Is it me, or are all pasta manufacturers lying buggers? Pick up pasta. Read packet. Ten minutes it says. Ten minutes my arse. It’s going to be at least fifteen, maybe even twenty. It’s the same with whatever pasta you buy. Buy ours, it cooks quicker! No it bloody doesn’t. Or if it does it’s that pathetic wafer-thin excuse for pasta you sell as “quick-cook”. You can always add five to ten minutes to the numbers on the side to get it anywhere near cooked.

There’s clearly a huge conspiracy against anybody who wants to cook the stuff. Forget your governments harbouring aliens, this one goes way bigger. It’s the mafia slowing the cooking speed of pasta. Perhaps they’re even controlling the boiling point of water. You can just see it can’t you? The Godfather, sat in a huge leather armchair, chewing on a fat cigar and surrounded by henchmen. If the Assozzione Manufacturi di Pasta does not meet our demands, water shall boil at 81°C! Penne shall forever take an age to cook! You will reach your grave before your Tagliatelle is al dente! MUAAHAHAHAAAAHAAAAA!

It’ll turn out to be true, you mark my words.

Prodigy, live on Radio 1, right now.

Very loud, very very good indeed.

That is all.

Yes, it’s another bike. Yes, I’m a silly boy. What can I say? It’s an addiction…

We [myself, Brett, Adam, Justin and Steve] visited Gethin, South Wales on Sunday, for the second weekend in succession. Despite some grey skies in the morning, it brightened up nicely, leaving us with a grippy, fun course on which to pilot our downhill bikes. “Alpine Olly” was back in force, riding the bike properly again. The top and open sections provided the most entertainment. They’re ace fun once you learn the right lines through the tight, twisting switchbacks. The rock garden is still a real challenge and shows what long-travel bikes are really made for. A great day all-round.

This was probably the last time we’d see Adam on a downhill bike for a while. There’s a short video of him too [AVI, 4.26mb]. This weekend he leaves Cheltenham to spend 12 months doing a digital effects masters degree down in Bournemouth. Good luck dude!

I’m sure someone’s posted about this already, but here goes anyway.

I was going through my RSS feeds, got to Cidoc, and clicked through a couple of articles.

One of the first told me about the Scottish Arts Council’s logo, brand and such-like. The very next one told me about Quark’s new logo and identity.

It’s fresh, inviting, and open says Quark. I can just imagine the response at SAC: Maybe it is, but it’s exactly the same bloody logo as ours!

I had a bit of geek pleasure this week. I took an in-house web-application and tidied it’s output up. What was once a pile of tag-soup junk is now clean, accessible, sentatically correct, valid HTML. This was relatively easy, once I’d got my head around the way the app works. It’s quite nice now – but it sits on our intranet, so you’ll never get to see it unless you happen to work in the same place I do.

Then I got cocky. I thought If I can do that for that app, why can’t I do it for this ever so slightly more complex one?

So I started looking at the source files. Holy crap! It looks like the code was written by a gibbon jumping up and down on the keyboard! As soon as I started trying to tidy it up, things got squelchy. Undo, undo undo! Put it back exactly how it was! Phew. Making that one look nice is going to be an interesting experience.

Still, I think it’s worth doing, even if it’s “just” an in-house intranet application. Your in-house customers are just as important as the outside ones. If you don’t keep them happy, the products and services that they produce for outside customers won’t be as good. Keeping the interface and the code clean and accessible means that it’ll be nicer for user’s to interact with. What’s more, it’ll be easier for the next set of programmers and designers to work with next time around.

Oh my. Lost is a bit good isn’t it? I’ve just reached the end of Season 1. Yes, I know downloading the whole series at once is cheating.

I won’t spoil it for everybody else – we’ve still got about another five months of it on TV over here. Suffice it to say that I really need to see Season 2, right about now.

I’m currently working my way through a sample chapter Sitepoint‘s DHTML Utopia book – partly to see if I want to buy the book, and partly because I’m trying to get my head around event listeners. I got some way through the chapter, testing my work in Firefox as I went, and it was all going swimmingly.

What happens in Internet Explorer then?, thinks I. Precisely nowt. It was at this point that my colleagues looked around to see what the swearing was all about. From the book:

Naturally, making events work cross-browser is not as easy as just following the DOM standard. Internet Explorer doesn’t implement the DOM Events model very well. Instead, it offers a proprietary and different way to hook up event listeners and gain access to event data.

What’s the point in having a standard if the most popular sodding browser is going to completely ignore it!?

Luckily, the book explains ways around Internet Explorer’s Javascript deficiencies in a calm and friendly manner (e.g. This is inconvenient but not catastrophic; it just means that you have to take different actions for different browsers.). It’s entirely possible that I’ll buy the book, simply because it’ll help dig me out of some big holes.

WARNING IE USERS! STROBE EFFECTS LIKELY!

So, I decided to try applying the lessons learned to one of my own projects. It was all going fine, up until I went to test it in IE. This time, the scripts were working perfectly. No, IE had to find some other way of buggering it up. Now, every time an event was fired, IE decided to re-load all of the background images in the elements effected. Flickerytastic dude! Does this mean I have to put an epilepsy warning up on the page? I navigate away, click ‘back’ and all is fine again.

A bit of googling, asking around on mailing lists, and tearing out of my fast-greying hair reveals that are two ways of fixing the problem:

1. Get every single one of your visitors using Internet Explorer, AOL, or indeed anything else that uses the IE engine, to alter their Internet Options: Go to Temporary Internet Files, then Settings, then choose Automatic. Realistically, that’s not going to happen is it?
2. Get your server to add the Cache-control header to the images on your server. Doing this works differently for different servers: ASP.net Resources has the fix for IIS, Dean Edwards has the fix for Apache. If you’re using something else you’ll have to rely on google.

It’s really frustrating that every time I try to do almost anything on the web, Internet Explorer jumps in front of me and holds up an enourmous stop sign. It’s good in a way, in that it forces me to find an acceptable way around the problem. I just wish finding that answer didn’t usually double the time it takes to complete a project. If IE7 really has improved as much as Microsoft say it has, I can’t wait for it to arrive. It’s just a pity that IE5, 5.5 and 6 will continue to linger for as long as they inevitably will.