Another great comic from Piled Higher & Deeper.
Archive for August, 2007
While the PS2 seems to be the platform of choice for mad fans of SingStar, Guitar Hero and Dance Dance Revolution, there are PC alternatives available for free that might give you most of the features without needing to shell out for a console. All of these games are free and open source (source is available on SourceForge).
I was originally intending to be writing something else right now but - unfortunately - I just managed to erase it all by accidentally clicked the home button in my browser. Gah! Even though Wordpress periodically saves your work via JavaScript it seems that you need to explicitly save your work before it actually stores these periodic saves somewhere accessible to the user. (Although it’s not in the database either so apparently the “saved at -” message is just plain lying.) Perhaps something to look at?
I also had a pleasant experience last night when I deleted the entire web site for one of the software engineering subjects I’m involved with. Thank God for backups.
Anyway, very annoyed right now. Once I’ve calmed down I’ll return to my original topic of discussion.
A few days ago an interesting article on Ars Technica about the Charmr, an insulin pump meant to be well designed, turned up in my feeds. Being diabetic myself, I admit I was intrigued so I took a look at the kinds of things Charmr is meant to be capable of.
Stylesheets and script files can often get quite large. Although they will be cached by the browser there is still the time delay (and bandwidth hit) of the first loading, which according to Yahoo! is more often than you think. Here’s a quick and dirty method of using PHP with gzip compression to send your CSS, Javascript and whatever else compressed to browsers.
UPDATE: A different take on Firefox blocking.
Blocking users who have certain browsers is a rather baffling practice to me. Recently a site explaining why Firefox should be blocked and how it can be done was featured on digg and it got me thinking about the issue. The practice of blocking Internet Explorer is actually substantially older than blocking Firefox so I’ll cover both.