Irregular Verbiage

I have just heard that Tim Berners-Lee, father of the world wide web, has accepted a post at my old university. What a coup! I wonder how they pulled that off?

Meanwhile /. has mentioned a conversation along the lines of Open Source vs. Secret source between Sun’s Tim Bray and Microsoft’s Joe Marini. I’m actually somewhat agnostic here, I’ve released GPL’d code but understand that sometimes closed-source is a commercial necessity. What I find funny is that while Tim’s blog withstood the huge flood of visitors, Joe’s (running MS’s closed source IIS) quickly stopped serving pages. I know that they probably don’t run on the same hardware, have the same band-width and the pages are probably different sizes but it still made me giggle a little.

A friend pointed out to me the other day that my blog didn’t have a style-sheet in Internet Explorer. When I looked into the problem, I realised it must have been that way since I updated from WordPress 1.0.2 to 1.2. Sorry!

This does give me a good excuse to say that in my opinion, nobody should using Internet Explorer for surfing the web any more! Firefox has many more useful features and seems to be more secure, making it less likely spy-ware, viruses and other dodgy software should infect your computer. Installing it is very easy so there is no excuse. For more details check out Switch2Firefox.

At the same time as fixing the style sheet I also fiddled with the comments form to help prevent comment spam, installing AuthImage so that users have to jump through the extra hoop of typing in a code before the comment is accepted.

For a blog with such a tiny readership, there seems to have been a lot (10 a day?) of attempted comment spam recently. I’m running WordPress and it queues for moderation any comments that it thinks are suspicious. It’s caught all of them I think but my blog is not the only one affected and people are starting to get annoyed by it.

It is clearly on the rise, I use the excellent bloglines.com to read blogs and it maintains a list of URLs that a lot of blogs have linked to recently. Over the last few days either a lot of people have got into online poker at dubious websites or some people aren’t keeping their blogs clean. Both WordPress and Moveable Type (and, I suspect all the other major blog software) are capable of dealing with this rubbish so hopefully people will get their spam filters turned on as it becomes more of an issue and the spammers will give up on sites that do. Okay, it won’t happen but I can dream.

The folks who write Mozilla and Firefox have long been debating whether to support MNG animations on webpages (they would be the only browser to do so as far as I know). They’ve come up with a new simpler format called APNG that’s being discussed as the moment. Gerv wrote an article on his blog about it which I read quickly and thought he was being much harsher about APNG than he was and wrote a comment on his blog before really reading it. D’oh

I guess the moral of the story is think before you write, which could also apply to blog entries when I write verbiage like this. Ah well….

Currently I have a few to give away, if you want one then leave a comment with your email address.