved into a dynamic template driven page, it failed, with a cryptic message in Firebug..
syntax error
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
Not much use for debugging huh? Especially considering identical code worked perfectly on the static box. It turns out, that if you have a script without an "src"attribute set correctly, or if you have an error in an external JSON feed, the DOCTYPE will fail.
So then, this tricky to find, but easy to fix error is fixed by making sure every script your page is being called correctly. In my scenario, it was due to an error in and external JSON file.
Hope it helps.
Monday, 26 April 2010
Why Some Men Have Dogs And Not Wives
2. Dogs don't notice if you call them by another dog's name.
3. Dogs like it if you leave a lot of things on the floor.
4. A dog's parents never visit.
5. Dogs agree that you have to raise your voice to get your point across.
6. You never have to wait for a dog; they're ready to go 24 hours a day.
7. Dogs find you amusing when you're drunk..
8. Dogs like to go hunting and fishing.
9. A dog will not wake you up at night to ask, "If I died, would you
get another dog?"
10. If a dog has babies, you can put an ad in the paper and give them away.
11. A dog will let you put a studded collar on it without calling you a pervert.
12. If a dog smells another dog on you, they don't get mad. They just
think it's interesting.
13. Dogs like to ride in the back of a pickup truck. And last, but certainly not least: 14. If a dog leaves, it won't take half of your stuff.
Posterous. First Impressions
I've noticed quite a few people using Posterous of late, so I thought I'd see what the buzz was about.It's a very cool idea. Post something once, by email, SMS or web, and publish to your Posterous homepage, Twitter feed, Flickr stream, Facebook profile etc.
So, here goes. My first posterous post. Overall, I'm impressed. Lot's of really nicely done interface design, with a bit of Prototype goodness thrown in. It was easy to setup an account, it's possible to be up and running almost instantly, but I opted to go through the signup process so I could customise my posts and setup publishing to Blogger etc. I'm hoping that now I have the means to post once and publish everywhere in one hit, I will be able to post more often, as I usually find myself too busy to sit and write long posts. Fingers crossed, you may even see proper regular posts.
My one gripe? It's a biggie I'm afraid.
Posterous allows you to import from your other blogs. I thought this would be a great idea, being able to put everything in once place so I have some historic content from the off, but in practice, it seems a bit flawed. As you can see, I have quite a few posts here already, but the import process has truncated them all! So, you can read the first paragraph, and that's it. Not even a link through to the original blog article. Arrrgh. For the time being, bear with me while I go back and manually add the missing content.
Other than that, very cool. I'm definately going to try to post regularly and see how it goes. Watch this space!
Sunday, 28 March 2010
Site of the Moment, - Carsonified
I really like the way each page is a different colour, with white text and illustrations. Funky indeed.
Well worth having a look around.
A fresh new look from the Blogger Template Designer
It’s a very nice web application, and it’s a huge improvement on the current template tools available on Blogger, and has some very cool touches, such as theme suggestions to match background images and text colours, a live preview of your changes, and some really nice new starting point templates.
I’ve only spent a bit of time playing on it so far, but I like what it can do some much I decided to apply one of the new templates, instead of my old custom template. I'm not the greatest designer in the world, so it's great to be able to come up with something that looks fresh without having to spend hours in Photoshop and Aptana.
A couple of things to note though. Firstly, the new templates aren’t built with IE6 in mind, so users who choose to punish themselves by using IE6 may not see your page as you intended. Secondly, as far as I can see, you are limited to the background images provided by Blogger, rather than being able to add your own. I’m going to have a play with the template XML and see what I can come up with to workaround this. If I succeed, I’ll post the details.
I've also added a new template based design to my other blog, just to give it a bit of a makeover (note to self: Post on Sidetracked sometimes huh?)
Other than that, give it a whirl, see what you can come up with!
Wednesday, 17 March 2010
First Impressions of the Dell Studio 1558 Laptop
Well, after being a loyal Toshiba user for the last 7 years, I was tempted into buying a Dell when upgrade time came around this again.
Despite appalling post-order/pre-delivery customer service, having my order cancelled, then replaced, and waiting 7 weeks instead of the original 2 weeks promised by Dell when I ordered, my patience paid off today when my new Studio 1558 arrived!
My job demands that I have a fast, reliable machine, and with that in mind, when it came to configuring the machine to my specification, I ended up almost doubling the base price, which gave me the following spec:
- Intel® Core™ i7-820QM Mobile Processor (1.73GHz, turbo up to 3.06GHz, 8MB L3 Cache)
- Genuine Windows® 7 Professional, 64bit
- 8 gigs 1333MHz Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM
- 500GB (7,200rpm) Serial ATA Hard Drive
- GB ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD5470 Graphics Card
- DVD +/- RW Drive (read/write CD & DVD)
- 15.6in Widescreen Full High Definition (1920 x 1080) WLED with TrueLife
- Internal UK/Irish Qwerty Backlit Keyboard
- Intel® Wireless LAN 6200 2x2 802.11a/b/g/n card
- 2.0 Mega pixel Integrated Web Camera
- Dell Wireless 365 Bluetooth Module
- Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi MB
First impressions are great! It feels well built, and looks the business. I’m particularly pleased with the optional back-lit keyboard, which makes life a bit easier in poorly lit conditions, and the performance monitor in the task manager shows 8 (yes 8!) processors, which I’m assuming means that each of the quad processors are dual core – I’m looking forward to see how this speeds things up when running applications like Photoshop, After Effects and Premiere!
I have already run into a couple of issues associated with moving from 32 bit to 64 bit however. I guess I should have done a bit of research up front, but anyway…
- Cisco VPN Client is NOT supported. If you need VPN access, you need to find an alternative method, such as NCP Secure Entry Client
- Adobe Flash Player – There is no support for 64 bit browsers, so you have to use 32 bit IE or 32 bit Firefox if you want to view Flash based content.
- Aptana, my JavaScript, CSS and jQuery weapon of choice, doesn’t yet have full 64 bit support. You can install in into Eclipse, or install the 32 bit version only.
- So far, I’ve had no joy with a 64 bit version of Firefox, but have got the 32 bit version installed instead.
I’m sure I’ll find a few more problems, but so far, so few. Fingers crossed that none that arise are deal breakers!
More to come as I use the 1558 more, but for now, I have to stop writing and carry on installing software, so I can use my new toy at work tomorrow.