All Thumbs and No Fingers » news

IE 6 will out live IE 7 – and I have proof

Paul — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 05:56:41 +0000

Microsoft have gone and released IE 8 (19/03/08) and with it finally gained ground on being a ’standards conformant’ web browser. This is excellent for the average user and long overdue. In fact it should in time make our lives as web developers easy simply because cross browser checking should be less demanding – will we ever be able to test in one browser?But then I was left thinking about how quickly this would be adopted particular within the elearning industry and I realised it may cause an interesting issue:Our user base has 2 principal operating systems

Windows XP / Vista
Windows 2000

The vast majority fall into the Windows XP group and therefore have the ability (from the manufactuer not necessarily company IT) to update. It is not unreasonable to assume the Microsfot update tool will push this out shortly. So everyone currently on IE7.0 moves on to IE8.0 probably within 6-12 months. But hang on a moment what about all those people on Windows 2000. There is no IE7.0 for them and certainly therefore no IE8.0.
Consequence: IE 6.0 is actually the last option here without an operating system upgrade which lets face it is unlikely if the machine has been around this long.So it therefore becomes conceivable that we’ll be left supporting IE6.0, 7.0 & 8.0 in the very near future, with decreasing attention given to IE 7.0.

And the proof…

http://ajaxian.com/archives/ie8-vs-ie6-rise-of-the-new-machine

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Firefox collections plugin

Paul — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 05:54:24 +0000

Firefox has released a useful extension which I’ve been hunting for for some time now.

Simply: the ability to define a collection of plugins and install all of them with a single instruction. In fact they’ve gone further than this and allowed us to create collections of plugins which are available for others to click and grab. It really is simple and very useful.

Head over to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/editors_picks to see more. And if you’d like to access my all things google related collection check out the following: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collection/cdb63c71-9c70-f92a-5d80-554beb600806

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Ascii Table

Mojo — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 13:30:43 +0000

As a web developer we often need easy access to an ASCII table so I thought I’d move one out of Google and place it at easy reach.

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Rails – speaking to rest as a mock webservice

Mojo — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 11:03:44 +0000

Finally understood the distinctions between webservices and rest. Now I don’t mean the theory aspects Roy Fieldings paper adequately explains the concepts and frankly helps a great deal to try to introduce technology which is along the lines of ‘less is more’.

What I mean is being able to create a service mock up a test script and talk to the server using XML.

Here is an example of creating a new Person:
require 'net/http'


s = <<-XML
        Sarah

        Jhummun
    XML
Net::HTTP.start('localhost', 3000) do |http|

  response = http.post('/people.xml', "#{s}", 'Content-Type' => 'text/xml')
  #Do something with the response.

puts "Code: #{response.code}" puts "Message: #{response.message}" puts "Body:\n #{response.body}" end

and here is an example of retrieving a list of people:
require 'net/http'


Net::HTTP.start('localhost', 3000) do |http|

  response = http.get('/people/', 'Accept' => 'text/xml')
  #Do something with the response.

puts "Code: #{response.code}" puts "Message: #{response.message}" puts "Body:\n #{response.body}" end

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Blog posting from Google Docs

Mojo — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 19:13:39 +0000

Blog posting from Google Docs First attempt No related posts. Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. No related posts. Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Westminster Annual Motorcycle Parking

Paul — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 09:02:47 +0000

If like me you comute into work on a motorcycle and would like to purchase an annual motorcycle parking ticket then this guide may help:

Navigate to: http://www.westminster.gov.uk/cashlessparking/

Click on Manage My Account

Click on My Account and login using your mobile phone number and pin.

Along the orange toolbar click on ‘buy permit’, you can now select to buy an annual parking ticket

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Evaluation of wordpress as an induction site?

Mojo — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 17:48:15 +0000

Great idea presented to me today – the idea that a company induction site could all quite easily be sat within an instance of wordpress. Wordpress being the blogging tool used by thousands on a daily basis to provide a strong and capable back bone to maintain and publish content. Plus throw in the facility that it provides plugins and static pages and we have a small induction site which can be maintained without an IT person – perfect.

So where’s the downside – well it aint custom so it will look like your actually in a blog, this could if not maintained mean that content doesn’t get ‘posted’ for sometime. Could this mean that the content looks old, and the site looks poor. Possibly but on the flipside the ease of adding content might suggest that any editor responsible for the induction site could add stuff. Of course if there is no sub-editor either process or person then we could end up with a shambles but I’m prepared to guess that this wont be the case.

From a costing point of view its extremely encouraging – wordpress is free and we have the skills to hack the code into various shapes. Add to that that all the really juicy content is stored elsewhere – videos, articles etc and it we have a compelling opportunity to bring something into being without excessive cost of bespoke development.

I’ll update again shortly with pitfalls and successes.

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IPhone blogging

Mojo — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 05:29:08 +0000

At last something useful for the IPhone – the ability to publish to the blog while at the coffee shop. Fab No related posts. Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. No related posts. Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

What is your throw away value?

Mojo — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 06:46:10 +0000

Concept:

Since childhood and the days I started receiving a reasonable amount of money each week (e.g. I’d got a job in the local cinema) I’ve had this concept of a throw-away-threshold. This is the amount of money that in a particular period, usually a day I’m prepared to twitter away to a hunch or meaningless indulgence.

At the age of 15 it was set at the amount of £1. Over the years I’ve watched it change and whilst watching a DIY home renovation program yesterday evening where it was clear their threshold had reached £200 I realised that at the grand age of 28 my threshold had reached £10.

I sighed and realised this had made my day, it feels grounding to still have a relatively low value before reasoning must take over from passion to take out my wallet.

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3…2…1…

Mojo — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 14:12:09 +0000

Hi,

This is the launch point for another corner to the world. Here I aim to offer insightful pieces on a variety of general interest topics. The aim in fact is to broaden my knowledge about particular areas as I’ve always felt that general knowledge was something I’ve lacked. In fact not so much I felt as confirmed by the abysmal display of grade ‘D’ in General Studies 10 years ago. Hopefully however in the long gap in between I’ve picked up a few pieces of knowledge which I can share here.

First up will be a small guide on night time city star gazing. I say city star gazing as its a particular skill to see anything at all. Firstly … I’ll stop there and let you wait for the article to appear sometime next weekend.

In addition to general information I do enjoy browsing the web and although am irritated by my abundant lack of self control when it comes to facebook I do occasionally find some interesting material and would hope this is a release valve to highlight the work of others.

That’s all for now I hope I can share more soon

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