Switching to a Mac is getting easier
run Windows XP on an Intel Mac using Boot Camp. This could be a great step forward for
Firstly I don’t think Apple will capture the casual market, at least not in the near future. However much certain Mac enthusiasts may claim Macs are easier to use, a Windows machine does everything the casual user wants it to do (and because of the market share of
Those with enough confidence with computers to manage the transition may now be willing to make the change. Before, buying a Mac was a big step. Unless you wanted to have two computers it meant giving up a lot. Now you can have the best of both worlds with just one computer. For developers this could be great. With the increasing success of Mono as a cross platform development environment, have a single computer to test everything on (whether it’s been done or not I’m sure it’s technically feasible to run
Perhaps.
Free advertising
TextLinkAds are offering $100 of free text link ads. The catch? You have to buy $125 of advertising. The catch isn’t as big as you’d think. I assumed it meant you spend $125 and get another $100 free, but it doesn’t. You order $125 worth of advertising and only pay for $25. You still need to be careful though. You’re actually ordering a subscription and if you don’t cancel within a month you will be charged again.
TextLinkAds sell hard coded text links (oddly enough) on publishers websites. Hard coded means detectable by search engines. And you can get them at one fifth the “normal” price.
To qualify just enter “New client” as the coupon code.
Going more mobile
Filed under: Computers, Programming, Technology, Web Programming, XML
announced limited support for mobile devices viewing the blog recently. That support basically only covered phones with
Well now I have a
You can force WML output with any browser though (although most browsers do not understand WML).
Detecting Mobile Phones
You’re first instinct is probably to check the user agent. Although it’s true there are fairly consistent ways to detect a phone from the user-agent there is a better way.
One of the many under-utilised headers that browsers always send (well 99.99% of browsers you encounter will) is called Accept. This is just a list of text/vnd.wap.wml.
if (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT'], 'text/vnd.wap.wml') !== false) $mobile = true;
Now we need to find out if the phone can accept XHTML Basic (or XHTML Mobile Profile or whatever) in pretty much the same way:
if (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT'], 'application/xhtml+xml') !== false) $xhtml = true;
Many “real” browsers are inconsistent with regards to the MIME type for XHTML. As far as I know since mobile phones do not have any sort of backwards compatibility issues they all use the proper application/xhtml+xml.
XHTML Compliant – Thrice!
Filed under: Computers, Programming, Technology, Web Programming, XML
nobr tag not allowed, span tag not allowed inside a ul and few others) so I fixed them and I'm
The main reason I did it was for the sake of any mobile browsers that might complain really loudly about bad markup. So I started reading about script tags, style attributes, replace i with em and again, a few other minor things. The end result is that an XHTML Basic version of the site is available to mobile browsers. Since I don't have a mobile browser to test it on I can't guarantee I'm detecting them properly yet. If you want to see what it looks like though, just go to Oliver Brown - Basic.
Then I discovered that it's mainly
Just to let you know, when browsing the other versions manually all the links bring you back to the normal site - you actually need a browser detected as being a mobile phone for it to work properly.
AJAX problems in IE
Filed under: Computers, Javascript, Programming, Technology, Web Programming
This worked well until I started getting an odd error from IE - "Unknown runtime error". Firefox and Opera both handled this fine. After some fiddling I discovered the problem was the type of element I was replacing into - Internet Explorer doesn't like you replacing the innerHTML of certain elements. So far I've found TR and TBODY don't work (and I'd guess THEAD and TFOOT too).]]>
StepMania
Filed under: Computers, Entertainment, Games, Programming, Technology
Ever heard of Dance Dance Revolution (Dancing Stage in Europe)? Well it's a funky arcade game you control by "dancing". Arrows scroll up the screen and when they reach the top you press the corresponding button.
The really cool thing is a an open source PC version of it called StepMania. Generally StepMania has more features and allows you to add as many songs as you want (assuming you can get the media files and step charts). In fact there are arcade machines around that are actually a computer running StepMania inside a DDR cabinet (which is a little overwhelming to play because of the sheer number of songs available.]]>
Looking good in every browser
Filed under: Computers, Programming, Technology, Web Programming, XML
Firefox (and
Well now it looks how it should in
IE supports “conditional comments”. They’re
The dodginess in IE (if you hadn’t noticed or don’t use IE) is that the graphic behind the Google links bar was 1px to the left. So all I did was put a style definition inside an IE conditional comment to nudge it to the right:
<!--[if IE]><style> #linksbar { background-position: 1px 0 } </style><![endif]-->
Apparently you can do cleverer things with the comments like so conditionals on specific version of IE but that’s getting a little silly and if you want that much control it’s probably better to do it on the server so you don’t send every version of a page to every browser…
For more information, check out conditional comments on Quirks Mode.]]>
Going mobile
Filed under: Computers, Programming, Technology, Web Programming
Following my recent discovery of Opera Mini I fiddled around with stylesheets trying to make the site presentable on mobile phones (well ones running
And I seem to have success. The image on the left is how it the page appears in Opera’s small screen mode using the “handheld” stylesheet I defined. That’s about 240px wide but it displays okay at anything down to 176px (the screen width of the
Since the modifications are only to the stylesheet the page is still the same size as before (which is rather bloated) Of course if you use
For anyone wanting to do something similar, here are some of the things I did specifically:
- Lower the font size. I’m not sure whether proportional fonts are ideal here – I just set
body { font-size: 10px }. - Remove the adverts. Most of the adverts are fixed sizes that are too big for mobile phones. Large ad networks probably won’t pay for mobile visitors anyway. Remove them by giving them a
display: noneCSS attribute. - Set a maximum size for images. All the images have
max-width: 95%to stop them needing to scroll. - Cut down the margin and padding for basically everything. Especially lists.
- Hide redundant navigation. Most sites have multiple menus that aren’t neccesary and a pain to scroll through. In my case I scrapped the calendar.
- Resize form elements especially textareas. I’m not sure whether it’s practical to try and post from a mobile phone but I don’t want it to be impossible.
- Use a sans-serif font – they’re more readable at small sizes. More subjective and only an issue really if you can’t read the serif font.
A final note (in case you didn’t guess): the page is using normal
Comment spam
I just got 200 spammy comments in 12 hours. Luckily most of them are coming from the same IP address so they were easy to deal with.
Fahrenheit Indigo Prophecy
games I mentioned a couple of weeks ago (actually I bought both but I’m only talking about one right now):
To summarise, the game is well cool. You don’t need fast reflexes or a large amount of skill as such but you do need to be able to think fast. A lot of the time you have a time limit to do something which is three times longer than you actually need – but it includes the time needed to work out what to actually do. Failing to do something isn’t always as bad as you think since the story seems quite flexible: there are times when you realise just what an impact your past actions have on the story.
The story itself has a lot of depth. While trying to solve the murder (alternately controlling the murderer and two detectives) you also have to deal with relationships of the main characters which adds more to the game than you’d think. In fact there are a lot of mundane task to you have to complete that are surprisingly fun.
Graphically the game isn’t that impressive, at least intrinsically. But the clever use of split screen during important events adds a certain style and grandeur to it. The sound for the most part is simple but many moments have an eerie sound track reminiscent of
This game will probably appeal most to point-and-click adventure lovers and anyone who loves story over action. But I strongly suggest everyone have a look at it (if you’re in the UK get it from Game; you have 10 days to take it back if you don’t like it 
).