I couldn’t find a MediaWiki extension for Eventum when I needed one, so this evening I knocked one up. It’s fairly basic, very unoptimised, and probably far from perfect, but it works for me, and someone might use it as the basis for something better. It uses PHPs MySQL library to open a connection to [...]

Imagine a scene in the not-too distant future… after a frenzied period of leaks, rumours, claims and counter-claims, interspersed with no-comments, denials, and increasingly reliable and suggestive evidence emerging from component and sub-assembly manufacturers, Apple Inc announce the imminent release of The Perfect Gadget. The mainstream press attend press conferences and briefings where Apple proclaim [...]

The new BBC News website is a bit too tall. The Beeb have introduced an additional banner at the top of the page which is of very little use (other than cementing the BBC Brand across its sites) so I wrote a little greasemonkey script to remove both the banner and a few other bits [...]

Something’s broken on the database that runs this site, specifically there’s b0rkage in the comment table, and the ssh daemon is not reachable. Perhaps it’s to do with the larger than normal amount of spam that’s been arriving today (for “larger than normal” read: one metric truckload). More info later after I’ve had a poke [...]

I’m in the process of rewriting the Worst Offenders plugin for the soon-to-be-released WordPress 2.5. Before I make a tested and polished version of the code globally available, I’d be interested to hear from anyone who’d like to alpha test it. As before Worst Offenders works cooperatively with other anti-spam plugins: its primary purpose is [...]

For the last few weeks I’ve been testing out some geo-tagging software on my camera. The concept is fairly simple, whenever I take a photo, the built-in GPS works out where I am and records this metadata within the photo.

I couldn’t help but marvel at the efficiency of our local station café recently, as I watched the staff pipeline their customer orders. The busy morning rush was so great that they’d streamlined the operations; one person greeted customers, took orders from several of us at once, and processed the payments. This freed the second [...]

On a recent train journey I overheard a conversation about someone who’d enjoyed the first class wine so much on a recent intercity journey that they had difficulty staying awake so as not to miss their destination. Staying awake is a problem for many commuters and for those whose destination is not the terminating station, [...]

This is one of those “maybe it exists but I can’t find it” ideas. Something that I’d find very useful would be media player plugin that could use the ID tag from mp3′s (etc) to nip off to the WWW and find the relevant guitar tab so playing along is thus a very easy process. [...]

In Britain, the process of finishing a PhD involves the submission of a written thesis, followed by an oral examination called a viva voce (the literal Latin translation is “live voice”). The “viva”, as it’s commonly known, is an in-depth discussion into all aspects of the thesis which typically lasts between 90 and 180 minutes. [...]

Back in the last century after Netscape merged with AOL, a 3-year deal was struck between AOL and Sun Microsystems such that the Professional Services groups from Sun and Netscape would work together on projects that benefited both companies. The Netscape server software became (to all intents and purposes) jointly owned and developed, and Sun [...]

I am a consumer. Buy my undivided attention. Exclusivity guaranteed. Bids start at just €0.01 per day.

What are the best alternative presents for a geek? The typical geek has carefully selected and purchased their gadgets of choice, has a computer that’s tuned to perfection and needs no software purchased (because their entire suite is open-source) – so aside from comedy tee shirts with clever slogans that can only be understood by [...]

I’m doing a lot of work with SVG at the moment, and something that would be very useful to understand is exactly which parts of a diagram are taking the longest to process and render.

The Nintendo Wii has now enjoyed it’s first week of sales and stories are floating around the net that the wireless controller (mentioned previously) has been finding itself airborne due to players getting sweaty hands. Videos of the problem are already surfacing.

This was a hard-work weekend. On Thursday, it seemed like I had lots of code starting to work. It appeared that the imaginary brackets that surround each work package and sub package were closing themselves off, so that the virtual equation that describes my work might seem a little smaller and more tractable. That’s when [...]

There’s a lot of fact-free Sony vs Nintendo articles getting in the way of computing and technology news at the moment. For example, the folks at Nintendo UK are are currently wibbling about Sony supposedly “stealing Nintendo’s idea for a motion sensing controller“.

Google has this week announced a labs project called Google Trends, a rather nice extension to the monthly search roundup that is Google Zeitgeist. Trends lets you see how popular a particular search term has been over time, and then just for fun, you can compare the popularity of other search terms over the same [...]

I think this may be an exclusive! It’s Apple’s 30th birthday next month; and they’re planning something big to mark the occasion. Today I learned from a trusted source that Apple is poised to make history next Saturday when it unveils the worlds first advertisement that can be seen from space.

Channel 4 will tonight air the first of ten programmes that amount to one of the largest television hoaxes of all time. Participants in the Space Cadets programme are a group of would-be astronauts who believe they have been flown to Russia, and that they will soon become space tourists, all in the name of [...]

This service has now been retired. If you’ve ever wondered if your ‘blog is actually worth anything, then this may be your cup of tea.

I find I work better at night: not just a bit better; a lot better. My code output seems to skyrocket between the hours of 23:00 and 04:00. Can anybody tell me, why? There must be a reason.

Penguin Books have come up with a rather neat little hook to get people off their iPods and curled up with a book, an open fire, and a comforting mug of brownian motion this winter; they’ve started a regular podcast in which they hope to include the latest news and extracts from Penguin Books.

This is an an everyday lesson that I shall try to remember next time I’m at the requirements gathering phase of system design, or the next time I’m explaining to someone why common terms of reference are such an important part of Software Engineering.

I just read the most wonderful news article ever: it’s about Web Browsers, and Forensic Science. It’s wonderful for two reasons: it gets the whole “telling a story” thing wrong by totally misinterpreting the status quo and being technically confused, then it gives an example that is so under-inspired that I had to come up [...]

I just watched the Discovery launch. It’s easy to be over-familiar with images of a Shuttle launch, there have been so many; but this one was different. This launch was important because it’s the first since Columbia broke up on re-entry, which affects not only NASA, but the entire scientific research community.

My big and very high resolution screen just made a very bad burning smell and went blank. I was ready to hoik it out of the window in case it decided to catch fire, but an acrid smouldering was the best it managed.

There’s now an Ex-Mozilla group on LinkedIn (in fact it’s been there for a while and is growing slowly by word of mouth). The group is associated with Alex Totic’s ex-mozilla website, and run in the same spirit, for all the employees that used to work at Netscape, from Mosaic Communication Corporation to AOL.

Do you have NTL 750Kbps Broadband? I have. Today I just noticed something rather dubious about it.

With the fans on my PC forever silenced in the wake of my successful water cooling experiment, the sound made by my hard disk is surprisingly grating – like a geiger counter going off as each radioactive file is read or written.

Rich installs water cooling in his PC.

I’m a little excited and apprehensive because my boss (who is me, incidentally) today decided to roll out a new silent-computer initiative throughout our corporate offices (i.e. my little back room). To whit, I have today ordered a water-cooing kit for the Dual Xeon 2.8GHz machine on which I perform my daily feats of technical [...]

One very interesting use of World Wind (version 1.3 released today) is to de-mystify a lot of the pseudo-scientific conjecture regarding the Aztec civilization.

After only nine working drafts, and more than two years in the writing, the W3C today published what I’m certain will become a must-read for all computing students who want to write about the web using more than vague hand waving gestures.

A short piece describing a little about the Internet’s cambrian phase betweem 1994-98, the formation of the W3C and why, even though they tried to snuff out Netscape’s air supply, Microsoft still deserve credit for their contribution to the web.

Today, November 9th, sees the official release of Mozilla Firefox 1.0. Firefox is a highly sophisticated and (above all) safe web browser which is available for most commonly used computing platforms.

If you’re going to learn java, it helps to have a well written reference book;

Make this your first serious Java book after you’re comfortable with the basics. It’s deeply technical, and an enjoyable read, a real rareity.

firefox 1.0 has advanced to the Preview Release (PR) stage, and it’s a significant improvement over 0.9.3 (which was already very good).

for those with more than one monitor, a good backdrop can further enhance the feng shui of your machine. today i found a site which produces wallpaper for all kinds of many headed configurations.

i’ve often wondered what it would be like to live your life with a soundtrack. when the walkman arrived this started to become a possibility insofar as you could add music to your everyday experiences – however – this falls short of what i mean when i think of a soundtrack. i’m talking about the [...]

if you sit working at a (powerful) computer all day then you too may be afflicted by the sound of multiple fans constantly whirring away in a limp attempt to stop your machine overheating. i’ve been toying with the idea of water cooling my machine for some time, but today i came across what must [...]

Due to a database error, the text of this article is no longer available.

Initially it seemed that not many pictures were taken of the days in Netscape. But some are starting to come out of the woodwork now….

A long time ago, in a company which now seems far, far away, Andy Walker took the concept of the (comfortably named) Sun | Netscape Alliance and assembled the following associative work… some of the images have been misplaced over time, but as I get copies I shall restore them. Since that initial foray, several [...]