From my Blog…

1. Tay Bridge Notifier

   7th January 2012

   Tuesday 13th December, the last day a colleague would relish the look on my face as they convey news that the Tay Road Bridge was closed. For now at least the bad news should be mine. The frustration of coming home via Perth–a 25 minute journey becomes ~2 hours–twice within a week was motivation enough to write TayBridgeTweets, a simple program that tweets when the status of the bridge… continue reading »

2. The new BBC Weather site, nearly but not quite

   9th December 2011

   A couple of weeks ago the BBC launched a–much needed–complete redesign of their Weather site. It's great, a million miles from the one that it replaced. All apart from one thing. Above is the forecast map for St Andrews tomorrow, notice the one thing you can't see? Yup, the weather for St Andrews and it's vicinity for tomorrow. And the local map is little better: When not frustrating,… continue reading »

3. Meta matters

   17th July 2011

   Yesterday I sat down to do some work on a couple of personal projects, and ended up reorganising my desk, and making a new laptop stand. You can see the final outcome in the photo below (go to the Flickr page to see annotations). My desk - July 2011 The main change is changing to a closed laptop stand rather than the open one, and a general reclaim of desk top space. In my previous setup my laptop… continue reading »

4. DIBI 2011, and speakers that fail to deliver

   9th June 2011

   Yesterday I was lucky enough to attend DIBI—a two track web conference in Gateshead. And quite honestly it was great. Gavin Elliott and Codeworks have done an all-round brilliant job, hiring a fantastic venue, looking after everyone incredibly well, and most of all luring top-notch speakers to speak outside of the London/Brighton/Bristol triangle. I also attended last year, and wondered how… continue reading »

5. That logo aint for us

   1st February 2011

   In keeping with my tradition of posting three weeks after the main event, and certainly a good period of time after anyone who gives a flying fruitcake has moved on to the next furor… here's my take on the W3C's HTML5 logo. Love or loathe the superman-esque crest, the single thing to grasp is that this logo is not aimed at us, developers. If you read PPK's blog you will see what I'm getting… continue reading »

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