Peterbe.com

At the time of writing, if you do any of these searches on google:

charles dunston carphone warehouse

supersize me,the moveie

7 wounders of the world

...you'll notice two patterns:

1. My site is no. 1 on all three
2. They're all badly spelled

I bought the A4 VisiBone Browser Book from www.visibone.com and have been using it now for about a month. How did I survive without it before?

Usually when I forget how a selector CSS works I usually go to Google and sift through a few different sites until I find what I'm looking for. Or if I forget how a JavaScript function works I pick up my 800 pages big JavaScript The Definitive Guide from O'Reilly. So many times I've searched Google for html entity chart to look up the code for å. Don't get me started on scanning the web for a decent DOM tree chart (none found so far actually) or various boring tutorials for how to do regular expressions in JavaScript.

My VisiBone Browser Book is 16 dense pages with web colours, fonts, characters, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, DOM and Regular Expressions. It's always one arm-reach away from my work computer. Another great feature is that the listings of tags, CSS declarations and DOM is speckled with little footnote icons such as "Obsolete", "Not supported by IE5 on the Mac" or "Opera bug". This is incredibly valuable. When I received my copy and sat down reading it (or rather, staring at it) for an hour. That alone taught me so much and I'm now probably faster at finding things between the 16 pages.

If you don't know what ping is, it's a program that tests the network connection between your computer and another host. When you run it you can see how fast the connection is but people use it mainly to test if it's even possible to make the network connection.

Often when I've had to struggle to get connected to the network (fiddling with the Ethernet cable or getting on a wifi broadcast) I often use ping to see if the internet connection works. Which host do I ping? I use www.com.

For a long time I was using www.google.com for no obvious reason. My colleague Zahid uses yahoo.com I noticed yesterday when I was leaning over his shoulder after connecting to a wireless router. So, who do you ping? (and why?)

This is quite amazing of a camera. I'm not sure I want one because I wouldn't be a photographer enough to be able to use it.

On Hasselblads promotional website:

"How do you improve upon the best digital camera in the world?
You start by making it the first DSLR to feature an extremely high resolution 39 million pixel sensor."

Every image weights 78Mb (50Mb compressed) and it's no surprise that they sell an external hard drive as an accessory.

At work we have a Windows XP computer that is used mainly to test websites in Internet Explorer to check the stylesheet compatability. The installed XP version is English and everything is therefore in English; except one thing.

Look at the screenshot and notice some weird lines of Swedish! Why??

Surely this is a bug. The reason why the deviating language is Swedish and not French or Icelandic is probably because the MS Office 2003 we have installed on it is Swedish. I already had a Swedish Office CD from Sweden from before and at the time we installed it we thought it would suffice because we didn't want to buy a new English version for a computer we very rarely use.

PS. If you haven't already done so, migrate away from M$ Office and move up to Open Office which is free and Open Source.

Here at Fry-IT we use timesheets, like so many other companies, to track the time we spend on each client project. Despite being a very "web modern" company we still don't use a web application to do this. What we use is a python script that I wrote that uses raw_input() to get the details in on the command line. The script then saves all data in a big semicolon separated CSV file and is stored in cvs. This works quite well for us. It's in fact all we need in terms of actually entering our times which is usually very easy to forget.

But, here's an idea for a timesheet tracker that will not guarantee but will really help in not forgetting to fill in your timesheets. The idea is that you have a web application of some sort that is able to send out emails to registered individuals. These emails will be sent at (a configurable time) the end of the work day when you're about to leave for the day. You might have seen this before on other timesheet tracker applications; it's not new. What is new is that the email would contain lots of intelligent URLs that when clicked fills in your timesheets for that day.

It's possibly a bit late for a new years resolution but I have had to think about it and here are my new year resolutions for 2006:

• Computers Redo my whole personal website in Zope3
• Work Increase my income by a third

Wish me luck! :)

I learnt an important lesson today about the <link> tag. I had a XHTML Strict that looked like this:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print"
title="Design for print" href="/print.css" />

And every time I tried to print the page it did not correctly incorporate the print.css file. The file gets downloaded by the client but not incorporated. After a lot of trial and errors and testing I finally discovered why. The title attribute stops the link tag from working.

The correct way to declare a link tag for a media="print" is to do the following:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print"
href="/print.css" />

Hopefully this will help someone else getting into the same pickle as I was in.

If you haven't started dropping in to Ask Yahoo! often, you should. A great thing about it is that all questions are available via RSS so you can look questions and answers in your personal RSS reader (I use Sage and Google Homepage).

One question that popped up yesterday was pretty interesting:

What state do the Simpsons live in?

After a pleasant 12 hour flight in Upper Class and 18 days, 15 days of hard training, 13 saunas, 5 massages and many many meals later I'm back in England again. My club training camp in China was a huge success. We had a great time and everything went smoothly.

Big thanks to all those who made it possible: Master Dennis Ngo, Karl the translator and guide in everything, Master Su Ying Han of Yong Chun White Crane, Master Chai of Wu Dang and Master Gu of Natural Boxing.

Although training was very hard every day the trip was more than just training punches and kicks. We learnt a lot about the food, the people and the habits and customs in China. Food was at major focus every day. Not only did we eat vast amounts of healthy food but we ate lots of different things of many different tastes. Some of the "weirder" things we ate: corps eating eal, frogs, sea blubber fish, jelly fish, wild chicken, turtle, dog and cat. Fortunately it wasn't the right season for mice which pleased me.

In a couple of weeks I will try to get all my photos up on this website. I took about 1,000 photos but some are experimental and some are near duplicates but expect more than 500 photos here soon.

UPDATE Photos from the trip now available here