Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

WordPress, web development, and world domination.

Monthly Archives: December 2002

Noticed

I was starting to think that nobody noticed my JabFoaf announcment. On the one hand, I figured that a lot of people are too busy with holiday travelling/relaxing to worry about FOAF. But on the other hand, I was a little disappointed that I wasn’t getting much feedback. But as it turned out, some people noticed, after all. Danny Ayers Ben Hammersley Paul Hammond Eric Snowdeal I really need to get TrackBack and/or PingBack working … Continue reading

Visual Semantics

In response to Mark Pilgrim’s “Pushing the envelope” post, Hans Nowak complains that sometimes semantically correct HTML elements don’t “look good”. So, he tends to use <pre> instead of <code> to designate code fragments in web pages. The answer, of course, is to just use CSS to make <code> act more like <pre>. Here’s my CSS: code { white-space: pre; } And here’s how it renders Hans’ code fragment: def f(x, y): if x > … Continue reading

Announcing: JabFoaf

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had a couple of different FOAF-related projects wandering around the back of my brain. I’m finally ready to announce the first one: JabFoaf: Jabber/FOAF conversion utilities. Since Jabber and FOAF are both aimed at connecting people (one literally, the other semantically), it just seemed like a natural thing to do.

Don’t Click This!

From Hixie, some info on the case against Jon Johansen, the kid who caused the DVD encryption debacle to make the international news: It’s been reported all over the place, of course, but this week Oslo has seen the opening of the trial of Jon Lech Johansen, who, as far as I can tell, is accused of trying to watch a DVD that he had bought. Yeah, we can’t have that. Whatever next. Someone who … Continue reading

500-mile Email Limit

I ran across a great sysadmin story about a problem sending email farther than 500 miles. To a technical person familiar with how SMTP works, that sounds like a user jumping to an incorrect conclusion. But sometimes, life can be stranger than fiction…. “We could send email. Just not more than–” “–500 miles, yes,” I finished for him, “I got that. But why didn’t you call earlier?” “Well, we hadn’t collected enough data to be … Continue reading

Rednecks

Man kills friend for drinking last beer. These are the kind of rednecks that give rednecks a bad name. “There was only two beers left, so I took one, and I told Willie not to take my last beer.” At least it happed in Texas, and not here in Alabama. Around here, people mostly shoot each other over arguments about the Alabama/Auburn football game.

Mozillize Me

The other day, I downloaded the latest version of Mozilla. In the past, I’ve fired it up from time to time just to check that my web design efforts look reasonably sane in it. But now I’m starting to use it as my primary browser. I normally surf the web with liberal use of “Open in new window”, and I typically have three separate browser windows opened to different pages. So with Mozilla, I’m all … Continue reading

DOM2 Events in IE

I figured I’d better bookmark this before I forget. Chris Nott (c.f. Dithered)has a new Javascript API that ports the DOM2 events API to older versions of Internet Explorer. Mmmm…. Cross-browser goodness.