Stuart Colville

Events

BBC Backstage London Christmas Bash

The sign-up for the BBC Backstage Chrismas bash [http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/news/archives/2006/11/christmas_party.html ] is open now. The party is happening on Saturday 9th December at the Cuban Club and looks to be a fantastic event and has been organised by Ian Forrester [http:

Firefox

Updating extensions for Firefox 2.0

It would appear that plenty of Firefox extension developers haven't got around to fixing their extensions to work with Firefox 2. In many cases these extensions don't work due to the maxVersion in the install.rdf file inside the xpi being set to only allow extensions

Linux/Unix

Ubuntu Edgy under Parallels Desktop for mac

As Ubuntu [http://www.ubuntu.com/] Edgy has not long been released I thought I would see how it runs on parallels [http://www.parallels.com/] desktop for mac. I downloaded the standard .iso and followed pretty much the same instructions as when I installed Ubuntu Dapper [https://muffinresearch.co.

Yahoo

YUI Bundle for Textmate

Ross Harmes [http://techfoolery.com/] has created a cracking bundle to make working with the YUI [http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/] in Textmate even easier. If you are working with the YUI and Textmate [http://macromates.com/] is your editor of choice then you'd better go grab yourself

JavaScript

O2 thinks Camino is out of Date

[https://muffinresearch.co.uk/i/o2.jpg] I was amused to find when I visited the O2.co.uk website with camino [http://www.caminobrowser.org/], an alert box popped up saying "Your browser is out of date. Would you like to upgrade it now for a better user

microformats

Export Microformats to your phone from your mac

John McKerrell [http://blog.johnmckerrell.com] has been busy adding bluetooth functionality to the original Tails Export [https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2240/] plugin in firefox. This makes adding hcards to your phone address book amazingly simple. Nice work! Now all that's needed is someone to work out

Apple

Disco Beta Review

There's not been that much in the world of software that I've as eagerly anticipated as the release of the beta for Disco [http://discoapp.com]. Made by the same people that made appZapper disco is a CD/DVD burning app like no other. The interface

JavaScript

Getting relative form actions with javascript

The other day I needed to get data from a form and manipulate the "get" manually through javascript. For that to happen I needed to obtain the action attribute of the form. The action of this specific form had to be a relative url. What I found through

Web Development

Six useful shell commands for web developers

The aim of this article is to give a basic introduction into six shell commands that would be useful to any web developer that regularly works on linux or unix boxes. All of these commands are easy to use and if you aren't familiar with any of these

vim

vim tip: Fix the cursor keys echoing characters in insert mode

Occasionally you'll log into a remote server and find that the cursor keys echo characters when you are in insert mode using vim [http://www.vim.org/]. Here's how to resolve it by modifying your vimrc configuration file: 1. vim ~/.vimrc 2. i (Enter insert mode)

virtualisation

Emulating right-click in windows under Parallels Desktop

Update: Mark has pointed out in the comments below that two fingered clicking is supported at a hardware level. If you you like two-fingered clicking then there's nothing to be gained by carrying out this tip. Intel macs are without doubt the absolute best machines for devloping websites

Apple

iTunes pegged my CPU at over 130%?

Today whilst I was working I noticed that my system (a MacBook Pro) had slowed to a crawl. To investigate I ran top from the terminal only to see this: I then noticed the following dialogue when I switched to iTunes: iTunes was updating my iPod with the few thousand

family

Back from Provence

We arrived back in England a week ago last Sunday, after a couple of days travelling up from Montfrin [http://maps.google.fr/maps?f=q&hl=fr&q=montfrin&ie=UTF8&z=12&om=1]. We had a really good time, it's

Events

Opera Backstage Event, London

Opera Software are running a special event in London on the 17th October at the Metra Bar, Leicester Square. The evening will feature a presentation about the vision of the company and new features coming out in the future and is aimed at web designers, developers and end-users alike. The

Events

En vacances

There's a couple of great events happening this month; barcamp London [http://barcamp.org/BarCampLondon], d.Construct [http://2006.dconstruct.org/] etc. Where will I be whilst all of this is going on? I will be dissappearing down to the South of France for a well-earnt break. I

family

Emma's 3rd Birthday

Yesterday was Emma's third birthday party. Emma had a great day, she loved opening all her presents and playing with her cousin at her birthday party in the afternoon. I can't believe she's three already, Emma's grown-up so much in the last

Apache

Redirecting subdomains to directories in apache.

Note: It is likely you will need root access to carry out apache config alterations 12-02-07: Fixed mistake in the directory comparison line. If you want to be able to redirect blah.domain.com to domain.com/blah/ so that blah.domain.com is shown in the address bar here&

Air Jaldi

Air Jaldi Summit in Dharamsala

I was interested to see a post over on Boing Boing [http://www.boingboing.net/2006/08/18/dalai_lama_issues_su.html], Xeni Jardin reporting that the Dalai Lama has issued a letter of support for the Air Jaldi Summit which is being held in Dharamsala (the home of

ubuntu

Running Ubuntu under Parallels Desktop for Mac

Installing Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake under Parallels Desktop is really easy to do so here's a few pointers how to do it and to customise it to be easier to use via the mac keyboard: The installation 1. Download the Desktop CD .iso image from the Ubuntu

Apple

Watch the Apple Keynote address

You can watch the WorldWide Developers Conference Keynote address from apple's site (requires quicktime) [http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/aug_2006/event/index.html]. Having gone through the highlight's on many of the apple blogs, the most exciting news for leopard is that it'

Apple

Re-map the apple key for Windows under Parallels

A big annoyance when using windows under Parallels for browser testing is that if you are using an apple keyboard you will find that the apple key, which as an apple user you are used to using for copying and pasting, is now mapped to the windows key. This is

Events

Geek in the Park

The Midlands based Multipack [http://www.multipack.co.uk/] have organised a fantastic al fresco event [http://www.geekinthepark.co.uk/] for Sunday 27th August in Leamington Spa. So for those of you who fancy heading on up for a picnic followed by a few jars with your fellow geeks

family

It's going to be a boy!

Last friday the missus, our daughter Emma and I went to the local hospital for Sandra's 20 week scan. As before when we were expecting Emma, we asked if they could tell us the sex of our unborn child and it turned out to be pretty clear that

JavaScript

Bug when creating select options using innerHTML in IE

Recently I was creating some code that dynamically changes the options in a select element. In the first draft I decided to us innerHTML for speed. Using innerHTML for this is very straight forward. You build your string of options and dump them into the select. Unfortunately the draw back

wsg

After the first WSG Meetup in London

The first WSG London meetup happened on Friday and judging by the comments people made afterwards was a tremendous success. The Presentations Andy Budd gave a thought-provoking talk about what standards are really about by first talking about the history of the screw to then talk about (in terms of