Month: October 2003

Google has a new feature, the “define” keyword

Geek:

a person who may be very smart yet lacks the social graces of those who are considered cool , a “computer geek” is someone who spends too much time on the computer and has no social life.

define:geek

Getting SVG in Firefox

Frustrated with not being able to use SVG in Firebirdfox (especially now that the GIMP has gone SVG and after reading about the Worst. Tag. Ever.), I finally decided to plough through the atrocity that is BugZilla’s user interface and came across the imaginatively titled: “Bugzilla Bug 133567: skeeter-s.com – M1RC3; Crash because Adobe SVG plugin used an unfrozen interface [@ nsLoadGroup::GetName] [@ nsHttpChannel::GetName] which changed its prototype”. Slowly reading through the comments it seemed there was no hope for me. Adobe had released their plugin with support for Mozilla, but against an unfrozen interface which had subsequently changed, hence, it didn’t work.

Fortunately, comment 66 came to the rescue:

———- Additional Comment #66 From Peter Sorotokin 2003-07-17 23:17———-

This bug and all related bugs were fixed in Adobe SVG Viewer v6 Preview Release (Windows only at the moment, but keep looking http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/beta.html). We no longer try to support Mozilla browser scripting.

So if you download and install the Adobe SVG Viewer 6 beta and copy the plugin files to your gecko plugins directory1 it should all Just Work. Well, it did for me, and it did for Jim.

1 copy the NPSVG6.* files from C:Program FilesCommon FilesAdobeSVG Viewer 6.0Plugins to $GeckoDir$plugins and restart the browser

Google
Googlewhacking
Are you Dave Gorman?
Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack adventure

Dave Gorman is a very funny man. A stand-up comedian who for the last year or two has been busy telling stories. Even better, he’s been telling real-life stories; even better than that he’s been telling true stories about his own life (these all seem to frequently occur after a bottle of tequila). Although he makes a living from making us laugh whilst telling us of his high-jinks there’s also an extraordinary pathos to his shows – you know he means it.

Oh yeah, and he’s really funny. 🙂 Go see his show. Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack Adventure is touring now and they give away free badges. What more could you want?

Everyone already knows about the excellent SimpleBits, and until recently I’d just been visiting every now and then to see how the SimpleQuiz series was progressing, but recently there have been two really great tutorials: Styling nested lists and Accessible Image Tab Rollovers which should be compulsory reading for anyone who writes web pages.

Also…..

Love the design on SuperfluousBanter

Excellent XSLT FAQ

What’s your age relative to….?

The top twenty-one books have been announced in the BBC’s The Big Read

Of that twenty-one, I’ve read twelve and have no particular desire to read the other nine. I must say though that it’s a pretty poor top twenty-one. I mean, “His Dark Materials” by Philip Pullman just isn’t that good. These lists are always so predictable. Maybe they should run it anually and not let any of the previous year’s top twenty-one enter; perhaps that way there’s a chance of seeing something else celebrated for a change.

My favourite, for the record, doesn’t appear on the list: A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.

I’ve written a lot tonight and it’s getting late, but to wrap up:

No Fishing – yes.
Semantics, HTML, XHTML, and Structure – this is excellent stuff for educating the unwashed masses of web developers who still think tables are the be-all and end-all and have no idea of how to mark up a page properly (at work we now have a web designer doing web development – my life just got harder).