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Easter

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According to the venerable Bede, the term “Easter” comes from the Old English word for what we now call “April”. “Eostre-Monath” was “the month of Eostre”. Of course, back then months were calculated based on the lunar cycle, which is why Easter is calculated using a thoroughly pagan method: it’s the first weekend on or … Continued

CSS Quiz

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66 … which makes me officially better than Rijk Which did I guess? I guessed: background, background-attachment, background-color, background-image, border, border-bottom, border-bottom-color, border-bottom-style, border-color, border-left, border-left-color, border-left-style, border-right, border-right-color, border-right-style, border-style, border-top, border-top-color, border-top-style, bottom, clear, color, content, float, font, font-family, font-size, font-style, font-variant, font-weight, height, left, letter-spacing, line-height, list-style, list-style-image, list-style-position, list-style-type, margin, margin-bottom, … Continued

The Semantic Web

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One of my current interests is the semantic web — that is, the push to move from publishing text on the Web to publishing structured data, which can actually be understood by computers (in so far as a computer can truly “understand” anything). By publishing information so that computers can understand it, you make the … Continued

The Great IE8 Meta Tag Climb Down

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Yeah, so I know I’m about a week late in mentioning this (I’ve been busy — let’s hope nobody is using this blog as their primary source of news), but the Microsoft Internet Explorer team have backed down on their ridiculous META tag idea. Read about it on IEblog.

Bottled Water

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Panorama has just run an exposé on bottled water — you can still watch it on iPlayer. As a rule, I tend not to buy bottled water, initially this was because it's a waste of money, but in the last couple of years, having considered the environmental cost of bottled water, that is now a … Continued

The Great IE8 Meta Tag Debacle

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So Microsoft, in conjunction with some of the folk at WaSP, has announced its intention to include the quirks mode that beats all quirks modes in the forthcoming Internet Explorer 8 in an article on A List Apart: Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8. This has proved to be quite a controversial idea. … Continued

Looking Ahead to Perl 6

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One of the most important changes in Perl 6 over earlier versions is that it has started out as a written specification, which may end up with several different implementations. In previous versions of Perl, alternative versions had to implement all the quirks of the official Perl interpreter, as the definition of the Perl language … Continued

Looking Ahead to PHP 6

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This is my look at what’s planned for the forthcoming revision to the PHP language. Removal of Deprecated Features PHP 6 includes a lot of tidying up, removing features of the language that have caused annoyance, confusion and security headaches. Although these changes are too numerous to list here, and the list will probably change … Continued

Seaford Trip

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It was a sunny day today, so we took the train to nearby Seaford. The pictures are, clockwise from the largest photo, and with links to larger images: Seaford Head View towards Newhaven Seagulls on Seaford beach Crouch Gardens

Social Spam

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I've recently started receiving the occasional piece of junk mail from friends and colleages who have e-mail accounts at some of the larger webmail services (Hotmail, GMail, etc). The messages genuinely seem to come from their accounts, with proper message headers indicating that they were really sent via the webmail service, and sent to everyone … Continued

CSS to HTML Compiler

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I’ve searched around the ‘Net for something like this before, but without success, so decided to write my own. The basic idea is this: there are certain circumstances in which you need to write some styled HTML without access to the document’s header. For example, when composing HTML-formatted e-mails, which may be displayed in a … Continued

Privacy

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Els despairs about some high-profile privacy and data protection gaffs in 2007 and asks can we still get some privacy in 2008?. Her use of the word “get” rather than “retain” is very telling — it’s not just a matter of retaining our current level of privacy, but of trying to claw back what we’ve … Continued

GPS & Cameras

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We are now starting to see the arrival of GPS chips in cameras. Why? Well, so that photos can be tagged with their latitude and longitude. Then when you upload your photos to a computer, they can be plonked onto a map — nifty little trick, and I’m sure people will come up with plenty … Continued

NetSol Cybersquatting

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Over the last couple of days I’ve read a few stories about Network Solutions pulling a Site Finder by stealing unregistered domain names on which people have run a whois query. They wait for people to whois query a domain (commonly done as a first step to registering a domain — to check that nobody … Continued

X-Blog-Name

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OK, so the Trackback specification includes the ability for a pinging page to specify its article title and blog name when it sends a trackback ping. However, these fields are optional. When not present, typically the recipient of the ping will then make an HTTP request back to the pinger to determine the article title … Continued

New BBC Home Page

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So the BBC has redesigned its home page. OK, so normally I’m against the “let’s be a portal” philosophy, but for the Beeb, I think it works. They produce such a colossal volume of content — and in areas that make sense for a portal site (news, weather, sports, listings info) — that they can … Continued