Fecking Microsoft

Posted by stephen on Friday, 23rd November, 2007 @ 14:16

Firstly, debugging JavaScript in Internet Explorer seems to be nigh on impossible. In the end I found some help in the form of Web Development Helper, which is really worthwhile if you're doing any development for IE.

Secondly, unlike WebKit and Gecko, IE's rendering engine takes the rather frustrating step of making any TABLE or tablelike element, seemingly along with all child elements (when I was trying to figure out ways around it), have read-only innerHTML values.

And worst of all, to compensate you for this, they've come with the (as far as I can tell) entirely non-standard Table Object Model. I thought the days of fragmenting the web with incompatible standards were past us?

Saving Money with iPhone

Posted by stephen on Friday, 23rd November, 2007 @ 00:19

So I gave in the week before ithe iPhone launch to the allure of the iPod touch in the Regent Street Apple Store and convinced myself that an iPhone I must have. I dutifully queued outside the O2 store from around 17.15 (I'd been there earlier but as there was no sign of a queue I decided a nice coffee in the warm Bar Citrus was necessary), and despite being 7th in the queue, I was the second person to leave the store with it, due to having no desire to play with it first or ask any questions.

Fast forward to nearly two weeks later and my original vodafone number has finally been transferred so it's properly my phone now (so I'm going to stop handing it around to everyone who wants to play with it as soon as they see it). So far, so good. 3G would make it amazing, and there's a couple of features a normal phone has that would be really useful, but I don't miss terribly. Such as knowing how many characters you're using in a text message.

Anyway, completely unrelated to the purchase of an iPhone, the issue came up of me feeling a bit poor this month, so I decided I need to get on top of things again. I managed to keep a spending diary as a spreadsheet for about 6 weeks a little while ago, which was helpful in tracking what I was getting up to. But I got out of the habit of keeping it up to date. I tend to forget exactly what I'm spending and where if I'm out and about during the day.

So I decided, why not make the spending diary mobile? So after about 25 mins of Django pokage and 25 mins of HTML tweakage, I have this...

Time Machine over SMB

Posted by stephen on Thursday, 01st November, 2007 @ 16:26

Or in fact to any volume your Leopard running Mac doesn't seem to want to use for backups, simply run this at the Terminal...

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

(thanks Dave)

I've yet to get the Install DVD to use an SMB share as a source for a full system recovery though, so best to keep an external drive spare that you can copy the backup to should you need to do a complete restore.