In lieu of actual content (too busy with the hell that is the last week of term), just a quick something.

1. The A-Team can make something out of anything.
2. The Blue Peter team can make something out of anything.
3. They are never seen together.

I’m just saying…

Time for more random links:

• SoundBridge – Lets you use your PC as a jukebox, feeding audio devices around your house. Very nice bit of kit, if a little on the steep side.
• Introspection and Blogging – Absolutely true. There is a file full of stuff I intend to write about, but anytime I think about it, I get too involved in thinking to write it.
• IE7 – Absolutely phenomenal development. Bypass Internet Explorers lack of support for web standrds using proprietary javascript.
• Ball Game – Flash game where you need to get all the red balls on one side, all the blue balls on the other. The time to beat is 31 seconds.
• Blog Epidemic – HP labs have come up with a tool to monitor memes passing through the blogosphere. Interesting.
• Rounded Corners In CSS – Getting nice rounded corners. Doesn’t work in IE.
• 2DO Before I Die – Make a list of things to die before you die. How morbid.
• Markdown – Another plain text format for generating XHTML.
• Unicode Regular Expressions – How to do regular expressions that involve the complications of unicode.
• Technicolour – Create interesting colour schemes for websites. Came up with some nice ideas that might appear here in the future.
• Penguin And Yeti – The developing story of the Yeti game, featuring some bizarre modifications.

That’s all.

Recently, several individuals (Bill Gates included) have been advocating buying “stamps” to send emails in an effort to stop spam. The two mechanisms for this would be an actual payment (a fraction of a penny), or giving up processor time (perhaps ten seconds) to solve puzzles. The cost would, they hope, put off potential spammers since sending out a million emails would either take too long or take thousands of pounds.

This idea is fundamentally flawed.

There are legitimate reasons for sending large volumes of emails: universities, organisations, corporations, mailing lists. They all utilise email to a great extend and would be hit in exactly the same place as the spammers. That would simply be unacceptable.

Additionally, processor time is cheap. The spammers buy a few more boxes and let them deal with the backlog of processor time. The cost of this is not prohibitively high.

Nice try though, but it just won’t work.

You have to wonder how much has been lost in translation in films like Infernal Affairs. The direction is stylish but functional, the plot good, but the dialogue seems very basic; like the mangled simplification of a poor translation.

The film does not suffer too much for this: the story is still comprehensible, even if it does have a few bizarre subplots (was the psychiatrist really necessary?).

Worth seeing.

Using a very simple technique, it is possible to compress your CSS files with PHP.

Following the instructions on that site, and you can cut your CSS files by a large percentage. Good for bandwidth, good for visitors.

However, I would suggest one modification to the code given: do some user-agent sniffing for Netscape 4. Now, normally I’m not a fan of UA specific techniques, but if you don’t make an exception in this case, the GZip process will crash Netscape 4.

The problem is that it is difficult to target that particular browser. After some careful observation of various similar UA string, I think it is sufficient to not run the compression routine if you find the string Mozilla/4 but not the string compatible.

In addition, I’ve set up an htacess rule to parse .css files, rather than rename them to .php.