For those of us who do web-based development, Firebug must be the single most useful tool invented in a long time. I’ve used it for ages but I keep discovering new stuff it can do.
If by any chance you haven’t discovered it yet, go and get it now – it’s free. Any time spent learning your way around it is definitely going to be worthwhile. For some more advanced examples, you can watch Joe Hewitt’s talk, given last year at Yahoo.
Ian Walker quotes this delightful snippet from the Metro:
Lords: Give green light to Segways
Scooters known as Segways should be allowed on the roads, peers said yesterday. The electric two-wheelers got the backing after peers tried them out…. Segways are used by police and the public in parts of Europe along with the US. There have been concerns here about safety. But [Liberal Democrat] Lord Redesdale said: ‘I drove one straight at Earl Atlee and failed to do him any damage at all.’
I posted my quick reaction the Irish vote on the Lisbon Treaty a few days ago. The Economist is saying the same sort of thing (only rather better, of course):
Europe’s political leaders react to these unwelcome expressions of popular will in three depressingly familiar stages. First they declare portentously that the European club is in deep “”crisis”” and unable to function. Next, even though treaties have to be ratified by all members to take effect, they put the onus of finding a solution on the country that has said no. Last, they start to hint that the voters in question should think again, and threaten that a second rejection may force the recalcitrant country to leave the EU. The sole exception to this three-stage process was the Franco-Dutch no in 2005. Then, after two years of debate the politicians hit on the cynical wheeze of writing the constitution’s main elements into the incomprehensible Lisbon treaty, with the deliberate aim of avoiding the need to consult Europe’s voters directly again.
Now the Irish, the only people in the EU to be offered a referendum on Lisbon, have shot down even this wheeze. And as EU leaders gathered for a Brussels summit, after The Economist went to press, most had duly embarked on their usual three-stage reaction, all the while promising to “”respect”” the outcome of the Irish referendum—by which they mean to look for a way round it. Some have had the gall to argue, with a straight face, that Lisbon must be brought into effect despite the Irish no because it will make the EU more democratic.
Full piece here.
I’ve just bought a new battery charger, which recharges standard AAs or AAAs in 15 minutes. You may be able to see the grill behind the batteries – for ventilation. Yes, this is a charger with a 60W power supply and a built-in fan, which cools the batteries as they charge.
It certainly seems to work as advertised, but does anyone know if there are implications, good or bad, for the life of your batteries if you charge them this way?
I bought it here, by the way.
A small group of developers at 280 North Inc (I think there are three of them) have shown that you can do some pretty impressive stuff within a browser if you work hard enough at it.
Their 280 Slides application is a Powerpoint-like presentation package which does a lot of things that you’d only expect a desktop app to do, and it’s written in Javascript, not Flash.
Mind you, ‘written in Javascript’ doesn’t really explain enough; they wanted to build a framework for creating such apps based on their good experiences with Apple’s Cocoa, so not only did they have to recreate much of the Cocoa API (their version is called Capuccino), but they also needed to create Objective-J, which brings to Javascript the features that Objective-C brought to C. So the browser first loads a preprocessor which can handle the ‘.j’ files in which the app is actually written.
Some may say this constitutes trying a bit too hard – a browser isn’t an operating system, after all – but it’s pretty impressive that it works, and works in several browsers.
More info in an interview here.
One day, the browser will be your operating system, and then this will all seem completely normal.
🙂
If you give a talk in a research establishment,
is that a lab-oratory?
Here’s a useful site: the Awesome Highlighter. It lets you create a short URL link not only to a page, but to some text you’d like to highlight within that page. There’s a bookmarklet and Firefox plugin to make it easier to use. Quite clever.
Here’s an example of the results. The yellow bit isn’t in the original page:
Hee hee… The Irish have voted ‘No’ to the Lisbon treaty. Splendid stuff!
Now, the Eurocrats have a long tradition of bypassing the democratic process. In 2001, they asked the Irish people to vote again until they got the answer right. A bit like Mr Mugabe.
This time, they changed the name of a previously-rejected treaty, and most of Europe didn’t even get a chance to vote because the French and Dutch got the wrong answer under the old name and they might not quite be bamboozled into voting differently this time. So, no doubt, the suits in Brussels will now come up with another way to ignore the wishes of the people. Ah well…
Europolitics is like Eurovision. The votes are highly dubious, it gets sillier every year, and it too is likely to go into serious decline when Ireland stops winning.
Neil Davidson from Red Gate software was visiting the other day, and since he’d seen my interest in the Iliad, he brought his along:
My brief experiments left me quite impressed. It’s beautifully manufactured and has the best e-ink-type screen I’ve seen yet. It has wifi, too, and I gather from friends that it’s rather more ‘hackable’ than some of the competition. And unusually, you can also write on it with a stylus:
Nice for notes & sketching, but you can also annotate PDFs.
Of course, there are downsides. Joe Newman tells me that it’s slow to boot, and the battery life is around 5 hours of reading… both of which are markedly different from my Sony. I guess you have to keep more bits powered up on the Iliad, to detect stylus contact etc, whereas the Sony uses almost no power at all until you turn a page. I felt it really needed a processor with double the speed, which no doubt would swallow a battery even faster. And, of course, the biggest problem is the price: at £400, it costs more than two Kindles.
Nonetheless, I think this, and not the Kindle, is really the shape of things to come.
Rose found my ‘cute story of the day‘ for today.
I’ve always felt that one of the things I’d miss most if I ever left the UK for, say, America, is our network of public footpaths. I’ve spent many a happy weekend afternoon on them, discovering places I’d never seen before.
An example from this afternoon for all you Cambridge residents. Where, within 10 miles of the city centre, can you find white limestone cliffs? You can’t see them from the road.
They’re a lot more dramatic than they look here, too.
But as well as drama this afternoon, there was beauty:
And history:
and cuteness:
But the cutest moment came near the end of my walk when, hearing lots of cheeping coming from the river, I went closer and saw a couple of swans and three cygnets heading homewards:
There was quite a current, and the little one were having to work hard to keep up.
But no, wait, I was mistaken. Four cygnets:
One had obviously found the current a bit too much and had to be given a lift.
They headed off in the evening sun.
And so did I.
More photos here.
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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