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Toby Inkster

The End of an Era

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Tony Blair is to step down as Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury, and it looks like he’ll soon be taking a job as Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds. He’ll also apparently moonlight as a Middle East peace envoy — in other news, outgoing Deputy PM John Prescott will be taking up a … Continued

A New Look for TobyInkster.co.uk

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This site has had a few facelifts recently. Hopefully this one will stick. It’s based on two main principles: Use Hoefler Text for copy. It’s an absolutely gorgeous font which comes with Mac OS X that I was recently using on a printed document. Hoefler has a delicious set of italic glyphs — they were … Continued

Typography in demiblog

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I've said it already, and I'll say it again: typography is a very important and oft-neglected aspect of web design. demiblog is my CMS; although great typography requires the conscious effort of the author/typesetter, and can't be handled automatically by a CMS, there are certainly steps a CMS can take to ease the burden on … Continued

Political Map of the UK

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(Requires Javascript.) See below for an explanation on how these placements were calculated. UK-Wide Country-Specific (New) Labour Conservative Liberal Democrats Greens Respect Coalition UK Independence Party (UKIP) British National Party (BNP) Scottish National Party (SNP) Plaid Cymru Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) Sinn Fein Social Democratic & Labour Party (SDLP) Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) Alliance The … Continued

dict, thes & ency

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dict is a command that is supplied with most Linux and BSD distributions. If you enter dict foo at the command-line, you get back the dictionary definition of “foo”. Normally several different dictionaries are supplied, including some dictionaries of translation, and it’s possible to look up the word on various online dictionaries too. As counterparts … Continued

Typography Links

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Most of the really pleasant web designs I see seem to display more than a little evidence of classical typographic knowledge. Here’s my collection of typography-related resources, including links to some classic (and some common) fonts. Tips and Tricks Mark Boulton: Five Simple Steps to Better Typography Richard Rutter & Mark Boulton: Web Typography Sucks … Continued

HenPlus

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For a while, I’ve been using a great little Java-based GUI SQL client called dbVisualizer. It’s a nifty little database management tool that — here’s the good part — supports virtually every database backend under the sun. I use it to manage PostgreSQL and MySQL databases at home and PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Server at … Continued

URLs in demiblog

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URL design is important. For this reason I’ve put a lot of thought into the URLs used by demiblog. demiblog has a PHP object SiteURLSpace that maps between URLs and data queries. This means that demiblog’s URLs don’t necessarily have to bear much resemblence to its code structure. It’s also pretty easy to completely replace … Continued

Non-Intuitive Surnames

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Below is a non-comprehensive list of surnames which are pronounced non-intuitively. (Or one could argue that they are pronounced perfectly sensibly but the spelling is non-intuitive.) I've also included a count of how many times each surname applies in the 2006/07 Brighton telephone directory, to give you an idea of the relative importance of learning … Continued

The Great Wi-Fi Controversy

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Last night, Panorama broadcast Wi-Fi: a warning signal unmasking the “controversy” over Wi-Fi health risks. This is one of those many controversies in science that are not really controversies as far as the vast majority of scientists are concerned, such as the “controversy” over whether global warming is caused by changes in solar output. Panorama … Continued

The Tao of HTML 5 – Part II

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Part of the problem with the WHATWG HTML 5 specification is that it’s primarily written by browser makers. (Hixie, its editor, is the exception, as he currently works for Google, though in the past was employed by the Mozilla Foundation and Opera.) This has steered the focus of the specification towards browser manufacturers — the … Continued

EXIF is Cool

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If you’re not aware of EXIF, here’s what it is: EXIF stands for Exchangeable Image File Format, and is a standard for storing interchange information in image files, especially those using JPEG compression. Most digital cameras now use the EXIF format. That is, many images, including most of the JPEGs you get off modern digital … Continued

MySQL WTF?!

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I’m currently in the process of extending demiblog’s database support. Version 0.1.0 only supports PostgreSQL, but I plan on also supporting MySQL in the next release, and a few other databases further down the line. Because this cross-database support had always been planned, I’ve been very careful in writing my SQL to make sure that … Continued

Shooting in Lewes

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About five minutes’ walk from our house: A man has been seriously injured in a shooting in Lewes town centre, Sussex Police have said. Officers said they were called to Southover High Street in the East Sussex town by a member of the public on Tuesday evening. (From BBC News) Part of the reason we … Continued

Keen on Web 2.0

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The Observer has an interesting article about Andrew Keen’s new book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy. Although the book isn’t released until early June, according to the Observer article the basic premise is that: bloggers and other evangelists for the web [are] destroying culture, … Continued

London Goes Wi-Fi

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The square mile now has Wi-Fi. The Cloud, as it is called, is to be free for the first month, but after that there will be a charge. Contrast this with the proposed San Francisco Municipal Wireless scheme, and the Cloud starts to look fairly weak. In contrast with London’s single square mile of coverage, … Continued

Ogg Theora Support in Opera 9.5

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In Hâkon Wium Lie’s latest missive on Opera Labs he details Opera’s upcoming support for the element in HTML 5. He points out that it’s not much use without at least one defacto standard web video format (much like JPEG, GIF and PNG have become for the element. A preview release of Opera 9.5 includes … Continued