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Its been a very busy few months

2008-08-26T13:05:00.002+01:00

Since Easter I have changed jobs twice and moved house complete with redecorating the new place from top to bottom. Not to forget looking after Joshua and Oliver for quite a while while Julian and Heather packed ready to go to Canada. Some of the changes are detailed in a Previous post

Lets just say the job with Patersons didn't work out and was very frustrating. That made me get rapidly fed up with the hour and a quarter commute. Then one day Rae was on MSN and said she had seen a web development job in the local paper. She said it was for a company called Lightcurve and the contact name was a guy called Stuart Lee. Well I went to school with Stuart and after an interview and a phone interview with one of their partner companies in Dublin I got the job.

Giving my notice in to Patersons was definitely a good day. Even if I had a raging hangover from drinking the best part of a bottle of champagne to celebrate getting the job. It probably turned out for the best as they were laying off people as I left.

I finished with Patersons on the 31st of July on a Thursday. Had the Friday off and met up with Neil, Sarah and the twins then and then started work on the Monday.

The new has been pretty cool. 20 minutes to drive to work is nice. A converted barn with air con instead of a tin shed to work in is nice. Not drowning in paperwork is nice. Not having 4 hour meetings at least once a week to report on "progress" is nice. Having a decent pc with two monitors instead of a laptop to work on is nice. Being able to get up at 8am, have a shower and still get into work with plenty of time is even better.

The decorating wasn't too bad. To be honest Rae did most of the painting. I painted a few ceilings and undercoated one room and she did the rest. Best thing in the world ever was the roller on the telescopic pole. It makes thing a lot easier. We spent yesterday putting up shelves and stuff. Tonight its pictures. Rae is busy making curtains too. We still don't have the lightwell sorted out but that can wait.

It was great to have the boys over too. Again Rae did most of the hard work as I was working. They can be a handful so again she did really well. I know Oliver will love his toolbelt we bought him for his birthday. He will be demolishing the furniture in Canada with any luck.

Lets hope things settle down for a while at least.

taking it slow

2008-07-28T12:49:00.002+01:00

We had a very slow weekend. Though come to think on it there was quite a lot of driving around and even the odd bit of shopping. Perhaps it just felt slow due to being incredibly relaxed for a lot of it.

Saturday was a quick trip to Yeovil in the morning then off to Warminster for Rae's Uncle David and Aunt Wendys 25 wedding anniversary . Lots of sitting around in the sun drinking (non-alcoholic for me of course) and chattting. Then over to Kellys for a barbecue the highlight of which was seeing Kelly turn her grandfathers head into a large ice gem with some spray cream. Oh and 2 1/2 pints of Pimms was very nice too...

Late start on the Sunday too then off to Dorchester to pick up a bookcase Rae bought on ebay for the new flat. Back home via Tescos and B&Q to get some odd bits and bobs. Then the rest of the day was spent floating in the pool, relaxing in the garden and watching a hot air balloon launch from one of the school fields. Oh and cooking some very nice ribs on the barbecue. We stayed out in the garden until it got dark and it was great. Just read the paper, chatted and relaxed.

Next weekend we have Neil, Sarah and the twins visiting on Friday then Julian, Heather, Joshua and Oliver arriving on Saturday for a few days before they go back to Canada. I don't think we will have much time to sit in the garden and relax then.

sometimes you cant see the wood for the trees

2008-06-03T11:57:00.002+01:00

The cyberpunks in Toxia have been looking at setting up a centralized database of information for some time. As I have a few skills in this area I was looking into it for them.

For some reason I couldn't think straight and was playing with all kinds of strange and exotic toys like RDF triplestore databases and the like. Then last night it hit me. A wiki is perfect.

What really annoys me is that I have used wikis extensively in the past both professionally and personally. Why the hell didn't I realise that the solution was so simple?

Its been a while

2008-05-28T19:57:00.003+01:00

But I am back.

One of the main reasons I have been away is that I have a new job. No more being the webmonkey in the corner at ingenta. I am now the slightly more senior webmonkey in the middle of the room at Patersons.

Ingenta made the very generous offer of "move to Oxford to work, no extra pay and no chance of working from home or take redundancy". Let me see now.... I could barely afford to work for ingenta despite having hardly any bills when I was in Bath. So... "I will take the redundancy please".

So after a bit of gardening leave and a few very annoying interviews and experiences with recruitment agencies I am now working for Patersons developing material for their websites and internal tools.

It's been interesting so far with a lot of new systems to learn. Hopefully some of the experience I gained at ingenta will be useful too.

Of course the other thing to talk about is the garden. The gardening leave did come in handy and its looking really good. Had some great rocket out of it the other day as a first crop from the veggies and some of the other stuff wont be far behind. The flowers were great this spring too. Well last year it was basically bare earth in the spring but this year we had tulips, daffodils, crocus, anemones and aliums in profusion. The tuilps were especially showy but I really like the aliums they almost look like fireworks bursting. Hopefully we will have some more food to eat soon. I reckon either pea shoots, radishes, lettuce or maybe swiss chard will be ready in a week or so. Possibly even spring onions.

We have been using our ingenuity too. I bought a little drip feed irrigation system from Tescos for a tenner and use that to water most of the containers. Then we noticed a length of hosepipe that had been lying around for ages. No one wanted it so I stabbed lots of holes in it and its now laid out on the veggie bed as a soaker hose. I can do most of the watering whilst sat on the new bench or better yet laying in the hammock I got Rae for her birthday.

Freecycle really came up trumps too. I got about 1/2 a ton of gravel for free to go along the bottom of the garden so we dont get muddy going to the new greenhouse and the wormery. Then Rae picked up a 3 tier planter thing and some hanging baskets the other day.

The other big bit of news is that we are moving house. Without leaving the building though. Hopefully in the middle of August we will be moving into another flat in the school. Its bigger and also more private. No more living next door to a bunch of screaming schoolgirls. Rae already has plans for decorating and has sent off for about 100 colour samples, or so it seems. The interesting thing is it actually has a lightwell in the middle. Nick and Karen dont use it for much but we are going to use it for houseplants and bringing on early plants for the garden.

Well thats quite enough of all that for now.

When to use programmatic constructs to get around browser failings.

2008-02-19T18:38:00.003Z

Often when I am developing a page there are things I could add to styling of the page to increase its accessibility or graphic design. Simple things such as highlighting the first paragraph of a section by changing its color or font weight. These can add immensely to the visual impression of a page with little additional work.

In theory that is. CSS provides a simple pseudo-class for the above example :first-child. IE6 doesnt implement it. Now I am left with two realistic alternatives. Either don't include that styling element and reduce the functionality of the design or work out a way to programmatically replicate that functionality in a way that IE6 can understand.

In the :first-child example its might be possible to achieve this if for instance the text for each paragraph is being individually pulled out of a database and looped through in a templating system to create the mark up. All that is necessary is to check if it is the first iteration of the loop and add a class attribute to the <p> tag which will hook into CSS to add the styling.

This is not always possible though. Perhaps the entire text for the page is stored en masse in your CMS system and its inserted into the mark up monolithically. You now cannot add in that class to find the first paragraph using your templating language.

Ok then, now what. Javascript to the rescue. You can run a bit of javascript as the page loads which selects the <div> tag representing the section, loop through its children, test to see if each child element in the DOM is a <p> tag and if its the first child. Thats messy, complex to write and error prone.

So, more javascript to the rescue. If you use a Javascript library such as jQuery which uses CSS selectors to attach actions or functions to elements in the DOM it becomes easy.

$('document').ready(function(){
 $('div.section p:first-child').addClass('emphasis');
});

does all the hard work for you.

Of course jQuery code runs perfectly well in IE6 so now you can use CSS selectors which never implemented them in the first place. There is the overhead of loading jQuery (or the library of your choice) but that is offset by caching and the like.

jQuery and its cousins do not just enable developers to create more interactive and engaging user interfaces they also enable designers to create more attractive and therefore engaging designs that will work in a wider range of browsers than ever before.

got my shiny new laptop

2008-02-11T19:49:00.000Z

After a bit of negotiation with the insurers my nice shiny new Acer 5520 arrived today. Its only the base model so no kill em all graphics card but its looking good so far.

The main thing that you notice apart from the wierd curved keyboard is how quiet it is. My old laptop was forever spinning up fans and stuff even under minimal load in windows. This one barely makes a noise no matter what I do to it.

Its also a little smaller and a lot lighter than the old one. The power supply is tiny too.

I have spent the evening installing stuff while waiting for the windows updates to come down. One thing thats coming off asap is Norton Antivirus which is as bad as having a virus in the first place. All I need now is CS3 and the stuff to connect to work and I am done I think.

Today is my lucky day

2008-02-07T13:05:00.000Z

I bought a kit kat today that had no wafer in it. Chocolate all the way through! Yum!

I found a use for AJAX on a site!

2008-01-29T12:04:00.000Z

I was ordering some seeds for the garden last night. Both of the suppliers websites I was on had a very handy feature. They had a page which assumed that you had a copy of the print catalog in front of you and therefore had the various product codes etc. On the page was a simple form with around 12 input boxes for entering product codes and the quantity for each one.

This was incredibly speedy, no searching through long listings of varieties of carrots etc to click on the right link. A really good example of integrating traditional paper based systems and e-commerce.

But the one thing it lacked was any immediate feedback on the product code you typed in for each input box. You had to wait until you pressed "add to cart" and check the contents of your cart very carefully to see if you had made a typo entering in your product codes.

With a little bit of ajax you could check the product code when the box looses focus and return a little bit of text or even a picture to show what that code relates to. Less errors, more feedback and better interaction.

Starting to like javascript again

2008-01-16T19:10:00.000Z

It used to be "javascript is evil, its only used to make bells and whistles that dont do anything useful".

I would jump through all kinds of hoops to avoid using javascript where it would have been very useful. I never really liked javascript coding anyway. It was always so repetitive with document.getElementById all over the place and lots of browser sniffing to get things right.

Then AJAX started making things even more complicated... and to be honest I don't see the point of most AJAX based sites. A lot of them use AJAX for the sake of it just like the javascript bells and whistles of old.

Early AJAX code was a complete mess too. Even more browser sniffing to be done and lots of complicated stuff to consider and code for. Along came javascript libraries that promise to take care of a lot of this stuff. I still didn't like a lot of them as they tried to force their own syntax which didn't always make a lot of sense. Some of them are like prototype / scriptalicious are tied to other frameworks etc fairly tightly. Others concentrate on silly interface widgets I never see anyone seriously use.

Now I have discovered JQuery and really like it. I like how you use css selectors to choose what to work with... I love how you can chain things together and I love how its possible to do AJAX and AHAH code with a single function. The onReady functionality instead of onLoad is fantasitic

I had to write a load of javascript today and it was a breeze. Select the element you want with CSS, attach a load of actions to it and impress some one in under 5 minutes.

the new cat is setting in nicely

2007-11-19T12:16:00.000Z

We acquired a new kitten last week. Her name is Millie though personally I think she should be called "special" as in "my mummy says I am special". Basically for it to be any more dumb it would have to be a rock. It walks into things that are there and spends ages apparently looking at stuff no one else can see.

On the plus side of things it has found loads of little things we lost around the flat. Also it produced a tennis ball from somewhere. No idea where though.

This post fulfills a prophecy of mine some time ago that all I would be able to write about would be kittens in this blog.

Halting State

2007-10-30T12:42:00.000Z

I have been on holiday for the last couple of weeks and one of the books I read was Charles Stross' Halting State. I am a big fan of his work and books like Acclerando and Glasshouse are some of my favourites of recent years.

Halting State is one of the few books I have read recently that I couldn't put down. I read it in two sessions interrupted only by sleeping. I really liked the way that it took things that are out there in the real world and different virtual worlds and blended them all together with a bit of speculative spice to create something believable.

At times it was a bit too current mentioning events in Real Life and even Second Life that have happened very recently as part of the historical background to the storyline. I personally think this will make the book date really quickly but there you go. On the other hand its whole idea of being able to transfer an avatar from one virtual world to another is a hot topic right now. IBM and others are said to be working on a "standard" to describe and avatar.

The characterization was the weak point for me. There were the usual "office" stereotypes of the geek, accountant with hidden depths, bastard CEO, moronic marketeer etc. and the spies were straight from central casting too.

The plot rattles along though twisting and turning as it goes. There are some things you can spot a mile off such as "I wonder when that characters real life sword fighting experience will come in handy". There was a sort of red herring for this but it was obvious that this would be used at a climatic moment. Having said that some of the plot twists come right out of the blue and are really clever. No spoilers though.

I know I have pointed out quite a few flaws with this book but I really liked it. It was even better to get to buy it in Canada well ahead of its uk release too.

This is weird

2007-10-03T18:03:00.000+01:00

A friend of mine started a blog when he started out traveling in Australia a while ago. I added it to my bloglines to keep an eye on it. Ross eventually didn't bother updating it but I also forgot to delete it from my blogroll in bloglines.

Today its now called "secured visa". Its at the same blogspot address and everything and is the worst sort of spam blog.

I don't think Ross is up to creating a bunch of spammy links so I guess somehow or another his blog has been compromised. Its here here if you want to get bombarded by the usual crap that fills up your inbox

An early open source success story

2007-09-19T19:47:00.000+01:00

Thee was an item on the bbc tonight about a collection of Chippendale furniture that has been saved for the nation. One bookcase was reckoned to be worth about 4 million quid at the very least.

What interested me though was that Chippendale published a pattern book so anyone could use his designs. You can see it at Digital Library for the Decorative Arts and Material Culture. This was open source furniture making.

Chippendales business model was to let anyone make copies of his work. That meant that anyone could see how his furniture looked. His very high end "consultancy" service for very rich clients meant they got the very best quality goods from his own workshops and also a great deal of advice on how to maximize their potential in the clients (stately) homes.

This isn't too dissimilar to a company like Red Hat today. Let anyone download Fedora Core and have all the fun of setting things up and optimizing things themselves or pay for the full on Red Hat release but get some consultants from Red Hat helping you make things work smoothly.

And the whole idea of open source is meant to be novel and unique... try telling that to an 18th Century cabinet maker (who also incidentally made a lot of money).

Travelling by train

2007-09-19T12:00:00.000+01:00

I actually like traveling by train, perhaps because I don't many chances to actually do it.

However the reality is often disappointing. Take my trip yesterday. The outward leg of the journey was great. Not too crowded, 1 easy connection to make, nice clean trains, even the bacon roll for breakfast wasn't that bad. I even thought at one point I wouldn't mind making a trip like this once a week or so.

The return trip was a nightmare. The taxi to the station took ages to show up. Thats more might fault though for not booking it far enough in advance. I got a train for the first part of the journey with no problem. Then the when I got off I was greeted with a message saying the next connecting train was canceled as there were not enough drivers. Bugger. Sit on the station for an hour waiting for the next one. Of course thats rammed solid as its a commuter train and its now rush hour and its got twice as many people as normal. I sit next to some polish girl and get elbowed in the ribs every time she turns the page of her book.

The next connection is a mere 10 minutes late. This is good as its normally a sprint across the station to make it affair. I get a seat and its in the quiet carriage which isn't too busy.

From now on the trip should be a doddle. Just remember to wake up in time to get off. Oh no. Some chav gets on and sits behind me somewhere and gets out his phone. He then proceeds to have a big shouting argument with however he is phoning. Lots of swearing too. Eventually this stops and a bloke opposite him says. "Excuse me this is the quite carriage, and you shouldn't be talking like that on the phone in public anyway". The chav now lays into this poor bloke "You can't tell me what to fucking do" etc etc etc. He then starts threatening the poor bloke so myself and several others come to his aid. Eventually the guard turns up and to a polite round of applause throws him off the train at the next station into the waiting arms of the police.

Eventually I get home two and a quarter hours late, pissed off, fed up and vowing to drive everywhere from now on. Its a typical train experience for me. No matter what you personally do to make things go well events conspire against you.

The worst part of the rugby at the weekend

2007-09-17T08:33:00.000+01:00

It was all god awful but the very, very worst part of it was when Jason Robinson finally got quick ball in a bit of space and his hamstring went.

The South Africans realised what happened and just stood over him and made no attempt to get the ball. Our late arriving, brain-dead pack saw it as an ideal opportunity for a pick up and drive over the top of the injured Robinson. Then they managed to once again drop it and had to be told by the ref that Robinson was injured. I bet it did Robinson's hamstring the power of good having the forwards "rumble" all over it too.

Rubbish all round.

are the augmenting people just more subtle immersionist?

2007-09-10T12:41:00.000+01:00

I was reading a New York Times overview article about SL yesterday and it made a big point of the incredibly materialistic lifestyle of many avatars. It mentioned bling and McMansions and how everyone wants to "fulfill the American Dream in SL".

You could look at it that the people living the virtual American dream are playing a role playing game whilst doing their shopping, dancing and chatting. The rules are not as defined and no one gets hurt, status is not defined by XP or Level but is definitely there in following the latest trends and being first to have the "hot new look".

Its still playing out a role. You role playing identity enables you to, "wear the most fashionable clothes, have the perfect, beautiful body and live in a wonderful mansion."

Its ultimately the same as some one who wants to be a half human - half fox creature and live in a magical forest. The difference is what you want to wear and where you like to live, not vast cultural differences. The difference is the way the same escapist fantasy is expressed as opposed to a radical difference between cultures.

So perhaps we are not immersionist or augmentors but just plain old escapists

which comes first

2007-09-03T13:16:00.001+01:00

The html or the css?

For a change I am currently working on a lot of box-fresh new designs rather than extending existing stuff. There are lots of very detailed design in psd or jpg form for me to convert into nice semantic html/css.

Its been interesting working out the best way to create the semantic meaning of content in html and then convert that into a working layout using css. Starting from scratch means I have complete control but also means a lot more to work out.

Is writing science fiction futile?

2007-08-31T08:04:00.000+01:00

I was talking with Rae last night about Sci-fi in general. Rae isn't a sci-fi fan at all but is quite curious about some of the weird and wonderful books I read.

I mentioned that every older sci-fi book that tried to predict the future we are living in now turns out to be comprehensively wrong as the author doesn't know that technology X is coming along which changes everything.

From Jules Verne through the golden age of Asimov and Clarke to the modern day cyberpunks and post-cyberpunks sci-fi authors have tried to write books set 50 years in the future (The millennium was always a good date too). Jules Verne's astronauts traveled to the moon in a giant artillery shell as he didn't predict the advances in rockets. Clarke wrote stories of spaceships flitting across the void with hardly any communications between them and William Gibson wrote about cyberspace but didn't know mobile phones would revolutionize communications.

As I see it there are 3 routes open to a modern sci-fi author.

Complete fantasy. Make up anything you like. Lets face it more or less anything might happen so why not make up stuff. Telepathy, faster than light travel, Gods walking the earth as Neil Gamain writes in American Gods and Anansi Boys.
Set your book more or less in the present or only a very short time ahead. William Gibson and Neal Stephenson have used this well in books like Spook Country and Cryptonomicon.
Try and predict the future like those that have gone before you. Something like Bruce Sterlings later books such as Heavy Weather and Distraction.

Where sci-fi is really good is when it uses the future to tell us important things about the present. Asimov's I Robot stories told us about the human condition using a robot to explain what it is like to be human. Neuromancer tells us about the breakdown of society in the face of mega-corporations and how the fringes of a society are its most interesting parts.

Writers like Charles Stross who believe in the singularity and transhumanisim have an even harder task. They believe the future is totally and utterly unpredictable past a given point but they still try to write about it but not in terms of complete fantasy. At the same time Stross' imaginings of more or less immortal transhuman beings living in facilities orbiting distant brown dwarf stars in the distant future can provide insights into our current lives and condition.

I have always loved sci-fi ever since I used to get all the books with yellow covers from the mobile library when I was about 13 (Gollcanz' Masters of Sci Fi series of reprints always had bright yellow covers, you could judge a book by its cover back then). Sci-fi makes important points that "serious literature" often misses as it dismisses sci-fi as "genre fiction" and lumps it together with crime novels and romantic fiction etc. Crime novels have been "rehabilitated" to some extent in the last few years. Its time to come out of the shadows for serious sci-fi.

the bugs and nasties fight back

2007-08-24T12:00:00.000+01:00

The caterpillars decimated the broccoli. I was just saying to Rae that they looked ready to eat and 2 days later there was virtually nothing left of them. Now blight has killed the tomatoes just as they were starting to bear fruit too.

Still its our only real disasters and there wasnt much we could do about them without using lots of chemicals.

Cute SL vs the grimy underbelly

2007-08-21T09:18:00.000+01:00

So much of what I read about second life shows the side the lindens want the world to see. Smart well dressed AVs going to well organised and planned events run by corporations or at least with some level of corporate sponsorship. Even the more "out there" SL sexuality blogs are generally fairly tame and as far as a I can see discuss what sexy underwear is available out there.

I would argue that most of the creativity in SL is actually in the areas that the Lindens dont want the world to see. Roleplay sims, sex sims, all the nasty seedy underbelly basically. This is often where real innovation comes from. Who cares if someone has found a new way to make a shirt and tie look more realistic? That doesnt really add anything to the world. New ways of animating avs, weapons, scripts etc are far more technically advanced and are being developed every day in more "adult" or violent areas.

The level of individual creativity is much higher too in RP or Adult areas. It takes a lot of effort to Role Play effectively to the benefit of your fellow RPers. The corporate, sanitized side of SL reduces the world to walking around window shopping and chatting to other drones.

I would argue that a lot of people come to second life to escape the corporate, consumer society. They want to do things in SL they could never do in RL. If thats being a hooker, changing sex, changing species, or blasting a vampire in the face at point blank range with a shotgun, or anything else, SL lets them do that.

I would even be willing to bet that most of the people who create accounts and leave after a while are the people who never get to explore the more "unusual" areas of second life. The sanitized, "friendly", corporate areas are DULL. Its that which makes many people loose interest.

P.S. I hear through the grapevine that some other people I work with are setting up stuff in SL. If I even end up going to a "meeting" in SL for work I will be turning up in a full cyborg AV and carrying at least one weapon ;)

And a very good time was had by all

2007-08-13T09:59:00.000+01:00

Sunday was the Barrington Cricket Club Twenty20 competition and it went rather well indeed. The threatened rain never materialized. The sun shone and grown men made fools of themselves on a cricket field.

The Barrington Oak team beat the Duke of York in the warm up game. One of the Shepton batsmen was heard to enquire if anyone had a defibrillator handy when he returned from his innnings.

The main even was the annual battle between the young bucks and the increasingly crocked old ones. Sad to say us old ones actually lost this year, mainly due to our sportsmanship in making a game of it in the first place. Jess brought on Stevie and myself to chuck a couple of overs worth of pies at them to help things out. Then when I took an absolutely magnificent catch after Duncan top edged a Wellman delivery that came down with snow on it it went up so high we graciously called it an above waist height no ball meaning they had one ball left to get one run which they just managed to do.

The best bit about it was we made around £800 on the day which more or less pays for the second eleven running cost for the entire of next season.

just when you thought it was safe to go back in the garden

2007-08-09T08:43:00.000+01:00

Cabbage white caterpillars attack the broccoli!

I spent a lovely 10 minutes picking them off and squishing them yesterday evening.

its all coming up roses

2007-08-08T08:26:00.000+01:00

Except we didn't plant roses but if we had they would have come up.

The garden transforms itself every day. The flowers are going mad. Big pink things have appeared everywhere. We dug out some of the annuals that have gone over and replaced them with perennials and thats looking good.

The veggie garden is going great too. We have had carrots, lettuce, 2 sorts of onions, spinach, rocket, courgettes, peas and beans so far. The broccoli is nearly ready. The herbs are fantastic with the parsley, basil, mint and oregano standing out right now. We should have more coriander soon too.

The path area is looking great. The thyme is spreading nicely after looking sorry for itself to start with. (its great in cous cous too) The forget-me-nots will be great next year too.

The lawn has a few weeds in it but I am going to dig them out soon but apart from that its looking great.

The tomatoes and peppers are looking good too. We have tiny little peppers and tomatoes forming on the plants so it wont be long before we get to eat them too.

My favourite are the sunflowers. They must be getting up to around 8 or 9 feet tall. I had to construct a system of guy lines to stabilize the canes they are growing up. All from a little tiny seed.

Either gardening is very easy indeed or we have a natural talent.

semantic HTML is hard to do

2007-08-03T12:32:00.000+01:00

I am working on a rather complicated form for a new project at the moment. Its a search form basically but there are a few more options than the google front page. There are all kinds of faceted search features on there which require a lot of form controls.

I have got the basic layout working (in FF at least) using just <fieldset> tags instead of <div> tags. <ul> tags provide lists of form controls and there are <legend> and <label> tags everywhere. Everything is semantic and accessible. I even carefully chose the id and class attributes of the elements to add even more meaning.

Now I have the achieve the layout required. Now I have to add in empty <div> tags to create nice borders and curved corners. Straight away there has to be a compromise and loss of semantic meaning. Ok so a <div> doesn't really have any semantics attached to it but when it wraps other tags there is an implication that it is "superior" to them.

I just cant wait for CSS3 when I can attach images to borders and corners.

another way of making SL more newbie friendly

2007-07-31T18:54:00.000+01:00

I was chatting in toxia with a few people the other day. We were privately making fun of a very obvious newbie on the other side of the street. They stood out a mile in their jeans, t-shirt and bad hair.

We were talking about how bad newbies look in general, particularly and especially furry newbies when someone floated the idea of LL supplying better avatars for free when you sign up. It wouldn't take a lot of effort to provide some avatars that look a lot better for newbies to choose from. Realistic body shapes and skin for a start. Better clothes and attachments. You could have a furry or two that dont look like cheap dressing up outfits, a goth, a mecha or cyborg all kinds of stuff. Make them copyable and modifiable and things would look a lot more interesting in places like the Shelter.

Then again the first thing most people spend money on is new av and clothes which generates lots of money for the Lindens....