www.oldskaters.com

ever wondered how computer hardware manufacturers are able to release cheaper and cheaper hardware?

A picture for each mile of the way. (Requires Flash)

now being a spring chicken of merely 30, I object to the term "middle aged" but this site for 30/40 something skateboarders is more relevant to me than friends re-united.

There is a good guide to some of the old skool concrete parks I used to frequent in the late 80's/ early 90's, including playing place near Truro and Market Harborough. Browsing through some of the pages and seeing pictures of those parks gives me warm feelings of nostalgia....

I also liked one of the comments somewhere in there "A cheaper mid life crisis than a ferrari"

People never could get their heads around the concept of grown men on skateboards. Even at the age of eighteen I used to frequently get the remark "aren't you too old to be riding around on a skateboard?". As a sport it certainly has an image of being for younger people. Now compare this to golf or football - how often do you hear footballers being criticised for being too old to be chasing a ball round a field or a skiier too old to be riding round on a pair of skis? Exactly how are skiing and snowboarding so different to skating?

only 4 days until I get broadband reinstalled and frankly I can't wait. It just goes to show that after me reverting back to dial up back in August, it felt like a step back to the stone ages. Not so much the lack of speed, but the pure tedium of having to dial up...

Yesterday my mobile phone died. I was in one of those weird situations where i could hear the other person but they couldn't hear me and they were getting spooked out.

Anyway, i'm not much of a mobile phone user - I might carry it everywhere with me and feel insecure without it but I hardly ever use it, so I went over the carphone warehouse website to see what clearance bargains they have. I picked a couple costing less than £50 and went to have a look at their technical specs and it drove me round the bend, because the categories don't match for each phone making it difficult to compare them.

For example, where one phone might have something like:-

Triband: yes

The other one would have something like

Triband: dualband

And another might have

Dualband:yes

and another one the category was missing altogether leaving you to guess whether they left it out or just presume they mean no....

I wonder whether they deliberately leave out the categories where the features don't exist so that the listing doesn't look too negative or whether they made the system so flexible that it is almost impossible to have any consistency.

If I was building it I would have a standard set of categories which would be listed against every phone and if a new category was added it would automatically be listed against all phones - this obviously makes more work for the administrator who then has to go through and update the status of the new category against all the old phones.

This has to be the most boring post i've ever put on this site.

This is definately the most boring post I have ever written

I've been doing some more asp.net stuff recently as it seems the logical technology to concentrate on having made a living using asp for the past 4 years. As far as adoption goes, i've seen it creeping into commercial use over the last couple of years and it seems to have made it onto most commercial hosts now too, so those two hurdles are falling out of the way.

This leaves just one hurdle: asp.net is not cross platform, it can only be hosted on a Microsoft server. So am I cutting myself out of the market? In theory yes, in practice no. I remember a similar dilema when I started doing asp stuff - shouldn't I concentrate on php instead? I took the precaution of learning the basics of php and mySQL just in case. Over 4 years working in a commercial environment no-one ever asked us for something written in php.

My situation is the similar now - I have improved my knowledge of php sufficiently that I can handle commercial php projects when they land on my desk, but more commercial interest seems to be coming in for asp.net stuff.

Frankly I can't wait - php seems like a toy when you compare it to the power of asp.net. This statement i'm sure will wind up thousands of php users the world over, but I stand by it as a user of both technologies. As with linux versus microsoft arguments I refuse to let prejudice obscure the facts.

Oh and then there's that political slashdot ranting teenybopper anti-MS thing. Even though I like, use, and see the benefits of open source I would be a hypocrite to slag off Microsoft, whose products I have used virtually every day for over a decade, the past five of which earning me a living....

There, i've said it - I sold my soul to bill gates!

after upgrading to mozilla 1.6 I had trouble logging into bloglines, I emailed support and they suggested logging out by browsing to http://www.bloglines.com/logout and trying it again. it worked. cheers mate.

The Aireo. I doubt it will be sold in the UK as "personal" FM transmitters are illegal in this country unfortunately (yep even the iTrip). It also only has a 1.5gb hard drive.

Article over at Digital Web Magazine discussing the "Behaviour Layer" of a website.

In summary, a typical web page has three layers: Content, Presentation and Behaviour. In this context, XHTML is the content Layer, CSS is the presentation layer and Javascript is the behaviour layer. The article argues that it is important that the site functions with various combinations of these e.g (content + presentation + behaviour), (content + presentation) or (content + behaviour). Essential behaviour such as form validation that has been added client-side using Javascript should also be replicated server-side ("belt and braces")..

As always, so much to do, so little time - therefore why not distract myself with plans to resurrect Adrian Frosts Blogworks XML project?

Recently i've been using Bloglines news aggregator to subscribe to all the RSS/RDF enabled websites which I visit regularly. This has completely changed my browsing habits. Bloglines works in much the same way as an email inbox - you can see which sites have been updated from a list in the left pane.

So now rather than trawling through bookmarks and tabs only to find that a site hasn't been updated since I last looked, I only visit sites that have new content.

Depending on how the RSS has been set-up you either get a list of new headlines, a list of new headlines and summaries or in some cases the whole article. Whichever way, clicking the title will take you straight to the article on the actual site.

Linux based media appliance running LinDVD was demonstrated at Linux World Tradeshow last week.

(source:New Scientist)

From Overcaffeinated

I've refrained from sticking one of those Tick! I'm a good brownie because this page is valid XHTML! badges on hypothecate (or any site i've ever done for that matter) because of a couple of reasons:-

1. Valid today, full of dirty tag soup tomorrow
It's happened to me numerous times, I make sure that the page templates validate, then I or someone else inadvertently inserts some invalid code. This is because virtually everything I build is driven by some kind of content management system, making it much easier to add invalid code faster and more conveniently than a hand coded site. I've been reading this morning about a lot of fuss over a similar issue at diveintomark

2. It looks rubbish
The W3C provided badges are ugly, theres no escaping it. Some people have created more subtle alternative versions, but it still looks rubbish to have this sort of information on the front page of a website. I would suggest maybe putting this info as comments in the source code if necessary, but isn't that what the doctype tag is for? (Machines and humans should be able to deduce what the document is from that tag).

For what it's worth, the front page of Hypothecate didn't validate when I checked it this morning because I had accidentally left an unencoded ampersand in somewhere and I had cut and paste the HTML image link for w.bloggar from the w.bloggar website (missing ALT attribute). It took all of 30 seconds to rectify and at time of writing it now validates, but i haven't had the urge to give myself a badge about it. (Note that the ugly little orange xml badge at the bottom of the page is actually link to the XML feed for this site, nothing to do with validation)

and other enterprise features.

Also see http://www.mysql.com/press/release_2004_02.html.

mySQL is already popular, but lack of stored procedure support has previously hindered adoption by many.

This must be a joke surely? - college students paid to wear temporary tattoos on their foreheads. I suppose it makes a change to the widespread practice of paying a fortune to advertise companys like Gap and Nike on your clothes and shoes.

been thinking about this before:-

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/08/15/slugs

The idea is to have URLs which make sense and do not contain file extensions. This is a nice user friendly way of doing things, and it also helps if you intend to change platforms technologies at a later date or maybe integrate more than one technology into a single site.

Some publishing systems such as the excellent Plone (Portal and CMS based on the Zope server content management framework) do this by default as web pages are actually objects rather than files sitting on the file system (well actually you can have both, but I won't go into it here).

Most of my commercial work is Microsoft ASP based, and I dont have the luxury of using some of the methods described above, especially when I don't have direct access to the server configuration (e.g. if the site is hosted on a shared host), so I have to experiment with the best way to do this.

On one ASP based CMS I built, I went to the laborious lengths of giving it the ability to create a new folder for every page to give the site the appearance of having a file extension free structure. It works fine but the code crunching needed to get the system to to create and maintain a replica structure via FTP on the live site is by no means ideal - there are pages of code needed to track changes and make sure the system tidies up after itself when a page is moved etc.

One other method I have experimented with is that of the custom error page. Before I describe it, it is a fairly ugly "hack" and makes server logs virtually useless, so custom logging and reporting is required if you go down this route. It also increases server load, and you need a host who will allow you to have a custom error page.

I won't go into detail here but the basic principle is that all unknown URL requests are sent to a custom error page (404 error page), which is in the form of an ASP. The page contains server side code to read the query string (which will contain the requested URL) and redirect to the appropriate "real" page, either by looking it up in a database or by some type of consistent naming convention. As I say, ugly. This method also makes it difficult to use querystrings.

A similar technique is to use an extension such as isapi rewrite to read incoming URL's and redirect as appropriate, using regular expressions to extract data from the incoming URL.

On the way to work yesterday I could smell burning rubber and then the the battery light came on on my dashboard. I took a look under the bonnet and noticed that my fan belt had disappeared. (The fan belt doesn't actually drive the fan, but the terminology remains from old engines where it would have done).

The fan belt actually drives the alternator which charges the cars battery, so without it eventually your car electrics will drain the battery, your headlights will get dim, you will probably get some misfiring and the car will stop working, possibly leaving you without even hazard lights. Therefore replace it immediately.

You would get the same symptoms (battery light, dim headlights, misfiring) if the alternator has become disconnected, blown a fuse or just expired.

everyone 's favourite gadget has just smaller, and for a refreshing change cheaper (smaller usually means more expensive when it comes to consumer electronics). Apple have just launced the ipod mini. It's only got a 4gb hard drive. only? why did I say only, 4GB is huge really and you could always seperate your music collection into "bite size" 70 hour portions.

Update: There has been a frantic buzz about the iPod mini, but then people have started to change their opinion on it fairly quickly. The main criticism is price - it's not that much cheaper than a 15gb iPod so most people would spend the extra and get 14gb more storage. Also people are saying that the pastel versions look tacky, and that physically it is not that much smaller either.

I'm still waiting for a hard disk based MP3 player with built in wifi, email and web browser to come out before I put forward a proposal to my purchasing manager (wife). Alternatively a PDA with a hard disk would do....

I'll be interested to see whether the forthcoming MS Portable Media Centers based on CE are going to have web functionality. Maybe all will be revealed at CES 2004 in Las Vegas this week.

oh and I just installed the WMPamplog winamp plugin which lets w.bloggar know what i'm listening to..(hence info below)

iMode sites are basically HTML cHTML (compact HTML - a subset of HTML) websites designed specifically for cellphone web browsers - I didn't realise how widespread they were, but is dominant in Japan because it is used by NTT Docomo.

In fact on closer inspection it seems to have been started by DoCoMo as a service, which goes way beyond just cHTML to incorporate Java and Flash based multimedia.

The first one I found was this one Googe Imode. Very useful, I was chuffed to find that it works (very slowly and expensively) on mobile internet explorer on my ancient sony cellphone.

The UK and US mobile internet market seems to be fairly oblivious to the potential of this, probably because of the WAP overhype, wheras Mobile internet use is more common than desktop internet access in Japan. Hmm deja vu

Update: mobile internet more popular than ever in UK

Also on this subject I was reading over at the register, about a move to Macromedia from Microsoft by Juha Christensen making flash lite an even more serious contender as a software product for mobile phones (has already been adopted by Docomo)

when Win XP Service Pack 2 beta comes out according to
this article at arstechnica. I've had pop-up blocking on Mozilla for ages and have virtually forgotten what the experience of unwanted pop-ups is like.