Posts by CD001

Funny...

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Bing is a joke which only those use who never had seen Google.

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Have you used it recently?

I'm starting to find more relevant results through Bing than Google these days - if you're looking for something a little specialist or from a smaller company then Bing is actually beginning to get the edge over Google.

For instance - searching for a particular small company in Shropshire; I knew the name of the company but their website was quite new. A Google search returned loads of business directories (none of which listed the web address) with the company in mind not in the first 5 pages of results... same search on Bing except the result I was after was #1.

Once I'd got the web address, I did a site:domain.tld in Google to see if they'd indexed it and yes, they had - but because the website was reasonably new and hadn't developed a zillion external links yet it wasn't appearing anywhere in the first 5 pages of results (I gave up after 5).

I'm pretty much tech agnostic - I use what works best (for the money) for the given situation. Windows 7 on desktop (since I play games), FreeBSD on the server, my Phone's a Sony Ericsson since it had the best camera for the cash *shrugs* - same goes for search and Google seem to be getting more and more biased to "big" web players these days - making their results, often, less relevant than those from Bing.

If I can't find what I'm looking for on Google, I'll try Bing... I wonder when the tipping point will come that it'll be "when I can't find something on Bing, I'll try Google."

I dunno

I rather like MS "Natural" style keyboards :P

To be fair

It's not normally webmasters who give a stuff about the analytics - we just make sure the damned thing is working properly. The only analytics I'm interested in are load times, the user's OS/Browser combination and any non HTTP 200 responses really.

Anything else is marketing :)

'bout right

Already happened with iPod...

"What's an MP3 player?"

"Your iPod is."

"Then why didn't you just say you were getting an iPod?"

*sighs*

Ummm...

You know Flash does more than video right?

I was probably doing AJaX-alike stuff in Flash before AJaX was even coined as a term - Flash can read in XML and HTML and build your menus and content from them so, even before AIR, you could dynamically create Flash content from your database and therefore your CMS system.

Alternatively, you can use flat XML files as a kind of database snapshot and use Flash as a parser. This has meant that, for years, I've been able to have my entire portfolio wrapped in a funky looking little Flash front-end whilst the content itself is updated by just altering the relevant XML files (a database dump essentially) and images - burn it onto a disk (or chuck it on a pen drive) and you've got a nice way to present your portfolio.

Flash isn't prefect, far from it, but it does work as a good (cross platform - sort of - excepting iP*d) development tool for nifty little apps and browser games *shrugs*

Which standard?

Which standard are we talking about here? HTML 5 is not a standard yet and, as it stands, whilst the video element is part of the markup language the video encoding itself hasn't been specified.

We're currently at the stage where every browser maker can implement the video tag and claim "HTML5 support" whilst one browsers uses <video> to stream Ogg, another H.264 and another VP8 - and ALL of them can rightly claim to "support HTML5" in it's current form.

Eventually there will be consensus on which video codec to use (this announcement has probably given VP8 a massive shot in the arm) and that will become part of the HTML 5 "standard" - that's how web standards evolve, they're not just magically spawned good-to-go, they start as an idea, move to "working draft", "last call" and finally "recommendation".

Big chunks of HTML 5 are still working drafts - claiming "HTML 5 " support at the moment is a bit like sticking a big BETA label onto your browser... sounds perfect for Google then ;)

pedant alert

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It might surprise some to find out that Canada ( Canadian - it's a clue!) is not in America.

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Ummm - yes it is, North America - as is the United States of America (the other country in "America"). If you were to say the "Americas" that would include Brazil, Peru and so on.

erm? what?

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they haven't done anything that anyone else couldn't do as they walk around the streets with a laptop and a linux build

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Which would ALSO be illegal *sighs*

Yes, I'd be an idiot to leave my car unlocked in a city centre car park overnight, yes, the insurance company wouldn't pay out when the stereo was nicked - but the person who nicked the stereo (irrespective of the fact that the car wasn't locked) would STILL have been breaking the law - they would STILL have been doing something wrong.

alternatively

by the time the Beatles back-catalogue makes it onto iTunes it'll be out of copyright and in the public domain - assuming copyright isn't made eternal beforehand.

Agreed

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And Steam is NOT solely online distribution service. Steam DRMed games are "sold" over the counter and you cannot install them without online authentication - which is what you don't seem to understand.

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Actually, I agree with you on that point - Empire Total War being a good case in point. Apart from DRM reasons, if you're only playing it offline there is NO reason for ETW to require Steam activation. It would be nice as an optional extra for muliplayer games (or even DLC) but a requirement for offline play (the initial install requires Steam activation) - meh.

Still - if we get all old-skool on this and substitute "DRM" for "Copy Protection", this argument has been going on for more years than I care to remember...

Seriously?

A CMS, in a nutshell, is a bunch of HTML forms (it could be XForms in theory but I've never seen one that is), wrapped up in an RBAC layer, that allows site data to be updated through those simple forms... that's it. Those are the only common features - there are SO many CMS systems written for the LAMP stack, practically everything else is optional.

The point is that your CMS should be a controlled environment that's not available for anyone other than approved users to access. Since your users are unlikely to be coders (think the marketing department) your CMS will be pretty useless WITHOUT client side scripts - you ARE going to need a WYSIWYG interface to create the HTML (TinyMCE, CKEditor ... etc).

However, so long as your RBAC system cannot be easily circumvented (which is the tricky bit) though use of URI manipulation, CSRF, XSS, SQL injection and the like, the risk from using a CMS is fairly low whilst the benefits are enormous (e.g. you build/integrate the CMS and then the marketing team do the work of keeping the site/products up to date whilst you drink tea and eat biscuits... erm, I mean, work on TNBT).

It was...

Chuck Norris

tbh

I'd never assume that a client had MS Office installed anyway - nor which version. You can't send anyone anything in docx/xlsx as it is so I just use OOo and export to PDF - both the Adobe and Foxit PDF readers are free. Yes, I could just use MS Office and export to .doc/.xls but really, there is no compelling reason for me to fork out for the MS Office license.

Of course, that's naff all use if you need the client to actually edit the documents but it's fine for reports and invoices which are pretty much the only things I send.

What...

What do you REALLY think would happen if you did plonk a soapbox down in the middle of a town centre and vent your frustration at an airport that had just canned your flight? Seriously?

I strongly suspect the police would question you but, unless they found (or created) evidence to the contrary you'd just be told not to be a prat and sent on your way - unless you aggravated them of course*. Then they might decide you were genuinely attempting to incite terrorism and use the full extent of the law to fuck you right over.

Funny thing is though - it's perfectly OK for the God botherers to threaten me with eternal damnation, via loud-hailer, or everyone else on the street when we're just minding our own business walking through town. If I wasn't so wary of getting involved with the police, ever, I might try reporting one for threatening my eternal soul.

*this can be done in any number of ways, owning a camera or even just looking at them "a bit funny" is apparently enough.

fneh

You really, really believe that it makes ANY difference whatsoever WHO gets in power? Really?

I'll give you a hint, as far as most people are concerned the only difference between Labour and The Tories is that there are more buses running under Labour... that's pretty much it.

Besides, the vast majority of the vote seems to come down to 2 types of people.

1: Those people who vote for the given party because they've always voted for that party, their parents voted for that party and their grandparents before them... and so on.

2: Those people who don't vote for a particular party but vote AGAINST the ruling party because they want to get rid of them - if it's red, they'll vote blue and vice versa.

A teeeeeeeeny, weeeeny minority might actually vote on candidates based on merit or on believing in the party manifesto - so if you don't live in a smaller marginal constituency there's no point in voting whatsoever if you're going against the flow.

I fully understand why people don't vote - and I agree with them. The only way to really register a protest however is to spoil your ballot paper - it still has to be counted then.

IE6

The BIGGEST problem with IE6 is the awful CSS support - the JavaScript support is bad but any web-dev worth their salt should not rely on JavaScript in an e-commerce application anyway (the goal with e-commerce is to sell stuff with as few barriers to user-adoption as possible... e.g. it has to just work).

However, if you can't even rely on absolutely positioning divs (for instance) you could well have the kind of problems that force you into using tables for almost every kind of layout... which makes the site horrendous for blind people using screen readers.

Then it comes down to how much time, money and effort are you prepared to put into supporting an obsolete browser used by an ever shrinking minority? We're down to 5.5% of visits from people using IE6 now (and we've not got a technical customer base - think grannies) - more people visit our site using either Chrome or Safari than IE6 now... it's not quite reached the point where we can scrap support for it entirely but it's getting there... slowly.

Nah

If Soylent Green was people it would have a MUCH higher fat content ;)

technically

It's the punctuation and grammar that needs checking rather than the spelling :P

a dictionary

"Hung: to put to death by suspending by the neck from a gallows, gibbet, yardarm, or the like."

- is, I believe, the point that was being made, hence the word "literally" *sighs*

Actually...

That's pretty much exactly what it is - if it was a genuine attempt to totally bork the website the requests would be more aggressive than simply reloading the page every 1 to 6 seconds - it's not like it was something to the effect of "ping [URI] -t -l 1024".

Tell you what...

Do a search online for "presents for women" or something similar and you'll find it's pretty universal of all the stereotypes... mix in some tame "kinky sexy fun" bullshit (like chocolate body paint) and you have the entire woman... according to the Internet.

... I guess the web really is still a predominantly male preserve.

The reason

that everyone is slowly dropping support for Maestro cards is because it's ONLY UK Maestro cards that MANDATE the use of 3D Secure (thanks for the Mastercard - yay) - if you want to accept Maestro cards you have to go through the joy of implementing 3D Secure... which is, if we're honest, a bit shite.

Since you no longer HAVE to accept Maestro cards if you take Mastercard (as used to be the case) it might be preferable to just drop support for Maestro entirely, avoid the whole 3D Secure debacle and be done with it... which is what Google Checkout did.

Make a statement

spoil your ballot paper by writing something like "I'd like to vote for a democracy please" right across the middle.

I'd like to see the highest election turn-out for YEARS with the highest proportion of spoiled ballots ever... maybe, just maybe, they might get the hint that we're sick of the fucking lot of them.

Ummm....

I think you missed the point that a "Barn Raising" is essentially a communist activity - in the purest meaning of the word.