spammers have been spoofing my domain to create random addresses for their mailouts - I am doing my best to get this halted, but in the meantime if you have recieved spam which looks like it originated here I would like to assure you that it has nothing to do with me whatsoever, and am more angry than you about this :-(

three white rappers to try to make sense of it all

The car park at work isn't the best place to eat noodles, but on a day like today it was too much to resist spending a peaceful half hour out there listening to Janice Joplins greatest hits.

I recently did a quick reimplementation of a website to remove a splash page and frameset which was hindering it's search engine listings. Before I did this, all searches stopped at the splash page and only listed the sole HTML of the page which was "can't see anything? click here" leading to a "please download flash" page.

The site contains some dynamic content using query strings which will be stopping spiders, but the rest is now static (although generated dynamically by a Content Management System)

However, it still hasn't been spidered after a few weeks and I am wondering whether the homepage URL has been marked as a gateway page? Therefore maybe I would be better concentrating on sub directories such as the services page, or maybe the "what's new" page.

For what it's worth I work as a Web Developer for them (disclaimer: opinions on this website do not necessarily reflect those of the aforementioned company) who are based in Bristol, UK and are a Microsoft Certified Partner providing bespoke software development (Delphi), web development (specialising in database driven websites and Content Management Systems using ASP and SQL Server, CSS, HTML, XHTML, Javascript), Network and IT support. Feel free to get in touch with us

Those of you who know how web spidering works will know exactly why I just wrote the above two paragraphs ;-)

I was just reading the interview with Mike Davidson of ESPN (Part 1) (which seems too be linked from virtually every web design blog in existence), and what particularly interested me is their policy on locking out netscape 4.x users, who account for about 2% of their audience. I then did what any self respecting web experimentalist would do and dusted off my "only used for testing" version of Netscape 4.6 and went to the site to see what happens.

Could it be that it is web designers who are warping the statistics by repeatedly hitting sites driving their battered old testing software just to see what possible mess ensues?

In case you now want to have a look at hypothecate in an old non-standards browser, you will experience nothing but unstyled vanilla content as god intended.

I haven't taken any photographs in the last couple of days and I think the reason is that I am looking too hard. When i'm not consciously looking around for things to take pictures of I seem to spot things and if I have my camera with me (which is most of the time) I record it for prosperity.

I think this sort of unconscious spontaneous photography will increase especially now things like camera phones are common place, and combined with mobile email to blog services, the pictures will make their way almost instantly onto the net.

I suppose one disadvantage is that camera phones are currently low resolution so a really good picture might never be good enough quality for a decent size print, but if you weigh this up against the fact that the photo might never have been taken in the first place then it balances out.

Personally I haven't got a camera phone, but I purposely bought a compact digital camera (Pentax optio 330GS for those who are interested) which would be small enough to carry around in my pocket (provided I am wearing combats with huge side pockets, it would look all wrong in the pocket of my rarely worn tight 70's cords) but take high resolution pictures to be suitable for a half decent print if the picture really warrants it.

I keep a yahoo account for a high volume email list I subscribe to and was just assaulted by a HUGE advert for a Cadburys creme egg Mc Flurry at McDonalds. The thing was a 425 x 600 pixels image embedded in the page rather than a pop-up. I dont think i've seen adverts that big on a website before - i'm hoping that they had detected my bandwidth and screen estate before unleashing it. I wonder if this is a new trend - hope not.

by default when you initiate an FTP session under DOS, the default mode is interactive. If you want to create a batch file to download multiple files and you dont want to have to manually accept each transfer, enter the word "prompt" which will toggle the interactive mode on or off

e.g.:-

open www.mywebsite.com
user myusername mypassword
cd mydesireddirectory
prompt
mget *.xml
quit

the above example will download everything with a .xml file extension

I saved those commands in a file called xml_download_commands.txt and created a batch file with the following commands:-

cd C:\downloads
ftp -n -s:xml_download_commands.txt

i'm using something like the above to connect to this site and download the archives periodically as an automated scheduled task so that I have a local copy if the web server was to blow up or something

XML is a wondeful thing, but I think sometimes it can be all to easy to make life difficult for myself, by attempting to do things in XML which would be much more straightforward if I did them with a database and then output XML as needed.

For example a couple of things I will be adding to this site are a "last updated" menu, showing which pages have been recently updated on this "multi-blog" site and a bookmarks section - a central place to keep my bookmarks rather than importing them from one web browser to another. Both of these could be done purely using ASP and XML, and i'm sure if I look around I will find some examples, but I know I can knock something up with an access database, even writing everything out as XML in half the time.

The other thing is that the ASP I would use if it was purely XML wouldn't be portable in the slightest if I wanted to move it all to, say , PHP, whereas any SQL queries I use for a database version probably would be.

I read this article by bill thompson on the BBC site about the Amazon IPAQ price error, and while i'm not sure that I agree about that particular issue (I was always under the impression that pricing mistakes have to be honoured), the general theory behind the article is that the internet suffers from a perception problem, where the general public believe that it is an imaginary place where different rules apply.

Whilst there is some truth in the "alternative reality" of something like an online role playing game, the mundane reality of 90% of internet transactions is that it is as real as filling out a form in a post office or phoning up a travel agent. The scale and automation of the internet may make it easier to slip things through unnoticed, but there are people behind the scenes, and alarm bells will ring when people start to get silly about it...

Sorry to burst the bubble ;-)

Ever since I reinvented this site as a multi-blog blog I have had trouble deciding which blog particular posts should be posted to and I sometimes post to the wrong one accidentally and don't like to move them afterwards. The idea of having multiple blogs was to try to keep separate the different elements of what I might be rambling about that day i.e. I wanted to keep the hypothecate blog along creative lines, free of some of the more marginal technical stuff you might find in the lab and at the other end of the spectrum I didn't want to clog it up with every single photograph I take, so I created the photography blog.

To tie it all together you will now find the x (limited to 5 at time of posting) most recent posts from any of the blogs on this site under the "recent updates" menu. I will no doubt mess around with the format of this as time goes on, and would also like to make this available as a rss feed eventually.

I can't help feeling that maybe there are better uses for several hundred quids worth of digital camera, but I have found it invaluable when doing DIY on the house. I'm good at taking things apart, convinced that I can remember how to reassemble them later. At the weekend I took pictures of all the wiring I was about to undo, feed through holes in the ceiling and put back together and it saved me from hours of my usual problems.

Of course in the old days they used paper and pencil...

and not the first. An old uni/ skate buddy of mine from Dublin found this photo of himself snapping his deck at cork skatepark. He puts me to shame because I rarely even skate to spar these days.

I took this on an early morning bike ride from the old railway bridge near the create centre in Bristol.

thekeyboardonmy laptop has a sticky space key itis doingmy headin

This is one amazing little creature I caught trying to sneak past me the other day. Actually I didn't catch it, just zoomed in from a safe distance and took this picture then let it carry on it's daily business of building huge webs. I know there is a bit of an insect theme going on at the moment and I know these pictures would probably be better in the digital photography blog but I keep posting to the wrong one.....

with a backdrop of blue sky and gorgeous sun. in march. in the uk. incredible.

...it has to come freely and so it was about time that we knocked my band braxtonhicks on the head.

The band had been going for about 4 years with a varying line-up, and it was fun while it lasted, but the format was getting tired and most of us felt that it was never going to go beyond what it was, which was essentially a covers band. With the guitarist leaving to focus on something more original and creative and a couple of other key members leaving this summer anyway to go onto better things we decided that it was pointless flogging a dead horse and to call it a day.

Fear not, because the creative energy behind the band will flow into other places and whenever it emerges you will hear about it here at hypothecate.

incorrect speling of "bo selecta!" spotted on a wall in bemmie, bristle

for those of you who don't know, amphetadesk is a program which allows you to subscribe to the Rich Site Summary (RSS) "feed" or "channel" of a website (if they have one, which they all should!), like the one on this site. It runs on your local machine as a server, periodically downloads local copies of the feeds you specify and generates an HTML web page for you to view the feed locally, or if it's running on a network or internet node, remotely.

I noticed that my RSS feed isn't 100% compatible with amphetadesk (and probably other readers) as my links show up as tags because they are encoded, so apologies to anyone seeing them like this via an RSS reader - I didn't know until just now!

I spotted this little green beastie pretending to be a leaf in the garden at the weekend.

Excellent - the battery in my laptop is now stone dead and I never got more than an hour per charge out of it at the best of times - a new one would cost me over £100 so i'm not going to bother.

According to this news story Toshiba are working on an alcohol powered battery due for release in 2004. Hopefully I can hang on for one of these!

I am really chuffed to see that one of photographs made it onto the BBC news site on the talking point | have your say | taken a good picture lately section.

My "dandelions" picture is number 10 in the "Your perspective on the world: 8-14 March 2003" gallery.

This makes up for all those years of failing to get one of my paintings on Tony Harts gallery as a kid!

Tonight as I came out of work it was the first time it has been light this year, the sun was setting over the derelict warehouses on the horizon, and I realised that this was the perfect time to put my shades on and drive home down the portway listening to "trouser jazz" by mr scruff.

imagine just for a second that you have been sat in front of a couple of flickering monitors for eight hours drinking coffee, then you wander outside and are as alarmed as I was to see this huge mushroom out of the corner of your eye, protruding from a roundabout.

I've always shyed away from putting pictures of myself on my site, but this one had to go up - me floating around...

I have added an article detailing the concept, design and build behind the hypothecate site

on IE on a mac, the grey vertical subheading bar was expanding to fill the whole screen and clicking onto the lab menu item is causing safari to freeze..

fixed the IE problem - specified 12px widths to the grey box and the dynamically created boxes holding each letter.

looking into the safari problem.... CPU goes to 100% when you try to load anything within "the lab" section.

fixed! thanks to tim at twisty.com - he pinpointed it to a problem with the text-transform:uppercase property used on the heading selectors - safari didn't seem to like applying it when some of the content inside was wrapped in divs and some not - if you remove the spaces, the problem was solved. I wanted to keep the spaces and so I moved that property to the individual divs surrounding each letter.

the same problem presumably doesn't happen on the vertical submenu because I had already replaced all the spaces with " " because without doing that they weren't creating any vertical space.

zeldman.com the daily report hasn't been updated in days, as he is "on the road" and obviously not taking advantage of mobile technology to keep his site up to date while he's hang gliding or whatever.

I feel lost, my routine has been broken - I feel like things are happening out there in web design which I don't know about because Jeff Zeldman hasn't told me about it.

starskiweb.co.uk has just become hypothecate.co.uk

the main reasoning was to move the emphasis away from mostly technology and web development based content to a broader field, but still mostly centred around digital media.

the word hypothecate was chosen because of the speculation and uncertainty surrounding the future direction of the internet, which I view as still being in it's infancy ( more on this here).

All the old content remains, but I will try to confine most of my techie ramblings to the lab. The site will also be accessible from the old domain for the time being.

this one stumped me for a while - the trick is to remove the hypen e.g:-

for background-image, use backgroundImage:-

myobj = document.getElementById("myObjId")
myobj.style.backgroundImage='url(/myimage.gif')';

According to this article cre@te online magazine (website at time of writing here) is shutting up shop.

This doesn't surprise me, because as a magazine aimed at "people who create websites" it always missed the mark. I am a "person who creates websites" professionally and I never found anything useful in the magazine.

The magazine may have been vaguely useful for graphic designers, and maybe for marketing bods, but for your average web designer or builder it always seemed to focus solely on visual snapshots, and not enough on the nitty gritty of design.

When I buy a magazine i'm looking for some sense of inspiration, authority and understanding of the subject matter, and frankly cre@te online provided none of these.

something i've always said* - from an interview with Andrew Beach:-

Q. Tell us what the future (net) looks like?

A. It will be more useful and less visible. It has to finally break free of the desktop and laptop to hit its next evolution.

* no proof

How to get a monotone distort effect like the background image on the braxton hicks website

I just found these notes, thought I would post them before I lose them

Instructions from Hozza

1. Open your image.
2. Convert to greyscale
3. Convert back to RGB.
4. In the layers pallette, double click background and turn to layer 0.
5. Create a new layer and fill with red.
6. Drag new red layer below layer 0.
7. In Layers pallette, convert the mode of layer 0 to Darken.
7a. Optionally, you may want to Image>Adjustments>Brigtness/Contrast and increase the contrast a little like the photo on your site.
8. In the tool box, make sure your fourground colur is balck and the background colour is the red.
9. Goto Filter>Noise>Add Noise and try about 4-5% Uniform.
10. Flatten the sucker and cut the edges out ot your hearts desire.

i'm sure there's a few of these around, but i've just had an idea to create a flash 6 movie which contains a menu of external swf files from a list imported in in XML format.

The movie would contain the preload script and the end user will be able to select a movie to import from the menu.

on the back end would be a file upload script like on my gallery system (used on braxtonhicks site), which would upload the file to the server and add a reference to the new movie to the XML file.

Hmm, I wonder if I can add swfs to a database as a BLOB and stream back as an asp like I do with the gallery images? Probably a really inefficient way of doing it but a good way to protect the swfs....

you know what? I could use it for the MP3 jukebox I want to build (and have been thinking about for over 3 years) too.

The cats were (re)introduced outside at the weekend. I say "re" because they spent the first few weeks of their lives outside, abandoned in a field in Nailsea, near Bristol until they were rescued.

we had them identity chipped (true) so in theory if they go missing we can track them down by satellite or police helicopter (lies)

Here is a video of their first steps outside (flash 6 format 400kb-ish file size)

Because all the formatting and styling for this site is done with CSS, this site should degrade to work on any device which supports HTML.

Below, starskiweb is being displayed on MS mobile explorer on a Sony j5e phone.



On the styled version (i.e. when displayed in a web browser which supports CSS), the site menu, login form and logos are displayed in a column at the right hand side. Without the styling these appear at the bottom of the text. I chose to do it this way because some mobile devices are very slow and as the menu grows, if it appeared at the top for vanilla content it would be a pain to scroll through it to get to the first blog post.

At some point I will create a seperate unstyled menu page which can be bookmarked for mobile devices and used tomove between the blogs.

Are you sure you haven't just got the caps lock key on? I mean of course i'd never make a stupid mistake like that, but....

The problem was a three column layout, with a strip, which needed to be scaleable according to the content down the right hand side.

The solution was to apply a background colour to the whole design, but obscure it with a white box apart from the strip at the right hand side. a bit like this example

I spend hours driving along this road. It's a beautiful approach to Bristol along the Avon Gorge, even in the pissing rain.

Random and spontaneous experiments in digital photography

The road verge on this industrial estate where I work is covered in rotting leaves and caked in mud from passing traffic. I was holding the camera down pointed at the floor to check the settings on the LCD screen when I noticed these dandelions poking through.

like where you want to create a repeated pattern like a background image in a web page:-

solution from Hozza:-

In Photoshop marque the section you want to make a pattern from, goto Edit, and then define pattern. Then select the entire page and go to Edit, Fill.., select Use Pattern and select your pattern from the custom pattern drop down.

I have uploaded some new mixes and new tracks to the braxtonhicks website

it was returning an error code -2147217887, and I believe this *may* have been because of brackets (now removed) from one of the blog titles. I say may because I also went through and republished all blogs and archives at the same time, just to make sure I wasn't missing anything

update: just been having the same problems again, and there were no brackets. This time i managaed to pin it down to a particular blog name:

"linux install :: on time m series notebook" fails
"linux install :: time m series notebook" doesn't

i'm sure there's a reason for it but.....

UPDATE: 06 Jan 2004 - just discovered that it was because of the length which was limited to 40 chars - I just edited the function getUsersBlogs in listen.asp. I didn't realise until now that the error messgaes are generated by blogworks rather than w.blogger

because I make them wear huge plastic collars to stop them pulling their stitches out.

with the following error:-

Microsoft VBScript runtime  error '800a01a8'

Object required: 'xmlRoot'

/admin_dir/xmlsubs.asp, line 477

I believe this is something to do with editing a post from a previous month, when there are no posts for the current month. The scripts are possibly looking for an archive file for the current month and it doesn't exist, so the XMLRoot object is not created.