Category: Techie

Oh, bum. While I was doing the site redesign, I was running the code off of my local machine. Then I tried the bits out on the Sunpig web server, and everything looked OK. But only because I hadn’t tried it out in Mozilla.

I used Mozilla to look at the new designs this evening, and lo! No CSS styles were being applied. At first I thought the stylesheet was broken somehow, and than Mozilla was therefore ignoring it completely. Nope. Then I tried every combination of attributes on the <link> tag to see if that was making a difference. Nuh-uh.

Google to the rescue. I found this page (on brain-stream.com), which highlights the real issue: my web server is serving up CSS documents (.css) with a MIME type of “text/plain”. And Mozilla doesn’t like that. Damn.

And the solution that is outlined won’t work for me, because I don’t own the server, and therefore don’t have access to the Apache httpd.conf file.

On the positive side, it showed quite satisfactorily that even without the stylesheet, the Sunpig site is still eminently readable. So the design decisions I made paid off. Yay!

An article in The Register describes a new invention for protecting tanks and other armoured vehicles. It uses electrically charged plating to vaporise anti-tank missiles before they can penetrate the rest of the armour.

“It sounds bizarre, but the paper reports that in a recent demonstration an armoured personnel carrier protected by the system withstood repeated attacks by rocket grenades that would normally have destroyed it many times over.”

As I read the article, Star Trek sprung to mind. Not the new-fangled force fields, but the special kind of hull plating they seem to have in Enterprise. When they seem about to enter battle, Captain Archer often requests that they “polarise the hull plating”.

And with scientists already having teleported beams of light, can warp drive really be that far behind?

This site currently validates to no known W3C standard!

First Google did it, now Amazon are getting into the game. They have just launched their web services, which allow anyone to hook into their catalogue. This should make it fantastically easy for affiliates or interested parties to display links to Amazon for searching and buying books straight from their own sites. Or for doing nifty stuff like producing cool pop-ups when you mouse over a book title.

As with the Google web APIs, people will find novel uses for this toolset within days, if not hours. Webword pointed out this site already: Amazon lite, which applies the pure and simple Google UI to Amazon’s search engine.

So when do we get something like this for Amazon in the UK?

And come to think of it, why do we still not have Netflix over here?

Oh, hang on… There seems to be something called In-Movies. Might be worth a look…?

I’ve just gone and got hooked on Ebay. Silly me. I’ve been to the site many times, usually as a result of people pointing out weird or cool items, but I’d never bid on anything until last week.

I’m going through a bit of an intense drumming phase right now, and a few weeks ago I got the idea that I needed some electronic drums. Needed. I love having the full drumming noise of my kit, but as we live in a semi-detached house in a quiet neighbourhood, I tend to have the quiet muffle heads on most of the time. With electronic drums, I could still play quiet, but have the full-on sound coming through a set of headphones.

Anyway, as a brand new kit would be reasonably expensive, I decided to look around on Ebay for secondhand equipment. Not to buy immediately, of course: just to see what the availability and prices were like…

But I got caught up in searching around to see what else I could find. And then last week, there was a hardback copy of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars up for auction. Even though the book didn’t have a dust cover, the opening bid was a ridiculously low £10. So created my user id (sunpig), and put in a bid. And right until the very last minute, I had the high bid, at £11.50. And then I got sniped. This is an annoying practice where someone will place a bid right before the end of the auction, giving other bidders no chance to respond with a better bid of their own.

There are two ways to deal with sniping: you can give in to the Dark Side and become a sniper yourself, or you can make sure that when you place your bid, your “maximum bid” is genuinely the maximum you would pay for the item. Ebay’s proxy bidding system will make sure that your bid stays as low as it needs to be. You will only go up to your maximum if other people are bidding against you, and they raise the auction to that level. And if it turns out that you still get outbid by a sniper then you can take solace in the fact that they won the auction because they were willing to pay more than you were–not because they used a frankly underhand tactic.

It’ll still smart, because if it’s something you really wanted, you’ll have got your hopes up. But that’s just the way auctions work. And thinking carefully about setting yourself this well-defined maximum is probably good practice for another reason: you are less likely to get caught up in a crazy bidding war. (As anyone who has played the Amber role-playing game can probably attest…)

So what does this all have to do with Opera (the web browser)?

Well, as I described in my review of Opera, one of its best features is how you can take a folder of Bookmarks/Favourites, and choose the commans “Open all folder items”. This will instantly open up all of these bookmarks, each one in its own window.

And this is a great thing for Ebay, because you can bookmark your favourite searches, and then re-do them all in one swift action! Ebay has a built-in tool for storing your favourite searches, but if you want to view them all with this, you’ll still end up clicking on a lot of hyperlinks and buttons. With Opera, you can perform all your favourite searches with a single click.

Opera rules, it really does. And Ebay is cool, too. But: must…not…get…carried…away! (Thinks back to a couple of years ago, when on weekends we would systematically scour all second-hand and charity shops in a selected part of Edinburgh, and then come home with anything up to 70 or 80 SF paperbacks in a single day…only 2 or 3 of which we would ever read.)

Opera 6 is out!Althought, to be honest, I haven’t found any major improvements over version 5.12 yet. It seems to be more of a collection of small improvements, and little extra features. The ability to double-click on any word or sentence, and then translate it, do a search, or look it up in a dictionary is quite nice, but not exactly revolutionary.

John Lettice writes about this new release in The Register

Oh, and have a look at the campaign to ban screwdrivers.