xiven.com stating the blatantly obvious since 2002

There is no car

Went to see Matrix Reloaded today (along with Kam and Amazon) at the Odeon cinema in Banbury. It was very very good. So much better than I was expecting. I have to say that I enjoyed it very much.

What I did not enjoy was getting a £25 parking ticket courtesy of Cherwell District Council.

The film was a little longer than I had anticipated and sadly, the 2 hour ticket that we bought was not sufficient. It would be nice if the car park that is located directly outside the cinema allowed you to buy tickets that are long enough for you to watch a film, but sadly 2 hours is the maximum ticket length.

Myself not being an expert in the layout of Banbury town centre I did not know where I could park that would have prevented me from getting a ticket, but I guess ignorance is no excuse...

So, this has been the most expensive film I've ever seen and I didn't even pay for the tickets.

Posted: 2003-05-29 10:27:27 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (2)

Hostile takeover

Looks like VoodooExtreme has been bought out by IGN.com. Ah well, that's another site I'll never visit again...

Posted: 2003-05-28 17:14:17 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (2)

You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.

There now exists on this weblog a list of recent comments.

The main purpose of this is so that I can easily keep track of when someone makes a comment on some random post from 6 months ago (it was either that or have it e-mail me each time someone makes a comment, and I prefer this).

Posted: 2003-05-27 13:09:14 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (2)

So what! They had a hundred episodes!

Apparently some people are shocked that I'm not using XSLT. I think that's a somewhat extreme reaction myself, but I am looking into learning it.

Therefore if anyone can point me to a good place to start learning XSLT I would be grateful.

(The first person to point me to the W3C spec gets ritually beaten for pointing out the blatantly obvious).

Posted: 2003-05-26 16:17:20 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (5)

Zippy

A little warning to those of you who serve web pages with an application/xhtml+xml Content-type and who also use Apache's mod_gzip.

Make sure it's not set to only compress text files.

The following in a .htaccess file should do the trick:

<IfModule mod_gzip.c>
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/xhtml\+xml
</IfModule>


Thanks to Kam for figuring out why my web pages weren't being compressed, my pages are now ~3 times quicker to download ☺

Posted: 2003-05-14 13:20:30 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (7)

Boogie-Woogie Feng-Shui

Some minor modifications to the weblog:

• Comments/cross-references are no longer shown on the front page. You now have to view an individual post in order to see them. It makes things look a little tidier and a little speedier on the front page (yes, this was prompted by the record 16 comments reached in the previous post - hey, it's a record for me...)
• Posts are now categorised. You can't do anything useful with the categorisations (such as view all posts in a category) but that will follow shortly. Honestly.

This is all part of the master plan to make this weblog more like the Ultimate Weblogging System (next on the list is non-crufty URIs).

Posted: 2003-05-12 18:21:36 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (2)

Research says that shows with X in the name get higher ratings.

So... the issue of XHTML (and the fun of the application/xhtml+xml MIME-type) has once again risen to the surface.

An enterprising individual took it upon themselves to hunt down all personal web pages of so-called Alpha Geeks that claim to be XHTML and subject them to various validation tests (which essentially tested the XHTML validity and that the page is being sent with the correct MIME-type).

Shocked I was to find that xiven.com was not mentioned in the list of fully XHTML compliant websites (which actually amounted to 1 site). Clearly I therefore do not merit Alpha Geek status (I'm not sure whether to be pleased about that or not ☺). Also missed from the list was The Freaky Weblog and The LambCutlet Disorganization.

Meanwhile others are pondering how to correctly deal with browsers that don't accept application/xhtml+xml (yes, we mean Internet Explorer of course), given that the specification for XHTML media types states that under no circumstances should an XHTML1.1 document be sent with a text/html MIME-type. Well the answer of course can be found in this very weblog. If the browser doesn't support XHTML, send it HTML instead. In my case, the conversion from XHTML to HTML only takes a few simple regular expressions.

Further reading:

• Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful

Posted: 2003-05-06 15:34:37 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (1) | Comments (19)

Why you should validate your web pages

Mark has written a very good article on this subject (web page validation). I strongly recommend you read it even if just to remind yourself what the point of it all is.

Also on the recommended reading list: Simon's article: Defending Structural Markup.

Posted: 2003-05-05 03:02:49 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (1)