http://www.alleged.org.uk/pdc/ Damian Cugley’s personal web site en-gb pdc@alleged.org.uk webmaster@alleged.org.uk http://backend.userland.com/rss © 2008 P. Damian Cugley Mon, 01 Sep 2008 12:00:00 +0000 Mon, 01 Sep 2008 12:00:00 +0000 http://www.alleged.org.uk/pdc/2008/09/01.html tag:alleged.org.uk,2007:pdc/2008-09-01_pogo Mon, 01 Sep 2008 12:00:00 +0000 If you are having trouble getting your brand new Polaroid PoGo to work it may be because the instructions with the printer do not say which way up the paper goes in. … http://www.alleged.org.uk/pdc/2008/08/21.html tag:alleged.org.uk,2007:pdc/2008-08-21_drupal_mail Thu, 21 Aug 2008 12:00:00 +0000 For once something I am learning at work is useful in real life: I am using Drupal (which I have been working on since last month) to implement a new version of the CAPTION web site. So far it has been plain sailing, more or less, except I hit a roadblock with user self-registration: Drupal could not send mail. It seems this is a known problem with Drupal that has not been fixed in years. … http://www.alleged.org.uk/pdc/2008/07/30.html tag:alleged.org.uk,2007:pdc/2008-07-30_drupal Wed, 30 Jul 2008 12:00:00 +0000 My current project at work has involved a quick-and-dirty crash-course in Drupal, a content-management system written in PHP. Here are some of my initial impressions. … http://www.alleged.org.uk/pdc/2008/05/31.html tag:alleged.org.uk,2007:pdc/2008-05-31_cap_identifiers Sat, 31 May 2008 12:00:00 +0000 CAP is the OASIS Common Alerting Protocol, which is a specification of an XNL format for disseminating warnings of hurricanes, earthquakes, and suchlike. The CAP v1.1 format is mandated by the European R&D project I am working on. This is an inconvenience, because CAP is badly flawed XML standard. I am going to discuss here some of the problems I have had with message identity as defined by CAP. … http://www.alleged.org.uk/pdc/2008/05/29.html tag:alleged.org.uk,2007:pdc/2008-05-29_dict_literals Thu, 29 May 2008 12:00:00 +0000 C# Does not have a nice way to represent a dictionary as a single value: you can only create an empty dictionary and add entries one by one. Which is annoyingly verbose if you are used to a more reasonable programming language, … http://www.alleged.org.uk/pdc/2008/05/02.html tag:alleged.org.uk,2007:pdc/2008-05-02_fontface Fri, 02 May 2008 12:00:00 +0000 If you are reading my front page in Apple Safari 3, then you will see the headline in a nonsensical font I just invented. This is a novelty made possible by the combination of two different bits of work from unrelated corners of the interwebs: Safari’s support for the CSS web-fonts module, and a web-based font editor FontStruct from FontShop. … http://www.alleged.org.uk/pdc/2008/04/16.html tag:alleged.org.uk,2007:pdc/2008-04-16_history Wed, 16 Apr 2008 12:00:00 +0000 This is one for people with a Unix-like operating system at home: … http://www.alleged.org.uk/pdc/2008/03/04.html tag:alleged.org.uk,2007:pdc/2008-03-04_traffic_calming Tue, 04 Mar 2008 12:00:00 +0000 I had one of those near-accidents while cycling in to work that illustrates a problem with some forms of traffic calming. … http://www.alleged.org.uk/pdc/2008/02/29.html tag:alleged.org.uk,2007:pdc/2008-02-29_ui_compatible Fri, 29 Feb 2008 12:00:00 +0000 There is some controversy over the proposal by the Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 team to support a new header X-UA-Compatible in IE8. Leaving aside the argument as to whether this header should exist at all, there is the question of whether anyone at Microsoft has read RFC 2616 (the HTTP 1.1 specification) and spent as much as five minutes considering how to make their header fit in to the established conventions. … http://www.alleged.org.uk/pdc/2008/02/23.html tag:alleged.org.uk,2007:pdc/2008-02-23_cite Sat, 23 Feb 2008 12:00:00 +0000 Mark Pilgrim reports that he’s been misusing the HTML cite element all these years because the HTML 5 definition contradicts his use of cite to wrap authors’ names. Just when I was about to crow excitedly that I’d always said he was wrong, I checked the old specs and discovered we both were—or actually, that HTML 4 was wrong. … http://www.alleged.org.uk/pdc/2008/02/02.html tag:alleged.org.uk,2007:pdc/2008-02-02_html5 Sat, 02 Feb 2008 12:00:00 +0000 Internationalization Activity leader Richard Ishida comments on the HTML 5 draft, The formerly deprecated b and i elements of HTML are defined in terms of their appearance: for example, the name of a ship can be bracketed with <i>…</i>, because ship names are italicized. The problem is, of course, that this applies to English, but not to Japanese, for example. Should these tags be suppressed in favour of something ‘more semantic’ (whatever that means)? … http://www.alleged.org.uk/pdc/2007/12/01.html tag:alleged.org.uk,2007:pdc/2007-12-01_leopard Sat, 01 Dec 2007 12:00:00 +0000 When my PowerBook’s disc started failing that was the final excuse I wanted to buy a new computer. This time I went for a desktop rather than a laptop: a 20″ iMac. …