The Subrosa Blog is now complete
Please be aware that this incarnation of the 'Subrosa Blog' has now ended - why not visit the new Stuart Homfray weblog?.
Of course, that's not to say that the Subrosa blog will never return... I may decide to reincarnate it as a sort of sideblog or something!
If you've arrived here via a search engine results page, you may also wish to consider entering the site via the main entrance, as Subrosa itself has now outlived it's usefulness...
posted by Stuart NOTE THAT THIS IS NOT POSTED VIA BLOGGER!
Tuesday, September 30, 2003
The Web Designer Benefits of Web Standards
Gilbert Lee of PlanSimple offers a nice 'triplet' regarding the benefits of designing sites that follow web standards. As you can see if you view the source of this page and the main site, it's not exactly standards-compliant(!!) I am, however, looking to unleash an all-new, table/frame-free construction (work in progress) as soon as possible - this site version is cleaner, faster, and easy to update.
I was about to add a couple of extra points to those that Gilbert made, regarding browser accessibility (it's getting closer - only a few
hacksfilters are required), bandwidth reduction, and search engine ranking (hey! the content's easy for Mr. Bot to read now), but I was beaten to it by the two articles that he cites - "The Business Value of Web Standards", and "The Business Benefits of Web Standards".All we need to do now is convince clients that they don't neccessarily need an all-singing, all-dancing, Flash-driven extravaganza - just nice, clearly laid-out, content-driven web sites. After all, when you seach for information on-line, isn't it pleasant expereince when you can actually find it? :)
posted by Stuart 11:21 PM
Sunday, September 28, 2003
What Makes a Blog a Blog?
An interesting look at defining a weblog.
"Russ Lipton takes a more fundamental tack when he says, "A weblog is just a web site organized by time" ... [but] the crucial factor is that a blog is a web site organized in REVERSE chronological order..."As for me, I just think that a weblog is "A combination of thoughts and reviews of websites, or anything else that occurs to me!" (in reverse chronological order!!! :)
posted by Stuart 1:17 PM
Tuesday, September 23, 2003
Macromedia - Contribute : Macromedia FlashPaper
It may be just me, but FlashPaper from Macromedia just strikes me as a more sophisticated version of Vendre Magazine!
posted by Stuart 11:43 PM
Saturday, September 20, 2003
Macromedia Certified Professionals
There are a few arguments going around about whether the Certified Professional Program at Macromedia (or, indeed, many other similar programs) are particularly useful, but, as someone who is actually looking for full-time employment (as opposed to freelance work - although obviously, I wouldn't necessarily turn that down either!) AND, someone who has a fair bit of experience with the Dreamweaver package, I thought that I'd try and achieve Certification status!
The point of these things is to give some validation to the claim "I know what I'm doing with Package X", a claim that many people (including myself) make. You could, of course, make a claim of this nature and be fibbing - after all, a lot of packages (and Dreamweaver is definately one) help you out to such an extent with preset templates, libraries, etc., that even beginners can make respectable looking sites with very little effort. If a potential employer/client is not careful, they could end up employing/hiring someone that is not really that knowledgable, but they are an excellent bullshitteer (that was a mistype, but then I thought the term seemed to work so I left it in!) or 'blagger' (someone once told me that "...you've just got to blag it..." and if that person's reading this, you'll know who you are!!! ;)
So, as someone who feels that they know what they're doing with Dreamweaver, I sat the Pearson VUE exam, at the New Horizons Computer Learing Centre in Birmingham. The exam's a little strange - some of the questions seem a little unusually worded to me, and on a couple of occasions I found myself sitting in my chair tilting my head on one side with one eye closed reading the question (don't worry, it's just an endearing little trait of mine when I'm trying to get a handle on the meaning of something!) Once I'd got passed that, it went reasonably smoothly, but I would suggest that anyone looking to sit the exam actually reads the manual well beforehand - I read it over two or three nights before and found that it had an impact upon what I thought I knew: I started to doubt stuff!
By now, you may be wondering about the outcome (and if you are, thank you, that's very kind! They say folks today don't care and... :) Well it turns out that I'm now fully Certified (certifiable more like!) and if anyone wants to know how to do anything in Dreamweaver MX, I can happily point you in the right direction... ;D
posted by Stuart 4:12 PM
Monday, September 15, 2003
KGB, as easy as 1-2-3...
Here we go again. After being forced to back-pedal last year when it became apparent that the people of the UK were not exactly 'over-enamoured' with the prospect of being spied upon, the government will be telling phone companies and internet service providers that they have to keep records of telephone calls and internet usage records for a year. In a short statement, Liberty director Shami Chakrabati said:
"This underlines the uncomfortable fact that the British public are the most spied upon people in the Western world."Not only that, but, along with fire authorities and ambulance services, the UK Atomic Energy Constabulary, the Scottish Drugs Enforcement Agency, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, Financial Services Authority, Office of the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland and the Radiocommunications Agency, will also be allowed automatic access to this personal phone and internet information.
Home Office minister Caroline Flint said: "These proposals are about vital investigatory tools being used now to prevent and detect crime and, in some cases, save lives." In reference to privacy, she said: "We need to ensure that we strike the right balance between the privacy of the citizen and the need to investigate crime and protect the public."
OK Ms Flint, so what's the problem here? Well, as the old saying goes, "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to worry about", but that depends, of course, on your definition of nothing. With a caring(!) socially-responsible(!!) government like that which we have now(!!!) we'll probably be fine, but what if we decided that we no longer respect or enjoy the company of Mr. T. Blur? What if we elect a government that's a little more 'interested' in observing the thoughts of what they might define as radical, dangerous free-thinkers? In blindly allowing surveillance measures of this type to be employed, we make it easier for future governments to take steps to control our personal liberty.
The 'Big Brother' state is not here. This is more insidious than that - this is something where it is claimed our liberty and freedom is actually being protected, and where we are actually happily assisting the process. Remember the famous (and here, rather apt) quote from Benjamin Franklin:
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."...and think on!
posted by Stuart 1:20 PM
Wednesday, September 10, 2003
Gaugin The Bass Again*
Scientists at the Chandra X-ray Observatory have discovered the deepest musical note ever heard. The single note (it's a B-flat, 57 octaves below middle C) has apparently been sounding for 2.5 billion years.
As Bomb The Bass once said: "Beat, Beat, B-B-Beat Dis!!"
Discovered via Slashdot
* a delicate little track from Bass Inc. - don't you just love Coldcut!?!
posted by Stuart 10:57 AM
Friday, September 05, 2003
It's Official! I Write Like a Girl!
The Gender Genie attempts to predict the sex of an author of a piece of work based on the key words or syntax used. In another of my incredible, unbiased scientific experiments, I inserted 6, reasonably-sized postings of this weblog into the sample box, and was rather surprised by the findings: in all 6 cases, the algorithm predicted that the author was female!
According to an article in Nature:
"Female writers use more pronouns (I, you, she, their, myself), say the program's developers, Moshe Koppel of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, and colleagues. Males prefer words that identify or determine nouns (a, the, that) and words that quantify them (one, two, more)."If I were female, the researchers imply, I'd be more likely to write sentences like this, which assume that you and I share common knowledge or engage us in a direct relationship. These differing styles have previously been called 'informational' and 'involved', respectively."I think some serious soul-searching is now required...
Do you think that I write like a woman? Are you a man that also writes like a woman? Are you a woman that writes like a man? Are you a woman who thinks like a man, but writes like a woman? Please, let us know!
ADDITIONAL: it turns out that if you put this posting into the Gender Genie, it thinks that I'm a man! And that's without including the testosterone-enhancing quotes from the Nature article! Now I'm confused!
posted by Stuart 3:18 PM
Thursday, September 04, 2003
How's the hosting with P4Host?
I've now been with P4Host web hosting for almost 2 months and I have to say that they are absolutely super! The ONLY site downtime that I've 'suffered' has been for a few minutes when the server was rebooted - other than that, perfect service!
The support is also excellent - whether you contact them via email, through the ticketing system, or their fora, they respond helpfully and promptly (with a 'big up' to Kevin Vu who's addressed/answered any issues/questions that I had - cheers Kevin!)
I do have one small issue regarding support (hey! It wouldn't be one of my 'comment' posts without some moaning!!) and that's the IM support (via ICQ, MSN Messenger, AIM, and Yahoo Messenger) - although each client shows the 'support guy' as being currently online (I've only tried ICQ, AIM and Yahoo), he generally doesn't seem to respond to 'prompts'. Now this could just be bad luck as I've only tried it twice and that's a pretty poor sample size to pass comment on, but if the IM client says you're online.....
Anyway, that's just a very small issue - as I've said, the support elsewhere is excellent and I would whole-heartedly recommend these folks!!
(...or maybe I wouldn't - after all, if TOO many people join up, the servers may not be able to to take it, and it'll be Hostgroup1 [who've now gone to the 'great Apache in the sky', by the way] all over again!)
posted by Stuart 9:09 PM
Tuesday, September 02, 2003
A Short Guide To Avoiding Spaghetti (And Seeing The Event Horizon)
When you fancy looking at the event horizon of a black hole there is a bit of a problem - the huge stresses and strains placed upon your body by spaghettification, and your subsequent crushing to a particle of infinite density.
Help is at hand, however, from Harvard University, according to this from New Scientist magazine:
"A ring-shaped lifebelt or life preserver could help you survive longer after tumbling into a black hole. But the buoy would need to have a mass of more than 12,000 trillion tonnes, equivalent to that of an asteroid 150 kilometres wide. If you plummeted feet-first into a black hole, your feet would experience a stronger pull than your head while your sides would be mashed together. Richard Gott of Princeton University calculated that this spaghettification would take just under 0.1 seconds. That would be long enough for a pain signal to reach the brain, so he wondered if it might be possible to delay the end "so you live longer and are tortured for less time". In a report submitted to Physical Review D, Deborah Freedman of Harvard University suggests a giant ring-shaped structure would do the job. Its gravity would counteract that of the black hole as you fell, keeping your feet and head dropping at the same rate. That would give you an extra 0.09 seconds to observe the event horizon, before being torn apart in the space of just 0.003 seconds."So there you have it - problem solved! If you fancy getting 'up close and personal' to a black hole, all you need to do is get hold of an asteroid of about 150km wide (easy! Juno fits the bill as long as it hasn't been eaten yet) and turn it into a doughnut!!!
posted by Stuart 2:21 PM
Monday, September 01, 2003
Stupid people who can't even be bothered to place free, open use, easily ported content on their site
It's a shame, but I thought that I'd rather not act as a file repository for dickheads like the 'SupremeVision Corporation'
After checking my server logs out it seems that some people are serving the Java Gameboy Emulator page (formerly located here) as content on their own site, and thus affecting my bandwidth. Admittedly, this is not causing a problem at the moment, but it's definitely worth stopping now! Sorry guys!!!!
posted by Stuart 3:47 PM
