Monthly Archives: November 2003

Linkin Park

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I got back from the Linkin Park concert earlier and I have to say the guys were fantastic! Truly awesome!

The support bands were OK, with the Lost Prophets sounding better than local band Kinesis. But Linkin Park blew them both away. The level of professionalism was a world apart. From the lighting and sound to the songs themselves but mostly I think it was the band’s presence on stage. And the songs. And Chester’s voice (which took two songs to really warm up but which was then outstanding). And Mike Shinoda strutting round the stage firing his rap lyrics scattergun stylee. And the songs. And the fantastic rapport with the audience. You knew these guys were really enjoying themselves. They had tons of feedback from the crowd. Mike joined the people on the pit at one point. Rob on drums worked hard all night and along with Brad and Pheonix provided the solid foundation to most of the songs all night. Joe was great too, ignoring the fact that he seemed to be wearing what appeared to be a green halloween mask all night!

All in all a thoroughly fantastic night. I can’t wait for the Live in Texas DVD. It won’t be the same as being there but maybe the next best thing.

Zendor Standards Compliant Website Launched

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I am very pleased to announce that the company I work for, Zendor, have just published their new website www.zendor.com.

The reason I am so very, very pleased is that it is valid XHTML 1.0 Strict. More than that, the site claims Level Triple-A Conformance to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WAI-AAA).

We have designed our site to meet the W3C ‘AAA’ standards recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium, which has been set up to promote world wide standards of access and to encourage wider use of the internet.

Unfortunately Bobby disagrees, but the priority 2 error seems to be a Bobby error and the priority 3 is being looked at.

Further, the site is extremely search engine friendly; check out some of the URIs

I wish I could claim to have had a hand in the production of this site but I cannot. My good friend Steve P took care of the standards compliance, and our design team managed to produce a good looking functional site without a single table! I can only claim to a little help with the occasional CSS problem and just about three years of solid evangelising for this level of standards compliance.

Well done to everyone involved.

Update: Steve P has pointed out that For compliance, two automatic checks are required – the two I [Steve] used were Cynthia Says and LIFT, I must confess to not having remembered the former and never heard of the latter. He also mentions that some consider Bobby to be unreliable. I do now remember that when it changed hands (wasn’t it hosted at the BBC at one point?) it became less stable.

Spam Spam Spam

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I read with interest Mark Pilgrim’s highly pessimistic, but well thought out, article on comment spam yesterday. Whilst I find that I cannot disagree in principal with most things Mark says, I somehow feel that things aren’t quite at the throwing in the towel stage. On the WordPress developer list we have been discussing tactics which Mark hasn’t touched upon but which could be employed to negate the value (increased page rank) of comment spamming. Dougal sums things up nicely in the article he wrote over at the WordPress Development Blog

Out And About On The World Wide Web

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  • I found it ironic that javahosts.net which describes itself as JavaHosts.net for Servlet & JSP Java hosts, THE Servlet hosting search tool is running it’s site with PHP-Nuke!
  • This page of Notes on American English was quite interesting.
  • The University of Leeds Water Rocket page is really cool. A little water and pressurized air and these babies are incredible! Maximum speeds are up to 200 km/h and the world record height is more than 300 m!

Another Disastrous Government IT Project

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After I mentioned the MoD IT project disaster last week, there is another one in the news. This time the project hasn’t (yet) been canned, but the expected cost has risen from £184 million to £400 million according to a report over at silicon.com.

The £400m government project for a single magistrates courts case management system has been slammed as “disastrous” and among the worst seen by MPs.
The 10-year deal for the Libra system across 300 magistrates courts was initially signed with sole bidder ICL, now Fujitsu Services, back in 1998 for £184m under the private finance initiative (PFI) framework.

It is beyond my comprehension how a project can be allowed to get that much over budget, and how people can still keep their jobs!

Back To Work

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I’ve been back in the office today after a week off work. I spent the week decorating the lounge, fitting a new oven, and a new door amongst other things.
Although I had a ton of email to read and respond to and two meetings to attend I didn’t have much else to do today, so it was a gentle ease back into the routine.