Brilliant
31st July 2006, Other0 Comments
Now Executive Director of Google.org, Larry Brilliant has a great story. Studied in an Indian monastery, joined the UN’s successful effort to eradicate smallpox there, then globally. Then founded a charity for the blind, Seva and countless other efforts, and then won a TED Prize for his early-warning disease & disaster system. Somehow he’s ended up at Google. They’re basically handing him $1.15bn, around 1% of annual profits to spend wisely. Asked in Wired Magazine whether he expected some of his initiatives to fail he responded:
God I hope so, I am a technologist. If I have a 100 percent batting average, it means I haven’t tried anything really noble.
I can’t help but like the guy.
Looking the gift horse in the mouth
30th July 2006, Other, Trends2 Comments
So Murdoch’s News Corp. bought MySpace but then insisted they wouldn’t start branding themselves all over it and killing the spirit of MySpace. In fact, a lot has been made of ‘the spirit’ of MySpace. Something about how tricky it is to make sense of the content into anything you could commercially target effectively, or at least, coherently ala google ads. But for now, in keeping with the spirit, they were just happy to be dabbling with something that made its own content, unlike the rest of the News Corp. media empire. I was left with the perception that MySpace would make money but would remain somewhat benevolent.
Then I came across a small article in Computer Arts, pointing to the Copyright licence. To paraphrase the article:
They can take your content and do anything they like with it, such as create a stock library, without any finanical remuneration to you
Alarmed, I took a look. Check out MySpace’s T&C’s down on point 6.1 you’ll see:
MySpace.com is not required to pay you for the use on the MySpace Services of the Content that you post
If I were hosting artwork lovingly toiled over on MySpace, I’d move it elsewhere. While the chances are it may never get abused by MySpace, I really don’t like the principle.
Adsense
28th July 2006, Other0 Comments
This is a new blog. The first week or so was pretty underwhelming as I’m still to receive a comment from someone I don’t know, but nevertheless, the invisibility of the blog in searches on Google were, I assume, the main culprit. Perhaps its just no-one likes my style [sob].
So Wednesday I added AdSense, and while there’s still a distinct lack of comments from the masses, I must say that typing “dk productions” into Google did not yield first page 4th on Tuesday. Looking at my stats, I felt like GoogleBot just didn’t love me, he hadn’t been back to my site since a very basic holding page that was quite old. I suppose signing up to their advertising prompts GoogleBot to pay you a visit.
Personally I find the ads ugly and mostly irrelevant, but surely a case of “you scratch my back, i’ll scratch yours”.
Online Tees
28th July 2006, Design, Trends2 Comments
They’re everywhere. T-Shirts, I mean. I remember many moons ago I got right into T-Shirt designs but there weren’t that many about back then. I even had a pop at hand-painted designs and flogging them on Camden Market around the early 90’s. It didn’t last very long.
Back then, cool looking T-shirt designs were mostly based around retro second hand shops. That random 70’s American summer camp one, the myriad of old sports logos, a mate of mine even wore a [Freddy] Laker Airways t-shirt that somehow had a charm about it. Then came the design wave and you can’t move for hip designs. I suppose the movement of design applications and the advent of cheaper printing all contributed. (more…)
Internet Explorer Fails to do something
25th July 2006, Ajax, Javascript0 Comments
How many times does this happen in development? I’ve lost count. This time round, I’m working on a nifty Continent/Country/Region trio of dropdown lists where the respective parent goes all Ajaxy and populates its child dropdown list accordingly.
All working great in Firefox, but as soon as I tested in IE its all gone wrong. So what’s the reason? BUG: Internet Explorer Fails to Set the innerHTML Property of the Select Object.
What I love about Microsoft is there ability to acknowledge their bugs but instead of fixing them (if they can disable invalid copies of XP remotely, i’m sure they can tweak the DOM model in Explorer) they simply call it a bug and offer a very very poor workaround. When you then consider you’re trying to make future proof applications knowing Microsoft will abandon their crappy workaround as soon as you implement it, this all becomes rather frustrating.
Oh well. At least they spared me their splendidly deficient “This error is by design” conclusion this time. Back into the DOM I go to find the proper solution to this.
Vanilla extensions
24th July 2006, PHP2 Comments
Now i’ll be honest upfront. I am not an OOP coder, I’m from the procedural, spaghetti code side of things. I am intending to move into OOP coding but most my work is PHP4 and the deadlines are just too tight for me to take on a better approach. Maybe towards the end of the year I’ll have time to perfect that. But then again I said that last year.
One of the reasons I’ve never taken it on is the endless arguments of PHP not being truly object oriented. I believe PHP5 is, or at least improved, but not PHP4 and when you want to get a site up quickly, cheaply with a host you know, it’s nearly always PHP4 and not PHP5 due to the various stability issues/ISP’s unwillingness to upgrade - something I believe is to do with CPanel not supporting PHP5.
Then something curious happened. I downloaded and tried a great piece of forum software called Vanilla which has, incidentally, just released Version 1 (Note to self: upgrade your installation). Vanilla is entirely Object-Oriented yet works on PHP4.1 or higher.
I realised it was Object-Oriented when I tried to add Google Adwords to it and couldn’t for the life of me work out where to put it. Thankfully I found this extension which saved me trying to work it out.
I’ll be starting some OOP lessons soon though, and while it doesn’t look that complicated, writing something like Vanilla that is compatible with both PHP4 and PHP5 could well be a pain.
XHTML Transitional & CSS Positioning
19th July 2006, CSS1 Comment
So, the reason the calendar is positioned correctly when not in the wordpress template is due to the default doctype declaration in wordpress. The wordpress template has this in the header:
<!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1- transitional.dtd">
If I take it out, the div is positioned correctly.
Date pickers
19th July 2006, CSS, Javascript2 Comments
I’ve been using a simple pop up date picker rather like this one for ages. Recently I’ve been refactoring a long term project with some splashes of Ajax etc and decided that I wanted a more inline calendar. Until now, the date picker has been built from the same PHP code that builds a more complex booking calender in the system, when really a javascript client-side date picker would be far lighter and suitable.
For the amount of CSS I do, I have a pretty poor understanding of positioning and the z-index but it seems to me that even the W3C have got it wrong. Trying to place a relative element into a layer above the page elements proved a complete nightmare, thankfully I found what I was looking for eventually. Its very well scripted and easy to decipher and tweak. It also helped me understand the workaround for getting a relative div to go into the next layer - simple really, sit it inside a parent node that is positioned absolutely, be it a p tag, a tag, even a span tag. Here’s my tailored version.
Stock photography
13th July 2006, Trends0 Comments
Seems to me that finally, stock photography is getting more readily available without those shocking prices that Corbis and others quote. Maybe I just didn’t see them coming but I recently signed up to iStockPhoto and its great. You can get a good quality cheap photograph for as little as $1.
Another site I’ve seen with a similarly cheap pricing model is Big Stock Photo and then there’s ShutterStock, which has a curious monthly subscription and max number of images per day download limit, which while not as cheap, if you’re a real regular user still beats the crap out of Corbis.
