A few nights ago, I went to see the excellent Biffy Clyro play live. Here’s what happened.

First, support band were the very poor Span. Sounding very much like a poor man’s Danko Jones they failed to impress from the outset. This was further compounded by the lead singers ill-advised and badly put speech about George Bush and the war. Unfortunately for him, he was playing in front of a largely pro-war crowd.

Next support band was the amazing JetPlane Landing, Whom I’ve seen before. They were, as usual, excellent; mixing new songs and old comfortably. From their 8 or so song set 4 new songs were played: the name of the first wasn’t mentioned (I think it was “Effect A Change”), “Strength Of Our Convictions”, “Conventional Thought” (the best of the bunch) and “The Violence”. How many bands are confident enough in their new material to devote half of a half-hour set to it? Importantly, though, it worked.

After what seemed like a moment of absolute genius, they left the stage and made way for Biffy themselves. I was surprised by just how good they were (to be honest, it was JetPlane Landing as support that convinced me to get a ticket). They rocked. But, at the end of the last song of the main set, Simon, lead singer, decided to jump off the amp stack; he landed badly and had to be carried off stage, and no encore. Turns out his leg is broken.

All in all a good night. I bought another copy of “Zero For Conduct” by JetPlane Landing, this time on vinyl and, with the exception of Span, enjoyed the whole thing.

Mike Davison on the standards-compliant redesign of ESPN.com:

Through a dizzying array of table tricks, transparent spacer images, and JavaScript hacks, we found a way to make things look great to the human eye through the window of a graphical web browser without worrying about what everything looked like under the hood. Now that digital lifestyle devices, tablets, wireless phones, and other Internet appliances are beginning to come of age, we need to worry about presenting our content to these devices so that it is optimized for their display capabilities. Do we want to send a 100KB index page full of Flash, images, and tables to a small wireless device or would we rather send them our top story, our top headlines, and essential navigation to get through our site? By separating our content pieces in a logical way rather than a graphical way, we are free to restyle this content for any device which supports open standards.

I’ve talked about standards and proper web design more than a few times on this site. It feels good to know that the people in charge of a major site sees it the same way. Who will be next to join the standards race?

The full interview with Mike can be found on DevEdge

A week ago, I was searching for something on Google and came across a link to this very site in my search results. It was linked to a page in my archives about PHP. So, I did the natural thing of clicking on it.

Because of the way the archives worked, the page no longer had any entries regarding PHP. Every time a new entry was added, each entry was pushed back by 1 entry on the archive. After 5 entries were added, it had been pushed off that archive page altogether.

This worried me. A URI should point to the same information all the time. So I began work on a new archive system today. It’s now done and available for all to see (the Archives are here for those who don’t know).

This time pages are archived by date, rather than some arbitary position that doesn’t matter. So, it’s now far more static and indexable.

Some surprises came out in this years oscars: the only oscar for Adaptation was given to Chris Cooper (Best Supporting Actor). How they managed to lose Best Adapted Screenplay is beyond me. Stupid academy.

I’m quite glad the Lord Of The Rings didn’t win many awards this year. The films have been moderately impressive visually, but quite overblown. There’s a big difference between epics and tedious detail; Peter Jackson just doesn’t see it.

I just found out about another reason to switch browsers to the Gecko family (I use Phoenix personally): keyword searching.

Imagine you want to use a search engine, say Google, (or any site that provides a search facility) to quickly search for information on horses. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just type “google horses” into your address bar and have it give you all the search results? Well, you can. And here’s how to do it:

1. Go to the site of your choice (we’ll use google), and enter a simple keyword (we’ll be using horses). You’ll get something like “http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=horses” back as a URL string.
2. Remove the search term (horses) from the URL and replace it with “%s” (with the quotations) to get something like “http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%s“. Bookmark this string.
3. Go into “Manage Bookmarks” and look at the properties for the bookmark you just created. In keywords, add “Google”.
4. Go back to your browser and type “Google horses”, and you’ll get your search results.

Very simple, yet extremely clever. I’ve already created a few bookmarks that you can use (just add keywords): Feedster, Google, and Dictionary.com.

Remember, you should be able to do this with just about any site with a search engine, so try it out a lot. Unless you use Internet Explorer. In which case, upgrade and then try it out.

Technique via Surf*Mind*Musings