Tag Archives: webgeek

How I Know I’m A Geek.

Tonight I got home at a bit after seven. Since I have no food in the house, I planned to go to the gym about half eight, and then pick up a sandwich or something on the way home. So I thought I’d use the hour or so I had in hand to get a bit of work done. Specifically, some data modelling for the Programming Project That Will Not Die. This will teach me to try and build a web app of LJ-level complexity on my own, in my spare time. If anyone fancies learning Ruby/Rails along with me, and wants to pitch in, speak up. (And if anyone’s got any experience of building calendar/scheduling type apps, please speak up, because I need to pick your brains.)

Anyway: It is now a bit three hours later, and I have just looked at the time and realised that I have forgotten both to go to the gym and indeed, to eat. So I’m going for a walk around the block to blow the cobwebs out, and then, in the absence of dinner, I shall drink a beer. Beer is still food, right?

Just in case anyone gives a toss

I’ve started a workblog, which is mostly just a place to dump all those webdev and web culture related bits of nonsense that occur to me. Part of an ongoing effort to general tidy up my professional life. If you fancy keeping an eye on it, you can find it at alasdair.biz.

I mention it because from time to time, I do intend to actaully write the odd article on there, and have just put the first one “The Joy Of The Commons” up there – about the monetisation of mass amateurisation. Feel free to check it out, and tell me I’m talking out of my arse.

Anyone in need of hosting?

For a number of reasons, I’ve just bought a re-seller account for webhosting (well, I say a number of reasons: I want to get the multitude of domains I have in one place, with a standard set of features, and reliable uptime, rather than scattered across half a dozen ISPs). But I’m not going to use *all* the space I’ve got. So if anyone’s looking for some small-scale hosting for their personal site, then give me a shout and we can talk prices…

[Web Design] There’s a reason I don’t do the pretty bits…

I’m at home working on a Saturday night, and god, I fucking hate CSS. I could accomplish the layout I want in about ten minutes using tables, but can I make CSS do what I want in IE Firefox and Opera? Why, noooo…

Anyone out there want to tell my why the small square photos at the bottom of this layout aren’t centered on the page? They’re inside the DIV that’s supposed to centre everything, and as far as I know, the float that’s on them should only serve to make sure that they don’t linbreak between images, not to actaully align them in any way. (If that’s not the case, please explain what I need to do in order to have them centered and on the same line in all three browsers. For preference, I would like them to stay in the LI tags, as I’d like this site marked up as semantically as possible, since I want it to score well on Google.)

For bonus points, please explain why, in Firefox, the LI items at the top are not appearing inside the darker blue/purple area at the top (as they do in IE and Opera) despite the fact that it’s the fucking UL that contains them that has the styles for the darker blue area.

In the meantime, I’m off to do some PHP. At least I can understand that…

Opinions Sought: Photo Printing

Firstly: has anyone used photobox.co.uk to get prints of digital images in the past? I think I’ve finally turned up somewhere that’ll do photo printing on demand like I want (ie. without requiring me to pay anything up front) but I’d like an idea of their quality before asking anyone to part with cash. If no-one’s tried them, I’ll order a few things myself, but I just thought I’d check first.

Secondly, and more importantly: of the photos I’ve put up to date on electricana, which are your favourites (if you’re not watching electricana, then by all means, take a quick look and tell me if anything leaps out at you)? Are there you would seriously consider buying, if they were a reasonable size/price?

[Webdev] PHP and Windows Login

I’m working on the company intranet at the moment which will have all sorts of different levels of access. We have been asked to come up with a system whereby the website does not have a seperate login system of any kind – a user simply logs on to their machine in the morning, and if they look at the intranet in any browser on their machine, they will only see those things that they have access to.

The intranet is using PHP on IIS.

Is their some cunning way I can get at their windows username and password via their browser, without throwing up any kind of log in?

(I would hope *not*, for y’know, security reasons, but I’m just checking.)