BBC News has a front page story about a petition to the government to phase out the use of IE6. Historically, ceasing to use IE has always been a good idea in my book, and IE6 is now very outdated (it’ll be nine years old in August). What caught my eye, however, was the following line in the article, removed from later editions:

“The petition, set up by Dan Frydman of web firm Inigo, currently has just 44 signatures.”

Since when is a petition with 44 signatures worthy of front page BBC News? Does someone in their web team have an undisclosed anti-IE6 agenda, or has the Beeb started doing marketing work on the side?

Since the BBC story was posted, the petition has gained approximately 1300 signatures.

Update: 11 hours later and the petition has 4400 signatures.

Wow, my iPad article from 5 years back is having a bit of a friendship day, and as a result the server is having its busiest day ever. Read more on “iPad Frenzy” »

A simple hint for email administrators everywhere. If you have a large number of users with unique sequential ID numbers, it may be tempting to use that ID as a primary email address, or an alias, but don’t do it. It’s an open invitation to spammers to target your users with the minimum of effort. Once they know one number in the sequence they can quickly find two more addresses by adding or subtracting from the first. Before long, with kinderarden maths they’ve guessed every email address and can proceed to spam them all. Today, I was automatically registered for one of Portsmouth Uni’s Google Apps accounts. It comes complete with an email address that is sequentially numbered. As a consequence, having never sent a mail with the account, and having never logged in until today, I found in my inbox, five, beautiful blinking pieces of spam. Years ago when we were setting up the email addresses for vodafone.net, the powers that be in Vodafone were really keen to have your-phone-number@vodafone.net as the email address format. We advised against it, strongly. We did sharp intakes of breath. We did furrowed brows. We did reverse psychology. Everything. The light was seen, and sanity and happiness was maintained, at least for a few months, then they did it anyway. I wonder how those vodafone.net accounts are doing now.

Not stepping on the lines in the infant playground. Girls drawing hopscotch numbers on the paving stones and singing “who stole my watch and chain”. Wondering why the girls never wanted to play war. Lining up when the whistle went before classes. The day The Whistle was replaced by The Bell. Learning the golden rule: DONT PLAY ON THE RAMP. The concrete steps being installed between the middle and the top yard. The view. Read more on “Memories of Hendrefoilan School in the 70s and 80s” »

I just watched a nice presentation by Yahoo evangelist Christian Heilmann who opened the show at FF09 yesterday. Whilst there’s a lot of good ideas throughout regarding the maintainability of JavaScript code, one nugget stood out about code tutorials. Christian Suggests a four pronged presentation strategy when writing tutorials for designers – it is equally valid when presenting concepts to fresh geeks:

1. Say what it does.
2. Show a working example.
3. Include the full code of the example.
4. Explain the example using code chunks interspersed with descriptive paragraphs.

A simple & sensible blueprint!

“A conference on ECMA-262” doesn’t sound particularly exciting, so I can understand the organisers of Full Frontal 2009 wanting to pick a name that was perhaps more attention grabbing. I’m heading along there tomorrow, and depending on the format (& facilities at my disposal) I’ll hopefully be able to blog and tweet throughout.

I wondered how hard it would be to get this site fully compliant with the as-yet unpublished HTML5 spec. Please excuse the dust. Most things are in and working. Still to tweak are nested comments and a few CSS niceties.

The idea of twitoaster is that it allows twitter users to reply to posts using tweets, so the discussion can live in many places. Nice. Fellow twitter users, I’d be most grateful if you could try this out to let me see if does what it says on the tin. Tweet comments are moderated, so they won’t appear immediately, but they should appear once I’ve seen them.

Right now, there’s limited information on reputable news sites regarding the earthquake/tsunami that occurred south of Samoa yesterday. To find more, I turned to Twitter (and its open source equivalent identi.ca). Disseminating live news from witnesses, moments after a major event, is the most compelling feature of such services, but both failed me. Not in the fail whale sense. Both sites were technically operating at 100% normal status. It was the content. Read more on “Probable Trust” »

Whilst idly watching my syslog recently (as one does), I noticed with some discomfort, that outbound connections were being made from my server, to sites of questionable repute. Something that might indicate that the machine had in some way been compromised. Read more on “Abusing OpenID to Increase Server Traffic” »