Monthly Archives: November 2003

Linkin Park

Posted on by
323

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

Posted on by
8

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

Posted on by
4

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

Posted on by
2
  • 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

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
1

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.