Thomas Legg's Geek Blog

So I actually snuck a new version of Songbird for Mac OSX PPC up to the server about a month ago. The dmg includes both Songbird and some of the extensions, including a working version of the Shoutcast plugin. At times I've had some instability with this version, so as always be sure to backup your configuration inside ~/Library/Application Support/Songbird2. (This directory is from memory, since I've mothballed my PPC Mac for the moment.)

Songbird_1.10.0a_macosx-ppc.dmg

Give me some feedback, if you use it. I'll probably turn on the Mac once in a ...

So I've been playing around with CSS3 media queries to target css stylesheets to particular browsers based on the min-width and max-width selectors. Basically if you've got a tiny viewing screen, like on a mobile phone, you should get one stylesheet and if you've got a bigger browsing screen, you get the main stylesheet. Works wonderfully on all the last generation browsers, like Opera 10 and Firefox 3. But... unfortunately during some testing for a new client site under development, I discovered that IE croaks on it. Just completely barfs and fails to render any of the ...

During the Scandanavian saga of Nokia announcing plans to kill Hamlet, Robert Scoble tweeted a link to a blog post purporting to explain why Nokia developers were so aghast at the death of Hamlet. Basically it said that devs worked hard to be the big man on the app store and that a switch of the development platform would produce an unacceptable loss of prestige among their development community. (In this case I actually see it as a problem where the new platform has no chance of producing a greater market than the existing platform and therefore is a massive ...

I haven't given up on updating the Songbird for Mac PPC. Holiday season is extended on this side of the planet to include Chinese New Year, which is more about family dinners and visiting relatives than it is about fireworks and lion dances. It's also been chilly, so I haven't been sitting in the unheated computer room working at my Mac. (On the plus side, the server's CPUs were reporting temps under 20C with no special cooling or air con.)

I've been testing some recent nightly builds and the best news is that the Shoutcast ...

So the editor of the HTML5 spec was complaining that I was being unfriendly when I said that the WhatWG was two-faced. Facts are facts and the WhatWG, with this particular editor at the forefront, are prone to what SitePoint has labeled "dick moves".

So based on Jeffrey Zeldman's commentary that xhtml2 was something that nobody wanted to use, I decided to revisit the xhtml2 spec to see what was so bad about it. (I assume when Zeldman, who did so much with the Web Standards Group, says "nobody" he really means "none of the folks in his social ...

So I created my first Zotonic site as a reasonable clone of the Django/Pinax site, I'd tested with apache-events+mod_wsgi and nginx+uwsgi. It was pretty straight forward with Zotonic using a version of ErlyDTL for templating. The hardest thing for me to grapple with was adding CSS files to the templates. Zotonic has built-in a system similar to django_compressor to combine multiple css or js files in to one, so I had to figure out how to get Zotonic to recognize that I had added new css files to the sites "lib" directory for static resources.

With ...

OpenID has officially been added to The List. Y'know, The List. The official list of things the kool kidz all mindlessly slag. Nokia, XML, W3C.

The proclamations go out far and wide that OpenID is a failure and OAuth is a resounding success. It is true that OAuth has found much wider adoption on the internet than OpenID, but there are a few reasons for that, which are more social and economic than technical.

OAuth is designed to simply provide authorization to third-parties to use another's ID system. It was implemented to replace the "password anti-pattern" of providing ...

So I've been testing out different web frameworks recently. The latest one to capture my imagination is zotonic. I've been installing and testing more and more software writting in erlang, so an erlang CMS seemed like an interesting possibility. Erlang is a computer programming language developed by Ericsson, the Swedish telecoms company, for high concurrency, high availability software. Some of the other items installed here recently are ejabberd, couchdb, and riak.

Zotonic is an interesting beast. It's internal webserver is mochiweb and only supports postgresql as its database backend and uses ErlyDTL, an Erlang-implementation of the Django ...

One of the major reasons web browser developers have been loathe to produce web browsers that point out bad coding to end users or remove support for code that's been non-standard or deprecated for over a decade is that these dev teams have also produced some of the worst web dev tools in history.

Andy Clarke (malarkey@twitter) suggested in this tweet to check the source of the site he was asked to redesign. He was pointing out the spam links at the end. I almost didn't make it to the end because of the craptacular code along ...

In Podcast #95, SitePoint, one of the major web dev sites, proclaims that we've entered the post-standards web.

The podcast is an interview with Paul Irish of Google, who is also involved in the modernizr.js project. Modernizr is a feature detection javascript library that queries the incoming browser agent about its capabilities and then adds class attributes to tags in your html that allow the html/css author to provide css code for the browser's available features.

With the unilateral proclamation this week by Ian Hickson that the WhatWG was no longer to be working on HTML5 ...