Alan Bradburne

Sweet retro gaming T-shirts. Wicked.

Excellent news! You can use gmail from a WAP interface by going to http://m.gmail.com

Well, Kinda.

Some uncool non-validating markup on the login page. Google? What’s up? Kills my browser, won’t render.

<div> <span class=”gaia le lbl”> Username: </span> <br> </div>

An unclosed <br> ?? Schoolboy error.

Please fix!!!

Technorati Tags: gmail, google, mobile, WAP, xHTML

I’m loving the PSP-formatted, Creative Commons licensed Manga, NYC2123 Dayender.  The forth installment was released a day or so ago.

Great fun, excellent artwork and proves that the PSP is an awesome format for manga.  When we went on vacation a few months back, I made a quick Automator script to re-format a bunch scanlations for the PSP and it worked like a charm.  Fantastic for the flight and incredibly convenient. 

Technorati Tags: PSP, NYC2123, puppy

w00t!

Rails hits 1.0. Great timing guys, just in time for our release!

Technorati Tags: rails, ruby, RubyOnRails

#1  When using Ruby’s XML builder, make sure you set a target – even if you’re going to a string, as other objects might just try to call things like ‘to_s’ on your xml string.  Doing so adds a <to_s/> to the end of your XML.

#2  Apparently other people’s XML parsers might just die silently if you don’t give them exactly what they were expecting (including an extra empty tag at the end).

#3  Guess what happens when you combine #1 and #2…

Technorati Tags: XML, rails, ruby, rubyonrails

Great Russian freerunning clip.  Thanks Stu!

I’m going to throw my 2c in about the discussion going on about what should and shouldn’t be in the Rails framework. 

I’m a long way into my 3rd full Rails app now.  For the first app, with very little experience in Rails, I immediately jumped on the SaltedHashLoginGenerator, and immediately thought that it should be in the Rails core.  When I started my second app, I ended up grabbing a few snippets of code from the said generator’s generated code, but having to change so much to fit my app’s needs, that very little remains of the original.

For the latest (and greatest) app, I needed logins to again, work totally differently.  Let’s be totally honest now, the rails code to handle login is really trivial.  Sure, it it can save you a lot of time when you’re starting a new project, but the chances are that you’re going to end up replacing it all with something different that works just how you want it.  As far I as can see, there is no Right Way.

Now, i18n however…  Again, I’m on the fence as to if there should be support in the Framework (at least for certain things – like not hardcoding the country names, for instance).  I’m looking into i18n at the moment, so I’m yet to form a strong opinion…  I will comment when I have one :)

Technorati Tags: rails, ruby, rubyonrails

Didn’t we go through this years ago with the ‘Playstation 2 box’ auctions?

Some sucker pays £470 for a photo of an xbox 360. Fool. I’d save sold to him for £300.

This auction is not for a Xbox 360 game system, but instead a picture of one. I hope you enjoy this high-quality item.

NeoPets is run by Scientologists?! That, I didn’t know. Yikes. There was me thinking that they were a really cool site/company.

So we don’t have any snow yet down here in the South of England, but this gorgeous screensaver is at least getting me in the Christmas and wintery mood.

Technorati Tags: osx, xmas, screensaver, snow, winter

OK, The Fox might still have a few problems on the Mac, but combining the G5 optimized verision, a Safari-like theme and a del.icio.us extension makes the whole browsing experience so sweet. Damn, that G5 version is zippy!

Technorati Tags: apple, firefox, mac