New Year Blog #1 - What I got for Christmas
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.
Posts from
Friendly URLs
Since I’m not adverse to regular expressions, I’ve tidied up the addresses for my blog posts.
Channel 4 News use Firefox
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 :)
Reasons to hate Microsoft Word #132
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.How to mark up images with captions
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.
It starts... post-SP2 Internet Explorer holes emerge
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.Steve Jobs wants my bank balance.
As a small aside from writing my forthcoming presentation on an accessible internet.
Creative Commons Licensing
As a small diversion from presentation preparation I want to ask a small question.
Ben Goodger moves to Google
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.
Blog Stats
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.
Listen to my music
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.
PHP4 & XML... Help please
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).
"PHP4" bug in b2Evolution
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.