Gaming Humour

For anyone who is a fan of the Angry Birds game (or any old games of the 80's or 90's), I recommend you check out the Dorkly website by CollegeHumor!

Page Peeling in jQuery

Most of the time simpler is better, and this still applies to web development. I stumbled across a great page corner peeling effect, and it is blindingly simple. If you are after a page peeling effect and use jQuery, I highly advise checking it out at Simple Page Peel Effect with jQuery & CSS. If you're after a nice page peeling effect without jQuery, there's loads of guides out there, but why not save the hassle and download jQuery!

The Cubicle King

I saw this Dilbert comic strip the other day and made me laugh and think back to the post I left at the beginning of the month.

Google Ethics

"Don't be evil" is the informal corporate motto of Google. Many people think this is a joke, especially after the Google Street View Data Collection scandal. What Google had done, although unethical, wasn't that bad in the scale of things. If anything it just served to help raised awareness of what had already been happening for years. During my BSc (Hons) degree at Plymouth University nearly 10 years ago, we covered war driving and people even undertook it as part of their project. People were driving around connecting to unsecured (and secured) wireless networks long before Google did it.

Going back to the slogan, when applied to online information retrieval Google have done extremely well to uphold their initial values.

• No pay for inclusion (in index)
• No pay for placement (in ranking)
• Clearly demarked results and ads
• 20% engineer time doing random stuff
• Users come first

So give Google a break, after all they probably already have all your personal details (thanks Facebook) and they're not going to disappear anytime soon!

jQuery Modal Box Issues

I had major issues with ThickBox 3.1 today. It's supposed to be a modal toolkit for jQuery but the latest version has too many bugs. With a fresh install, it refused to work in Firefox, and after a few bug fixes I found that it also didn't work with IE8! I did find many fixes for these through Google, but whats the point of needing to fix something 'out the box' when you can send it back and get something else? Oh well, I've ended up going with the jQuery lightBox Plugin instead.

My Desk

I know it looks a bit cluttered, but I love my setup at work. Even if it is running on Windows! I've found a few good ports of my favourite OS X apps like E-TextEditor (TextMate for Windows). Also, just like all good desks I have a coffee percolator just to the left (out of shot) for that quick caffeine boost!

IE Compatibility Mode Headache

Having problems with IE's Compatibility mode? I couldn't figure out why a site I had recently designed worked consistently in IE6, IE7, IE8, IE9 beta, but failed to work on IE8 under the same conditions on another machine.

The culprit, IE8 compatibility mode! Luckily, you can disable this, as do many sites such as Google. You have two flavours to choose from; HTTP Headers or META tags. I opted for the simple .htaccess implementation with the line:

Header set X-UA-Compatible "IE=edge"

This removes the button from the toolbar and forces use of the latest standards rendering mode. You can select from other modes if you so wish, but with IE9 on the horizon I wanted to keep it up-to-date.

Claim your homepage with OpenID

Signed up as a member of the OpenID Foundation today. I've always been a fan of OpenID but many people remain skeptical for the obvious reasons.

Not many people know that you can use your own doman for your login username. It's handy if you ever want to switch providers, as it means you can easily do this transparently without having to switch to a new login. Just check out this guide for an explanation and a simple how-to!

Free Mobile TV

Just signed up to TVCatchup for my iPhone. If you live in the UK and have an iPhone, I'd highly recommend it. You get all the main channels, and few of the +1s, and it's decent quality!