May 2009
3 posts
The Age of Distraction
Today I’m trying out Cory Doctorow’s @doctorow ‘s Writing in the Age of Distraction.
It works quite well I think - though rapidly changing (in 20 minute blocks) from one subject to the next makes me feel like I’ve just been hypnotised… you kindof go into a coding trance, and breaking out of it suddenly is quite disorientating.
Well it is for me anyway.
Anyway -...
Time Passes...
And now it’s April… is it? No. It’s May.
Have I been busy. Yes. No.
Absolutely - I’ve discovered a new Grand Passion - which is The Crowd Sourcing of Intelligent Design - which I go on about over here http://www.genomicon.com. I can see massive waves of successive revolutions breaking upon these fair shores - Web 3.0 is going to be in hardware. It’s going to be...
November 2008
2 posts
Twitterbotting
The twitterbot that I wrote for http://www.free-the-web.com went live a couple of days ago… and today I sifted through the feedback and replies.
Out of about 230 sent, I’ve had about 4 that have had snarky replies… and more re-tweets than I can count and an offer to translate it into Romanian - which is incredibly cool. So I think that’s positive… but I’ve...
Free The Web
Boycott IE6
http://www.free-the-web.com is now more or less completely liveish, and looking as it should in all browsers, with the possible exception of (wait for it) IE6.
It’s looking ok I think. I tested it with the mult-browser viewer thing here : http://browsershots.org which is pretty cool - it shows you about 60 different browser combinations which you can zoom in...
October 2008
5 posts
MTV and Greasemonkey
Well it looks like MTV have released all of their videos a la Youtube (although you can’t post them yourself, which is like the difference between two dimensions and three dimensions)… but they are there, and they appear to work. Slightly frustrating in that you look up your fav song, and they’ve got the artist doing everything except the one you want to hear. Still. Kudos to MTV...
MVC and SQL-Level Benchmarking
Because the trouble with MVC is that it makes instantiation of an object seem so trivial, that you can put $thing=new something($id); in a 1000 iteration loop… and you forget (and this is really easy to do) that you’re actually making 1000 seperate requests to the database when you could be making one.
And a lot of this stuff (for me at least) doesn’t come to light unless I...
Chrome and the pre-launch javascript jitters
Tomorrow I think… I’ll set up some benchmarking, then officially launch the 11v11 api, and England Microsite.
as in : http://www.11v11.com/api http://england.11v11.com
They seem to work - but I’m slightly worried about the javascript - it’s loading on some very big pages… and client-side stuff is iffy. Loads of combinations / permutations of browsers, and...
Clearspring plugins... the cop-out/workaround
Ok - I’ve gotten round the Clearspring plugin saga by popping the embed code up in a window of it’s own because any kind of on-click javascript thing appears to kill it, and although this is sub-optimal (it would be better to be able to load the things using ajax) it does at least work… and will do while I converse with the Clearspring support people, via their forum… which...
The never ending wordpress login loop
This one was a bit of a bastard to sort out, so I thought I’d pass it on.
How to tell if you’ve got it
1) Load your wordpress site in Firefox, with Firebug installed.
2) Go to the “net” bit which shows you which files are loading.
3) try to go to wp-admin (or any admin page)
The Firebug display will show
login.php
wp-admin
login.php
wp-admin
login.php...
September 2008
6 posts
CV / Brochure-ware site live
Ok, finally done it www.tangerineworks.com is reincarnated once again.
A little more involved than last time, but far prettier I think. Going through all the things I’ve done in the past is quite mind-boggling… and to be honest, the “previous-work” brain-dump only covers half of it. There’s so much that winds up on the cutting room floor.
Still there it is....
The flat table vs normalisation conundrum
So that’s what I’m doing today… massive tables linking to massive tables linking to massive tables, killing my server.
So, against everything I was taught at uni, I’m doing what everyone does and that’s abandon normalisation in favour of expedience… flat tables. I saw the DBA from Digg do a talk once (to a packed audience. Geekery is the new rocknroll, I tell...
Internet Explorer vs Cogntive Surplus
If you google “internet explorer pie chart”, then look at the images, the very first thing… the very top of the list is this:
Right now I’m trying to put together my CV site - and it’s working in all browsers except IE, and the reason it doesn’t work in IE, is that if you set the opacity of an absolutely positioned element, it (and this is the magical part)...
Football plugins
Ok - For the last month or so I’ve been working on creating an API / Plugin thing for the massive database that runs behind 11v11.com.
Having built an html-only plugin thing myself, I decided it might be an idea to go with someone who already makes these thing : http://www.clearspring.com - so they can plug in to pretty much anything: Your content has a little box thing that appears...
Well you've got to start somewhere don't you?
And to be honest, I actually started in early 2000, but I’ve only started writing down what I do each day (work-wise) today. At some point http://www.tangerineworks.com will have a condensed version of the backlog. But not yet.
So today I have mainly been putting together the new tangerineworks.com site, and adjunct to which is this here blog, so I’m doing this as well.
Why?...
