Day 19. Coming out a bit multi-coloured, brown, blond and some black. Too much blond really so it doesn't show up all that well. But give some money anyway!

Via the SFSFW blog comes the very welcome news that HLBS have, temporarily, re-released their Bog-A-Ten rules and some of their dinosaur miniatures range in honour of the game's tenth anniversary. As it was their original range that got me into miniature dinosaurs (I bought a Styracosaurus and some Velociraptors at Salute 2000) this is very pleasing. Get them whilst you can, in particular DA10 Tylosaur, DA11 Elasmosaurus and DA12 Phorusrhacos which have been out of production for several years.

(This does make my web page even more complicated as some of these models have now been released under three different product codes.)

Microsoft have announced that there will be an Internet Explorer 9 (not a big surprise) and have given an early indication as to what it may include.

Headline features - faster with better standards support (in both cases playing catch up with Gecko, WebKit, Opera, etc.) and hardware accelerated graphics and font rendering which is something new and will improve the speed and quality of rendering across all sites not just ones that add new code.

No word yet on a release schedule, my personal guess would be late 2010 or early 2011 but as it's Microsoft that could be well off.

One thing that concerns me is that the uptake by consumers may be slow. IE7 was the first release in five years and also shipped as part of Vista and IE8 ships as part of Windows 8 so users buying new machines got them automatically. With no new operating system the take up of IE9 may be slower.

We have an web application at work that's used by thirty or so people, many of whom are non-technical. The application runs in the browser window and is a mixture of standard HTML forms and Java applets.

The most comment "it doesn't work" message I get from users is caused when the application displays this message:

Unspecified error invoking method or accessing property "showWindow"

The pop-up blocker built into Internet Explorer seems not to like Java applets trying to launch new browser windows. It blocks these by default even though they are "requested" by the user via a click and not launched automatically by a sneaky script. I guess IE can't or won't work out what's happened inside the applet before it calls out to create a new window.

Not once have the users noticed the yellow bar at the top of their browser window informing them that a pop-up has been blocked.

I can see the problem for browser producers - if you make the notification too prominent it becomes as annoying as the pop-up would have been; if you make it too subtle it goes unnoticed when the pop-up needs to be noticed.

Compounding the issue is that Internet Explorer seems to maintain three separate lists of trusted/permitted sites for privacy (i.e. cookies), security, and pop-ups. Would a master list of trusted sites with the ability to fine tune options on a site-by-site basis as an advanced option be easier to use? Or is the interface just leading me to the wrong conclusion? Oh well, maybe IE9 will streamline things.

Oh, and don't get me started on the Google Toolbar's pop-up blocker...

I've just finished watching the finale of Battlestar Galactica. Yes, I'm behind the times (oh I am talking about the new series, not the original one, that would be really behind the times). It's been hard to avoid spoilers for the ending because of the very strong opinions it's generated, hence I was watching it with one eye on the telly and one eye on my reaction: would I hate the ending as much as some people did?

Um, no. I have no problem with the ending per se. I thought it was rushed, but only to the degree that the last four episodes needed to be six or seven episodes (it struck me that characters like Tyrol and Helo jumped in and out of the storyline over the last few episodes).

( I'm trying to avoid outright spoilers but those of you who want to remain unspoiled should click away now. )

It was one of the best pieces of television that we've had. Possibly the best ever in the SF genre. For all its faults, in the ending or in any part, I can't think any less of it. If you haven't watched it, do so; if you have, I hoped you enjoyed it as much as I did.

Part 1 of a few.

It seems that everyone has started talking about HTML5. I've recently converted sfsfw.org (still a work in progress) to HTML5 (ditto) and built a microsite at work in the language.

So, what parts of the brave new world am I embracing?

The new doctype

<!DOCTYPE html>, well that will save a few bytes per page. I've never tried to type a doctype from memory before, I've always cut and pasted from another project or from an authoritative source, but now I might just type it, saving a few seconds. I can't help feeling that the lack of versioning information is a making a problem for the future (and let's not get into the related area of all the things that HTML doctypes do/mean in comparison with what SGML or XML doctypes are meant to mean...).

The new character encoding

<meta charset="utf-8" />, again that will save a few bytes on those pages where I bother to include a meta tag rather than just trusting to the HTTP header (and I know why the belt and braces approach is useful, so long as they both tell the same story).

The new block level elements

<section>, <article>, <header>, <footer>, <aside> and <nav>. These are rather cool. Not immediataly earth shaking but they make code cleaner and debugging easier - less often will I be staring at </div></div></div></div> and wondering whether my current problem is caused by having too few or too many closing div tags.

The new input types

number, tel, email, url are already being used in several forms on visitlondon.com and it makes me smile 'cos me and a handful of other Opera users get to see the benefit right now. I think these will be my favourite part of the new spec for some time to come.

There's a lot more to HTML5. This isn't meant to be a tutorial, just some personal observations and use cases. I'll try to delve a bit deeper into how I'm using these pieces of code and why I'm using these but not others in future posts.

FAIL

I spent Friday evening and all day Saturday being ill and unlike certain bloggers (I'm sure we all know at least one) I wasn't going to inflict the details on you. So the goal of posting every day in November has taken a hit even quicker than it did last year. I'll still try to make "30 posts in 30 days" though.

This blog was down for a few hours this evening. I could have spent the time composing a post and having it ready to cut and paste in here now that everything is working again. I could have done that.

Oh well. Tomorrow is another day (spent at an users' day for the CMS we use at work, held in a building that is one minute's walk away from the office) and the it's the weekend.

Just a quick one to point out that when you build a Christmas web site in October, sometimes things go a little strange...

I've been updating my Dinosaurs in Miniature pages. The main differences have been the addition of the MegaMiniatures megafauna that I posted about previously, the continuing expansion of the Dazed Miniatures range and some new miniatures from Wargames Foundry, including the Terror Bird shown here.

BTW, Foundry have a 20% off sale until the 10th November 2009. So now's a very good time to pick up these new goodies.

At SELWG last month I picked up a "new" Smilodon from the "old" DZ range sold by Trent Miniatures. It's in a walking pose rather than the leaping pose that's been available for a while. This range is now available over the web from North Star though this additional Smilodon isn't listed.

There have also been a few additions to the 10mm DinoMight range form Magister Militum.

MY Miniatures ice age range seems to have melted away from the web with the close of Geocities. Does anyone know if they have a new web site elsewhere?

And finally, the Tusk rules are available as PDF via Wessex Games/Wargame Vault. You can still buy the paper version from Irregular but the new version has full colour photos throughout.

I am currently growing a moustache as all big game hunters should.

November has arrived accompanied by wind and rain and cold (and indeed a cold). How to spend the month?

Well mostly Lettice and I will be spending it buying a house. Or trying to. The other day we took a tame civil engineer to have a look round the place we're hoping to buy (in a sort of "look for the massive faults before paying a surveyor" kind of way) and he could only see one potential problem. Fingers crossed that it isn't.

Like last year, I'll be taking part in NaBloPoMo as a form of half-hearted solidarity with the people who are attempting NoNoWriMo.



And I'll be growing a moustache. Some banter in the office on Friday has somehow led to me agreeing at the last minute to take part in Movember. Now, despite having a silly name and being an Australian import, this is a very good cause so please make a donation. I promise to only post very occasional photos of the mo's progress.

Finally I'll be hiding from the bad weather and watching telly, not least Doctor Who which is back for a special on the 15th.

Today I decided to try and build rounded corners on a button that would work in both CSS 3 compliant browsers (Gecko and WebKit based browsers, i.e. Firefox, Camino, Safari, Chrome, etc.) and also in IE and Opera.

Continue reading this Very True Thing

There are only a few things that pink_weasel and I disagree on, but one of them is the concept of jumping the shark. Lettice believes that it is a binary event - a show can only jump the shark once; there's a before and there's an after. I believe that it is always possible to find a new and bigger shark to jump over.

This disagreement normally surfaces whilst we're watching or discussing CSI: Miami.

Tonight's episode. In fact the pre-titles sequence of tonight's episode is a perfect example of my thesis.

I'm not going to put a spoiler cut for CSI: Miami, okay?

Horatio gunned down seven gangsters - several armed with automatic weapons, three in or on vehicles - armed only with a pistol without getting a scratch on him; in fact it was nine shots, seven kills. Now, considering that this show jumped the shark a long time ago (Lettice maintains that it jumped, before a single episode had aired, as soon as David Caruso was cast) was this not a new and bigger shark to jump? Will there be a scene next year where Horatio takes out a tank or a helicopter gunship with his trusty sidearm?

Well, no surprises there then.
( How spoilerphobic are you? )

At the time of writing it can still be seen at http://www.bbc.co.uk/pudsey/ontv/.

( Sigh, still spoilerphobic? )

I follow quite a few blogs, some are friends, some are famous, some are funny, some are wise, some are thoughtful, some are hopeful.

I could post my thoughts. But really, they'd just be recycling all these other guys.

Now, that's enough about that, how about some dinosaurs for tomorrow's post?