Chawlk

1. Drawar
2. Fenxy
3. Decaflon
4. Two Credits
5. Wriging
6. Loose Suits
7. Chixe
8. Dud3s
9. Wing Colors

 

Where would the world of savoury food be without tomatoes, peppers and chillies?

Bacon is my favourite fruit anyway.

*sigh*

A vegetable is the set name for everything herbaceous grown to eat.

A fruit is an ovary. It contains one-to-many seeds in a wrapper that is usually designed to feed the seed, or feed an animal that disperses the seed.

The overlap (where people get things wrong) are: tomatoes; peppers; chillies; cucumbers; the squash family (squash, marrow, courgette (zucchini), etc); avocados; peas in their pods; pumpkins.

In other words, if it contains seeds, it's a fruit*.

There are probably some exceptions to the rule in the other direction =)

Haha Twingos seriously litter Paris's main ringroad. They're a real menace.

But how many concepts (especially in the mega-low-budget-market, as the Twingo is aimed at) make it from pretty mock-ups to market?

But you're right about TVR. Absolutely superb cars. I got to drive my grandad's Cerbera before he got rid of it a few years back... For a Jag I think... Sigh. He likes his cars too much =)

The problem with TVR is they don't make enough money on the cars and the company keeps bobbing into the red.

More interestingly than TVR (I think anyway) are the Ariel Atoms. Check out Top Gear's review. But the company is too small to get those out fast enough. If they had someone chuck in a few million to boost production, they could walk away very rich.

Heh my grandad just got his new 300C... Takes up far too much road here in the UK.

I'm with you, the look of American "muscle cars" is far too boxy. I guess they're trying to distinguish themselves from European/Japanese cars (other than only getting 10bph per 1000cc).

That said, the older BMWs are hideously boxy too. I'm happy with my Peugeot 307 2l turbodiesel

Argl >_<

Well we only need a victory once every couple of decades to maintain our constant moral victory... Once every 4-5 decades for football.

I've noticed one SERIOUS bug. Try browsing any thread when you're logged out.

Whoops!

"bb_get_user needs a numeric ID"

Along the lines of the copyright stuff, if you're taking copyright away from your users (as I do), you're taking on the responsibility for the content too.

If something is legally (or maybe even just morally) shifty, I won't stop to think about editing it out.

My blog is my baby. I won't let people screw around with it.

I don't really have a problem with editing things. If I felt I needed to edit something then I would, without regret or hesitation.

I should say that I rarely edit anything. If I'm going to edit something, it will only be a serious typo, ridiculous flamebait or spam.

I think he has a point -- even though he's trying to make his delivery stand out by making it rude.

Does every bit of writing on the internet need somewhere attached to it where people can bitch/rant/agree at/at/with it?

Your stance on this question will depend on what your write.

If you write a blog based on your opinions of the world, you may well wish to hear the feedback directly to your little spot -- Even better, directly with the post so other people can read it along with your post and give feedback to everything.

But more and more news sites, whose job is to deliver the facts as best as possible, are allowing people to comment on the articles directly underneath them. I'm not saying that those people's opinions aren't valid or shouldn't be heard at all, instead that they should be removed from the news section completely and placed in a forum.

The more you mix user-opinion and "fact", the page gets further away from the truth you end up reading a load of mixed opinions.

We also have no idea how these things are moderated. If there was a story about Iraq: 5 people posted comments in favour of the story, 5 against; and the newspaper edited out the negative comments; you may well find yourself thinking that the vast majority of people agreed with the content.

However... If you're talking about a column -- something inherently opinion based -- you should be open for other people's opinion. He's wrong when he says "A column is not my attempt to engage in a conversation". A column is supposed to do exactly that. They're supposed to be easy to read rants/raves/stories from one person to another. About as blog as your get.

To play a game of "do as I say, not what I do" is just mildly hypocritical. If Joel Stein expects the LA Times to display Joel Stein's opinion, why doesn't he expect them to show mine?

A drunk man's corrections...
From: We don't see (too many) designs for 80px width.
To: We don't see (too many) designs for 1280px width.

Stupid wine ='(

The real question really has nothing to do with screen resolution so much as it does with window size. Unless you can guarantee that everyone who visits your site is running full screen with no sidebar tools (such as sage).

But if you limit your site to what some people do with their browser, you'd have to design for 640*480, if not smaller.

I do understand your argument. We don't see (too many) designs for 80px width. Some people could handle ~1200 but people with that sort of res, tend not to have anything running fullscreen. That's kind of the point of the higher resolutions, isn't it?

With the lower res, the user is clearly choosing an unreasonably low resolution. Unless their PC is 10 years old, they can move up a notch... Or turn CSS off. Again, it's their choice.

When you can push a genuinely decent wide-design out and sit on it because 2% of your users can't get with the times, that's sad. You allow your creativity to be constrained for the sake of everyone seeing the same thing. I say (and I must say, now, I've been on the wine this evening) I'll do the source well, everyone that wants to play (98%) can see a beautiful site and 1-2% can hit the button to turn off CSS.

I'm not saying dump on anyone not using 1280, just those that still view the web with 1990-goggles on.

And the video's already on Google Video.

*sigh*

Does make you wonder if "the internet", as a whole, focuses on the wrong things in life, at times.

The "other stuff" was always going to be the consequence of unsettling an already fairly unsettled state with very flimsy reasons, regardless of what happened to Saddam in the end.

I'm sure if they just put him back in power, there would be equal (if not greater) issues. If they'd kept him in jail for the rest of his life, there would still be the same issues that there have been for the last three years. If they'd let him out into exile, I'm sure that would have made no difference either.

This way, with his death, some people feel they have justice. Some people feel they have security. But some people feel they have been deeply betrayed by the west. If only the contentment cancelled out the hatred for the west.

The only real lesson the world can take from something like this is: it's not as simple as removing the head of state when people are loyal to that figurehead. The US and UK should never have thought that removing him would bring anything but more suffering to the area; it's called war for a reason.

Well that NWN updates link didn't work at all. I guess it helps to put the URL in there =(.

I've not played Gears and I don't have a 360 so I'm unlikely to get it. I also have a complex about playing FPSs without a mouse... Call me old fashioned...

Oblivion is definitely up there. That game borders being too big but several sections are highly repetitive and it's sometimes easy to lose your way mid-quest and end up doing another one. Regardless of these short-falls, it's too big and pretty not to be my #1.

The New Super Mario Bros was fun but I wouldn't rank it that high. It was more of the same, if you ask me... But that hasn't stopped me playing it all the way through with both brothers.

Neverwinter Nights 2 was (well still is) a bit of a let down. They took too long and ended up releasing it after Oblivion which made it look so pale and confined in comparison. The camera system being almost unusable and the massive amount of updates as soon as the game was released (as i blogged) were also against it. It did have the advantage of the stronger storyline over Oblivion, but when you factor in the enormity of Oblivion, there's no comparison.

CoD3 was another "meh this is just more of the same". A few nice updates, but they're dragging flogging a dead horse on the story-front. They should pick another war.

I should mention the Wii and Wii Sports while I'm ranting away. I think, and so would you if you've used one, that the Wii definitely takes a lot of the innovation titles this year. That's particularly relevant when you look at the state of other gaming markets and you're just seeing a constant stream of clones with the smallest upgrades possible.

There's not much I'm looking forward to for 2007 yet. Just the latest Command and Conqueror but I don't expect too much innovation there... They are owned by EA after all...

=P

Show off

456 Berea Street and Devlounge were the ones that got me really interested in the movement, but I'd seen various blogs sporting the logo for a long time before those.

One of my main reasons for hankering around 9r -- and I'm being frightfully honest here -- is to share my content and chat with people that have similar interests.

Just to highlight that first reason, as I've matured as a blogger, I've found myself needing recognition more and more to keep my enthusiasm for the medium up. It sounds like my heart is in the wrong place, and I blame Digg fully for this, having been dugg several times for various articles. When my blog's traffic drops below a certain level I get depressed (don't worry: not medically, just the blues). I know I sound very spoilt but when you get that sort of exposure (and the subsequent feedback) on a few things, you want it for everything.

But in subscribing to the 9r notes section root RSS feed, I've found a good outlet just for chatting. I've found WebDev a hard thing to just chat about but it looks like the perfect environment here...

I'm afraid I have to disagree with people that say the language is not the slow part. As languages go, PHP is terrible. Check out some direct algorithm comparisons and you'll see that PHP's runtime is only just kept off the bottom (in almost all the benchmarks) by things like Ruby, which usually runs even slower.

I agree that a lot of what you program does matter on how good you are at that language (knowing what's the best way to do something) but PHP doesn't help you optimise things when there's no native caching/application store.

@ Kyle

Newer technologies like J2EE, Ruby, .NET, etc are a lot more resource intensive.

Than PHP? Ruby certainly is but MSIL and Java rape the pants off PHP in execution times. It's also a lot easier to cache things in both of them.

CNN say they have confirmation from Saddam's lawyers. I guess that's proof enough.

Well the BBC have upgraded the article twice now, removing their doubt from the wording. They usually don't go that far until they're really certain it's happened.

They're also quoting a local TV station:

"Criminal Saddam was hanged to death," state-run Iraqiya television announced, as patriotic music and images of national monuments were broadcast.

A scrolling headline read: "Saddam's execution marks the end of a dark period of Iraq's history."

The TV station said Saddam Hussein's half-brother and the former chief justice of the Revolutionary Court were also hanged.

Fun.

Agreed. 1280x1024+ will be the "standard" desktop resolution as soon as everyone manages to replace their CRTs... But we won't be able to ignore 1024x768 completely for a while, if ever, due to other devices like projectors as Mike said.

That's always going to be the problem with webdesign. The designers will always have the latest things, be those browsers, resolutions or plug-in functionality and that sometimes makes it hard to imagine how on earth people can use these "dinosaur" computers to work on the internet.

However, with more and more mainstream sites urinating in the face of the bottom-end browsers and computers, we might find it easier to justify moving up, even when there are 3-5% of people using incompatible browsers.

Either that or we manage to suck it up enough to leave the design-comforts of fixed-widths and go fluid. I'm certainly not brave enough yet but plenty are.

I just took a screenshot of Firefox resized with the webdev toolbar and it made the browser window 800x600. That does mean you would lose some vertical pixels for the task-bar, but little more.

Just tested the IE one too. Does exactly the same.

Although you care about the people on 800x600? You've got your priorities all mixed up =P

Just as I pay for software. If I find it really useful and it saves me time and/or money and I have some to spare (not as often as I'd like), I will donate.

I'd love to be able to give Mozilla the £1bn they deserve but only if I had enough for a few cans of beans afterwards.

For (IE6/7, Firefox 1.5+, Opera 7+, Safari 2) you *CAN* use valid code without hacks and reach the same output.

Personally, I feel people turn to hacks far too fast when they could accomplish what they like if they just tried changing the mark-up a little or testing other avenues.

I daresay there are some things that are impossible to do and remain valid but I've not found something I can't do hack free with just a little bit of thought.

If you want IE5 etc compatability, you will need to hack at it. The browser is scum and on that basis I refuse to support it. They can have a JS-powered CSS-free version. If you mark-up is good, this should make just as much sense, just look slightly less pretty.

The Web Developer toolbar for Firefox is something you should have already which has the capability to resize your browser window to emuate the screen sizes of other resolutions... But that assumes you're running your browser in full-screen mode.

There is a similar toolbar for IE7 but it's nowhere near as good.

Otherwise, you could also try out BrowserShots, a fabulous free system where you punch in the URL, select which OSes/browsers/resolutions you want to see and it comes back with screenshots. Usually takes somewhere between 1-2 hours for all the pictures, but it is free. There are paid-for versions that I know many professionals use.

I'm not saying, for one second, that 800x600 users have any choice in whether their browser is maximised or not, but you do need to consider that 1024x768 user might not like to have their browser on full-screen mode.

Lots of people have said correct things here. I've been involved in several "my language is bigger than yours" style arguments, and being an ASPNET dev (a proper server-control developer, not one of those Nancies dallying around with tags), I'm 100x smugger than the rest of them.

As many people have said here and elsewhere, you really need to go with your developers on this one. If you have a bunch of peeps with excellent PHP skills, you really don't want to force RoR on them because they will do a much better job in PHP.

Additionally, if you compare the runtime speed and how much memory an identical algorithm in Ruby vs PHP, you'll find Ruby is even slower than PHP. The "even" is there to suggest that PHP is slow and fat enough as it is. Many people pish this off as negatable against development costs but when you consider that Ruby is roughly 50x slower than ASPNET, and your server could take 1000 users with a RoR site, you could easily extrapolate that you could get 50,000 users on the same ASPNET site. There are extra overheads for Windows and IIS, so it doesn't exactly work like that, but it does work like that and I do speak from experience. Based on the last version comparison PHP is just 10x better. When you have to buy many, many servers to handle your Ruby site you might be able to escape with a very simple PHP setup.

Just to address the points as you threw them out:
>> 1 - Rails can handle search-friendly URLs.
Piffle. Any server side language can handle requests like that.

>> 2 - Rails is the hot Web 2.0 technology....
Tripe. Are you really going to make a business decision based on what's cool? Especially when the people using the technology never see the actual language.

>> 3 - Developers tell me things like "Rails is better for Web-based apps"
Utter nonsense. The problem you made there was you asked RoR developers looking for a job. If you asked the same question to a PHP developer, I'm sure it would be a direct rebuke.

The main problem here is you're trying to force Ruby [on Rails] to be the correct answer without any justification for why. Why do you want RoR to be the winner? You're not even going to use the language, you're going to force it down on people below you.

Just take a step back and talk to the developers.

I'm only had to contact support a couple of times and that was only because I have 14876134918325498712364 domains hosted with them (ok not that many, but a similarly stupid number) and I keep screwing up my own DNS (because for some of them the nameservers are actually with another, ASPNET host). I'm an evolved monkey, what can I say?

Took them about 10 minutes to get back to me with the solution each time.

Their phone support is a little more restrictive than some hosts I've dealt with. They might have a phone number you can go through but I'm in the UK so I wouldn't fancy calling them when their email support is a) free and b) so fast.

Amen to hard-copies. If everything goes boobies-up and you need to reinstall, chances are your text-files won't be around on the day.

>> lunarpages... its fast and its cheap..

Yeah really cheap when you have to pay $75 for a simple DB restore.

When your contract is up with lunarpages, give Dreamhost a try for a year... use a discount coupon (DREAMKITTEN for example -- $90 off) so you save yourself some money at the same time... You'll end up paying about $3pm... And you'll get over twice the stats.

I think 50% of the problem is blogrolls on the whole looking like bogrolls. (Did you see what I did there? Comic genius, I tell you.)

It's *so* boring looking at a list of sites and you get no idea of what sort of thing they're providing. More people should do what I do -- here comes the Zionist bit -- and make their site go the extra mile and fetch stuff off their RSS feeds and display that to the world. If you like them that much, you OWE them that much.

I've got mine with about 10 sites in there at the moment with only 7 being displayed at once... The theory being that the most updated one gets more exposure (probably, as it should)... Exactly like the sections here on 9r.

Check it out running on my latest post... at the bottom of the right sidebar.

Tripe... They should have carried on the number-system... Fantastic Four, Five, Six, Seven etc until they run out of money

It depends how intrusive they are to the user...

If they're too unobtrusive, you get very few results and therefore your data isn't nearly accurate enough.

If they're too in-your-face or take too long/registration/etc for the user, they're also going to deter people from voting unless they feel very strongly about the topic... again, skewing your data. Forcing people to vote will always get your users disgruntled too.

But, when done correctly, and asking your audience the correct questions, you can often use your results in follow up posts... You also learn more about your userbase so you can target your writing better...