Latest blog posts

My current job involves a lot of web development for mobile phones. Compared to the WAP phones of 10 years ago, present day phones are like supercomputers, with browsers almost as capable as those on the desktop. The major challenge posed by designing for these devices is making sure that mobile web sites are lightweight in terms of bandwidth, easily viewable on a small screen and that the site can be navigated easily with both the four-way directional key as well as with a touchscreen. With mobile browsers catching up to desktop web browsers, I figured it would be a good time to take a look at some of the eye-candy effects that are possible with CSS2 and see what the support for these effects is across the mobile browsers.
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It's been long overdue. Not just ageing, but positively decrepit, the much-reviled Internet Explorer 6 died a few days ago. A funeral was held, hosted by the Aten Design Group. The Microsoft Blog picked up on this and urged people to send flowers.
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I always figured that Electronic Arts were the worst company in the gaming industry. I've been proven wrong. Activision Blizzard, the company that was created when Vivendi acquired Activision in 2008 have just shut down The Silver Lining, previously known as King's Quest IX, a fan-made game that was 8 years in the making.
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I enjoy reading the amusingly named www.phpwtf.org on the rare occasions that they add a new post. A recent post complains about negative lengths when using array_slice (actually confusing it with array_splice at one point). Unfortunately, a technical issue means the site doesn't currently accept comments, so I'll simply make a blog post out of my comment there. The info may still be useful to other PHP programmers.
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A user at the VOGONS forums posted a question about being able to start Windows 3.1 (inside DOSBox) with another application and shutting down that Windows instance (and thus DOSBox) immediately when that application exits. This would normally be accomplished by setting the application as the shell in place of the default (Program Manager) by changing the shell=progman.exe line in SYSTEM.INI to the path of the application's executable.
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