That’s twice now in the last couple of days that I’ve been pulled up for reading the source of people’s webpages. A few days back it was on Mark Pilgrim’s website, where browsing his code led to a spambot trap - I was curious as to why he was hiding a link inside a paragraph with display:none. I’m glad that he’s nice enough to make the robots follow a second link before permanently banning them, but I’m still a bit sheepish about reading pages that only a true geek would stumble across. And since you were asking Sam, I guess that’s why I was reading your html code as well. It seems like a natural thing for me to do; I needed to remind myself that I’m pretty much alone in that respect when I was out earlier; I was thinking out a routine to reformat the source of my weblog to improve the readability of the code. There’s not that much point really.

Anyway, Sam, you’re still a git. Even if Fireburst validates.

On a different tack, I wonder what xaosseed is thinking of all this. Trust me, I’m not a geek at all, at least compared with the rest of the people in this place. But from recent events, you’d be forgiven from thinking otherwise…

Well, at least Ed is sensible enough to keep quiet when he’s pissed, but he did ask for feedback on his new site design. Some of this might not be quite what he’s looking for, since I’m a bit too much of a techie, but here goes.

We’ll start with the simple things first - it doesn’t validate (67 errors). Mostly due to not quoting values in tags and using & in hrefs (instead of &) both of which are common problems. There’s a few problems with nesting tables, divs etc, but not that many. Things get worse with the weblog (136 errors) : more of the same, but now with some missing alt tags and invalid id tags (a new one for me). But things get interesting when you look at the stylesheet. Firstly, it doesn’t validate(10 errors), but that’s easy enough to fix, since it’s almost entirely just quoting font families when you shouldn’t. The really interesting bit is that the stylesheet is being served up with the content-type set to application/octect-stream, instead of text/css. I can’t speak for Internet Explorer, but the reason Mozilla accepts this is because it isn’t in standards-mode. If Ed were to fix all the html errors, and change his doctype to one of the strict ones (like mine), then his stylesheet would mysteriously not work. With Konqueror, and I guess Safari, the following (courtesy of my packet sniffer) goes on:

GET /div.inc HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3; Linux)
Referer: http://www.eddie-brown.co.uk/default.aspx?page=FrontPage&cat=Me
Accept: text/css
Accept-Encoding: x-gzip, gzip, identity
Accept-Charset: iso-8859-1, utf-8;q=0.5, *;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en
Host: www.eddie-brown.co.uk
Cookie: ASPSESSIONIDQSCATABB=AGMPDKPBAHCEBANNIDCKMDNA

HTTP/1.1 406 No acceptable objects were found
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2003 13:19:03 GMT
Connection: close
Content-Length: 3906
Content-Type: text/html

What follows is one of the standard IIS report forms, suggesting that you contact the website administrator. (As an aside - there’s a bit of comedy with it, since the link it gives to the site homepage is calculated by javascript, so when you save the page and look at it again, it suggests something about the file:// homepage. A little $servername before the page is generated would be a better idea, but that’s Microsoft for you.) So because Konqueror will only accept text/css for a stylesheet link (which also has the type="text/css" set), the server returns a 406 Not Acceptable error. Which is, again, a first for me. I’ll also query Ed’s need for a CSS hack to change some margins from 199 to 201px wide - surely he isn’t that bothered about a pixel-perfect layout?

As for Sam, he doesn’t get away either. Fireburst doesn’t even have a doctype or a character encoding, which is a quick and easy way to prevent me being able to complain about anything else. Free-lance web coding, eh? Reminds me of a time when he wrote webpages "for the express purpose of showing me how good i am at building stuff like this," and look what happened then. At least he got off the mark quickly with hackmail.org, since that now validates. But none of my old links to Fireburst work anymore, and that’s irritating. After all, cool URIs don’t change. Or at least, cool webmasters set up some 301 Moved Permanently, or some rather funky 410 Gone responses.

I’ve been faffing with my weblog again today. Why, you ask? Because (like Mark Pilgrim I’m a markup wanker who won’t leave well enough alone. Not in the same league as Mark or Hixie perhaps, but at least I try. You don’t get to see any of the fruits of my work though, since I haven’t copied the changes over to the live website yet. I doubt anyone will notice any difference (in fact, that’s half the point). I’ve been changing pointless div’s to headers, but more importantly adding plenty of relationship links to the head section. Since Dan C was pestering yesterday, and Sam has been waiting since last summer, I’ve finally got round to producing a syndication feed. Most of the work has been in the backend though, and some of the stuff I’ve changed has made me cringe. Mainly involving the phrase "SELECT * FROM weblog", which is becoming increasingly stupid as the size of the table increases. Especially when I realised that for each of the three displays (front page, archive list and individual posts), absolutely everything in the weblog is fetched from the database server. Not exactly optimal, eh? That, and some funky object orientated stuff for setting page titles, stylesheets etc means that I’ll need to be careful when I update the main site. Not tonight then.

After a discussion with a friend, and remembering what a different friend got up to in halls a year ago, I thought I’d have a go at doing some packet sniffing on the home network. I got set back by our having a switch instead of a hub, and though I know what needs to be done to get round it (ARP shenanigans), actually doing so would be to move on from the play into the hard work catagory. If I thought it likely that I would find anything interesting then I would do it, but I’m more likely to just piss my housemates off by cocking it up.

Still, I’ve (re)learned loads of stuff about connections, and I finally understand the difference between IP and ethernet (I knew the difference before, now I understand it). It also gives me a cool way of seeing the http headers for the websites I’m working on. If only I was the gateway for my flat (or if I 0wned it, mwa ha ha ha), then I could could be one step further along the same thing we do every day, Pinky…

I got a fair few hits from mentioning the Iraqi Ministry of Information last time, so I thought it deserves another one here - Andy Wright pointed out www.welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com. The guy was a class act - he came across as an optimist at first, but certainly no worse than any of the Labour spin doctors. Unfortunately, his rhetoric descended into a bit of a farce, and now he’s missing. Although I’m sure that if he reappears, he’ll deny that he had been missing in the first place.

My favourite quote? There was the one about the Americans being in a different airport, and then the BBC cutting into footage of soldiers standing beneath huge letters on the side of the building spelling out ‘Saddam International Airport’, or the one about the Americans committing suicide outside the walls of Baghdad, or perhaps where he makes a little slip about owning scud missiles (my emphasis added):

"It has been rumored that we have fired scud missiles into Kuwait. I am here now to tell you, we do not have any scud missiles and I don’t know why they were fired into Kuwait."

Well, unlike last time, the trip home was fairly uneventful - I managed to resist buying a first class upgrade (although I think they should change the Mobile-Free carriages to Annoying Little Brats With Parents Who Can’t Control Them-Free ones), and the train was actually early into Euston on the way back.

One of the gruesome foursome (now there’s a thought for you) has been reading this, and reckons that I have an ‘interesting and engaging style’. Which is nice.

Come on guys, let’s hear what you’re all up to (while I try to get round to doing some work). Adam is still posting impenetrable stuff, Ed is posting reasonably frequently, but Andy and Sam are a bit reluctant. And as for the other two, I hope this public silence isn’t what they’re planning for the forthcoming year!

I get a sense of impending doom fairly frequently (too frequently), and I don’t know whether that’s because I’m perceptive, or just a pessimist. But sure enough, I had this sneaky suspicion that my new stylesheet would be twarted by Microsoft, since Internet Explorer still doesn’t support position:fixed. Which is really, really irritating, since it’s been a standard for years now. Ho hum. I would do something about it, but I’m too busy watching Season One of 24, in a long marathon style. Just as well I don’t have any revision to do…