boakes.org

Author Archive

HTML5 Please

Posted on January 23rd, 2012 by Rich

HTML5 Please is a new site reflecting the suitability of the latest Web Standards that are still works in progress. It’s somewhat similar to Can I Use.

Back from the Google Wilderness

Posted on January 17th, 2012 by Rich

Some time ago, I noticed the traffic on this site dropping off rapidly.

Smallest Federated Wiki

Posted on August 26th, 2011 by Rich

Ward Cunningham introduces a work in progress, the Smallest Federated Wiki with a series of short films.

SVN Externals Reminder

Posted on March 18th, 2011 by Rich

go to parent folder noting that there is a . at the end of the command, type: svn propset svn:externals ‘foldername url’ . observe that it says; property ‘svn:externals’ set on ‘.’ type svn up

Liquid Alchemy

Posted on September 10th, 2010 by Rich

I woke this morning feeling still a little under the weather after a few days of the common cold, so before making a pot of tea, I went for a Lemsip. In a pique of consumerism at the shop the other day I also bought a tube of orange flavour Berocca. I’m not usually one [...]

The People’s Manifesto

Posted on September 7th, 2010 by Rich

I’m delighted to see Mark Thomas new book “The People’s Manifesto” is now available from the publisher as a traditional paperback and an ebook. It’s as razor sharp as any of his previous books & TV shows, and stunningly diverse because each policy was suggested and voted on by the general public in shows all [...]

Delicious-to-WordPress

Posted on September 3rd, 2010 by Rich

Having tried several solutions for publishing delicious bookmarks on WordPress I came to the conclusion that nothing did what I wanted. What I wanted was each link on the front page, interspersed with any articles I write, so that the time-line of links and articles becomes apparent and the main page is a more dynamic [...]

Goodbye Windows

Posted on August 24th, 2010 by Rich

In an attempt to rescue a couple of files I fired up the “old” PC today. It’s about 3 years old now, so not what you’d call obsolete by any stretch of the imagination, and when it was new no OS would recognize the Gigabyte SATA RAID drivers. I tried Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, Suse, Redhat, [...]

Postalicious is Breaking Fixed

Posted on August 24th, 2010 by Rich

I’m using Postalicious to pull my links from Delicious.com and republish them here, however, several times lately it’s published server errors such as those below. I’ve dropped the author a line so maybe we’ll get to the bottom of it “real soon now”. These are my links for August 22nd through August 24th: 500 Internal [...]

Bankers Bonus-Malus

Posted on May 9th, 2010 by Rich

There’s been a lot of talk about bankers bonuses and whether they’re right or wrong. There appear to be 2 main problems. 1. They’re too large 2. They’re paid regardless of overall bank performance. Here’s an alternative: use a bonus-malus system that is regulated and applies across the European banking sector. If a banker / [...]

TFL Cheesed

Posted on April 12th, 2010 by Rich

Did TFL just get cheesed or is it a genius viral move?

FAO Anon

Posted on April 8th, 2010 by Rich

I got three messages in a row from an (almost) anonymous reader today. The first message was startling. The second corrected the first, and the third asked that none of the messages be published. I was pondering the first two, and thus had held back from publishing them, when the third message arrived. Since I [...]

Is the IE6 Petition News?

Posted on February 2nd, 2010 by Rich

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 [...]

iPad Frenzy

Posted on January 28th, 2010 by Rich

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.

Sequential Email Addresses are Silly

Posted on January 26th, 2010 by Rich

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. [...]

Code Tutorial Blueprint

Posted on November 21st, 2009 by Rich

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 [...]

Full Frontal 2009

Posted on November 19th, 2009 by Rich

“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.

Rolling out an HTML5 theme

Posted on November 18th, 2009 by Rich

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.

Trying Twitoaster

Posted on November 14th, 2009 by Rich

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 [...]

Probable Trust

Posted on September 30th, 2009 by Rich

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 [...]