From the Orient

Italy, desparate for a winning goal against Bulgaria finally start playing in injury time and pressurise the Bulgarian goal. It’s 1-1 and Italy need to win. The only way they won’t go through if they win is if Sweden and Denmark draw 2-2. It’s 2-1 to Denmark and time is running out.

Sweden score in the 89th minute, and the Italians are out.

Then this happens :-

90 mins 4: GOAL - Bulgaria 1-2 Italy: Cassano fires home and celebrates joyously before the Italian bench tell him it is to no avail. He looks close to tears and the Italians are broken.

The moment where he discovers the Sweden Denmark result is one of pure schadenfreude.

Let it not be said that it was a fix because both teams played to win, and I have both a Dane and a Swede in my team and there is a very friendly rivaly between then.

This is a victory for attacking play, Italy went out because they failed to attack and score enough goals when it mattered. Stop boring us with your defensive play and start attacking, you have the talent. You’re defensive nature knocked you out. Sweden and Denmark both went for the win and ended up with a very entertaining 2-2 all draw. Great for the competition.

Well, I hadn’t raised my hopes too high, what with the English tendancy to throw away good positions and certain players not performing, but we won 4-2 and are into the quarter-finals to meet the hosts, Portugal.

Rooney, what a tornarment he has had so far. I have just two concerns, Rooney gets booked again or Ronaldo does Ashley Cole again (last time they met Cole was left on his backside by the swift footed boy-wonder) and puts us out.

As soon as Croatia scored tonight I felt safe. Time and time again, teams sit on 1-0 leads or the draw they need to qualify and fail. Italy and Spain from this week alone, and this year is the year of the attack. We can win it, but so can many other teams. Fingers crossed Beckham and Owen raise their games because if they do, with Rooney and a great defence (set pieces aside) we can win it.

p.s. drunken posts are not counted in the tempting fate department
p.p.s.

A new version of Firefox is now out.

On my system it is a lot quicker at loading pages. Maybe it was just cruft build up on my system, but the new import tool made this the first upgrade that was painless and almost effortless. The new Extension Manager means I’ve still got to add in all my extensions again but hopefully this will be the last time I have to do that.

To be clear on this, the import tool is brilliant. My profile, my cookies, my configuration and my setup were all imported without fuss into the new browser. This is an important step towards a mainstream browser.

I’m not sure I care for the new default theme, but I’m not going to comment futher as the argument about that is almost as pointless and divisive as the Mass Syndication Debate.

Further reading

• A big list of weblogs talking about 0.9
• Burning Edge

If Heskey is Six, then Zidane is Seven

He ain’t no god, anyone can take a penalty. Oh, actually …

Anyway, it is all Heskey’s fault, and we shall say no more on the subject, except for see you in the final and I hope you’ve used all your luck up.

Simon Willison points to the WHAT WG, a group aiming to help HTML develop and progress.

It’s hard to under-state the importance of all this. If you’ve been frustrated by the slow rate of innovation in the modern web, you need to check these guys out. It’s an open process so there’s nothing to stop you from getting involved, and with support from three out of four of the major browser manufacturers (and acknowledgement from Tantek elik of Microsoft) your input could lead to real features in future browsers. Exciting stuff.

Current progress is limited because HTML stopped being worked on, and all effort is now being put into new technologies which the most popular browser (IE for those on another planet or too excited about Euro2004 to concentrate) does not support. We’re stuck with what we’ve got. The goal of WHAT WG is to extent HTML4 without breaking backwards compatibility.

Read more :-

• Ian Hickson at the W3C webapps workshop (and whilst there read the rest of his marvellous travelog)
• The WHAT WG website
• The future of HTML and the Web
• The non-world non-wide non-web
• Dave Shea

I seem to have fallen off the weblogging horse and I’m having trouble getting back on. However, with a bizarre “free period” at work (lets see if this lasts until the end of this entry) and no next actions (GTD, I’m waiting for other people on a number of projects), I’ll attempt to kick start the process.

Two linked links. Tom Coates on search engine optimisers and Anil Dash on Nigritude Ultramarine. I couldn’t muster the energy to write about Nigritude Ultramarine which was about gaming a game and in the end utterly pointless. However, Tom is the one talking a lot of sense.

Search optimisation isn’t really about optimising for a search engine at all. It’s about making good quality, cleanly designed, semantically-constructed sites that people want to read, that people can link to and which people can get the gist of in a few seconds.

And search engine optimisation companies are not really about making a site better, but about making money.

The XSLProcessor.setParam(uri, name, value) allows you so set the value of a top-level stylesheet parameter.

The uri parameter is the namespace URI of the paramater name, which by the XSLT 1.0 specification is a qualified name.

That means that you can have:

    <xsl:stylesheet xmlns:foo="urn:foo" xmlns:bar="http://bar.com/params" ...>
    <xsl:param name="foo:param1"/>
    <xsl:param name="bar:param2"/>
    <xsl:param name="param3"/>

so the parameter names can be namespace-qualified, where the namespace prefix is a shortcut syntax for referring to the fully-specified namespace URI.

So, to set values for all three of these parameters above, you would do:

    xslProc.setParam("urn:foo","param1","'val1'");
    xslProc.setParam("http://bar.com/params","param2","'val2'");
    xslProc.setParam("","param3","'val3'");

The parameter value is expected to be a valid XPath expression (note that string literal values would therefore have to be explicitly quoted)

[Gleaned from mailing list email from Steve Muench and documentation]

I messed around with PHP this afternoon and hacked the wp-recent-links so it grabs the referrer information using the bookmarklet. Now it automatically fills in the via section in Newspaper Cuttings like Simon describes in his blogmarks. In fact, not knowing any javascript either, I got the bookmarklet code from a link in a comment in that post at clagnut

I’ve emailed the author of the plugin, so he can either ignore it, or write the PHP properly and fix all the mistakes I’ve probably made.

I’m now off for a bath to sooth a bruised foot. Playing football last night, a swung my foot at a beautifully deliveried cross only to kick the studs of the intercepting defended. Now I can’t move my foot at all. Shame, cos I’m sure it was going straight for the top corner. Maybe I’ve broken my metatarsal, but that was sooo last year.

Danny O’Brien has an article in this week’s New Scientist about RSS newsreaders.

At seven o’clock every evening, Robert Scoble settles down on his sofa with his tablet PC and checks what’s new on more than a thousand websites.

Whilst I was half expecting to find out some new and exciting scientific treatment that would be available to cure this poor addicted person of his cruel affliction, I was no less delighted to read about RSS.

I’ve moved my linklog, Newspaper Cuttings, from del.icio.us to a WP powered side blog using a plugin from rebelpixel. The main advantage of this is that it makes it possible for me to add via links to the entries and give due credit, and gives me control of the output in a way I didn’t quite have before.

RSS Feed here and the index page here but as before you can see the links over on the side there.

wp-recent-links is a very neat Wordpress plugin. I had to hack it a bit to get it to how I liked it. For example, it was hard coded to point to a /recent-links/ directory and I had to change it to /cuttings/. I’m glad I made the move to WP, as hacking plugins was something I found impossible in MT. I understand PHP and can hack it, even though I can’t yet write it.

Billie Piper, famous (well sort of famous in that kind of really crap “celebrity” way) for being married to Chris Evans and having teen hit single is going to be the Doctor’s new assistant.

Apparently, she is a good actor based on some recent TV appearances that I haven’t seen, and on the forum’s it has gone down as a good move, so who am I to argue.

The former singer, 21, was an instant hit when she appeared in BBC1 drama Canterbury Tales: The Miller’s Tale opposite Dennis Waterman, and was watched by more than 8 million people. She also appeared in BBC2’s contemporary drama Bella and the Boys.

She’s a bit old to have that teen following anymore, but she is just the sort to get the Dad’s watching (if she dresses like Leela ... ). So the die hard Who fans will be watching (and saying it’s crap obviously), the Dad’s will be watching, the Mum’s have Christopher Eccleston, but what’s in it for the Kids? “Doctor Who’s new arch enemy, ‘The Rapper’, played by Enimen”?

WordPress 1.2 is released and it took me about 5 minutes to move from the beta to the production version. And very good it is too. I had a very busy day today, and there are a lot of WP links to review and talk about. I’ll get round to looking at those tomorrow.

Also, Adam spotted my problem with mturls and this is working fine now. I’ve had a recent surge in search referrals and I was wondering what had caused it; the move to Wordpress or something else. Then I check and found I was number 5 in a search for christiano ronaldo and his little acheivement over the weekend has sparked a huge number of searches.

Eye I Adio etc etc.

that Ronaldo, 5 trick pony, but what tricks!

off for more drinks

that tribute at the end for Jimmy Davis brought a tear to my eye.
I passed the accident he died in last summer

This is a test to see if this pinging service from Pingomatic works as gilmae tells me I’m not pinging blo.gs

Let’s see if trackback works too.

Wordpress has a final RC available and I’ve installed it without significant issue.

Papascott says something that has been on my mind this week :-

With WordPress, if you want to do anything slightly different from what it intends (for example, customizing the text of the monthly archive links, or listing the 5 latest comments), you end up writing a hack, essentially rewriting one of its PHP functions to do what you want. But PHP is at least logical and well-documented. Movable Type has it’s own well-documented but esoteric template language, for which you can find plugins to make it even more esoteric

You have two options if you are a coder and want to write weblog software that is specific to your needs. Firstly, you can write your own weblogging system (e.g. Epistula) or you can use a pre-built package and write hacks or plugins for it. As long as the plugin system is flexible enough, and in a language you know, you have the benefit of not having to code a system from the ground up and have the benefit of a well written performant weblog without having to design it yourself.

MovableType didn’t work for me because I didn’t know Perl. Wordpress is better because PHP looks easier to learn, but I’m holding off writing any plugins or hacks until 1.2 is released. I don’t feel confident enough in the language to contribute yet. Also, when I did have time last night to look over the forums and see what others were doing, there was a database problem and I couldn’t access anything. (btw, the best plugin system was in Vellum)

Reading a few of the trackbacks at Mena’s request for feedback on licensing, I am quite stunned at how many blogs people run. “I’m running 27 non-profit personal blogs with 43 authors each all about Brittany Spears” (or something. Where do people find the time. I’ve had up to three blogs running concurrently, but the others always die and I only really count this one as currently active.

The problem with the MovableType license is not really price; there is a free version after all. It is the limitations imposed. Suddenly, MT has gone from being a very flexible tool, inspiring creativity to one with a limitation that if you want to be more creative you will incur a financial penalty for doing so.

Limitations on the use of a product will only stifle use of the product and in the case of weblog, it will stifle creativity and lead to users finding alternative products to do what they want.

Derek Powazek explains how he runs his very popular creative weblogs

Similar story [to Fray] on City Stories. There are two blogs, one public and one private, and a ton of authors. 30 at last count. Again, it’s central to the concept of the site to have a lot of authors. That’s why I chose Movable Type to power it.

If someone was using the personal license and was at it’s limit, and had a crazy idea for a new weblog would they really bother to start it up if it was going to cost them extra money to do so? Or would they put it on the shelf for another day? Or would you instead start it using different weblog software to see if it popular? And if it works, would you bother changing it back?

I had an idea for a multi-author story weblog where all the authors were me. Is that one author or five? How could I prove it was all me to the licensing police? The idea was that you weren’t supposed to know I was writing it all, in fact you weren’t supposed to know which author wrote which post, and you were supposed to work it out. The free MT license covers me currently, but I would have had to pay $70 to set that idea up. I wouldn’t have paid for this pie-in-the-sky idea. I was too lazy to get it off the ground anyway, but that’s another story.

An amateur rocket called GoFast has made history by becoming the first such rocket to reach 100 kilometres altitude – the official edge of space.

Note this isn’t the X-Prize for the first civilian flight to carry a crew into space (twice) which carries a prize of $10 million.

The Bloglines Toolkit for Mozilla written by Chad Everett is something I meant to blog about last week before the MovableType situation occurred. It puts the bloglines notifier into your Mozilla-based browser. I installed it straightaway, and have just upgraded to the latest version.

Allowing me to subscribe to feeds, search for references or even search for highlighted text it is a very useful addition to my set of extensions.

I’ve just got tickets for Sunday at V Festival which means I’m going to see The Pixies. (+ Badly Drawn Boy, Starsailor, Strokes, Zutons, Primal Scream, Snow Patrol). A week later, and it is time for Morrissey at Reading Festival (+The White Stripes) . It’s funny how neither are the main act on the night and are supplanted by the young americans.

But wait there is more because to keep me occupied until then is Euro 2004 which is guaranteed excitement and disappointment all rolled into one. Which team will have all the stars and yet fail to deliver? Or will Holland be this year’s Holland? Can England get past the group stages and the mighty France?

But hold on a minute longer, because this Saturday is the FA Cup Final and I haven’t been this excited about an FA Cup Final since 1996. Sure there was 1999 but that was the nervous middle cup on the way to the treble. The European Cup final overshadowed it.

Vibrated shear thickening fluids [via has a brilliant video showing how vibrating a liquid at a specific frequency can alter its behaviour, even forming solid-like structures.