January 2006 Blog Posts
I've been looking a lot into how asp.net translates its controls into html recently. The menu control for isntance puts each menu item in a table cell to make even spacing easier, which is fair enough unless you're trying to keep up with the Joneses in that nice xhtml0.5 - well it's never proper xhtml1.0 unless it's sent out as application\xhtml+xml - website you're writing at which point a list or even a simple sequence of link tags would be nicer. Even if Stephen Walther points out that everything really is possible, it's straightforward until you look at the code...
I finally decided to retire my laptop last week after four years of excellent service, trips round the world and so on. It really struggled with just XP and VS\SQL2k5 on it, so the original software (Win98 yikes) got reinstalled and an ad was put out. I figured no-one would be interested. After one day of thirty people inquiring about the laptop in various accents, I wish I had asked for more. In the end, a nice retired gentleman named John came round and picked it up - just rewards for the early bird who phoned me first at 8.45am...
The principle of service releases applies to even the best developed software... The nUnit team have now released v2.2.6 on their sourceforge page for .NET v2.0 test-drive developers out there.
Chris Sells writes that his son wrote his first program today midst the cries of 'Program, not read' when offered C# for Absolute Beginners. Not quite a Mozart of code yet. Maybe Chris and James will start project firefly off on something a bit less taxing like basic or html.
Reading this article, it's strange to remember that the com in dotCom stands for 'commerical' rather than 'US company' which it has since devolved into and that .gb is also a ccTLD for the UK, even if Google has only 186 total entries for pages using that suffix while Guinea-Bissau, who you'd think would use .gb actually use .gw and their suffix is ranked last in Google. A grand total of 26 entries. The suffix we do use (.uk) has 473 million entries, a load more than the official USA prefix (.us) with just 68 million which is just a...
Slashdot ran a great article from lawrence person on saturday detailing the shift in sci-fi novels from the classic cyberpunk chrome-and-nanoleather loner experience of the late eighties to early nineties to the generally more community-based post-cyberpunk novels of today. Interesting to note that while Gibson's Neuromancer simply out-imagined the world in 1986 and has never really been imitated in reality, the societal influence of post-cyberpunk can already be felt on the net with reltagging, myspaces, blogs and the like.
[Listening to: Cassandra Geminni: Tarantism - The Mars Volta - Frances the Mute]
Pretty darn impressive. I was always a fan of the Quake Done Quick speed runs, but this feels different, probably because Mario isn't really about killing everything in sight. Quite how the guys (I assume thse involved here were blokes - can't see girls spending much time on speed runs really) figured out some of the more blind jumps and exactly where to go next for the stars is beyond me, but it's fascinating to watch. Mario 64 completed in less than 17 minutes.
You know how every now and again you have to sacrifice a sock or two to the god of washing machines and tumble driers? I just bought another copy of Megadeth's Countdown to Extinction and, if things continue as before, it will have disappeared \ been sacrificed to the gods of hi-fis and portable stereos by the end of the month much like the two other copies of the album I have owned previously and the first copy someone actually threw away because they didn't like the artwork. Think I'll rip this to hard disk now - just in case.........