pender, i

What-ho tech fans. Yes oh reader, if you're less interest in my technical musings (which would be worrying as I've only otherwise talked about pa, poo and travel peeves) then this post will be a little baffling.

[Background - pender,i is a computer systems programmer by trade. A slightly older but frankly more accurate description of roughly what I do]

IE8

So that's why I'm a little excited about the new version of Internet Explorer that's due to be released later this year. Now first things first, I use and love Firefox. Firefox is fantastic and along with firebug are the bets way to view, access and create web pages. Full stop.

But Microsoft (who make Internet Explorer) have upped the game. Considerably. The less computer-savvy users will be deluged with new feature lists including web slices, activities and enhanced RSS consumption.

These don't excite me one bit.

However I also heard that Microsoft were going to entice programmers by enhancing the 'web development' experience.

Now that's about as far i can go whilst holding forth on the full-scale techno babble. Oh and overexcited babbling.

Developer Tools

Here's a set of screeenshots and some descriptions of the functionality contained, along with a comparison to similar features in firebug.

So on downloading IE8, you get a browser (woo). Ok its standards compliant but that gets no thanks from me (stop 'consuming and expanding' APIs. Follow them. Consistently please). But it now has built-in 'Developer Tools'. View a web page, hit F12 (same key as firebug & IE Dev toolbar btw) and the following main window is displayed (this is pinnable to the bottom of the web page). The screen is split into 2 halves, each half being configurable. The first screen shows: Left-hand side (LHS) - HTML try view of current web page Right-hand side (RHS) - full list of current active styles
Selecting the 'trace styles' tab on the RHS displays a list of the current styles employed on the selected element. Expanding each property produces a list of tag.class/ids that apply that property. This is really useful as the source particular property, say colour, can be traced to the css class applying it. Firebug has a similar feature, but the organisation is nowhere near and clear, consistent and manageable.
The next tab along brings a familiar firebug view -the layout box. Each 'box-property' of the selected element is displayed. A visual cue is provided for each padding, margin, width properties. The absolute coordinates and z-order complete the layout properties. Once again extending the facilities provided by firebug and improving on them.
Switching to the LHS, after HTML, CSS is the Script tab. This lists each script file used in the page (as with firebug), and provides an integrated debugger with breakpoints, call stack and call stack. A welcome addition to IE, but standard with the current firebug release.
The final tab on the LHS is the Script Profiler. On clicking 'Start Profiler' each subsequent action on the page is traced. The view can display, for example, each script function call, time and count. Each function, on double-click, is displayed in the source. Once again, over and above the firebug tracing capabilities.

Overall

All-in-all I think the IE team have really nailed it. They've integrated the previous IE Developer Toolbar and provided and integrated experience that extends on the standards established by firebug. Lets hope the competition keeps momentum. Can't wait to see the firebug response.

Travel for work.

Don't.

I could leave it there, but something tells me that 2 posts in 6 months (not my lies, oh readers -> look at the facts), the latest of which being 1 word may lose my cherished band of readers. All 2 of you. And yes 1 of you is my brother. No not you Carl.

So instead an explanation. A month ago I travelled for work (TfW) for the first time. Don't be perturbed pop fans, I've been abroad a few times before, so no bother there; just no through work. This, it turns out, is a very different kettle of fish altogether. For a start the jet lag when flying clockwise round the globe (London, UK to Connecticut, US) is a little worse, and is exacerbated by the fact that one can't lie on a beach, rest, and get over it. No you get up at 645 AM and head into 'work'.

It's not regular work - things are in different places (although at my company the US office was eerily similar to that I'd left), people are different, sound different and the coffee doesn't smell or taste the same. I can't stress that last difference enough - you try getting hold of coffee. Pure, espresso'd coffee. Not coffee with blueberry, or hazelnut or pine nuts or fucking pumpkin (that one really pissed me off - I want plain coffee you rummage around search for everything bar the kitchen sink then under the sink, to the right next to the bleach you find the most inappropriate foodstuff to put into coffee and then, passing to think that maybe this is the one time you could offer a plain coffee you decide nah, fuck it, lets give the pumpkin a whirl, it might work - it doesn't).

Wow. That feels better already. What else ? No cars (I mean, who needs a car in US?). Ok we had 2 cars between 8. No quick broadband (US, it turns out are FAR behind even average Europe rates. Imagine what would happen if they went to Korea! No not like that.), but very friendly people (some frankly mad types - some garrulous dude who let us know he was a big cheese by insisting he'd funded the fil-lm Michael Clayton and arranged packages to be ferried around the globe by aircraft. Light aircraft).

The boys I went with (there were 8 of us) were fine and dandy. Indeed we got on famously, we drunk (or rather we were drunk) every night, managed to get the job done and had a right laugh at the same time - preserving our sanity.

Ok we ate well (thank you oh company accountant in the sky), and saw some odd stores (humidified guitars anyone), but overall 11 hour days and little to do in the evening didn't help.

I guess the lessons have to be:
- if you need to setup shop in the States, stick to a city (yes there are various economical and corporate-socio justifications. It also allows for more beneficial jollies - read:external contractor liaisons)
- coffee is best drunk on it's own. Add your favourite dairy item / sweetener is desired. Lets face it the cowboys got this right a few years ago.
- always have a car for yourself. No it's not environmentally sensible, yes it is how the whole country works.

Now I wouldn't mind heading out to Hawaii for a week.....

A break from the technical jazz, oh readers!

A few ideas whizzing by that I thought I'd share.

Clearly as we get older we get a little more sensible, more responsible and we get more like our parents. This is more of a change for some more than others. Unfortunately I'm more of the former and less of the latter and so am perhaps realizing the change a little more. As I'm getting more parental, I'm finding chats with parents are often more agreeable. There's no more tantrums, and even less disagreement (I find).

But bizarrely I'm finding I'm having the same thoughts as my dad. (As an aside I REALLY dislike italics. I'll try my darnest to use no more in this blog) Now before this gets a little freaky-deaky it's not entirely out of the question (similar genes, same values through education etc) but it's starting to get weird.

Anyhoo, the thought we both hit upon was that People no longer care about their job. They are not bothered in doing a good job. YES IT'S A GENERALISATION, but I'd wager it's true. Increasing leisure time is addictive. The more we have, the more we want. and this means less work time. A good thing indeed, but there are jobs where rushing is not ideal. When leaving home early to have an extra 15 mins scratching your arse watching the telly isn't the done thing, as the patient hasn't been treated.

There's a couple of ways I arrived at it. Perhaps it's a parental thought -> older people always pour scorn on the work and ideas of the younger generation (never in my day...). Perhaps it's because I'm finding customer service no longer matters. In the age of the long tail companies no longer cherish repeat business, as the know new 'suckers' will have found their company on Google and send business their way. Convenience is the only commodity, so a rushed job from someone a minute away will always be more attractive than a perfect job 45 minutes away....

Perhaps it's the lack of fear, discipline or responsibility. One could point to the collapse of a moral compass - the increasing secular aspect of modern western nations and reduction in church support over the last few decades in Britain. Perhaps the rise of the underclass and rejection of the state it's held within. Personally I'm starting to feel that it's a lack of trust. A lack of fundamental respect for other human beings, a loss of the fundamental law of equality, enshrined by religion and utterly overrun by politicians.

It's been highlighted for me as my good lady's father is in hospital at the moment. He's had a throat cancer operation (after 9 months harrowing treatment) so good old Vic could do with a lucky break. Instead he got MRSA. I'm not a tub-thumper, but I just wish people took more responsibility in their jobs.
The way Vic sees it, he feels that some of the nurses are good, but he's always left with a feeling that no-one steps up and takes responsibility. Rather a job will always be left until the next shift if it can be. Hence he's fluid bags aren't emptied as often as they should etc etc.

Anyhoo...

I feel an avalanche (of posts) a-coming.

Yes indeed friends (or comrades) it's been a little too long, due to extended periods of not being home. Hopefully that's coming to an end. If not I'll just have to post from work. Sod it.

First off a little admin - I can't remember the font I've been using on the site... and am a little concerned I'm offered the choice in the Spaces blog (I really am regretting using Spaces at the mo. Can't manage Google indexing, and in particular the use of Passport for authentication clashes with most workplaces' default blocking of Passport due to Hotmail) Doh!

Phones

First up Fisk. No clearly it's phone. I'm a long-time PDA/phone user. I've been searching for a unified device since the glorious debut of the P800. It promised much, but lordy was it easy to lose the stylus, it looked and felt like a brick and was woefully underpowered. Welcome to the future! It took a few years for HTC to stop kowtowing to Compaq (you do remember Compaq, right ?), strike out on their own and release a series of fantastic phone/pda devices.They're getting there. Clearly we have issues with the mobile telephony market trying to eek out as many models as possible from an ever expanding list of apparently mutually  exclusive features (want Bluetooth, sure but no radio. You can have GPRS but no GPS) when it's clear we want everything on a small device. This really pisses me off, but it's clear why. Hopefully someone will just enter the market and blow it all out of the water.

Well HTC have FINALLY put GPS in. There's issues with battery (can it really be 2hr using GPS) but here's the HTC Touch Cruise (cracks me up for some reason or other). Anyway it looks cool but I've some concerns. I've currently got a phone with a keyboard. It works pretty well (despite the space bar being CRAZY small). It also has number keys (*shocker* a phone with numbers to press). Now this sounds stupid, but my previous phone had touchscreen and no keys. This made dialling with low power, or in the rain, a complete pain. I realise it's hardly the biggest of concerns, but the rage generated from not being able to use a phone to um, make phone calls, is damned annoying.

The other option (currently, until a GPSed HTC Dual emerges in 3 years time...) is the Tytn II. It's a bit big and heavy, but it's code a keyboard and all the rest.

So we'll see. it feels like in 5 years we'll finally get what we've wanted for the previous 5 years. they've got the technology, just not the mind-numbing profits. Still it's something to put in the land-fill.

Meal in a sandwich 

Firstly a disclaimer. . I live in the UK, although I'd consider myself at least part-Irish like a few others. As an Englander, I am more than familiar, nay obsessive, about the humble sandwich in all it's infinite variations.

I'm also relatively new to the City of London. Please note, international comrades, I am not referring to London, Britain's capital, but the City - London's financial district which is very separate and, I believe, probably not even owned or governed by the people of the country it resides in.

Anyhoo.....

... the City has a few branches of Fuzzies. Now this place will, if you so request it, place (not attempt, they manage it just fine) an entire roast meal in a bap. This will
include gravy and yorkshire puddings. Just give it a go, and ensure you've a few hours to digest before you attempt travel, vigorous debate or exercise of any form.

El Fisky
And so to our man in Lebanon, Mr Robert Fisk. I'm a bit of a fan. I first came across him in The Independent something I've been reading for 14 years. This has more to do with lefty leanings and some vouchers they gave away in my first-year at Uni than anything else, but I've stuck with it despite the recent increase in adverts and reduction in size.

Now Fisk always has a great slant on all things Middle-East, partly as he lives in Lebanon and has a far deeper understanding than most, but he also paints the picture as it is and rarely tainted. I've even been to some of his speaking tours. Yes  friends, I'm a fan.  And so to another wonderful article asking the same questions that entered my head. How can a renowned wahibist supporter condemn the  British (on a state visit I may add) for not doing enough to stop terrorism .... anyway have a read.

Phew.

Vista has never found drivers natively on my machine. I'm always having to search for drivers across the web. This isn't so much of a shock for my top-fo-the-range graphics card - I don't expect vista to know about it. But I DO expect Vista to recognised a USB key. Or a 5 year old Microsoft USB mouse.

Instead Vista starts a very predictable, slow and annoying sequence:

- it scans an internal repository (which finds nothing)

- it searches online for a driver (again always successfully and also taking a number of minutes)

- it then gives up.

I then have to specify an exact location and point it to C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore and viola! the driver is found. Before I found this hpold location, via the internet, I simply had a bunch of useless peripherals.

Why o why is that so difficult? Roll on Ubuntu......

Now I've had this draft saved for a month (there's a lesson somewhere here dear reader) and then lo and behold both the UN and the BBC beat me to the punch.

Now my good lady Leni started finding out about issues with food production since a number of brave and responsible countries started using biofuels. I only really started worrying (I'm a bit of a worrier you know) when Italian natives started getting restless over the price of pasta.

They care you see. The people of Italy were really going to strike over this. But then over the course of a year their staple food was rising by a fifth. That's huge. Especially when you consider it's due to shortages that are in turn due to diverting crop areas to biofuel production.

It's moronic kids. And it's quite simple. Rob Newman covered this in his unbelievably good History of Oil. It's simple. We cant grow enough crops to sustain ourselves, even with HYV/GM. So we certainly can't grow enough to chuck into our cars, and even if we did, we'd just use it to ferry the starving to the cemetery, as we'd have used all our land for crops to power our cars. It's just moronic.

Ah me. Ooo whilst we're at fantastically controversial (some tw*t will mention the dreaded c* word, but I won't) you should watch the Zeitgeist series. There's one on the Federal Reserve and bankers in general and a 11th September episode. Interesting viewpoints, obviously skewed and one sided but poses come questions....

Now there's a blog title!

Ah me. Yes friends (bit of an assumption I know), today's post will be scatologically inclined. This is now the eighth day of the the trotts. Crikey o'Reilly. I've learnt a few things in this time that I didn't know before:

• Pooing is tiring stuff. No really. When you go more than 12 times in 24 hours, day and night, it really is quite exhausting. 
• Diarolyte is nectar from the gods. You see it turns out that on 'passing' you shed loads of salts and minerals from the bodies. When you're regular  you simply don't notice as it's not a strain on the system, but when you go at the frequency I was your body leeches these salts, and you feel really rather sub-human. It's most odd.
  
  Fortunately, Diarolyte is there for just these things, with sodium and potassium chloridey things. As soon as these babies hit your tongue you feel human again. Wonderful.
• You really can return to baby poo at some point in your life. The colours have been alarming.
• NHS Direct is a wonderful idea, but know your own body. I know I've a cast iron constitution, and that if I had a bad banger from a BBQ, say, I'm usually fine (or at worst a day of inconvenience). After 2 days I should have just gone to the doctor straight away instead of waiting, er, for it to get worse (you really don't want to know the details).
• And finally a question - how do you spot mucus in a stool ? I was asked this time and again and I just have a vacant look whenever I think of it.

Anyway I've of course just been looking at crap online to pass the time.

desktopgaming is a fantastic site for old skool gamers. It contains full images (some can be 3000 x 1000) of entire levels from old console games My new desktop is the first level from super mario world. Nice. 

I think some people are all over flicker at the mo. Now I didn't know much about this until I lost a good half a day around flickr. It started with the Running from Camera site. One dude, one camera, one self-timer on a couple of seconds, and different locations. Sometimes he manages to get a good distance. Loved it.

... that also sent me round to this superb collection of photos. It has some amazing shadow shots. Just awesome.

Also saw the most remote monastery I've seen and downloaded a new Firefox tool for blogging that's quite handy.

Now.. back to my stooling....

As part of my new PC install, I thought I'd list a few tools I can't do without...

Firefox Extensions

Of course I use Firefox, I consider it or Opera as mandatory for web browsing. Firefox v2 is more mature now, and it's default installation has a set of features that keep most users happy. Call me a power user, fidget or gadget fiend, but I like to customize a little, so heard my list of Firefox extensions that I use regularly.

n.b. I think it's worth noting people can go a little crazy with extensions, but it's a balance of functionality vs Memory bloat - you have to remember, each extension adds to the memory footprint and processing of Firefox.

Firebug - skip if you don't make web pages (SIYDMWP). If you do develop, you'll need this. Complete listings of styles (including inheritance hierarchy and source), web metrics, oh html, js profiling and debug and .. oh just get it!

WebDeveloper - SIYDMWP. slightly different to firebug. Adds outlining. Better for layout

AdblockPlus

Colorzilla - SIYDMWP. gab a colour and copy to clipboard. Simple. Invaluable.

DownloadStatusbar - adds bar listing downloaded files and progress. v.useful.

IE View Lite - The only IE viewer that doesn't link. Ensures Firefox compatibility issues can be workaround (it adds a right=click menu item to open current page in IE).

Live Writer Fox - kinda handy for writing blog. We'll see if it's long-term useful.

NukeAnythingAdvanced - this is cool for printing web pages. Right click to remove entity, be it an image, table cell or right margin. It's cool.

Session Manager - I still don't think Firefox session management is very good. Add this and ensure you ALWAYS open with previous tabs.

Ultramon

Thanks to badgering from Paul i now have a dual monitor setup. I scouted around and found Ultramon which does things I didn't think I needed. I menu bar right-click menus to shift the current window to another monitor, and keyboard shortcuts. I think it's awesome and I'll have to buy it. (trial is 30 days)

James Newkirk: Announcing xUnit.net. There I've said it. I don't know if anyone has noticed but a few guys have started blogging about James' new testing framework. It looks to dovetail into the book nicely and is attempting to promote better testing practise through the model, which can only be good.

Sorry for the brevity, but I wanted to broadcast it first, look at it, and then post findings later. Things to note:

- NO setup / tear down

- NO Assert.Fail

- NO exception attribute

- Data driven testing framework

Many others besides. Yes these are the sensationalist headline items. No the framework is not cripple.d It's about formulating tests in a more productive manner. Anyway, read digest and comment!

Well I think we'll take that....

I've been taking a look at LINQ on and off for over a year now and things are maturing quite well.

If you've been on mars / aren't at all technical then you may not know that Microsoft have looked at the data layer for a time now. They've moved through ObjectSpaces and have settled on LINQ which combines language improvements first trialled in polyphonic c# and c omega, which originated in the Cambridge labs.

The intention is to provide .Net language developers full access to the circle-square-triangle of data. The circle being a set, the square a table and a  triangle a hierarchy, or XML. With a single programming paradigm to query any of these types of data developers will greatly ease the complexity of the most fundamental task - accessing information.

And so to LINQ. To providing inline querying capability for SQL, to ArrayLists, XML. Now ScottGu has a number of great introductions, but if you really want to know a little more of the inner working of LINQ... I can heartily recommend the following. Rather than repeat it I'd rather you just read it from the source!!

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb308959.aspx

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