The above shows @media and related events in blue, World Cup related events in purple, and work type meetings in green. See what I’m saying?

See you there if you’re attending any of this extravaganza. and if not… heh – have a nice week.

Wednesday, April 24th, 2002. Nwankwo Kanu’s header, and our second goal of the night against the Hammers, in my eyes clinched the 2002 Championship for us.

Dennis

Our second against Fulham at Craven Cottage in 2003. Driving run through the centre of the park, and hit from 20 yards. Dennis at his peak: quite literally untouchable.

Thank-you and goodbye, Highbury.

Thank-you and goodbye, Dennis.

MacZot are running a clever little promotion where they drop the price of AppZapper by 5 cents for every blogger that links to them.

I’m a blogger, and I’ve linked to them. So don’t say I never done anything for ya.

Being fairly proficient with CSS, I think I’ve forgotten just how much trouble IE can cause when you’re not sure how to work around it’s various bugs and weird behaviours. But the last couple of weeks have opened up whole new world of torment and suffering for me in the field of browser inconsistencies.

The obvious developments in online mapping mean that most of my work these days involves rather serious amounts of client-side scripting. Of course, on paper IE’s support for Javascript and the W3C DOM is a hell of a lot better than it’s CSS or even HTML support. But in practise, with the massive amounts of behavioural logic running on the client-side that draggable maps have, IE throws up so many inconsistencies you wouldn’t believe it. And it’s driving me nuts!

The best of the lot came at the end of last week. A slight layout bug in IE was occuring after inserting a few extra chunks of content via the DOM. Seemed like a classic reflow bug, but none of my tricks for that managed to sort the problem. So, I started breaking things down, inserting a few alerts for debugging and trying to find out what was happening where.

To cut a fairly long story short I noticed that when I was triggering an alert box immediately before adding the new markup, the reflow bug didn’t occur. Remove the alert and back it came! Grr… what the fuggery buck is that all about?

My better half and her gang have had this in the pipeline for about the last 6 months, and finally they’ve got something out there. My part involved seriously customising WordPress to fit their needs, as well as working alongside the portfolio-less H&W Media on much of the IA and front end code.

Anyway, job done. I can continue my evening in piece now. ;)

Anyway, inspired by Stuart’s take on the event, and in an effort to keep up with the banter and buzz surrounding the build-up, I’ve knocked up a little banner for those of us who will be there in spirit.

I would have put it in my side bar for all to see, but… er, I don’t have a sidebar. Feel free to wear it with pride though.

Joshua Schachter of Delicious fame, started the day with the most practical and useful presentation of the lot. His experiences of building Delicious were succintly delivered along with practical advice and tips he’s learnt along the way. I, along with many others I guess, were scibbling furiously throughout the 45 minutes he was up there, trying to get down gem after gem of this advice.

The other speaker who captured my attention from start to finish was Tom Coates of Yahoo!. Tom gave the most insightful and sensible explanation of what Web 2.0 might be that I have heard. He didn’t just list technologies, or compare old sites to new; he captured the essence of where the web is heading in terms of aggregation of information, and the concept of isolated resources being built on top of one another to create a bigger and better whole.

He even mentioned Microformats, and although he didn’t seem that in to them right now, he did acknowledge that they could play a leading part in the story of the aggregated web if things continue to develop in that arena.

Maybe it’s because he captured everything I think about what Web 2.0 might be myself, that I enjoyed this so much. For me, the idea of Web 2.0 has always been about doing things the ‘right way’, and allowing the inherent power of the web to come to the fore. But that’s for another post I think.

Of course, the other great thing about these events is the people. I got to meet up with some friends I don’t see so often, as well as put a few more faces to blogs which is always nice. Much beer was consumed towards the end of the night, along with much chat about Maps, other maps, and the best way to achieve Variable fixed width layouts, amongst other things.

It was a good night. The next morning: less good.

Four Jobs I’ve Had

1. Paperboy
2. Manufacturing factory worker
3. Orchestral Trumpet player
4. Web Developer

Four Movies I Can Watch Over and Over

1. Ghostbusters
2. It’s a Wonderful Life
3. The Rock
4. The Italien Job

FourTwo Places I’ve Lived

1. London, UK
2. Faro, Portugal

Four TV Shows I Love

1. Red Dwarf
2. Only Fools and Horses
3. Hancocks Half Hour
4. Airport

Four Places I’ve Been On Holiday

1. Alice Springs, Australia
2. New York, USA
3. Milan, Italy
4. Vienna, Austria

Four of My Favorite Dishes

1. Spaghetti Carbonara
2. Bif Pimenta (Pepper steak)
3. Thai Green Curry
4. Shephard Pie like my Mum makes

Four Sites I Visit Daily

1. Multimap.com(does that count?)
2. Arseblog
3. BBC Sport
4. Google

Four Places I Would Rather Be Now

1. Sydney might be fun
2. Beer Halls of Munich
3. My new flat
4. Tomorrow evening

Four Bloggers I Am Tagging

1. Er…
2. Not…
3. Gonna…
4. Happen…

After the update to 10.4.4 you may find that PHP and MySQL lose the ability to communicate with one another on localhost. As far as I can tell, the socket file has been moved in the update and PHP is looking for it in the wrong place.

If you are getting a MySQL error along the lines of ‘Can’t connect to MySQL server localhost through socket /var/mysql/mysql.sock’, then this is probably what the problem is.

The easiest way to fix this is create the directory that PHP is looking for, and link it to the old one. That is easily done at the command line by entering the following.


$ sudo mkdir /var/mysql
$ sudo ln -s /tmp/mysql.sock /var/mysql/mysql.sock


The idea, if you haven’t come across it yet, is to bundle together your bits and pieces from around the web in one unified and smooth, XML and Ajax powered bundle. Currently I have photos from Flickr, links from Del.icio.us, events from Upcoming, and an RSS reader for my favourite weblogs. It’s a great way to learn about the APIs from these different services, and I hope to build more as others become available. If you’ve got any suggestions…

How it’s built

The Dredge “Remote” is built with a whole bundle of technologies. At the back end is PHP and MySQL, which together look after parsing and caching the XML that is pulled in from around the web. I’m using PHP 5 and it’s ridiculously simple-to-use XML functions.

Out front on your browser is XHTML, CSS and a fairly hefty amount of Javascript. The Javascript is completely unobtrusive, and is not required to get to any of the content; but if you do have it available it should do a lot to speed up and increase usability of the site.

As I say, it’s version 1 and it has bugs which need ironing out – not least the interface which could do with being a lot more than simply lots of lists displayed inline.

Incidentally, if you’re using Internet Explorer 6 (or indeed less), prepare for an experience which is slightly more on the shabby side. Technologies used which your sad five year old browser cannot handle include, CSS 2.1 and Alpha transparent PNG images. I would recommend downloading Firefox.