It’s almost embarrassing to admit but my shiny new laptop has got a cold.

It’s my own fault, really, as I wasn’t paying attention. I also was doing something fairly – but by no means hugely – risky. Let me start at the beginning. Last weekend I got the urge to revisit an old game called SWAT 3 which is a tactical police squad shooter that’s set in real-life LA locations and can be quite entertaining. It’s an old game – released in 2000 or something but I still have the CD so installed it. Next task was to get patches for it which is not as easy as it sounds because a lot of the links to patches and a lot of the fansites which gave comprehensive patch information no longer exist but anyway, I managed to get that done. One problem remained: the game wouldn’t recognise the CD in the drive (which, I reiterate, was a genuine, shop bought, original CD). I was faced with two options: 1) Try to fix it or 2) find a no-cd hack for it (which, for those of you unfamiliar with these things, is a hacked file which allows you to play the game without needing the original CD in the drive).
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So I was just dithering around with a possible new theme for this site (again? Yes, again. For about the billionth time in the last two years) when I once again stumbled across a little oddity with Internet Exploder which has led me to ask the following question:

What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fucking fucking fuck?

So I’ve got this image, right, and it’s 1240 pixels wide, right, and I put it into a webpage. If I view that page in Firefox I get an image which is, not very suprsingly, 1240 pixels wide. If, however, I view the same page in Internet Fucking Explorer, it’s about 1.25x the size. It’s made the image bigger.

What. The. Fuck?

I don’t know why I’ve never really noticed this before either. I spend most days building websites at work and comparing them in two browsers but maybe it’s because I’m concerned about functionality more than appearance in those cases (plus they generally look absolutely awful which really is nothing to do with me).

I’ve read that this is to do with IEX automatic image resizing which can be switched off in the options but the test I’ve just done hasn’t actually done that. So the question I have is, how do I get around this problem (don’t tell me to use Firefox or I will be unkind to your dog - this is about making sure the site is multi-browser capable) but ignoring whatever setting a viewer might have in their options?

Just before starting my present contract last year, I took a certification upgrade exam to keep my CV up to date. It wasn’t difficult and required a weekend of cramming and going through a sample test before pretty much breezing through the test itself. Because I originally upgraded my original certification to an advanced version (basic 3 tests plus 1 specialisation test), whenever I take an upgrade test, I keep my advanced status.

This week, 9 months or so after taking the test, I finally got my certificates through. I wasn’t really bothered about them - it’s not like anyone’s ever asked to see them - but it’s nice to be able to add it to the collection. I was more amused by the fact that it took IBM nearly a year to send them to me.

Then yesterday, I got another copy of the standard qualification certificate.

Today I got another copy of the advanced certificate.

The word “fuckwits” comes to mind.

Mere days after talking about how much I loved the old Star Wars arcade game and mentioning how it would be cool to get an old cabinet rigged up, by coincedence, my attention has been brought to this amazingly geeky but extremely clever sod who has taken an old oscilloscope, a sound card and used MAME to get Star Wars running on it.

Absolutely brilliant.

Via Alice

I have been becoming more and more disillusioned with the writing that I do for a day job - i.e. that programming software development malarkey. It’s been a year since I started out in the contract world - a year today, in fact, judging from the calendar - and while it’s a marked improvement over working for a global corporation, it has also confirmed that I don’t really enjoy it. It bores me. I’m just not interested.

Warning: techie-talk ahead.
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Activities that I am currently using to put off doing any writing:

1. Finishing Half-Life 2 Episode 2 (which was great and I’ll tell you all about it soon)
2. Designing a new theme for the blog (and actually getting somewhere too)
3. Work.

Ah well. Maybe I’ll do some tonight.

Now, questions:

1. Can anyone recommend a freeware ADSL download monitor?
2. Does anyone know how to display text in a font on a webpage that the reader may not necessarily have. (PHP solutions involving graphics generated on the fly are also acceptable)
3. What should I include in the blog design in terms of functionality?

Well, what an exciting week it’s been. At one point on Tuesday, I even ended up swearing at the representative of the company that I won’t name - oh alright, it’s BT - who was sticking so steadfastly to the script that I simply said “Look, I couldn’t give a fuck about that…” which was followed immediately by a click of the call being terminated and a disconnected tone. Seriously though, he should have demonstrated some fucking understanding of what I was trying to tell him. The third guy I spoke to on, however, was very good. He listened to me repeat my story and then asked how I’d like it resolved. Good bloke. Didn’t really get me anywhere but good bloke nonetheless.
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Owing to a potential disagreement I’m about to have with my current broadband supplier, I’m researching alternatives - preferably including a landline package as well. So 2 questions for all (UK) based readers:

1. Has anybody tried Virgin Broadband/Talk? Issues? Problems?
2. Can you recommend anyone else?

Much obliged.

Just curious but of those of you who develop websites (especially those who do it commercially), what tools and packages do you use?

Signed up to Facebook, found out I can’t hide, signed out again. Not before having a quick wander around and finding a stack load of people who I wouldn’t want to know I was on there. Mostly relatives. That is another story, however, and one likely not to get told here.

To the 3 people who did attempt to add me as friends using my email address (and then probably wondered who the hell the person was given the hastily constructed pseudonym that I used) apologies about that. It’s nothing personal. In fact, in this case, it definitely wasn’t you and it was most certainly me.