I remember a good while ago, a young man by the name of Ste (by the way, if you’re reading this, how the hell are you ya old sod?!) advising of his hatred for Internet Explorer to anyone who’d listen, and the beauties offered by Firefox for PC.  In fact it was probably the same chap who actually got me switched on to Firefox in the first place.

At the time, Ste was building a lovely, shiny, CMS (or Content Management System) which he hopefully one day would be able to license to those who may want one.  To do this he was learning all sorts of web application languages, and doing a far amount of testing in a number of browsers.  No browser is perfect granted, but he always seemed to get more pissed off at IE.

Never before did I understand quite why it was such a pain in the arse until I began coding myself!

I recently picked up a copy of CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions (a superb read if your CSS skills need a boost).  It’s amazing just how many times I’ve read ‘Unfortunately, this technique does not work in IE’ or similar, to the point that everytime I saw the word ‘unfortunately’ I skipped the rest of the sentence knowing what it was going to say!

What I don’t understand, is if Microsoft are so involved in the Web Standards debate, whilst having the majority share of browser user coverage, why can’t they make a more compliant browser?  It just befuddles me completely!

To be fair, IE 7 alledgedly solves alot of the issues of 6, adding in more support for CSS 2 (although god help us when CSS 3 comes out).  I say alledgedly because I don’t use 7 at home or work, becuase the work servers haven’t been updated with it, and I just cannot get to grips with it at home after using Firefox for so long now.  I do find it funny how IE is now looking and acting more like Firefox, a la Vista and OS X!

Does mean one thing though.  Browser testing of my first real site should be fun*.

What a journey this web malarkey is!

*Note: Tongue was firmly placed in cheek whilst typing that!

Hello, remember me. It’s Travelling Phil. I had a great time in Asmara again - although the work was hard it was great to be back there for what was my fourth trip to Eritrea. Setting up a new HELIX server and a PDC and Windows domain for a client.

On the way back I spent 36 hours in Cairo and did as many touristy things as possible. Visited the Pyramids, went in one as well, did the Egyptian museum, went on a camel ride, saw the Sound & Light show. It was superb.

I’ve uploaded a selection of pictures to Flickr for those that are interested : 36 hours in Cairo

I’m really happy to be able to announce a brand new league that is starting up on consolesandconkers.co.uk, in conjunction with GBS!

Since the release of this superb racing game, we’ve wanted to do something to use the online facility of the title, but we wanted to do something that required a decent skill level rather than bumper car driving.

Full details of the league can be found over on the forum of Consoles and Conkers, but to give you a quick overview, here’s some of the main things you need to know about the league.

• It’s a ten race season (tracks and dates tba)
• Each race meet includes a qualifying ‘hot lap’ session and race, with points available from each. There is also an optional practice session
• Entrants are able to use their own tuned cars
• Everyone rides in the same class car, with a BHP restriction to try and encourage closer racing
• Should there be enough entrants, we may even be able to run a concurrent ‘B’ Championship, similar to real world GT racing

Best of all is the prizes available, but I’ll let you read that for yourself over on the C&C forum.

If you are interested, then head over to the site now, register on the forum, and leave your name in the Forza 2 League thread. Plus, if you sign up soon, you may even be able to shape the way the league runs, as some details are still in discussion.

Think you can make everyone believe you’re the next best thing since Lewis Hamilton?!

Especially if that someone else has written code when they only have half an idea of what they’re doing!

I’m talking about XHTML and CSS in particular.

Unfortunately Project BD has taken a bit of a back shelf stance at the moment, at least in terms of making the physical site anyway.  Two reasons for this:

1. I’m concetnrating on writing more content for the site first, so I actually have something to build it out of, rather than a vague idea in my head.
2. I’m still learning alot of CSS and how to use it effectively.

Point 2 has come very much into play this week as I’ve been given some more time to work on the department Intranet site.  I started making early pages using *shudder* table design, which was before I began to look into CSS layouts more.  As a result, those early pages are a fucking mess, especially as I’m also now trying to code in Web Standards.

To explain for any of you who don’t knwo HTML et al, (X)HTML is used to ‘mark-up’ the content of the page, CSS is used to present it well and make the page look good.  That’s a very simplistic breakdown but it gives you an idea.

To get techy again, I now have some pages that are a mix of table and CSS layout, and it’s getting to be a pain.  So much so, I’m now getting to the point of questioning whether I go back, and recode those early pages to do away with the table layout aspects.  If it were one or two pages, I’d do it and take the development time hit, but I’m looking at some 20 pages plus.  If I get the CSS right then it’s simply a case of applying the new stylesheet to all of them, but some pages have little unique aspects that don’t appear everywhere.

For anybody who’s learning now, or is thinking about picking up XHTML and co, go for it, you won’t regret it as it’s a great journey to go through.  But for the love of your own sanity, get your head into CSS layouts, Web Standards and semantics BEFORE your fingers starting tapping out your masterpiece.  It’ll save you a lot of stress later!

PS. Forgot to mention this nearly, but my own personal blog has moved over to Wordpress now because I wanted an environment I could play with the layout and style of my blog as a bit of a code testbed.  I am also using as it’s main function i.e. a blog, so feel free to potter over to boidster.wordpress.com.

I’m can’t write too much as my eyes are failing. Just enough time to say I’ve arrived and I’ve written a much more detailed entry on my own blog. (Not sure the details of Asmara Airports baggage problems are quite geeky enough!)

One piece of tech stuff though - I have a great new laptop. A DELL Latitude 820 with Intel Core 2 Duo at 2Ghz, 2GB ram and a 256mb Nvidia Quadro graphics card. It’s running Vista Ultimate and so far I’m very impressed. Not used it a great deal but I’m liking it so far. The main reason for Vista really is to put all the NOVUS (Insurance software we write at work) programs through the Vista hoop and make sure they work. We also use Word a lot for document creation so I have Office 2007 loaded on the laptop to test that as well.

Will chat more soon when I can.

I sat down last night on Forza 2, thinking I’d just have a quick go, complete a couple more races, upgrade a car or two.  Three hours later, I find myself completing my 30th test lap around the Sebring short circuit in my GBS sponsored Golf GTi (pictures coming up when I’ve finished the paint job.

I worked out that I’d spent just over an hour, tweaking the upgrades I’d just bought for the car, and trying to get a minimum stable set up.  It was a case of do a few laps until I throw it off and reach the limit of the cars grip, adjust some settings, and try again.  I think I threw it into the tyre wall a couple of times resulting in a race ending crash had been in competition.  Luckily as it was only the test section, it didn’t cost me a dime.

Have to say that the car is much better after it was stiffened up, reducing roll, but it still has this nasty habit of wanting to swap ends too quickly if you turn into a corner with brakes still applied even slightly.  Now that’s probably my driving style, but trying to teach myself a new way to drive around a track was more difficult that trying to get the car to compensate.

Now I’m left with a stable car in a straight line, decent through fastish bends, but anything that needs 3rd gear or lower i.e. fairly tight to tight, the back end says hello.  Honestly it’s pissing me off now, as I know it’s a combination of parts that should dial it out a bit more, but I’m yet to find the combination.

Guess I’ll be back in the virtual workshop tonight!

PS. Noticed how we haven’t even mentioned Halo 3 since the beta ended?  What does that tell you!?

You may remember a short while ago I emntioend I was on the lookout for a HDD camcorder.  I only went a bloody bought one the other week!

This one to be precise!

Like any good gadget freak as soon as we got home it was out of the box….that’s a lie, it was out of the box on the way home. I’m impatient ya see!

It’s a superb little unit.  Very light to hold and manipulate, buttons where you need them; a clear and quick to use GUI with a wealth of settings for quality of recording, situational settings, memory usage, loads of stuff; flip out LCD screen to line up your shots; a nice sized 30Gb HDD which can take up to seven and a bit hours on the highest quality, or over 37 hours on the economy setting; optical zoom of x32 and digital at x800; and the option to take stills pictures with a 1.07 MP quality.  Oh and an SD card slot for even more space.

It comes with a nifty little dock to hook it up to the PC with, charge it from, connect to a TV and a few other devices.  Actually using the camera is really easy too, although my directorial skills aren’t quite up to it.  I’ve done a few test films so far and it’s really a case of point, click and record.  Another click stops it all.

Whilst it’s not the cheapest camera (the camera and a carry bag came to just under £370) I wanted a HDD one because it’s relatively easier to use and manipulate the video produced.  Although there were plenty more expensive models from JVC and Sony, with the high end Sony costing around £1000.

When I get chance to do something worthwhile I’ll throw something up on here.  It may even leave room for possible new features for GBS, you never know