I’ve been using Firefox for about a year now and hate those days where I’m on someone else’s machine and stuck without tabs in Internet Explorer. I downloaded v1.5 as soon as possible and have been enjoying the new possibilities. I’ve just discovered something that has made me ridiculously excited. I tend to use php [...]

Look at almost any website today and you’ll see a level of automation at play. Perhaps as simple as a Dreamweaver template, or as sophisticated as the BBC News publishing system, but there will almost certainly be something happening without pure hand coding and individual attention. Skill in web programming now often lies in allowing [...]

Audioscrobbler records what you play on your computer, looks at other people who listen to similar, and gives you recommendations. Tie it in with an online radio station, and you’re in techie music heaven. OK, there are some obvious privacy issues here. Like, the plugin is designed to be transparant (a good thing), but you’ll [...]

Occassionally, I lose days to surfing the internet. I’m desperately trying to make sure that today isn’t one of those days. It’s sunny outside, and not too hot, and the day is my oyster. So, it’s just darn silly to have spent the last couple of hours checking out sites and following links at random. [...]

I’ve just fought with www.thetrainline.com again. I hate that site. It makes it SO difficult to buy a ticket, but unfortunately it seems that all the websites selling UK train tickets are run using the same underlying, flawed, system. As an example, I can’t search for train times without logging in. Why? What’s the point [...]

Well, I’ve been a busy little bee. I relaunched the website for Jessica Kingsley Publishers at the weekend. The site has been redesigned and recoded with a bit of extra functionality. The main thing that has changed is that the site now uses Smarty templates. I’ve always been reluctant to use formal templating systems in [...]

We just upgraded to QuarkXPress 6.1 at work and have run into some problems. When we opened documents previously built and saved in Quark 4 everything seemed fine. We then saved as Quark 6 documents and ran into the following error message “This document was built with other version of some fonts or using QuarkXPress [...]

At work today I wrote a conversion tool to translate 10 digit ISBNs into 13 digit ISBNs. Jessica Kingsley Publishers have given me permission to share it with the world here. I first wrote about ISBN-13 back in January 2003 and now I’m in a company that needs to contend with it. The idea is [...]

What is this all about? A surfboard with a wireless laptop built into it? Are they utterly mad? Or is it (I hope) just a big joke? What possible use could you have for an internet connection while your surfing? Now, wireless access on a beach would be cool (and happens on lots of beaches [...]

So, I decided to spruce up Bojates! with a design using stylesheets instead of tables. Nice to work with, and less code to worry about and download. I was thwarted, however, for the pictures section because Gallery uses tables like it was 1998. It’s prompted me to think seriously about looking again at code for [...]