Christmas was spent with my family back home in Cambridge. Thus, other than performing maintainance on their computer (as is the tradition whenever I visit home…) I was largely separated from my Blog.

Since I’m not adverse to regular expressions, I’ve tidied up the addresses for my blog posts.

Didn’t manage to get a picture (my TV tuner card doesn’t do Channel 4 yet) but Channel 4 News in the UK have taken to using Firefox as their demonstration browser for reports that involve shots of web pages. It’s a nice to see it infiltrate the real world :)

I will admit right away that I’m not an expert user of Microsoft Word, or any word processor. This is software that I will only ever use as a tool and right now I’m ready to throttle it.

Microsoft Word screenshot:

I’ve spent the evening writing up documents for my BCS log book – documenting my Year in Industry for University. We’ve been provided with electronic versions so that we can email them back to our tutors.

In my previous post I included an image with a caption. I struck me that right now in HTML there is no proper way to mark-up captions for images.

See Virtuelvis for a well written report on the latest, hugely major security hole in Internet Explorer. Basically, it lets a website execute any command they like on your computer. Y’know, like “delete”.

You can find an example test-case at Julien McArdle‘s site. If it’s successful then it creates a harmless empty directory on your C-drive. If implemented by the malicious, it could erase your hard disk. Now that’s a hole.

As a small aside from writing my forthcoming presentation on an accessible internet.

As a small diversion from presentation preparation I want to ask a small question.

Firefox lead developer Ben Goodger has taken a job at Google. His role in the Mozilla Foundation remains the same as before and he’s not leaving or taking a reduced role or anything like that. In fact reading his post you could be forgiven for thinking that Google were employing him to work on Firefox.

Having been poking around inside my website’s control panel this evening I finally found the access stats package (awstats, it appears). After peering at browser access percentages (IE 50%, Firefox 30%) I spotted an option to tell me the most popular search terms that led to my blog. The result was interesting, a past entry on the subject of Stuffplug-NG for MSN Messenger dominates 30% of all incoming searches. Strange. I actually rank 6th on Google on the subject. I’ll concede that my current understanding of search engines isn’t gigantic, but that seems odd.

As of today, I’ve started making some donations to the online services that I use and love. First up, and long overdue, was a donation to Audioscrobbler. I’ve dropped them about 5 a month (you can choose how much you want to give, based on how much you value their service) and paid for three months.

I spend a vast amount of my time programming. I do it for most of my day at work and I do a lot at home too (‘cause I’m a bit of a nerd, really).

Some regular visitors might have found a bug in the blog last week that meant you couldn’t access the “Comments” page for my entry on PHP4 XML parsers. After some debuggering, I’ve found the culprit in b2Evo 0.9.0.10’s source (not sure if it is present in 0.9.0.11).

The problem is caused by the presence of “php4” at the beginning of the permalink for the post. b2Evo also allows a syntax of “p<pagenumber>” to access posts. It was incorrectly catching the “p4” part of “php4” and trying to load a post number 4 that doesn’t appear to exist.

I seem to be pulling my trick of taking on a lot of ideas at once again. Not necessarily a bad thing, though it does mean I have to prioritise my free time, which is maybe a less normal thing to have to do.

February wasn’t a good month for this blog. Not only did I manage a paltry one post but I also broke my Blogroll script. Ultimately, not going well.

Feeling a bit arty this evening I did a T-Shirt design based on the excellent “LiveMarks” icon from Mozilla Firefox. I’m quite a fan of XML feeds and the potential for the technology’s use in different forms of data syndication (Microsoft SharePoint, I’m calling you out – again).

As a T-Shirt I’ll admit it is, well, rather nerdy. It would mean wandering around wearing the icon from a computer program on my chest. But it is a very cool icon. To be honest, I think it fits into a similar vein to the too-cool-for-words set of designs that Panic now sell.

Some time ago I was avidly following development of an icon set called Minium by the supremely talented Sascha Hhne. He’s a busy man though so it took an age to finish, his blog didn’t get updated and I stopped looking.

Picasa – Google‘s image organisation and photo retouching program for Windows – reached version 2.0 a while ago and now has Gmail integration. This, combined with the incredibly useful (and simple) photo retouching tools put it in the running for ’my new favourite Windows program’.


The above picture is a ‘Before/After’ comparison of Picasa’s “I’m feeling lucky” retouching tool and then slightly increasing the colour temperature to restore skin tones. For what was initially a quick and cheap shot taken in a club (5th Avenue in Manchester), the result is suddenly far more respectable.

… CDs. In fact, I seem to have developed a dependence on buying new CDs. My iPod has a playlist, y’see, which contains all the music that I’ve bought in the last two weeks. When that list empties I get an overpowering urge to buy more to fill it up again (rather than, say, change the SmartPlaylist to contain three weeks music rather than two…).

Denis Radenkovic did the logo designs for the upcoming Media2005 conference in London. He also created an illustration for the header for the <a href="http://atmedia2005.co.uk" title="Media 2005">@Media 2005 website</a>. Is it just me that finds the Godzilla sized Zeldman looming over London’s skyline more than a little unnerving?

The Conservative party in the UK have launched a toolbar for Internet Explorer. Although they have no chance of getting my vote, I figured I’d test out their ability to respond to anal questions anyway…

While I’m sure that no Conservative politician has any input into the creation of the “Conservatives.com toolbar”, I’m curious to know if there will be versions produced for other web browser software, such as Mozilla’s wonderful Firefox browser.</p>

I’m back home in Cambridge for the long Easter weekend. Thanks to our countries Christian heritage, we get given Good Friday and Easter Monday off work. This is a good thing, since Jo keeps telling me I’m stressed, and she tends to be right about such things. In response, I will doing absolutely nothing tomorrow. Apart from possibly introducing my mother to Picasa, just because it’s so cool.

This blog, as some may have noted, runs not off the insanely popular Wordpress blogging engine, but a piece of software called b2Evolution.

This statement is getting pinned to my desk during software design sessions.

Proving that reading Jon Hicks’ blog too much has had adverse effects on me; Today I consumed about half a dozen wonderful cups of tea, whilst Saturday involved a trip home to consume a traditional quantity of truely classy cheese (well, softer than soft brie and a wonderful soft cheddar that I need to get the actual name of).

About a month ago, I put in a request at my bank to convert �1000 from a 60-day access account into cheque form, and send it to me. The reason, I want a PowerBook. I’d like one for Uni and I put aside the money for buying a notebook computer years ago. I never bought one before and I’ve been flirting with the idea on and off ever since.

At midnight, I discovered a fantastic bug in iTunes. I have a smart playlist for “new music”, which contains all the music I’ve put on the computer in the last two weeks.

I’m trying to build myself a contingency plan for getting a job over the summer. Ideally I’ll be staying in Bracknell until September and doing lots of web standards work for FSC, but since that’s rather in the balance for accommodation reasons, I’m looking for an alternative back home that doesn’t start with “Mc”.

I actually looked at my Technorati profile again this evening and notice that next to my claimed weblog, it says:

Claimed with Quick Claim. To enable advanced features, cancel and reclaim by editing your blog template.

So, what advanced features are these? This must be a stonking example for making words into hyperlinks – the words being “advanced features” and the hyperlink pointing to a page explaining them, please.

This has been bugging me for a few days now as a ‘hole’ in the way Blogging works right now. So, as a short “lunchtime thought”:

This is ordinarilly buried under the “Wider Web” sidebar, but since it’s election day I think it deserves greater prominence.

Elly has sent the infamous musical baton my way (which, by pleasant coincidence puts me only 5 degrees of separation from the Brit Pack).

I’ve been working hard for Uni these last few weeks, but before I run up north for a few days, something has been playing on my mind for a while.

I rather luckily got a place at the @media conference in cloudy London yesterday, and had a fantastic time learning more web design from some supremely talented and entertaining speakers.

New Screens

Uploaded by Ben Ward.

I’ve been wanting a dual screen set up for simply ages now. We’ve had two screens at work pretty much since we started and I’m hooked to point of clinical dependency.

I’ve not finished the @media write up yet. I need to do it tomorrow or else it’ll be too far after the event to even be considered ‘token’.

Here’s a question for web designers. It’s a bit of a clich� question and I’m not advocating it at all, I’m purely curious.

You may be aware that I’ve been quietly and not-so-quietly planning a major redesign of these pages for a while now. It involves switching from b2Evo to Wordpress, tweaking it, customising it and finally revealing a new look to call my own.

I’m probably the last of the ~400 delegates to complete their ‘proper’ @media write up, but I shan’t be discouraged. I may, of course, sound like an old record.

The glorious ‘first time’

This was my first conference. I don’t have the money to afford such things and won’t have for a number of years. However, thanks to a stroke of luck, some jammy holiday planning and selfless generosity on the part of Steve Marshall I got a place. That’s Steve who still doesn’t have a blog to link to, by the way.

As of yesterday, I own a lawnmower. This seems very, very wrong (although since the one provided by our landlord had smoke coming from it, it is ultimately very right).

John Oxton has posted about the rather spiffy new Microformats specifications which are starting to grow in maturity and usefulness. John’s initial reaction goes like this:

My initial impression of Microformats from logging on to the site was that this was some major new technology, so technical is the blog and Wiki. I was a little surprised then to learn it was “just” XHTML after all. First on my Microformats wish list then, get someone on the blog that can communicate with us lower level geeks!

The current state of Microformats is, sadly, very much ‘not for lower level geeks’ (God forbid the general populace). The specifications are newborn and, not to be too much of an apologist, time is needed for the specs to mature more and for people to really understand and communicate their usefulness in practice. I hope it wont take long.

As a native English speaker, I tend to accept the Americanisms on the internet and will instinctively ignore anything on a web page offering alternative languages. British English (or ‘English’, as I like to call it) is hardly a localisation priority if your site already has a US English translation that everyone can read, right?

I’ve been making a bit of an effort in recent entries to start adding a related image to my posts. Obviously my redesign is a way off, but I’ve found that they do serve to brighten the place up a bit. It’s also helping to alleviate some of my ‘colour block’ I spoke of recently.

Windows has a ghastly love for prefixing the word ‘My’ to the names of various folders. It’s a pain to type and it’s unpleasant to read. You can, of course, rename most of these in the usual Windows way. On my systems, ‘My Computer’ quickly becomes ‘Computer’ and ‘My’ is culled from all the other ‘My’ folders too. You can use a tool like Tweak UI to change the location of Pictures and Music.

Just a small post. Anyone who’s keeping track of today’s ongoing terrorist events in London may be interested in watching the following links:

As Colly is all too aware, I am something of a Super Furry Animals nutjob. It’s a love I share with my brother Nathan and my Dad and we make a habit of attending SFA gigs together whenever we can. They’re the first band I ever saw live and they’ve never disappointed me.

As a short follow-up to my obligatory ‘should I get a Mac’ post, here’s an update.

My iBook arrived on Thursday, as predicted. It’s a glorious feat of engineering, I must say. Every part of it says ‘well built’ on it (figuratively, I mean). I love OS X like it were my child (I’m not a parent. If I ever have children I expect to revoke that statement immediately). I love the way I can select the word �figuratively� and look it up in the integrated dictionary to make sure I picked the right word, I love the integrated spell check, I love the Adium instant messenger and I’m very impressed with Safari.

The small problem with buying an Apple portable, is that using it is so much more of a pleasure than using the desktop PC I have. Being a small notebook it is by definition less comfortable to use and a combination of looking down at the desk and using the smaller keyboard too much will ultimately do me an injury.

The more I play with my Mac, the more I like. I vow that I shall write something not about the Mac soon. But for now, read this. It’s stupidly cool. And I’ll try and keep it shorter, too.

This is my promised �not about the Mac� post.

The long awaited first beta of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer version 7 has surfaced, and some screenshots with it.

You know that feeling of unrelenting terror? Well, scale it down to the relative importance of an iPod and a 3’ drop.

This post starts with the phrase �Having just set up the Internet Explorer 7 beta on my machine� but does not concern ruining my system with Microsoft’s latest.

It’s come to my attention that there’s another CSS Reboot event this Autumn. That’s Autumn, not �Fall� or any other bizarre season name you might have.

Updated 09^th August: Removed ghastly bevel effect, achieved something closer to the images in my head. Thanks Matt Robin for the polite nudge.

I’ve become a big fan of iCal on the Mac. iCal has got a the fine balance of �features vs. simplicity� about right, so suddenly my life is colour coded.

I have been getting more and more excitable about the potential of HTML5 as a future web standard. Rather than throwing away existing HTML (as XHTML2 will), it attempts the more �CSS like� approach of evolution. It’s being specified extremely well, filling in some gaps in HTML4.

Many will already be family with Flickr‘s many ’pools’, but via Adacio’s photostream I stumbled into the Food Porn pool. Oh God I’m hungry now.

One of my chief irritations with Gmail is the way in which it will embolden any folder with new mail, even ‘Spam’. Making things bold encourages you to look at them and deal with the items inside it (be that reading or deleting). Spam folders aren’t supposed to be distracting like this, they should just be there, lurking, for when I choose to check them.

Once upon a time, on a website revision now somewhat more aged than I realised, I had a web cam. I don’t think many people used it (bar Jo, who could keep tabs on me and a few others who found it a useful means of seeing if I was on the phone and had neglected to set my IM status).

So, this is it.

One of the things that I really hate about Windows XP is that it handles external storage like a stone absorbs water.

I first got online at the age of 14. It’s terrifying in itself because this was nearly 7 years ago, but there’s an after effect of maintaining the same online presence for so long which now manifests itself. At the age of 21, with a growing concern for a more ‘grown up’ online image, I have a really, really silly name.

Not ‘Ben Ward’. I rather like that name and am rather glad not to be a woman and face losing it in marriage. The name in question is ‘Shovel’. It’s an alias I used when I first came online (stolen from a 5 minute GCSE English sketch, if I remember rightly. A guy called Neil actually thought of it). I joined forums with it, I played Quake with it and to this day am still recognised by it in certain dingy corners of the interweb.

One of the many fabulous things about Apple’s MacOSX is the incredible number of keyboard shortcuts for advanced typography. Left and right (so called �smart�) quotes are generated with Option+] and Option+Shift+], for example. Some word processors automatically insert them, but when you enter as much content into a web browser as I do, it’s a pain to remember a dozen different ALT+1234 style �shortcuts� to make Windows generate the same characters.

We’re all of thirty days away from CSS Reboot and things aren’t looking so hot at Chateaux Ben.

Many of you will already have seen the preview screenshots of Microsoft’s next release of Office. Currently referred to as �Office 12�, it will likely arrive in late 2006.

This evening, Stevie �artistic placeholder� Marshall has been mostly trying to fix his new blog design to work in Microsoft’s broken web browser.

They’ve changed something�

I just suggested that Jo search Flickr for Kittens. She may never again leave the house.

In what is best describe as �bloody brilliant�, Andy Budd has announced a last minute, grass-roots web standards conference taking place in Brighton next month. When the ticket price comes in at a student friendly �50 and a 4-week advance ticket from Manchester to Stevie weighs in at �10, you know you’re on to a winner.

Via BBC News: Fire hits Wallance and Gromit sets

This is something I’ve known for a few days but felt I should announce it for posterity. Whilst my migration from b2Evolution to Wordpress has been a fabulous success, I shan’t be completing my design in time for the CSS:Reboot on November 1st.

Right, as part of my as-yet unnamed final year project (broadly speaking, it’s �desktop search�), I need to do some research. Actually, if anything I need to find some books that tell me what I already know so I can put them in my bibliography to get around the fact that I’m a smart-arse and can’t justify any of my knowledge.

Just a short post this one. I had the great pleasure of meeting up with some other like-minded geeks in York on Saturday.

ElfUrl is a service that generates short urls for long and unwieldy urls. Anything with a whopping great query string (Amazon search results, for example) can be converted into a short code that’s easier to recite and won’t break in email.

Nascentguruism has finally gone live.

OK, I’m in the process of preparing a questionnaire aimed at users to establish the final round of functional and non-functional requirements for my Desktop Search project. I’ll obviously be linking to it on here when it’s live, but I thought I’d give out a last call for questions first.

Or: Admitting that Robbie Williams might not be a half-arsed, talent-deficient, waste-of-space, womanising bum is hard to do.

Jeffrey Veen asks: ‘What’s in your folder of shame?’

Childish game to ease the coursework anxiety

Help me out with the final year project by taking a survey.

By default, Windows dumps your documents and settings on the C-drive, puts Pictures and Music as subdirectories of Documents and insists on prefixing everything with the word ‘My’. Here’s how to fix it.

I’d never eaten peanut butter outside of a Satay sauce before, but Jon Hicks mentioned something in his mcville interview that made me outrageously hungry:

A full write-up is coming next week, but here’s a handy placeholder for anyone I met (or not) that would like to leave a message.

Seeing as I’m leaving for this in all of 25 minutes, I don’t expect much to come of it, but if you’re in Manchester and fancy some rock, it’s No Way Back #3 at the Night & Day on Oldham Street.

Here I am writing up my final report and Word is doing everything in its power to frustrate me. One of the most irritating of its ‘features’ is related to hung quotes (the use of which Stevie’s typography quest got me into and and I now respond to indented quotes in my documents with faux choking).

I can’t quite decide if SuprGlu is really useful or not, but it pulls a rather neat trick of munging every piece of Ben Ward related data on the Interweb into a single page.

Jo reminded me on the phone that this site is currently messy in Microsoft’s favourite son. Since this design is going to stick around rather longer than I once planned, consider this a commitment to hack it into shape in a few weeks time.

An exercise in internet stalking and comment tracking.

I got to see Doves again in Manchester this evening, having missed them back in the spring. The show was very good as ever, but particularly great was their solution to the ever-mundane ‘encore problem’.

There’s a new group on Last.FM, it’s called The Legion of Ben and it’s for people whose name is also Ben.

2006 is just 23 days away, which means that all around the country thousands of people, big and small, are preparing for an onslaught of annual reviews.

Christmas has well and truly arrived at chateaux Ben. Being students, we’ll all be going home for Christmas-proper. To make the most of our time together then, the tree has been up for a few weeks, fairy lights surround the living room (all of which is actually quite pretty looking, if you ignore the wire tacks that’re holding them up). Unfortunately someone has stuck a godawful multi-coloured plastic ‘candle’ thing on the tele, but apparently it’s not really Christmas without some real tat. Also, the living room is covered in Roses chocolate wrappers, never have I seen £8 of chocolate devoured so fast.

I’ve been pillaging my red folder marked ‘redesign’ this evening. A portfolio which now documents at least a year of irregular, on-and-off sketching frenzies. I like the way the design has evolved on paper, and I’m reassured that on the whole I still like it (even if I can’t suss out how to balance the conflicting pulls of minimising my design, whilst cramming in all sorts of syndicated personal content).

Can you say “Grids”?

Good news for people still searching for an enjoyable IM experience on Windows and seething at all the Mac users with Adium. Gaim 2.0 is in beta 1 and it’s a grand improvement over the 1.x versions.

The internet is in the middle of a royal kick-up-the-arse as regards usability and accessibility. Bad sites are named and shamed, great design is celebrated. In all of this, we mustn’t forget the desktop; the desktop sucks too.

It’s a review of the year, of course.