Stuart Homfray The Weblog

Boris vs Germany

Last night, Five showed a football match commemorating the 40th anniversary of England’s victory over Germany in the 1966 World Cup final (yes, it’s sad, but at least it was for a good cause - the Bobby Moore Fund bowel cancer charity and the Red Cross.) The two teams were made up of a mixture of ex-players and celebrities but England had a rather surprising secret weapon - Boris Johnson, Tory MP for Henley-on-Thames!

Note, the piece of action shown here contains scenes that lovers of pure football may find highly disturbing:

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWIUp19bBoA

Seriously, anyone that’s played in any so-called ‘friendly’ kick-abouts can relate to this (he says from personal experience of being on the end of a fair few ’slightly clumsy’ challenges!!)

NOTE FOR WEB STANDARDS FOLKS: This video from YouTube makes the HTML on this page invalid - I hope that you can forgive me just this once!! :)

Sk8er Boi (NOT)

At the moment, I’m just wasting a bit of time waiting to attend a hospital appointment (I won’t go into details - you’re not really interested, and I seriously don’t like talking about hospitals!) To wile away the time (and take my mind off it a bit) I’ve been reading these email responses to ‘misinformed’ fans from the greatest living rapper, author, and raconteur (OK, maybe not the greatest, but he’s definitely up there with Ustinov, Diddy, and Tyson).

Tony Hawks is his name, and I think you might be able to guess the origin of the confusion in his mail - Tony Hawk is clearly the demon sk8border (sic), whereas Tony Hawks is simply a demon tennis evangelist and refrigerator assistant. Anyway, take a look at some of Tony’s delightful responses - they had me in stitches (obviously not literally - at least not yet anyway.)

And if you feel they’re a little bit harsh, take a long, careful look at his disclaimer. Would you buy a used skateboard from this man?

Tabs And Spaces

One of the recent threads on the CSS-Discuss mailing list highlighted the occasional wit and humour frustrated developers sometimes show in when they leave comments within their work. In “Too Funny, and not really off topic” (apologies - the thread isn’t archived just yet [8:06pm]) “Too Funny, and not really off topic“, a list member highlights what can happen when you spend too long looking for a solution to a CSS problem.

To be honest, it’s not really something that I tend to do, because I am a calm, centred and well-balanced individual OK!!. Anyone that says otherwise is going down maaan, GOING DOWN!!!!.

(Actually, I just don’t tend to do it any more!)

Anyway, my favourite comment is provided by a link to “We Are Morons: a quick look at the Win2k source“, where a Microsoft progammer makes the argument for tabbing:

* !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
* !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
* !!!!!!!IF YOU CHANGE TABS TO SPACES, YOU WILL BE KILLED!!!!!!!
* !!!!!!!!!!!!!!DOING SO FUCKS THE BUILD PROCESS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
* !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
* !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

But I like spac-AAAARRRRGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

Destroying The Earth

It’s not easy to annihilate our world, at least according to Sam Hughes’ How To Destroy The Earth anyway. I won’t spoil it by giving anything away, but I like Mike Trainor’s wonderfully devious method best!

Please let me know if you have any success with these or any other tactics by posting a comment - don’t use my main site contact form as I’m likely to be a little busy…!

via Bruce Schneier

Looking for Olsen Twins Snow Globes

As it’s the New Year, I thought I’d take a look back over my visitor logs for 2004 to see whether there was anything interesting with regards to browser usage. As it turned out, there were no real shocks, with Internet Explorer 6 remaining top of the pile all year round, and the Gecko browsers (Mozilla, Firefox, Firebird) starting the year quite high (26%), then sinking as low as 11%, jumping back up to 25% in September, and then staying around the 20% mark.

If there had been any surprises, be sure that I was fully prepared to share my browser and layout engine usage comparisons, OS usage, and visitor-by-country statistics with you all (the UK topped that one, with the US coming in second - amazing, huh!?!) - it was all more or less how you’d guess.

But then, I had a look at some of the search keyword phrase terms that led to the site, and that was a little bit more interesting - in fact, some of the terms can tell you quite a bit about the searchers themselves….

(more…)