New Earth Online / News

Firefox sets World Record

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:05:27 +0100

Those who took part in the Firefox download day will have now received an email from Mozilla confirming that the Guinness World Records have accepted the new record of the most downloads for an application over a 24 hour period. We set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours. With your help we reached 8,002,530 downloads. You are now part of a World Record and the proud owner of the best version of Firefox yet! Don't forget to download your very own certificate for helping set a Guinness World Record. Well done to Firefox and all those who participated! It's good to know there's a lot of people out there using a decent browser.

Google learns to Flash

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 08:08:51 +0100

Who would have thought the day would come where Google's robots would be able to index content out of Flash files? Well now it can! Google announced on their blog today that after working with Adobe to better integrate the Flash technologies into their crawler. The benefits of this have been shared with Yahoo, and it should mean that the pair of engines will soon be able to fully index content from any Flash based site, or even just indexing small bits of Flash used for text or menus. As well as indexing the content of Flash files (SWF) it will also look for URLs embedded within them as links. This will probably mean that we'll be needing the equivalent of rel="nofollow" for Flash quite soon. However, only URLs associated with text will be indexed, URLs attached as links to buttons or images will not be. For now at least, FLV files will be ignored as they typically contain no text elements that can be indexed. According to their blog they also have a few limitations still that they are working to resolve: Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed. We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file. While we are able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, we will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files. But it's good news for Flash developers anyway!

The Trouble With (Line) Endings

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:54:53 +0100

In PHP it's probably quite common to want to import data into your database using a CSV file, or an XML file - even though phpMyAdmin is capable of doing it. As I recently found out though, this can sometimes be an issue in itself. In this particular example there was a CSV file from an unknown system that was being read in by PHP and processed but it appeared like it was only reading in the first line due to way the data was being processed. As it turned out the entire file was being read in as a single line, and since the script was using fgetcsv to read in a line of comma separated variables it turned out to be pretty obvious what was happening after using print_r on the output. I knew that fgetcsv didn't have a parameter for specifying a line ending character so I decided to investigate what could be done to solve the problem. Eventually I found: After putting that line in before reading in the file all the problems were solved and the file was read in correctly. A strange issue, but a simple solution.

Blizzard announce Diablo III

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 16:13:57 +0100

Blizzard are a pretty awesome games developer. You only have to look at the popularity of their existing game portfolio to know that when they make an announcement people will listen; and listen they did. Today at their conference in Paris, France, they announced Diablo 3 - a sequel as eagerly anticipated as Starcraft 2. Already on their European website they have a cinematic teaser, a 20-minute gameplay demo video, and a load of screenshots and concept art. Not really sure what else I can say about it, other than if you played either of the previous games then you'll already know what it's about and will want to go take a look.

How to use vim

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 19:28:37 +0100

No, I'm not telling you how to use a cleaning product, it's an article on how to use the editor of the same name that is commonly installed on *nix boxes. This brief guide shows you all the most common controls and uses to aid you editing files directly on a *nix webserver. Article: Using vim for Development

Invalid SSL certificates and Firefox 3

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 21:50:39 +0100

There are legitimate reasons for having an invalid SSL certificate. If you are a developer and have a development environment that is a copy of a secure environment you may also have a self-certified SSL certificate to simulate the live environment. In the case of IE7 this would warn the user, advise against it, but provide a link to continue anyway or cancel. In the case of Firefox 3.0 they try to deter users more by giving them the option to, then having to confirm and then going through a dialogue box to further accept that you are about to use an invalid certificate. For those who are unsure how to do this I've added an article to help. Article: Firefox 3.0 and Invalid SSL Certificates

Greener Computing

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 20:54:28 +0100

The world has gone green crazy. Since a would-be President released his film, "An Inconvenient Truth", it's opened up the eyes of the world to the effects of global warming and that something must be done about it. Some of the recent steps we've seen from technology companies is to remove "stand-by" settings from appliances, and to reduce power consumption where possible. This has never quite translated to the PC world though - they've always been power hungry beasts with the minimal power supply being around 300W but people using anything up to about 700W. So if you're using your machine as a personal web server for development, etc. and if you have it switched on 24-7, then that's a lot of power. Not very nice for the environment.Aleutia seem to have come up with a simple solution to the problem - they've created a SFF PC that runs off 8W - a low enough requirement to be run off a solar cell. Let's step back for a minute, a PC running off a sustainable power supply - that means even if the world ran out of oil, gas, coal, and wood then there would still be a way to power it. On it's own the tiny little PC costs only �199 which isn't bad considering it's a PC with 512Mb RAM, and it's small and durable. One thing they don't state though is the speed of the processor. For an extra �300 they mount it to the back of a wide-screen monitor, throw in a keyboard and mouse, a 12W solar panel, and an inverter.

Firefox 3.0 Portable Edition

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 08:30:58 +0100

If you're not yet ready to replace your Firefox 2 with version 3 then there is still an easy way to test your pages in the new browser. That is to use the Portable Edition of Firefox 3, released by PortableApps.com. Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition is the popular Mozilla Firefox web browser bundled with a PortableApps.com Launcher as a portable app, so you can take your bookmarks, extensions and saved passwords with you. What I've done to be able to test in both version 2 and 3 is the opposite - I've upgraded to 3, and then downloaded one of their "legacy" downloads of version 2. There's no real argument as to which way is better, though if you do choose to do it the same way as me then I recommend checking that your favourite Firefox addons are supported first! Link: Firefox 3.0 Portable Edition

Firefox 3 D-Day

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 08:40:59 +0100

Today is download day for Firefox 3.0 - they hope to set the World Record for the most downloaded application in 24 hours. I personally can't wait to see how the final one compares to the release candidates and the betas. When Firefox 2 was released a lot of extensions weren't ready - but hopefully the majority of extensions will be ready by now. Even though it's 9am BST, it's still not available - I guess we're waiting for the Americans on this one. Once it's out though, make sure you go get it! UPDATE: The release time will be 10:00am San Francisco time, which means in British Summer Time that is 6:00pm.

Flock 2.0 currently in Beta

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 21:44:04 +0100

I've mentioned before that I really like Flock, but don't use it as a main browser - I just use it for social stuff like Flickr due to it's cool features. Now it's due for an update which brings it up to the same level as Firefox 3.0 (due tomorrow) which means it will have improved security features (should help protect against phising), better performance, improvements to the media browser (okay not a feature of Firefox 3 but it's still been improved), bookmarks have been replaced with "Places", and the "awesomebar". So far I've liked the new Beta and nothing's gone drastically wrong. If you're feeling lucky I recommend trying it too! Just remember to take a backup before you do though just to be safe. If you're a Mac user then you'll probably get on better with the new Beta as there's less to worry about. Link: Flock 2.0 Beta 1

Pledge your allegiance to Firefox

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 22:42:52 +0100

With the new version of Firefox being just 2 days away now from being released, Mozilla are trying to get the popular web browser into the record books. Their aim is to get it into the Guinness Book of World Records as being the most downloaded piece of software in a 24 hour period. As an indication of how many downloads they're going to get they've asked people to register on their site as a pledge of support to show how many individuals will download it. On their "Spread Firefox" site they've added a map showing pledge density and a total number of pledges. At the time of writing they've already reached 1,233,362 worldwide. I wonder though what the record is that they need to beat, as there doesn't seem to be any indication of there actually being a record already.

Flock version 1.2.1 released

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 19:58:30 +0100

Flock has not long been updated to version 1.2.1. The new features this time include: Pownce and Digg have been added to the People Sidebar. Media Bar IconDiggman: Click to Digg the current page or to see the Top 5 articles on Digg. AOL Mail has been added to the Webmail feature. Link: Flock 1.2.1

Google Browser Sync to be "phased out"

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 15:48:51 +0100

Reports are starting to appear that Google's Browser Sync extension for Firefox will be starting to be phased out over the remainder of the year and as of next year will no longer be available. In it's place Google recommend using one of the following: Mozilla Weave from Mozilla Labs - Offers bookmark and history synchronization across computers. Google Toolbar for Firefox - Store your bookmarks online and access them from any computer online. Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer - Synchronizes your bookmarks across all computers where it is installed.

Mozilla already planning Firefox 3.1

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 09:00:13 +0100

With Firefox 3 being released in just a few days it should come as no shock that the team at Mozilla responsible for the development cycle are already looking ahead to what will be implemented for the next version. Mozilla Links, speculates that the next version they will be working towards is 3.1 (codenamed Shiretoko) - that does kind of make sense based on the evidence that they will be implementing features that didn't quite make it into version 3. Though saying that, features such as "Places" that are in 3 were originally going to be in 2 so it is possible they may be planning to go to version 4 next in what seems like a mad rush to try and catch up on version numbers with other popular browsers. The main feature currently being talked about is the Ctrl-Del replacement so that when you use the key combination to change tabs it no longer changes tabs instantly but switches between previews of the tabs similar to what Windows users experience in Vista. Add these to previously announced support for tag, cross site Ajax requests, more power for the location bar, and some recently added support for CSS 3 selectors (which will improve Firefox score in the Acid3 test), and we can already foresee an interesting update. Also being improved is the addition of smart folders for Places (similar to what Mac users get in programs such as Mail.app) and bulk-tagging bookmarks.

Apple releases a security document

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 10:46:02 +0100

Apple have a released a guide in the form of a PDF that describes different ways of securing OS X "Leopard" using the Terminal. This guide is for users of Mac OS X v10.5 or later. If you're using this guide, you should be an experienced Mac OS X user, be familiar with the Mac OS X user interface, and have some experience using the Terminal application's command-line interface. You should also be familiar with basic networking concepts. Some instructions in this guide are complex, and deviation could cause serious adverse effects on the computer and its security. These instructions should only be used by experienced Mac OS X users, and should be followed by thorough testing. Link: Leopard Security Configuration

Back from the land of Incas

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 21:50:52 +0100

I've been back a few days now from Peru, but I've been too tired to post anything - I'm still quite tired now but thought I'd post to mention that I've started posting some of the pictures from the busy "holiday" on Flickr as a set called "Peru 2008". So far I've uploaded 113 of just over 1,000 photographs - though I've deleted a good 40-50 of them that I didn't like so they won't all make it to Flickr. The places covered in the two weeks were: Lima, Nazca, Ica, Pisco, Ballestas Islands, Paracas National Reserve, Cusco, Sacred Valley, Pisaq, Ollanthaitambo, Agua Callientes, Machu Picchu, Puno, Lake Titicaca, Islas Uros, Isla Tequili and Juliaca. On the way from Cusco to Puno there were several places we stopped off on the way such as La Raya which is the highest point on the road there at just under 4,000 metres above sea level. Hopefully normal service will resume shortly as there's been quite a few things happen whilst I was away such as the release of the second release candidate of Firefox 3.0 and of course the release of Apple's iPhone 3G - a very nice looking piece of hardware.

Please leave a message after the beep

Thu, 22 May 2008 23:29:38 +0100

I've just finished seeing Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Wasn't a bad film, but the last 20 minutes were a little odd. I'd say it was better than Temple of Doom, but Raiders and Last Crusade beat it. There won't be any news on here for the next two weeks as I'm off to Peru - expect to see some photo's when I get back!

Firefox 3 RC1

Sun, 18 May 2008 09:21:04 +0100

The people at Mozilla have released the first Release Candidate of Firefox 3. Amongst it's many changes are security improvements, optimisations, GUI changes and tweaks, and major changes to their bookmarking system (now known as Places). One-click site info: Click the site favicon in the location bar to see who owns the site and to check if your connection is protected from eavesdropping. Identity verification is prominently displayed and easier to understand. When a site uses Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificates, the site favicon button will turn green and show the name of the company you're connected to. Malware Protection: malware protection warns users when they arrive at sites which are known to install viruses, spyware, trojans or other malware. New Web Forgery Protection page: the content of pages suspected as web forgeries is no longer shown. Link: Firefox 3 RC1

Ajax powered search

Fri, 16 May 2008 21:00:12 +0100

Ajax is overrated, and I hope by now it's just a new name for something which has existed for ages which has now made it to mainstream. That aside there are still some pretty cool uses for it, such as what can be seen in Google Mail, Flickr, and of course Facebook and many other sites. Searchme uses Ajax to put a new twist on the way people search for sites they want. Historically we've always found sites from a list of titles and descriptions that result from what we search for. Since then the only major change in search we've seen is the ability to filter by content type such as Web, Images, Products, etc. Searchme as you've probably guessed, does something different. Once you start typing into it's search box it replaces the beta button with a list of options to narrow the search down by which is based on the context of the results found. For example when searching for "New Earth Online", it produced: Stocks Global Warming Christianity Astronomy Non-fiction Distance Learning Online Games Basket Ball Weather Music I'm not sure I'd really clash this site as any of those, so I decided to go for the "Search All" option. This then produces a "CoverFlow" like view previewing each of the results (I think this is limited to 10 though) which you can scroll through. There's also a "grip" like bar at the bottom which lets you view them as text results. The results aren't great, and the interface isn't all that practical, but it is quite an interesting concept.

Eye-Fi Explores the World of Geo-Tagging

Wed, 14 May 2008 19:11:40 +0100

Whilst reading some RSS feeds today I read about an amazing new product that is either on the market, or should be shortly, that is capable of uploading photographs to a site as you take them (as long as there is a Wi-Fi connection available). The Eye-Fi cards look like any other SD card though they actually have a Wi-Fi adapter built into them! This means once configured from a Windows PC or Mac, you're able to automatically upload pictures to a desired destination as you take them. If a Wi-Fi connection isn't available at the time it uploads them when there is one. All Eye-Fi Cards come with everything needed to make it simple to set up and connect to your home Wi-Fi network. After that, pop the card into your digital camera and start capturing memories. It stores pictures like a regular SD card no matter where you are, and uploads automatically as soon as you return to your wireless network. All you have to do is turn the camera on. It's not just the web it can upload to though, they will still allow your photographs to be transferred to your PC. There are 3 different versions available: Eye-Fi Home The cheapest of the options costs $79.99 (around �45) but does not allow transfer to sites - just to computer. Contains 2Gb of space. Eye-Fi Share Also has 2Gb capacity, and transfer to computer; but also unlimited WebShare services. Priced at $99.99 (around �55) Eye-Fi Explore This one includes unlimited Geotagging, Hotspot Access for 1 year, unlimited WebShare service, wireless Uploads to Computer, and still has 2Gb capacity. Priced at $129.99 (around �70) At present there are only 20 different sites that are partners of their "Webshare" service - hopefully this is something that would be cool to be increased upon. Something else that would be good is support for custom settings for sending to sites using XML-RPC so that pretty much any site can accept photographs. It really does open the possibilities of blogging. Of course though, people using the iPhone can already do this!

Opera Dragonfly set free

Thu, 08 May 2008 07:20:11 +0100

Opera Dragonfly is the Opera teams latest developer tool intended for people that need to debug Javascript, inspect CSS code and the DOM, and view Javascript errors. So it sounds like it's their own version of Firefox's Firebug, or the Web Developer Toolbar on Internet Explorer. Can't really say much about it other than it does most what Firebug does, but is for Opera and works with their Mobile browser too. If you use Opera, or develop for Opera, then this is going to be the perfect tool to help you. If you don't use or develop for Opera then I guess this won't be much use.

Indiana Jones and the Set of Icons

Tue, 06 May 2008 22:37:39 +0100

In the leas up to the release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (whoah huge title isn't it), Icon Factory are giving away free Indiana Jones themed icon sets. The first one they've released is for Raiders of the Lost Ark (yes I've used a few of them to theme the logo at the top!). Indiana Jones is out May 22nd, can't wait! Seems some of the new film is set in Peru, which is where I'll be off to in a couple of weeks.

May the Fourth be with you!

Sun, 04 May 2008 14:33:30 +0100

So it's Star Wars day once more, May the Force be with you! Don't forget that New Earth Online currently has a Star Wars figure archive in development that you can use to mark off what figures you have in your collection. It's not quite finished yet, but still feel free to try it out whilst it's in Beta.

PHP 5.2.6 released - Fixes over 120 bugs!

Sat, 03 May 2008 17:39:53 +0100

To fix over 120 bugs in this patch makes PHP 5.2.6 one of the biggest point releases to date. Fixed possible stack buffer overflow in the FastCGI SAPI identified by Andrei Nigmatulin. Fixed integer overflow in printf() identified by Maksymilian Aciemowicz. Fixed security issue detailed in CVE-2008-0599 identified by Ryan Permeh. Fixed a safe_mode bypass in cURL identified by Maksymilian Arciemowicz. Properly address incomplete multibyte chars inside escapeshellcmd() identified by Stefan Esser. Upgraded bundled PCRE to version 7.6 On top of that are many other bug fixes such as the implicit conversion of variables to a string leaks memory. Link: Complete Source Code Link: Windows Binary

Homer Simpson in CSS

Sat, 03 May 2008 17:37:40 +0100

On the blog of a Roman Cortes, he's done something really impressive - created an image of Homer Simpson using only CSS to style HTML elements - no images involved! Now that's pretty amazing. It just goes to show what CSS can do. He's reported it as working in: Internet Explorer 5.5, 6 and 7 Opera 9 Firefox 2 Safari 3 To get it working in such a range is what really impresses me.

Notepad++ version 4.9

Fri, 02 May 2008 14:43:58 +0100

Notepad++ can be quite a useful application for editing code since it has syntax highlighting, it's quite small, and doesn't use much memory. There have always been a few problems in terms of the UI being buggy, but all that now seems to be sorted in their latest version 4.9 release. They list the following fixes: Add smart highlighting feature (double click a word to highlight all the same word in the document). Enhance visual effect of Mark all feature. Enhance Incremental search dialog docking. Enhance Incremental search : add Highlight all feature. Add auto-hide menu feature (IE7 style menu - Alt or F10 to toggle). Enhance tool bar GUI usability (display a chevron while some tool icons hidden). Add style transparency feature, right click on color to enable. Fix the files not opening by DnD bug.Enhance Find Replace dialog : Add "Extended" option - search (and replace) for tabs(\t), newline(\n\r), and a characters by it's value (\o, \x, \b, \d, \t, \n, \r and \\). Bug fixed : Find dialog always scrolls text into view now. Add places bar in save as dialog. Fix non-recognized relative path bug in command line mode (under Dos prompt). Add 2 messages for doc monitor plugin. Fix the transparency bug (in Styler Configurator). Make search in hidden directory (for Find in files) optional. Fix the replace bug while replacing nothing. Fix the F3 searching direction bug. I've been using it all day and so far so good, no problems with the UI.

OpenID made friendly

Fri, 02 May 2008 13:21:28 +0100

I've never been to fond of OpenID, that's no secret. It just doesn't feel secure enough, and having to copy and paste the URL into a log-in box feels cumbersome and to the average computer user I think it could actually be confusing which is what will stop OpenID from becoming mainstream. By the way, by "average computer user" I mostly mean those that really don't use computers much and probably understand the internet as being that blue "e". ID Selector seems a possible solution to the problem of getting it mainstream by trying to make it easier and more understandable. Helps new users get and remember their OpenID. "One click" login experience for return users. Consistent login experience across OpenID enabled websites. Takes minutes to add to your OpenID enabled website. Attaches to your existing form. No changes to your form processing code required. Capability aware to help users choose an OpenID provider that will just work. You choose which providers appear in your selector, and in what order. At this point not sure how accessible the option is, it's something I'll have to report back on soon.

Adobe starts the Open Screen Project

Thu, 01 May 2008 13:00:33 +0100

Adobe have started something new, the Open Screen Project which is an attempt to provide a consistent way of delivering rich internet experiences on pretty much any internet capable device. Already they've had a huge response with people such as Cisco, Intel, LG Electronics, Motorola, Nokia, and many others supporting the project. It's an excellent, and worthy idea trying to bring a standard forwards to make it easier for consumers to choose which devices to get. However there is potentially a downside - will it work? Since the project is specifically for delivering Adobe Flash and AIR to devices that means that there is a pretty reasonable chance that Microsoft won't be happy and will start their own project that pushes Silverlight. Of course this will mean people will still be no better off - but the the project does still have benefits: Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player Publishing the Adobe Flash Cast protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services Removing licensing fees - making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free With the SWF and FLV formats now being open there is the possibility that we'll see people customising and proposing changes in the near future.

Free Star Wars e-Book!

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 08:07:21 +0100

Not exactly web development news I know, but Del Rey books are giving away a free e-Book / audio copy of the "Legacy of the Force: Betrayal" story that kicks of Jacen Solo's descent into the darkside of the Force - an event that forever changes the Star Wars universe. If you've not already read any of the 9-book series then the first book is indeed a good place to start, especially for free. It seems a lot of publishers are giving away full versions of things lately as a way to better publicise what they do. Away from literature, some recording artists have been doing the same for a few months now. Such as Coldplay, who will also be giving away a free single later today. It's a pretty cool thing for consumers, and I think it does help retail too. By giving away a free single or the first book out a series it helps generate attention to that bulk of work and is more likely to generate more sales from people that would otherwise have never listened to or read it.

Advanced Metadata

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 07:33:40 +0100

Adaptive Blue have come up with a great idea for extending metadata to better describe products and media detailed / reviewed on a page. AB Meta is based on the eRDF Standard meaning that is is fairly simple and easy to learn how to use. An example they provide is what could be used for describing a book. This metadata provides information that could easily be used to uniquely identify a book and is something that would be great to be used by search engines for product results. Their reasons for AB Meta are: Object-centric: Focuses on everyday things that we encounter around the web Semantic: Upgrades pages to be part of growing Semantic Web Lightweight: No complex markup, no changes to the body of the document Intuitive: The names of things and attributes are easy to understand for anyone Efficient: The meta headers are easy to get to without parsing entire HTML page Extensible: Additional attributes and concepts are easy to add Compatible: Alternative markup based on existing standards is supported On their site they describe briefly some of the rules they plan for it, and how it should be interoperable with Dublin Core metadata. There are examples of object types for: Albums Blogs Books Gadgets Items Movie Stars Movies Recipes Recording Artists Restaurant Stock Video Games Wine Best to keep an eye on this one to see where it goes and whether it gets taken up by any search engines.

Browser Stats for April 2008

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 07:33:05 +0100

In the months since I last reported statistics for New Earth Online, quite a bit has changed - the Firefox 3 Beta was released, as was the Internet Explorer 8 Beta. Figure 1. Browser statistics Browser Percentage 1. Firefox 58.94% 2. Internet Explorer 33.30% 3. Safari 4.96% 4. Opera 2.13% 5. Mozilla 0.27% 6. Playstation 3 0.15% 7. Camino 0.10% 8. Mozilla Compatible Agent 0.07% 9. Konqueror 0.02% 10. Netscape 0.02% I'm quite suprised to see people visiting the site from a Playstation 3 - does it actually display okay on one? No suprise, but the top 3 are Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari with Firefox and IE getting the most hits between them. Looking at individual stats for the browser I can see the majority of people are using the latest version of Firefox for those that are using Firefox; but some are still using very old versions such as version 1.0 - whilst others are using the Firefox 3 Beta. For those using IE, 99% are using either IE7 or 6 - the rest are using a variation of version 5 or the beta of IE8. I'm quite amazed to see quite a few people still using old browsers!

Articles to come...

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 18:13:51 +0100

Just a quick update on what articles I've already started writing and hope to have online as soon as possible. Subversion - Managing your code repository Using sIFR Adobe Flash Cheatsheet Microformats, Accessibility, and Usability - The Balance Microsoft Silverlight Basics Implementing an OpenID solution Expiring Content with Apache mod_expire Using vim for Development Parsing vCalendars and vCards in PHP Create an RSS Widget for OS X Coding Efficiency (Big Oh) Beginners Guide to Encryption Creating a Photo Gallery Compression Methods A Quickstart to the DOM HTML Emails Making Fire in Photoshop Structuring your markup Colouring Photographs in Photoshop Using Masks in Photoshop Implementing SSL Creating a Testing Environment Privacy on the World Wide Web As usual please feel free to leave a comment or email me using the contact form if there's anything topics you'd like me to cover.

Caching your PHP sites

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 13:46:40 +0100

As your site traffic grows it takes longer and longer to generate a dynamic page from sending multiple queries to a database. One possible solution to limit queries is to cache the result of each query that is needed, or to have a complete full page cache for your site. The purpose of this article is to help with ways of caching your PHP powered site. It only touches very briefly on using Cache_Lite (part of PEAR), APC (part of PECL) and developing your own solution. Ideally it should be used in such a way that if your database server goes down it also acts as something to fall back on. Article: Caching PHP pages

Yahoo Analytics Suite

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 17:31:36 +0100

Back on the 9th April, Yahoo bought themselves their very own Analytics company - IndexTools. Probably as part of their "we want to be like Google and not get bought by Microsoft" strategy. What this means is that the 3 biggest search engine powers: Google, MSN, and now Yahoo each have analytical tools for seeing how many visitors sites get, and what popular search terms were etc. At present IndexTools charge a princely sum for their services as opposed to Google Analytics which is free. This could mean that IndexTools may end up offering a cut-down version free to Yahoo! users. Normally their prices range from �26.95 to �139.00 per month. As with Google and many other analytic packages it involves adding some JavaScript to every page that you want to be tracked; the results of which can then be viewed from one central location. Comparing it to Google Analytics though I really don't see what the point in paying for the same statistics is though.

Safari no longer an update for iTunes

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 16:15:58 +0100

Apple does seem to be making a few strange moves lately. First they release a "Time Capsule" that uses an Hitachi "Deathstar", and then they decide to get people to install Safari on Windows by including it as an update. Neither of these moves were particularly clever, but at least they're doing something about one of them. As of version 2.1.0.110 of their Software Updater tool, Safari will be clearly labelled as a separate download so as to not confuse consumers. Whilst on the subject of Apple has anyone tried the Time Capsules? The place where I work got a couple of them earlier in the week and are already sending them both back for a full refund as they just don't work! I think it would be interesting to see what percentage of people that have bought them are actually pleased with them.

Googlebot and Forms

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 08:37:45 +0100

A few days ago (a week in fact!), the Google Webmaster Central Blog reported that Googlebot now attempts to submit data to forms on "high-quality" sites in an attempt to index more data. In the past few months we have been exploring some HTML forms to try to discover new web pages and URLs that we otherwise couldn't find and index for users who search on Google. Specifically, when we encounter a

element on a high-quality site, we might choose to do a small number of queries using the form. Upon hearing that, one of the first questions you're going to be thinking is what sort of data is it going to be submitting to the form? Again, they have an answer. For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML. Having chosen the values for each input, we generate and then try to crawl URLs that correspond to a possible query a user may have made. If we ascertain that the web page resulting from our query is valid, interesting, and includes content not in our index, we may include it in our index much as we would include any other web page. What is important to note is that they say it Googlebot only does this for high-quality sites which means not all sites will have this treatment, nor will it affect search engine rankings - which stops bigger sites having an unfair advantage over smaller sites with "better" content. Also, if you're one of the "lucky" ones to have Googlebot doing this to your site, you can block it from using your search form using robots.txt as normal.

Security updates to Browsers

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 07:26:33 +0100

It seems Firefox has had some issues with it's JavaScript garbage collection (issue MFSA 2008-20), as Firefox 2.0.14 has been released solely to deal with that. In other news, Apple have released Safari 3.1.1 which also deals with a few security issues: CVE-ID: CVE-2007-2398 - A maliciously crafted website may control the contents of the address bar in Safari CVE-ID: CVE-2008-1024 - Visiting a maliciously crafted website may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution in Safari CVE-ID: CVE-2008-1025 - Visiting a malicious website may result in cross-site scripting in Webkit CVE-ID: CVE-2008-1026 - Viewing a maliciously crafted web page may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution in Webkit

Subversion climbs up the beanstalk

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 09:13:54 +0100

In times long past I've mentioned the benefits of keeping your code under version control using programs like Subversion, CVS, or Visual SourceSafe. Today I've come across an interface for Subversion that seems quite interesting - it's called beanstalk. I'm not sure how long it's been around for but it's premise is quite cool. Beanstalk is a hosted Subversion system, making it easy to setup, browse, and track Subversion. Beanstalk has built-in integration with your favorite tools such as Basecamp, FogBugz, Campfire and more. Take a quick tour. Looking at what it integrates with shows a pretty impressive list: Basecamp - Online project collaboration FogBugz - Online issue tracking Campfire - Instant messaging exclusively for groups Twitter - Online activity messager Lighthouse - Online issue tracking Harvest - Online timesheets Using Beanstalk means you have to register of course, and there are 4 options available for this; Free, Personal, Team, and Business. All of these have different features / spec depending on how much you pay monthly for it. I decided to try it out with the Free option. Registration was dead simple with it asking for my name, email address, username and password, and sub-domain to use. The next step is to create a repository for your account; this just needs a name, URL, and some basic details on the structure. When setting up the structure it does have an option of creating it blank, or importing it from elsewhere which is a great way to continue using your existing repository. Finally the next step just requires you to set-up users and permissions - which with the Free account you're limited to 3 users. Afterwards you're able to set-up the integration for each repository with the services it supports too. Overall it looks a great product, one I think I may end up using quite soon.

The end of CAPTCHA?

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 07:33:52 +0100

It's not secret that I despise CAPTCHA images, especially when on some sites it takes me a several attempts to get it right due to how badly they obscure the letters. In most of these cases it's possible for a 'bot to do better than a human. Now reports are coming in from Ars Technica that a spambot has now cracked the CAPTCHA for Windows Live Mail (formerly known as Hotmail) and has since also cracked it on GMail. This happened back in February, but it's being reported now that the method for reading these images has gotten to the point where it has a 10-15% success ratio meaning it could take up to a minute at most to crack the CAPTCHA. Time to arrange a funeral and grave for CAPTCHA, hopefully.

IE8 and the DOM

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 16:26:19 +0100

Standards compliancy of browsers is essential for web developers and for people using the sites. For people visiting the site they'd expect it to look and function the same no matter what browser they used, they shouldn't have to think about what browser they need to get the optimal experience of a site. Likewise, developers and designers shouldn't have to think about what will work in some browsers and not in others because one browser does something one way and another a different way - that is what standards are for, so that things like accessing the DOM are done the same way no matter what browser you're coding for. The people developing IE8 are starting to make headway in getting the latest iteration of the notorious browser to better support the DOM which is a huge relief for those that like a bit of JavaScript (JScript in the case of Microsoft's implementation of the ECMAScript standard). Some of the details of what has been improved is listed on the IEBlog site. button element defaults to submit action setAttribute changed to use HTML attribute name (fixes setting of style, class, and for issues) getElementById no longer does the stupid thing of including the name attribute, and now does it only by id button when submitted submits the value instead of the innerHTML, now matching behaviour of other browsers and the standard There are quite a few other fixes they've made, and some issues they've noted as still being outstanding - if you want to see the rest of them then head over to their blog to find out. Link: IEBlog - HTML and DOM Standards Compliance in IE8 Beta 1

The Tale of a Spider

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 18:37:15 +0100

Most "spiders" (otherwise known as crawlers, robots, etc.) such as Googlebot index your site without too much hassle, others can be a nuisance. Just lately I've found Baiduspider to be incredibly annoying since it seems to be almost permanently crawling my site meaning that every now and then it stops the database from being accessible. On this site whenever a database connection fails I've set it up to redirect to an "offline" page and to email details of what happened, which means with this spider crawling I'm getting something like two dozen (24) emails a day which is starting to irritate me a little. So I decided to investigate and find out what this spider is. Fortunately the user-agent provides a URL to where details on the spider can be found - as all good spiders should. However it's in Japanese so has to quickly be run through a translator such as Google or Babelfish. Once done we can see what it has to say for itself. Apparently it's supposed to ajust it's self to only put the server under as much pressure as it can take - ooookay, well that's not happening. Further down the page it says it will only crawl once a week, okay that's not happening either - try twice or more a day. Even more useful - they provide people with what's needed for their robots.txt in order to stop Baiduspider crawling the site, however after adding the following code it made no difference - the spider still crawls my site. User-agent: baiduspider Disallow: / User-agent: Baiduspider Disallow: / I've got it in there for both upper-case and lower-case due to inconsistencies on their site - on the spider details page it says it should be an upper-case B and the rest lower case, on the examples page it shows it with lower-case. Whichever way, the spider still ignores it. Looking at the Apache log file it shows that it's not actually shifting a lot of files, but is creating a large number of hits in a short time which seems to be what causes the problem. Google and Yahoo crawl my site daily, and shift about 10Mb each a day, but they don't cause me any problems. Anyone had any trouble with the "BaiDu spider" or any others? Update: It took around 24 hours, but it seems the Baidu spider is now ignoring my site! Yay!

Mozilla Firefox 3 on the horizon

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 07:32:42 +0100

It won't be long now until Mozilla Firefox 3 is in the hands of enthusiasts everywhere. Earlier this week Mozilla released Beta 5 and apparently the first Release Candidate will follow around April 8th - which isn't far off! Although there are improvements to security, stability, and performance, there are UI changes to make the various platform specific versions look like they fit in with the operating system, and Places. Places is a new way of managing favourites and looks like it might be quite effective - something worth having a little play with if you download the Beta or the forthcoming RC.

More downtime coming soon

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 10:23:31 +0100

Please note that New Earth Online will actually be offline on Tuesday 15th April from approximately 10PM (GMT) until about 2AM the following morning due to the database being upgraded by my host, Xcalibre, to version 5.0 of MySQL. Definitely a welcome change, and worth the brief downtime it will incur.

A perfect 100

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 07:39:23 +0000

Yesterday the Opera browser was the first to reach 100/100 on the Acid3 test in their nightly build. However it does still have some rendering issues, but the team hope to have them sorted soon so that their browser is the first to be 100% compliant with the Acid3 test. At the time Webkit, the renderer for Safari was at 95%, but in the hours since then they too have reached 100/100 and also have a few rendering issues to resolve. It's good to see a little competition between rival browsers to help speed up browsers becoming more standards compliant. I guess we could do with Firefox 3 and IE8 trying to aim for the same really.

IE8 has Improved Zooming. Apparently

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 08:54:08 +0000

The latest from the IEBlog team is that IE8 Beta 1 has better zooming (called "Adaptive Zoom") for webpages. The example they show is a screenshot of a page at 150% in IE7, and the same page at 150% in IE8. What they say here is that there are no longer any horizontal scroll bars as the zoom now takes into account relative sizes, etc. but if you look at the two screenshots carefully you'll notice that they don't actually look that different. The main difference you can see is that the image on the page that was forcing the scrollbars before is now being cropped (yes there is a very small difference in text size too) - is that advancement? I don't think it is somehow, it's just using overflow:hidden - no magic there, they're just trying to make the feature sound better than it is. Link: IE8 and Adaptive Zooming

Is Safari an update for iTunes?

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 18:36:23 +0000

Whilst Apple seem to think it is, the answer is quite clearly a resounding 'no'. One of the biggest problems I see about this is deception. Your average home PC user, and I'm not including about developers, when a window appears unexpectedly telling them there's an update available for something most will think it's a good thing and agree to it. So in this case that gets them a new browser. Fortunately though installing Safari using the updater does not make it the default browser - if it did I wouldn't be surprised if Apple got into a lot of trouble. A lot of people for the past few days have already been crying foul, and others see it as a good thing - it's giving the users a browser that's better than IE6 and 7 to use. How effective can that strategy be though? If someone falls for Safari being an update then they probably won't know it's a browser and will leave this new unexplained icon alone in fear of breaking their PC. That's still the way it is with a lot of users, if they don't know what it does they won't touch it. So it's kind of pointless making Safari get added to the update list for iTunes in my opinion.

First new article of 2008!

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 22:16:29 +0000

It's taken sometime to write a new article, but I've finally written one. This one discusses the problems with timestamps when using MySQL due to certain functions returning the time as UTC rather than in the local timezone meaning for potential problems. Timestamps get used everywhere - people use them for creation dates in content, to record the last time some content was modified, and many other uses. In MySQL what you get back is not always what you'd expect and so requires a slightly different methodology. Article: Unix Timestamps and Timezones

Arthur C. Clarke Dead At 90

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 07:41:02 +0000

The visionary author, Arthur C. Clarke has died at age 90. Many people will remember him for his forward thinking of scientific possibility, and for the great works of fiction that he wrote - one of which, The Sentinel, became a hit movie by Stanley Kubrick - 2001: A Space Odyssey. Rest in Peace.

Firefox 3 Screenshots

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 07:40:18 +0000

Network World have a selection of images of the new Firefox 3 that should be out later this year, showing off some of it's new features such as "Places" (the new favourites) and enhanced security features. Also out now are updates for Apple Safari 3.1, and Opera 9.50 Build 9841 Beta. The Safari updates features improvements to JavaScript performance, adds support for CSS 3 web fonts, CSS transforms and transitions, HTML 5 video and audio tags, and SVG, as well as various other improvements for developers and for Windows users. For Opera, the following changes: Fixed inline find. Fixed downloading attachments in the new Yahoo! mail. Fixed async XMLHttpRequest to never be blocked by a slow script. Fixed internal plugin methods not accessible from javascript engine when data attribute defined. Fixed an issue where new mail messages would not be detected. Opera Mail now handles mailto links with encoded characters correctly. Improved handling of subscription to temporary subscription to news groups. Fixed some offline mode issues. And lots more of stability fixes! March has definitely been a good month for browsers.

Microsoft update Vista to SP-1

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 07:28:40 +0000

The first service pack for Windows Vista has now been released to the public over Automatic Updates. There are unfortunately certain circumstances it will not appear in the updates list for, as the Windows Vista Team have blogged about: You have a driver installed that is not supported You have a pre-release of SP-1 installed You already have SP-1 installed Your operating system is running a language it's not been released for yet. So far it is available in English, French, Spanish, German, and Japanese For me it's the first in the list that is causing me issues - SP-1 is not compatible with early Creative drivers, something which they've not updated to many peoples dismay since early last year! I'll be installing SP-1 anyway, and will report back with anything I notice about it.

Colour of Magic next weekend!

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 07:35:29 +0000

I couldn't resist mentioning that Sky One will be showing The Colour of Magic over Easter!! Sir David Jason will be playing Rincewind the magician, and Sean Astin (who played Samwise Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings) is playing Two-flower, the tourist with the walking luggage. Can't wait to see it, really enjoy reading Terry Pratchett books - watching them is even better! You can watch the trailer for it on Sky One's "The Colour of Magic" microsite (under "The Film") to see what it's going to be like. Sir David Jason Rincewind Sean Astin Twoflower Tim Curry Trymon Christopher Lee The Voice of Death Tempted to watch it?

Nokia get personal with AMP

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 13:36:21 +0000

There has always been a struggle with development for mobile devices - there has never been enough interest or collaboration to make development easy. Since Apple released the iPhone there has been a renewed interest in developing mobile applications, though most of this has been with an increasing number of web applications designed for mobile devices. Whilst coding for mobile devices is still diverging due to many different platforms and constant changes from them platforms each year, development for websites supporting mobile devices is starting to converge to a single standard - something that sites such as dev.mobi and certain W3C working groups strive for. In order to aid development there is an OpenSource project from Nokia called PAMP that runs on Symbian Series60 3rd edition handsets with a minimum of 128Mb free RAM - a few years back that would have seemed a pretty hefty requirement. So far the only handsets they've tested it on are the N95 and E61i models though there are others it should work on. They've even gone so far as to test it on various CMS products and have confirmed it as working with CMS Made Simple, Drupal, e107, Joomla, and PHP Fusion. Quite an amazing experience to have a pocket webserver - something that would be nice to have on a Windows Mobile device too, but so far I've not been able to find anything. Link: Nokia PAMP Wiki

Rendering Modes in IE8

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 07:37:24 +0000

As I've mentioned in a previous post, and as you may have noticed from using it - IE8 has a button to switch the browser into IE7 rendering mode with just the click of a button. Definitely a useful feature if you're a developer or designer as you can test your design in IE7 and IE8 in the same browser window. I do wonder if they will keep that button there in the final version, or if they'll move it to somewhere else. From a developers point of view it kind of feels like they'd be doing something like: if (IE7Button.state) { ... } else { switch (viewport.doctype) { ... } } Although that probably isn't how they're doing it, it kind of gives an idea of how the rendering engine probably switches "under-the-hood". What would be kind of cool is if they decided to also include the rendering engine from IE6 - true it'd add a little bloat to the browser, but if they did that just for an IE8 "Developer only" version it would still be very useful and very cool. It would mean that developers and designers alike wouldn't need to install a virtual machine running XP, or a second machine in order to test their sites in IE6 and IE7/8. If they did this I imagine it'd be either done from the "View" menu, or from a special IE8 web developer toolbar. Anyone else think it'd be a good idea for them to include other rendering engines too?

JavaScript debugging in IE8

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 22:44:46 +0000

The ability to debug JavaScript (known as JScript in the Microsoft implementation of it) has always been troublesome in Internet Explorer. There have been tools released to help with it, but none as good as Firebug for Firefox - and I've never been able to install the IE web developer toolbar on an Windows XP system without it killing the browser totally and having to uninstall the toolbar. The developer preview of IE8 shows how JScript debugging can be done in Internet Explorer when things work right. Just as the IE team have their own blog, the group within Microsoft responsible for JScript have their own blog too. The latest post from the JScript team talks about the JScript Debugger that is included in the beta, putting emphasis on it being a light weight JScript debugger - isn't that just a way of saying the debugger isn't as fully featured as others or are they talking about it's memory footprint? That aside, the debugger does handle a little like the Visual Studio suite with it's ability to pause execution of code, step over a line, and step into and step out, as well as being able to continue after you've paused so that it can continue with any dynamic changes you've made - such as in the immediate window for example. The code view area has 3 tabs; one for HTML, one for CSS, and one for Script. The script tab also has an area for monitoring watched variables (handy for doing a trace), all currently local variables and their values (which can have their values changed here too), monitoring of breakpoints within the code (places where the execution will cease when it hits those lines of code), an immediate window, and a view of the call stack (which allows you to see what functions have been called to get to where you are). As far as their blog is concerned that is pretty much all they cover - a pretty quick and basic overview really, but they do provide a link to the Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 Whitepapers - maybe something worth reading. Link: JScript Blog: JScript Debugger in Internet Explorer 8

IEBlog explain the new Favourites toolbar

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 07:42:20 +0000

It's not everyday you find a developer has to explain changes to a favourites bar - but that's what the guys at Microsoft, busily working on IE8, have done. Of the changes they've made to the Favourites toolbar (formerly the Links toolbar), the WebSlices is starting to seem one of the cooler changes. The IEBlog demonstrates the use of WebSlices with an eBay auction to show how it works with monitoring a small portion of HTML just like you would an RSS feed. Now that it can be seen working we can see how it might be used on sites that are regularly updated such as monitoring responses in a forum thread or whatever you can imagine. These and RSS feeds being accessible form the favourites bar is a step forward from earlier iterations where you could only add links - this adds an extra dimension now for better organising and viewing your favourite links, 'Slices, and feeds. Any updates to Feeds or slices show as bold in the toolbar - a good change from a usability point of view. Anyone else have any opinions on the new IE8 toolbar? The IE8 Favorites Bar

Speed Matters

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 12:52:03 +0000

According to the Search Engine Roundtable, Google have confirmed that the time it takes to load a page will be taken into consideration for AdWords quality score in the near future. For those of us that don't use AdWords it shouldn't really affect us for now - but it does raise the question of whether or not they will eventually consider doing the same as part of the SERPs.

Trying out IE8

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 12:33:24 +0000

Microsoft have done it, they've released Beta 1 of Internet Explorer 8 for developers to start using and commenting on. One of the first things most developers have done is try it with the Acid2 Test - something that some people have found doesn't render right, yet others found it has. The reason for this discrepancy has been explained on the ever informative IEBlog as being down to it only passing on the official site and not copies of the tests due to IE8's "protection" against cross-site ActiveX controls. Although we said that IE8 Beta 1 passes the ACID2 test, some of you may be seeing results like the image above; we thought we should explain what's going on. IE8 passes the official ACID2 test hosted on http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html. (Note, this seems to be a popular destination at the moment. You may have trouble reaching the site.)There are also a number of copies of this test around the net. One popular copy that I've seen of late is http://acid2.acidtests.org/ IE8 fails the copies of ACID2 due to the cross domain security checks IE performs for ActiveX controls. Since IE does not natively handle HTML content in the OBJECT tag, but rather uses IE's rendering engine as an ActiveX to display this HTML content, the same cross domain security checks also apply. Well that explains that then! As part of their "Readiness Kit", Microsoft also describe some of the new features showcased in Beta 1, the two major ones being Activities and Web Slices. Activities are contextual menu options which quickly access a service from any Web page. Users typically copy and paste from one Web page to another. Internet Explorer 8 Activities make this common pattern easier to do. Activities is a nice idea and I think it would be good to see other browsers (such as Firefox 3) take a similar approach, although I'm not too keen on how it requires the addition of a button or link with an onclick event to the site in order to work. The example Microsoft give isn't great for starters, they use: If I was writing that I would have not bothered with the "javascript:" bit as that is implied by it being onclick - it's only needed if it's added to a href, but that is frowned upon now. Of course though there is no reason why it can't be used on a link tag instead. Furthermore, I think this feature would have been better without the button, and instead found the XML using RSD as that way it can be used seamlessly with any page. The other big new feature is the WebSlices - they are basically just like RSS feeds, but done by checking portions of page contents for changes - so no RSS feed is required. Also changed is: CSS 2.1 support Data URI Support Improvements to printing styles Versioning and Cross-document interaction for specifying IE render mode Improvements to the DOM Performance improvements Slight improvements towards Acid3 - hopefully we'll see further improvements here later as it's currently 1t 17/100 Having played about with the Beta on my XP virtual machine I found it very similar to IE7, though I guess there shouldn't be any surprise there. The first things I noticed was the addition of an "IE7 render" button, and a few additions to the contextual menus. It was also nice to see it not break many sites, in fact of the ones I've tried they all work as well as they do in Firefox.

Silverlight Goes Mobile

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 19:25:31 +0000

Microsoft have signed a contract with Nokia to get new mobile phones from the handset manufacturer to include Silverlight - the Microsoft competitor to Adobe Flash. Apparently we'll start to see it included with their new S60 (Symbian) based range coming soon with it hopefully being released for Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform shortly after. Silverlight allows designers and developers to produce rich web applications that are independent of browser, operating system and handset. Over the next few months I expect we'll see if Silverlight can really compete against a product that's stood on it's own for as long as Flash has, but with it breaking through into the mobile market it may just stand a chance of getting sufficient people using it.

IE8 to use standards by default

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 19:21:03 +0000

The title says it all really. Microsoft have back-pedalled and have decided that maybe it is best after all if Internet Explorer 8 uses it's best standards compliant mode by default without having to add any extra code to the page for it to "opt-in". Anyway, probably best to read it straight from the horses mouth as it were. Link: IEBlog: Microsoft's Interoperability Principles and IE8

Time Capsule of Death?

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 08:37:45 +0000

In case you haven't heard, Apple have released a new gadget called a "Time Capsule" that according to Steve Jobs uses a server grade hard drive for machines on a network to back-up to using Leopard's Time Machine app. However as noted by The Unofficial Apple Weblog the components of this Time Capsule are in fact an Airport Extreme and a Hitachi Deskstar harddrive. Pretty much anyone who's been dealing with hardware in the past 10 years will know how unreliable the "Death"star harddrives are. Back when I used to build PC's for a living it didn't take long to find out the "Death"star had about a 30-40% failure rate within the first year. Now compare that to the RROD problem of the XBox 360 which affects 16% of units and you soon realise how unreliable the "Death"stars really are. Not exactly a good choice for backing up your system too, especially if you're a business. It's a shame they didn't use a more reliable make like Seagate, Western Digital, or maybe even Maxtor. Whilst we're talking about Macs, I finally upgraded mine to Leopard and Office 2008 and it doesn't really feel like that much of an upgrade. I'd say one of the biggest features of Leopard is Time Machine, and I don't even use that! One useful program I have started using on the Mac though is a handy webserver app called MAMP (Mac Apache, MySQL and PHP) which is a great way to set up a development server for you Mac.

How NOT to secure a site

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 18:50:57 +0000

It's amazing that anyone would use JavaScript as the sole method for securing a site - it's ludicrous! Reading "The Daily WTF" today really made me laugh - a company providing "Federal Suppliers Guide Listings for Agents" had used JavaScript to check the value of a username and password field to secure all their sensitive information. That's just an insane thing to do - even most amateur's just starting out with web development wouldn't dream of doing that, let alone a supplier site for government agents - makes you wonder about the legitimacy of the company too. What's even better though is that once the author of the article contacted the company they accused him of hacking their site and responded by changing the username in the JavaScript. I almost wish one or more of their clients would spot this problem and get them to do something about it, I'm sure it'd be funny from a web developers point of view! Link: "The Daily WTF"

Calendar Design Patterns

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 09:07:51 +0000

Smashing Magazine a few days ago had an interesting article on designs of different calendars, and links articles on producing your own calendar graphic. Some of the examples are really good; so if you're planning on a redesign any time soon I'd recommend taking a quick look. They're so cool I'm pondering whether I should redesign mine again!

Downtime scheduled for March 18th

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 07:25:47 +0000

Just a quick heads-up that New Earth Online will be down for a while on Marth 18th 2008 whilst PHP and Apache are upgraded by Xcalibre (website host). Can't wait to start using PHP 5 in a production environment as there are so many useful bits that would be good to try.

Earthquake!!

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 01:03:35 +0000

Wow! We don't usually get earthquakes here in England, but we've just had one this morning that was strong enough to wake me up. Even lasted around 10 seconds! Last time there was one it was barely noticable. UPDATE: Just checked BBC News and apparently it measured 5.2 on the Richter scale. Thought it was reasonable strong!

Internet Explorer 8 Beta on the Horizon?

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 23:10:45 +0000

It seems that maybe IE8 isn't that far off being ready for eager web developers and designers to sink their collective teeth into. Apparently the first beta is aimed at exactly that audience to try and see what sort of reaction it gets so they can use that feedback to improve it further. Nice idea! This "Technical Beta" is currently by invite only so very few people will actually get to see it just yet - but good things come to those who wait. Let's hope Microsoft get it right this time.

Flock 1.0.8 Released

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 22:20:33 +0000

This time they've changed: The default home page will now import correctly on Macs when the Netscape is run from the installer DMG image. On Macs, if Netscape is set to be the default browser, Flock will now default to import that from that browser. In general, when importing into Flock the default home page import selection is from the browser being imported into and not Flock. Not much really, and most of it for Netscape users. Do many people still use Netscape? Even though it's no longer supported?

Custom Apache .htaccess Made Easy

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 22:01:15 +0000

I've run article in the past to help people write their own .htaccess files for use on Apache webservers. However wouldn't it be easier if there was a way of doing most the basic stuff without having to think how to do it? Luckily there is an online .htaccess editor by Ryoken & Mannen called .htaccess Editor that can help create .htaccess files containing rules for password protecting files and/or folders, permanent redirects, custom error pages, canonisation of URLs with/without WWW, IP restrictions, and what filenames to look for as a default page. Link: .htaccess Editor version 1.0

Google still King

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 18:39:26 +0000

Looking at the statistics for search engine popularity compiled by Search Engine Land, the current usage is: Google: 68.9% Yahoo: 17.4% Microsoft: 9.2% Ask: 3.9% Even the combined power of Microsoft and Yahoo, should a hostile takeover happen, will be unable to touch the search engine superpower that is Google. One thing this shows is that defaulting Internet Explorer to use MSN Search has no real bearing as most users still use Google - probably because of it being a word that is now in common usage.

Hotlinking images is bad

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 21:52:48 +0000

With an increasing number of people hot-linking to images on my site, specifically the photograph I took of a sunset, I've had to disable linking to them on other sites to stop the drain on my bandwidth it's causing each month. If more people continue to hotlink to these images without permission I may have to resort to only keeping my images on Flickr. For those that attempt this anyway, they will see the following image. If you want to use one of my photographs then please ask permission first.

Adobe's Buzzword

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 09:17:53 +0000

Adobe love to use Flash for everything - and when they decided to make a web-based word processor that was no exception. Buzzword is their Flash-based attempt at producing a fully featured, online word processor that comes with all the usual features you'd expect to see in a word processor. Ability to change the look of text - font family, size, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, foreground colour, and background colour. Spellchecker with ability to add words to the dictionary, or to just ignore the word always within a document, or correct it with a variety of suggestions. A running count of spelling mistakes is kept on the bottom status bar and seems to be the only way of brining up the contextual menu for correcting errors. Paragraph options to change alignment, spacing, and indentation. Bulleted lists, numbered lists, and checklists. Insertion of images. Insertion of tables. Ability to add comments and to then show/hide them. Sharing of documents. History of changes to the document. Page headers / footers. It looks quite nice too, and doesn't take too long to load. Some of the interface does feel a little sluggish though which can be a little irritating; and you have to register in order to try it out. Link: Buzzword

PostgreSQL 8.3 released

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 22:03:44 +0000

It seems there has been a lot of interest in PostgreSQL lately - probably because of it's sheer flexibility, and some of the speed advantages it has over MySQL. The new release, version 8.3, is a massive improvement over previous versions and as they state in the changelog it is because of the growing community that have helped to dramatically increase the speed of development. Listed amongst the added feature are: Full text search is integrated into the core database system Support for the SQL/XML standard, including new operators and an XML data type Enumerated data types (ENUM) Arrays of composite types Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) data type Add control over whether NULLs sort first or last Automatically re-plan cached queries when table definitions change or statistics are updated Support Security Service Provider Interface (SSPI) for authentication on Windows Support multiple concurrent autovacuum processes, and other autovacuum improvements The addition of enumerated types I imagine will be a welcome feature to many people - something us MySQL users have had the benefit of for quite some time. Now PostgreSQL users can enjoy the fun with them too! On top of these and other feature additions, they've also made a number of performance improvements such as improving disk usage efficiency, and the reduction of overhead. PostgreSQL 8.3.0 Documentation - Release Notes

Cairo - Revolutionising the Windows UI?

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 22:03:00 +0000

For years there have always been attempts at making decent shell replacements for Windows - some successful, some not so quite. Out of all the ones I have seen so far, none have really sparked my interest. Cairo is the latest one I've noticed, and it does actually look quite nice. Certain aspects of the new UI are very "mac-like" in appearance and that certainly doesn't have a negative effect - it's a really nice looking UI. Link: Example of the Cairo UI from their news page Unfortunately it's impossible to try it just yet though as it's not yet available for download - but it might be worth keeping an eye on if you're a Windows user. Link: Cairo

Google afraid of the Microsoft bid for Yahoo?

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 21:05:33 +0000

You may or may not have heard of Google's Blog, but I have absolutely no doubt that you have heard of Google. It's everywhere from TV to Films, so it's no surprise that it is the most popular search engine on the planet. Though despite their popularity they are still prone to a little worry. With the recent bid from Microsoft to acquire Yahoo they seem to have got their feathers ruffled that maybe the combined power of Microsoft and Yahoo might usurp their position as the kings of search. Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? Is it fair to say Microsoft have exerted an illegal influence over the PC? I don't think that's quite fair to say. Microsoft gained their position today by creating products like Windows that were unlike anything most people had seen before. It was easier to use and less daunting than using DOS, so people were bound to flood to it. Nowadays it is still the operating system that most people refer to when thinking of PCs. People who are not particularly computer minded if given the option between Windows, Linux, or OS X would be likely to go for Windows just because they've heard of it. That's the power of bran recognition. Google has that same power with their search engine. If a Microsoft/Yahoo partnershop was to produce an engine that become more popular than Google then it would most likely be because it's a better product - though in all honesty I can't see that happening, I don't think Google will lose their crown just yet. Google then finish their public address on their blog with: This hostile bid was announced on Friday, so there is plenty of time for these questions to be thoroughly addressed. Is a bid hostile if the company being taken over doesn't want it? If Yahoo don't want to be bought out by Microsoft they don't have to be. Very paranoid of you Google.

Microsoft sets it's eyes on Yahoo! (again)

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 19:14:18 +0000

Microsoft, never one to like competition, has made another attempt at buying Yahoo! This time they have offered $31 a share, which values the company at $44.6 billion. An absolutely amazing amount. If this is accepted and is passed by the US and EU authorities, what will this mean for the myriad of services that Yahoo! currently provides? I think it would be safe to say that they'd utilise what technology they could, re-brand, and absorb the rest over a period of a few years. I hope this doesn't happen as it would be a shame to see Flickr get Microsoft-ified as it's already a great user experience that doesn't need turning into ASP.net and turning into an Office looking application. No, I don't hate Microsoft - I actually like Vista, but I'm not sure the consumption of Yahoo! would be a very good idea for web users and web developers alike.

Acid3 Browser Test

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 08:31:05 +0000

The Acid3 browser test is now available for trying it seems. Unfortunately Firefox 2 doesn't score too well on it - I tried it earlier and got to a meagre 52 out of 100, and it looked not even close to the reference rendering they provide. Though saying that when tested in IE7 it was quite different; JavaScript errors and only got as far as 13 - with none of it rendering right at any point. Safari 3 on Windows got as far as 40/100 and didn't look too bad actually - it was very close. Opera 9.25 got 47 out of 100, and again looked nowhere near as bad as IE7 did. Now the question is, how well will Internet Explorer 8 do on Acid3; and how well will the final version of Firefox 3 do? The WaSP have provided a list of specifications that the Acid3 test is designed to test browser implementations of: DOM2 Core DOM2 Events DOM2 HTML DOM2 Range DOM2 Style (getComputedStyle, ...) DOM2 Traversal (NodeIterator, TreeWalker) DOM2 Views (defaultView) ECMAScript HTML4 (, , ...) HTTP (Content-Type, 404, ...) Media Queries Selectors (:lang, :nth-child(), combinators, dynamic changes, ...) XHTML 1.0 CSS2 (@font-face) CSS2.1 ('inline-block', 'pre-wrap', parsing...) CSS3 Color (rgba(), hsla(), ...) CSS3 UI ('cursor') data: URIs Link: Acid3 Test

Prototype updated to 1.6.0.2

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 18:52:40 +0000

Prototype has had quite a few fixes in the new 1.6.02 update - so many in fact that it's quite impressive that they've achieved so much for a point release. Apparently it also helps improve performance too which is always good! Anyway, their changelog from 1.6.0.1 to 1.6.0.2 is as follows: Update the list of officially supported browsers in the README Add tests for Element#descendantOf that deal with dynamically-created elements. Ensure positionedOffset properly considers "position: fixed" elements. Also ensures IE reports offsets correctly by triggering hasLayout when a "static" element has a "fixed" element as an offset parent. Roll back the fix for #9609, since it does not work in Opera. Instead, avoid using "valueOf" or "toString" as field names in forms. Prevent DOM node expandos _countedByPrototype and _prototypeEventID from being serialized into (inner|outer)HTML in IE. Make Ajax.Request#isSameOrigin JavaScript Lint compliant. Properly serialize form fields with names that collide with built-in JS properties (like "length" or "toString"). Make Object.isArray correctly identify arrays created in another frame. Fixed issue where Element#match failed on attribute selectors with single or double quotes. Add tests for Element#match. Fix Element#writeAttribute to work with 'cellspacing' and 'cellpadding' attributes in IE. Prevent a potential security issue for cross-site ajax requests. Test for attribute existence before applying more complex CSS3 selectors. Fix "function $A" declaration inside of a conditional (confuses IE). Fixed selector parsing so that "#foo [bar=baz]" is treated the same way as "#foo *[bar=baz]". Fix Element#descendantOf logic in IE. Fix missing "var" in Element#insert. Add Test.Unit.MessageTemplate class. Add flunk, buildMessage and assertBlock methods to Test.Unit.Assertions. Refactor accordingly. Remove useless binding in Template#evaluate. Make Object.inspect more robust. Add a description to :test and :dist rake tasks. Fix Selector.matchElements to allow for coma-separated selectors in Element#up/next/previous and Event#findElement. Test.Unit refactoring. Allow running multiple instances of Test.Unit.Runner on the same page. Allow rake to run specific testcases (e.g.: rake test BROWSERS=firefox TESTS=array TESTCASES=testUniq,test$w). Optimize property detection of outerHTML. Avoids triggering FOUC in Safari 3.0.4. Add document.loaded, a boolean that is set to true once dom:loaded is fired. Setting document.loaded to true before the document is loaded prevents dom:loaded from being fired. Make Element#insert standard-compliant. Fixes an issue in FF3b2 when inserting HTML or text inside DOM nodes which aren't (yet) appended to the document. Add some missing semicolons to the source tree. Ensure Ajax.Response#getHeader returns null for missing headers in Opera. Allow WEBrick to simulate slow or dropped connections and to ease Ajax request inspection. Ensure Ajax.Response#getHeader returns null for missing headers. Ensure $A creates an empty array when its argument's length is undefined. Fix incorrect variable declaration in Event.fire. Fix the way Selector handles [pseudoclass + combinator] with no space in between. Optimize Element#up/down/next/previous. Handle case-sensitivity in Selector tag names better. See it's a huge list! Link: Prototype 1.6.0.2

New Opera 9.5 Beta 1

Sat, 26 Jan 2008 10:02:51 +0000

Opera is a browser that some love to use, and for others it's the browser that they love to hate (though not as much as Internet Explorer). Whatever your view of Opera it does get updated fairly regularly and they've released Beta 1 of the new version 9.5 build. Amongst the many changes are: Even more Gmail2 fixes, getting closer to working More presice rounding of HSL values in CSS Playing video on CNN works again Adding links to walls on Facebook now works Login to Open-Xchange now works Fixed various issues on Windows Live Mail Saving playlists on YouTube should now function correctly User style mode no longer applies to Mail or IRC tabs Several favicon fixes Fixed the line below dialog tabs in native skins Tweaking and improvements to Windows native skins (both themed and classic) based on feedback and bug reports Fixed a problem with wrong handling of some filetypes, including messed up display of MHTML. This was actually fixed in the last weekly, but we forgot to mention. If you upgrade from an older snapshot using the same installation directory, you must remove the [File Types] section in opera6.ini. Mac: Fixed color corruption when copying images (and preserve the alpha channel) Mac: Possibly fixed printing crashes on Leopard UNIX: Plugins in symlinked directories should now not be listed twice So if you want it, go over to Opera's site and get it! Link: Opera v9.5 BETA 1

RIP - Heath Ledger

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 22:23:21 +0000

Heath Ledger, the actor who plays Joker in the forthcoming The Dark Knight was found dead today. Definitely came as a surprise to see it on BBC News. He was getting more and more good roles, and I'm sure his role as the Joker will be remembered. Definitely too young to die. May he rest in peace. Link: BBC News

IE8 - Compatability over Enhancement

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 14:54:39 +0000

The latest post on the IEBlog talks about the decisions that were made when releasing IE7, why it broke so many sites, and what they're doing to stop that happening with the release of IE8. One of the key points that indicates the direction that they are going in came from: The answer is that developers of many sites had worked around many of the shortcomings or outright errors in IE6, and now expected IE7 to work just like IE6. Even if you don't read past that point you get a sudden feeling of dread that they're going to start undoing some stuff that they did in IE7 - thus creating a problem of having to have rules to detect changes between IE6, IE7 and IE8. That then gets further backed up by: We realized that "Don't Break the Web" should really be translated to "Don't change what developers expect IE to do for current pages that are already deployed." This kind of reaffirms that the IE team regretted decisions that they thought were good and should have made sure that what looked right in IE6 standards mode should also have looked right in IE7 standards mode. People are up in arms over whether or not this is right, but I agree with those that believe making it more standards compliant is right - once IE6 and eventually 7 are gone it would be nice to be left with something that presents the markup as close to how Firefox and other browsers do as possible. It's good that they worked with WaSP on coming to a decision over this point as it's a show that they really do care about people who develop for IE and other browsers and they want to do something to make IE8 better and something web developers can approve of. Eventually they talk about the simple statement that they presented to WaSP at the beginning of their discussion: We started from a simple statement of "enable (and encourage) interoperable web development, but don't force IE to break pages that work properly in IE today." Now that does sound more promising - that simple concept if used means that web developers will not have to revisit old projects to make sure that they now work in 3 iterations of Internet Explorer, but just that they work in IE6 and 7 - if it works in either of those it will work in IE8. Excellent idea. Of course though we also know they've done a great deal of work towards making the browser more standards compliant with the earlier news of it passing the Acid2 test. This at first thought seems to create a paradox - how can it be more standards compliant and not break IE6 and IE7 sites; the answer has to be with some sort of trickery. What they then confirm as the solution is to add a new meta tag into the header of sites which gives 3 options: Quirksmode: all current content remains compatible Standards mode: same as was in IE7 Adding a meta tag to state a higher level of standards compliance for IE8 As IEBlog state, an article on the use of this new meta tag were added to A List Apart today. For pages to render optimally in IE8 we would now use: ALA also offer an example piece of how we can guarantee being able to use this tag without having to keep updating the version number, and that is to use: It is however highly discouraged as it can't guarantee decisions that are made with future versions of IE. Overall I do like the idea of this, and I think I will make use of it as soon as I can - most likely once the Beta is available for public consumption! Link: IEBlog: Compatibility and IE8