Categories
music

John Martyn’s playing in Cork

sldair2.jpg
I’m a big fan of the music of 70s singer songwriterjohn martyn as most of my friends will testify. In particular the album solid air (pictured) which never loses its magical quality no matter how many times I listen to it. John’s wonderful and deeply expressive voice together with his stunning acoustic technique are something to behold in concert. So I was delighted to learn that he’s playing in DeBarra’s in Clonakilty, Cork on December 4th.
For those of you not familiar with his music here’s a lyrical sample from “I don’t want to know”


Sometimes it gets so hard to listen
Hard for us to use our eyes
All around the cold is glistening
Making sure it keeps us hypnotized
I don’t want to know about evil
I only want to know about love
I don’t want to know one thing about evil
I only want to know about love

Categories
technology

Browser Identities

Browser incompatibilities are definitely the bane of a web developer’s life. Having spent much of my development life messing around with command lines, I’m now spending a lot of time looking ath CSS section of w3schools grabbling with CSS positioning & layout issues.

I decided that I’d solve some of these browser incompatibilites on the server side rather than with client side javascipt.. MT’s natty Perl-plugin interface looked the best bet and I whipped up a few quick lines of PERL to pull the HTTP_USER_AGENT from the env and parse it. Easy-peasy I thought having read all about browser identities here (skipped the RFC)… This turned out to be no fun. I learned a lot about writing plugins which are a really great feature but when I outputted the browser ID for both IE and Opera I got guess what?
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) Opera 7.54 [en]
Not exactly what I was expecting. A diff of the two confirmed that I wasn’t going nuts. They’re the same so my plugin is effectively useless for sorting out CSS layout issues between IExploder, Opera and Nutscrape… So HTTP_USER_AGENT is apparently not the thing to use.. The appName in javascript would be more reliable apparently. SO much for sorting out the problem on the server side. Ah well… de nouveau au conseil de dessin as they say in pidgin french 😛

Categories
This Blog

Apologies for archive problems

Apologies to anybody looking at this page over the past few days. Due a mistype there were some archiving problems that I’ve sorted out now (hopefully)… To make up for it I’ve been trying out some audio-blogging and I’ll make the results available over the next few days. I recommend any MT users out there interested in this technology should install the MTEnclosures plugin

Categories
technology

IDC information society index

This index was established in mid 90s and provides a statistical analysis of the degree of IT access and absorbtion within 53 countries worldwide. Ireland can only manage 23rd spot, which is less than impressive considering we’re a small nation with such a disproportionate amount of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) coming from IT. (For a cold hard look at our GDP/GNP comparisons read this) Our neighbours in the UK fare better in 10th, while the tech savvy danes and swedes claim 1st and 2nd place respectively.