Horrell.ca

For some odd reason if you want to watch the following video from Microsoft at the Channel 9 site about the IE 9’s support for standards and interoperability, you are prompted to install Silverlight.

I just thought I'd post this to show them how it's done. The quality of the Ogg file isn't the greatest so apologies for anyone using Firefox 3.5 or Chrome. Update: I removed the Ogg version of the video to cut back on bandwidth usage.

You may have heard about Kanye West storming the VMA stage during Taylor Swift’s speech. To mark that event I bring you the Kanye Bomb, an easy way to add an interrupting Kayne to your site.

Download the file below, follow the README and enjoy!

A new phenomenon has hit the web: Squirrel Photobombing. I first discovered this on Cute Overload and Intelligent Travel. It’s taking over!

To join in the fun, I’ve created Squirrel Pop, an easy way to add the Banff squirrel sitebomb (yes, I just made that up) to your site.

Download the file below, follow the README and enjoy!

There’s an interesting article over at Surfin’ Safari about FOUC or Flash of Unstyled Content. Anyone accessing my site using Safari will already know what this is if not what it’s called.

Basically, it’s a glitch that happens when a website is rendered in a user agent (a web browser) where, for a bief moment, the user (that’s, like, you) sees an unstyled version of the page before it fully loads. This happens a lot in Safari if the page in question has Google Ads — like the main page of my site. So if you see it while browsing my site: it’s not you, it’s not me, it’s Safari.

And this isn’t a unique issue with Safari. Internet Explorer has (or had, I don’t know if they fixed it in version 6) the same problem under different circumstance as well as explained here.

Of course, I could always remove the ads but after 4 years I’ve “earned” just over $50.00! That’s American dollars! Yeah, you see thing thing is, Google only sends you a cheque for every $100.00 so I haven’t actually seen that money yet. Bah!

Could someone in the Rails developer community please create a webmail application that periodically saves what I’m writing?

I have this habit of spending a painstakingly long time writing emails and by the time I’m ready to send it, my session times out and I pretty much lose all of my eloquent and thoughtful prose. I know, I know, I should be frequently saving it as draft, but my brain doesn’t work that way and imagine I’m not alone in this. And hey, I’ve used a few webmail accounts in my day and it’s clearly an area that needs improvement.

Look, I figure with the whole Ajax and XMLHttpRequest business, this should really be a done deal.

What I’m after is the simplicity and usefulness of Basecamp, with an autosave feature that backs up what I’m writing every 2-3 minutes.

I mean come on, that shouldn’t be so hard, should it?

Firefox 1.0 is finally out and I strongly suggest you get yourself a copy. It’s probably the best browser available for windows at the moment. I use it at work (although I probably shouldn’t) to see how my sites are supposed to look; then I make the appropriate tweaks for Internet Explorers relatively poor standards support. Oh, and if you dabble in web design as I do, you should get the Web Developer extension. I use it a lot and it’s a very handy tool indeed.

So yeah, validating is a bitch to be sure. I was having a hell of a time yesterday correcting some validation errors that were base on character encoding. It all had to do with me switching the site from ISO 8859-1 to UTF 8. Ok, there’s a lot of background here I need to fill you in on. I’ve been pretty busy over the last few months doing a whole wack of things, hence my infrequent posting.

Several weeks ago I signed up to be a member of the TextDrive VC200. It was a sweet deal and a damn fine hosting service even without this offer. So anyway, I moved my site over to the new server which serves all my files as UTF-8. No problem at first but then I got some wacky validation errors and it took me hella-long to resolve them.

Of course, moving the site over was painful in its own particular way too. I started out trying to move my Movable Type installation and that got complicated — never do this sort of thing late at night. Then I had the brilliant idea of switching over to WordPress which I thought would be easier than moving my current configuration over. Big mistake. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a damn fine CMS, but I’m just not too familiar with it and I couldn’t port over my Movable Type templates without seriously b0rking my site. Chalk that up to my poor knowledge of PHP and mod rewrite. Mod rewrite is very cool and very powerful allowing you to do very complicated URL rewriting, but things can go pear shaped very quickly if you don’t know what you’re doing. It also helps to have a decent knowledge of Regex (regular expressions).

On top of all that I was buying a condo, applying for a mortgage, and dedicating some free time to Habitat for Humanity, a wonderful cause that I’ll be hope be a part of again in the future.

Oh, and my BlogSnob link broke this morning which took out all the pages of my site (TextDrive support to the rescue). Apparently if a PHP include doesn’t have any content the whole page won’t display. Not exactly liberal parsing although under a completely different context.

Update: The problem I had doesn’t necessarily have to do with BlogSnob and I’m still looking into it. I tested out the PHP include and it’s working again. I also tried out a PHP include with a broken link and the page still displays, so there goes that theory.

So yeah, things were pretty busy on the Christopher front.

These quotes are gold. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the site. I’m a big fan, and user of, the Simple Character Entity Reference. It’s a web design thing.

It looks like HotBot has been relaunched. For those not in the know, HotBot was a pretty popular search engine in the late 90’s, until Google came along and destroyed them. Ah yes, the dizzying highs and terrifying lows of the internet. It’s kind of suprising HoBot allows you to search through Google considering, well, you know. Inktomi, incidentily, is the service that HotBot runs on, that’s why it’s the default choice for searching. The other services probably belong to Lycos, which bought out HotBot a few years ago. This new version of HotBot comes in standard’s compliant XHTML, which is a fact only relevant to all the web designers out there. I’m not exactly thrilled with the off-centre layout. It took me awhile to figure out they did it on purpose. I also noticed you can change the way the page looks. My fav’s are plain text and classic.