The HTML5 audio tag
Tuesday, March 30th, 2010I have been mucking around with the
Python and The Very Slow Server
Saturday, November 28th, 2009I don't usually do a lot of Python programming, but I always enjoy it when the opportunity arises. Python is in no way a "clean" language, it has all sorts of warts and limitations that mean that it tends to not get used for big projects. Despite this (or maybe ...
WordPress Upgrade Time
Thursday, July 30th, 2009I have just upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. Usually this is a simple procedure, but this time something went wrong - attempting to view the blog threw up a blank page! Luckily I could still get to the admin pages, so I knew my database was still OK (of ...
Safari 4 is Pretty Good
Saturday, June 13th, 2009Safari 4 has been out for a couple of days now, and I must say I am enjoying using it. On the Mac, Safari has always had a great overall browser experience but Firefox always managed to stay my weapon of choice for viewing the Internet. This may change, ...
The HTML5 Video Tag’s Fatal Flaw
Thursday, May 28th, 2009Back in the day there was no standard way to publish video on the web. You could put any kind of video file you wanted on the server, but there was no guarantee that your readers would have the correct plugin required to view it. Everyone had to have a ...
New Zealand Public Holidays
Monday, May 25th, 2009Queen's Birthday has snuck up on me again, as it does every year. I can never seem to keep my public holidays straight, particularly the floating ones, but that is not going to be a problem anymore now that I have found that the Department of Labour publishes all of New ...
Sketch This Page! Image Processing with the Canvas Tag
Thursday, March 26th, 2009I have been quietly impressed with the progress web browsers have been making in recent years towards the goal of supporting a wide variety of applications. The promise of web-apps rivaling traditional desktop applications seems within reach after nigh-15 years of ballyhoo. Most recent browsers have extremely fast Javascript support ...
The New Zealand Web Harvest 2008 Harvests Too Much
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008I was looking through the server logs for this site tonight and I noticed a user-agent that I hadn't seen before. It turns out that the National Library of NZ is trying to take a snapshot of all New Zealand sites to archive as part of their mandate to preserve ...
Javascript and Saved Passwords
Saturday, October 11th, 2008First some facts... Fact 1: None of us can remember the passwords for the dozens of web sites we re all registered on. That is why web browsers all optionally store logon information and automatically fill out logon pages when we revisit a site. Fact 2: Web browsers do all support a special type ...
Chrome
Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008So Google is going where angels fear to tread, and has released a browser of their own: Chrome. This is a very interesting move; I can think of a few reasons why Google might think a custom browser might be a good idea: although everyone thinks of Google as a ...
A new font
Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008To celebrate my blog reaching 100 published posts, I decided to buy it a new font. After researching font creation for a couple of days, I decided that it was all too complicated and sought professional help: Fontifier is a web service that takes the pain (and believe me it ...
New WordPress Theme
Thursday, May 29th, 2008I updated to the lastest version of WordPress last week and I thought it was time for a new look. Unfortunately I have noticed that the RSS feeds don't work in quite the same way as they did before, and although I like the general look of this theme there ...
Tax Cut Calculator
Sunday, May 25th, 2008Another budget has come and gone, this one more discussed than most for it actually contains the much promised but little seen tax cuts (read the Minister's Executive Summary for details). Here is a little project I whipped up to calculate the amount you are going to better off when the ...
Safari 3.1
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008The browser wars are starting to hot up again. Apple is making a late play for cross platform browsing by releasing Safari 3.1 onto the world. Safari is MacOS X's bundled browser - on the Mac it has always been pretty good, but the recent Windows versions have been terrible. ...