At last (at very long last actually!) we have just launched our new site for our online development agency. (Did you spot the SEO-ness there?!) Whilst it is a bit sparse at the moment, over the next few weeks and months we’ll be adding to it, endeavouring to keep it a bubbling hub of life at ibrow. Please pop along, and let us know what you think.
One small step for man, one giant wait for mankind.
Well, it was something like that. Today marks the 40th anniversary since man first landed on the moon. 40 years. Forty years. Four decades. Fourteen thousand, six hundred and ten days. And I have one question:
Why can’t I visit the moon?
On September 12, 1962 President Kennedy proclaimed that man will go to the moon, as a challenge, a challenge that “is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win”. And they did. America went to the moon. America travelled 238,857 miles and into the future. And we are now further away from the future then ever.
In the past forty (40!) years mankind has acheived the most amazing things. We have mapped the human genome, we have developed an entirely new method of instant, collaborative communication, we have cloned a life, we have accomplished medical advances that would astound people from 40 years ago, we have invented travel at twice the speed of sound (and then decommissioned it), for the love of god, we have invented the waffle-sole running shoe!!
So, why can’t I fly to the moon?
Because we have lost the will. We have lost the will because we are focusing on the now. We are fighting amongst ourselves instead of realising we are more alike than we want to admit. We are squabbling over who has the most vengeful invisible friend whilst ignoring the glorious beauty of the universe we live in. We are blaming each other for making the planet slightly warmer instead of doing something about it. We have been sucked into worldly problems of survival instead of lifting our heads above the grass to look at the amazing view. We are waiting to see what happens. We are looking to the past, we are looking behind us to admire what we’ve done.
The human race is living out of it’s inbox and we are all missing the bigger picture.
I think the words of Kennedy summed it up best: “the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward–and so will space.”
So this is a plea from a citizen of a fallen empire: Come on America. Stop waiting. Stop looking to the past. Stop reminiscing about previous greatness. You are the only country that can possibly accomplish the unaccomplishable You are the only country that has the will, the drive, the energy to do this.
America, fly me to the moon.
At last, at long, long last, there appears to be a groundswell of opposition to supporting IE6. The revolution has begun! First Twitter began hinting to its users to upgrade to Firefox 3.5 (oddly, even if you were using Firefox 3.5 apparently). Next Digg announced that they might be “cutting back on development time” for IE6. And now it appears that YouTube will be phasing out support for IE6.
IE6 is the bane of most developers’ lives (including yours truly). A lot of people are getting very excited about the prospect of no more IE6. I would be one of the first to crack open a bottle of bubbly when the final installation if IE6 was wiped from this world. But is this tactic of “phasing out” going to work? Read the rest of this entry »
I’ll let you into a little secret: I’m a huge Twitter fan. I’ve been using Twitter for over two years now (excluding a month’s break to get some actual work done) and I find it is a valuable source of news, opinion and comment. However, the more I think about it, I can’t help but conclude that Twitter is bollocks.
“But how can that be?!” I hear you cry, “surely Twitter is a the archetypal example of a Kuhnian paradigm shift: exponentially changing the way humans communicate with each other forever more. Gad zooks! just look at how it is redefining collective interaction, stripping out the once hierarchical monoliths of a bygone age, and helping to rebuild in their wake the conversations of meritocratic individualism, whilst simultaneously aiding us in our quest to navigate the choppy waters of “the long-tail“. For Christsakes man! what about the democratic ideal it is helping to instigate – just look at Iran!”
Well, yes, that is all true. But Twitter is still bollocks.
And it is bollocks for 3 reasons:
Read the rest of this entry »
In my never ending quest to improve this blog and your experience whilst reading it I have installed the Disqus comment system. I’ve seen this on a number of other blogs and it appears to work well. Hopefully this will encourage comments and improve the discussion.
The wordpress plugin that I used can be found here – took about one and a half minutes to install.
I have just been browsing few development blogs and in two separate posts about two completely different topics there was an interesting crossover.
First I was reading a post on “Making Good Software” which lists the top 5 non-technical mistakes programmers make. Their top 5 list was:
Have a read of it, it’s pretty interesting.
I was also reading one of Jeff Atwood’s latest posts – “Code: It;s trivial” and I thought that the main point of his post could be slotted in at number 6 for non-technical mistakes.
Essentially Jeff was saying that programmers always think about the code.
They (and I know this is a massive sweeping generalisation, in which I include myself) forget that only coders care about the code. Real people, instead, care about the experience.
So this would be my “Number 6″ for non-technical mistakes programmers make:
Forgetting that the code is the means, not the end.
I’ve been working on a Wordpress site for a client with one of our developers Tom Hartnell. The design of this particular site was that some pages would need content displayed over multiple columns. This content had to be updatable by the client, as such it could not be hard coded into the template files.
We had a look around and we found a potential solution on this blog post.
We played around with this for a while but found that, whilst it was a good solution, it wasn’t quite suitable for our needs. What we needed was a solution which allowed us to have any number of columns and for each column to contain completely different content. The solution in the post demanded that each column start with the same HTML tag (H2 in the example). We decided to rewrite the function described above, based on the same principals, but updated and improved so it would fit our needs.
To see what the end result is, you can see a demo page.
I’ve become a bit fed up with this blog.
That is to say I’m not bored of writing it as I do enjoy the writing and when I publish a post I get a great feeling of satisfaction. Nor do I think I should get rid of it and start again, I think some of the stuff I’ve written is quite good. I am, however, a bit fed up with the low number of users reading it. It can be a bit demoralizing at times to spend a good few hours or so crafting (what I would think) is a pretty good blog post only to have only a few people read it.
So I’ve decided to change tack.
