// March 31st, 2005 // No Comments » // Uncategorized
Google have just announced a prefetching feature found in mozilla based browsers such as firefox or camino. Basically if you’re using a mozilla based browser then google will start downloading the first search result in the background while you’re on the results page. This should give a little speed boost, this would be a useful feature to add to other websites as well.
// March 30th, 2005 // 1 Comment » // General
After experimenting with drupal I decided to switch back to Wordpress as I feel it is better for blog usage. However when I opened my drupal database backup it was corrupted, so I lost the last two weeks of posts, a couple of comments and a user (apologies Nick). I’m left feeling quite dumb.
UPDATE: I’ve since managed to recover all the data, except for comments thanks to yahoos cache of my site
// March 24th, 2005 // No Comments » // General
Went into town today to find some white camouflage trousers – the urban type, for part of my fancy dress for Nicks birthday. Only to find that the army surplus man didn’t have any, and Yeomans had stopped selling them – they had some on Tuesday though 
I ended up getting two books, easter eggs and a pair of jeans from Blue Tile Lounge.
Hopefully mother dear is taking me to the army surplus place tomorrow.
// March 24th, 2005 // No Comments » // Uncategorized
I have 50 Gmail account invitations to be gave away if anyone wants them. Gmail can be thought of as ‘googles version of hotmail’ but much much better for many reasons – more storage space (~4x as much), better email searching and a whole round better user interface are the first three that comes to mind.
Post your email address here, or mail it me and I’ll send you an invite
// March 15th, 2005 // No Comments » // Uncategorized
Google have recently revamped their news service. It now features a ”customisability” mode which lets you rearrange the order of the news categories and the number of items that appear in each category. They do this by dragging and dropping news category names around a little faux page, once you save your changes they reload the pieces of the page that need reloading – the rest doesn”t reload. I”d guess they”re using XMLHttpRequest like in maps and gmail.
The only problem I can find at the minute is that the categories are kind of limited, I”d have liked to have a more granular choice. A good way of doing this would be to have sub-categories, as an example I”d like to see the sub-category Politics under UK. I”d guess though that this might take quite a refinement of googles existing algorithms to do. I”ve sent them feedback on it anyway, actually it”d be nice if there was a pingback facility to make it easier to give them feedback.
It’’s quite funny to think that several years ago everyone was raving about DHTML and all it was used for was drop down menus, this last year it’’s got kind of exciting with more and more sites using it in new and innovative ways, though non perhaps as much as google.
// March 12th, 2005 // No Comments » // General
The Da-Vinci Code is the last of the books I acquired from London. The story is one that mixes a crime thriller with lots of twists and excitement with the revealing of secretive religous sects and ceremonies and manages to provide an explanation for Mona Lisa’s smile along the way.
The storyline is based on the Christian Legend of the Holy Grail, which has been hidden over the ages by a secret society. When cryptologist Nevue’s grandfather is murdered he leaves a grisly clue on his death. It is up to Neveu and Symbologist Langdon to solve her grandfathers clues and riddles, before they’re arrested for Nevue’s grandfathers death, or the shadowy Catholic sect Opus Dei obtain the grail first.
Dan Brown has created a book that I simply couldn’t put down – I sat and read it from cover to cover in one three hour sitting without batting an eyelid. I think I’m right in saying that this is the biggest selling book so far this century, it has also spawned a lot of books debunking some of Browns statements in the book. A movie is also planned to be made.
// March 12th, 2005 // No Comments » // General
Meggs had the idea of going for a curry, so he, Nick and I headed off into town about an hour after we got in from uni. Wetherspoons was quite terrible. We got there and they didn’t have about half the curries in stock and weren’t including a free drink any more. So we got back to our seats with a pitcher of Vodka Redbull each and after about half an hour our curries came. Well, mine and Nicks did, they’d lost Meggs’ somewhere, probably the same place they left my naan bread. Wetherspoons on the whole was quite shockingly poor so we left after our curries and drinks.
Then we decided to go to the Forester, I decided to try double vodka and lemon fanta, which was really nice. So I got a couple of those and an Aftershock, then we sat down and played pool. Well I wouldn’t really call it playing, it took us ages to finish games and we were all shockingly poor, me being the poorest. I got through a couple more Lemon Fanta + Vodkas and a bottle of VK Blue while playing, so decided to go and put money in the jukebox.
Nick and Meggs got talking to the bar people and this random guy while I was in the little boys room. The random guy decided us to show us his “gargle Aftershock and set it on fire trick”, so after I’d had a couple more Aftershocks and this gold shot stuff which was dissapointing, decided to give it a try, only it didn’t really work.
Had a really good night out and had a good laugh with the random guy. Never did catch his name.
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