« March 2005 | Main | May 2005 »
April 30, 2005
The nightmare returns.
As a child of the 60's I spent some of my most frightening moments hid behind the sofa on a Saturday afternoon. Grandstand had just finished when the haunting theme music began. I was 7 and I was petrified. The daleks had arrived. They were the most fiendish space monsters ever devised.
Tonight they returned, as menacing as ever. Watching tonight's Dr Who episode sent a little tingle down my spine. The BBC has done well and remained more or less faithful to the original daleks. Not sure they had to dispel the myth that daleks couldn't conquer stairs and the overall levitation effect came off as a bit cheesy.
Nostalgia, just as I remember it.
Posted by weaver at 12:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 29, 2005
CSS Compression
A nifty little online tool that compresses CSS files. I found an 8% saving when trying the macla css file.
Posted by weaver at 11:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
50 million plus
Firefox reaches 50 million downloads. If you haven't, you know you ought to!
Posted by weaver at 11:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 28, 2005
Krakatoa
Krakatoa or 'The Day the World Exploded' by Simon Winchester is an enthralling read in parts. The book is about a nineteenth century natural disaster with eerily prescient echoes of the recent tsunami disaster in the same part of the World. Winchester successfully brings events to life though I feel he struggles to really capture the sheer scale of the final explosion. The background section on plate tectonics alas had an air of smugness about it that detracted from the overall feel of the book. Nevertheless, a good read - 3/5
Posted by weaver at 10:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 23, 2005
A walk in the park.
Blankney Park to be precise. Today is (was) a beautiful warm spring day. The Sleaford based, Society for Lincolnshire & History & Archeology (SLHA) had asked Rodney Garlant & Heather Routledge to arrange a walking tour of Blankney & its surroundings.
A group of about 40 of us turned up and were treated to Roger's guided, informative talk around Blankney Park & village. Heather finished off in Drury Street, Meg, before we invaded Meg Church Hall for tea & refreshments.
A really enjoyable way to spend an afternoon in the company of such knowledgeable people. Well done Heather & Rodney.
Posted by weaver at 09:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 20, 2005
Transport Direct
The Department of Transport hosts an excellent UK travel planner, Transport Direct. It allows you to specify your mode(s) of travel: car, bus, train, plane ferry or foot. It will then give you directions and a map.
The really clever part is that it will also supply you with timetable details if any part of your journey is on public transport. What a truly useful feature, tying together mapping, planning and public transport timetables. Not bad... and from a government department too.
It has a couple of extra features; a live update listing of severe incidents restricting travel and a UK inspirations section, where you can vote for the place in the UK that inspires you the most. Football grounds seem to be quite popular!
This site will be added to the really useful links page on the main site.
Posted by weaver at 10:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 19, 2005
Google maps reaches the UK
Google Maps finally reaches the UK. If you've not seen the US version of this, then you're in for a pleasant surprise. Some clever caching and pre loading of surrounding tiles gives the impression of speed in this useful web application.
Try typing your postcode in the search bar and be amazed at the results.
Having watched the blog community's reaction to the US version of Google Maps, then it will be an interesting few months as the UK come to terms with the functionality this provides as a web service.
It lacks a couple of things at the moment. Quality imagery and the ability to add your own labels. See the US memory map tags on Flickr for an example of how it could be used in the UK.
Posted by weaver at 11:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Web Standards Solutions
Web Standards Solutions by Dan Cederholm is another book on building sites to web standards. There are lots of useful hints and tips and some wonderful code snippets in this book.
This book is probably more accurately aimed at the complete CSS novice and I found its tone just a little patronising in places. The 'quiz questions' that lead to the development of each chapter didn't really do it for me.
Also the black pages separating the chapters are a lame attempt at inducing some feel of style to the book. These are really minor critiscisms of a book that I'd use as an occasional reference.
Not perfect, but a good addition to a growing CSS library - 4/5
Posted by weaver at 11:18 PM | Comments (0)
April 18, 2005
seeing is believing...
...or not. You can find some more interesting 'illusions' by following the link on the page.
Posted by weaver at 11:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 13, 2005
The World in 3d
This application is nothing short of spectacular. Its from the guys who put a man on the moon, NASA. They have produced a 3d mapping viewer of the world.The application is called World Wind and is currently on version 1.3.
Its a hefty download, some 240MB, requires a good 3d graphics card, Direct X drivers, the.net framework and a good broadband connection. I used the bittorrent stream to capture the download. Took something like 20minutes in total.
Installation is a breeze but make sure you've lots of space on your hard drive (2Gb recommended). If your desktop can match this, then you must try this out.
From a perspective high in space viewing a 3d glob eof the world you can zoom anywhere. I tried to find Meg, very easy, although 15m colour satellite imagery seemed to be the best it could do. Swooping in on DisneyLand in Los angles gave me detailed street maps and 1m colour imagery of the park. fantastic.All rendered in beautiful 3d You can tilt and look at the mountains.
There is so much more to explore.....
The cost of this - zilch, nil, nada, absolutely nothing. Well done NASA 5/5 Top marks.
Posted by weaver at 11:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 11, 2005
Clearing of floats
I love del icio.us
Last night, I wrestled with a layout problem on a page containing thumbnails from 2 series of old maps. The thumbnail series were in the centre content div and I'd used float:left to position them. The problem that I faced was with the accompanying text that was wrapping around the thumbnails. I scratched my head and couldn't resolve the problem. The page was put aside, unfinished, on my list of things to do.
Checking del.icio.us tonight, a random bookmark threw up an entry by Robert Johansson that solved the problem.
2 lines of CSS were added to the page:
.floatclear {overflow:hidden;}
* html .floatclear { height:1%; }
Wrapping the content areas in a div with class of floatclear produces the exact effect required. Works in both IE & Firefox at varying widths.
Job well done
Posted by weaver at 07:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 10, 2005
Horizontal lists
A vertical list is relatively easy to display using CSS. On one of the page redesigns there was a need for a horizontal list, with each item separated by a small vertical line.
This is the CSS used to create the list:
li.inline {display: inline; padding-left: 3px; padding-right: 7px; border-right: 1px solid #066;}
li.last {display: inline; padding-left: 3px; padding-right: 3px; border-right: 0px;}
The second line, li.last, was used to avoid putting a vertical line after the last element.
This technique was taken from an article published in A List Apart, an excellent reference source for all things CSS.
Posted by weaver at 07:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 09, 2005
Blank page
The time since the Easter break has been spent with family so there hasn't been much work done on the site or this blog lately.
I loaded this Ramblings page today and found a blank sheet. Panic! Its broken! What's gone wrong? It worked fine before. Hmmmm. A bit of investigating shows that the template is set up to show content from the last 10 days. As I've not posted for over 10 days, the blog is only doing what its been told.
Panic over. Time for breakfast.
Posted by weaver at 09:38 AM | Comments (0)