nocto

no doubt these have been around for ages but i’ve only just come across them. among the languages supported by google are

• bork, bork, bork!
• elmer fudd
• hacker
• pig latin

i’m just trying to figure out if the rest are real languages….

i’ve been having fun writing my own front end to blogger. josh lucas is going to be releasing a new version of jblogger later today which should include my front end as part of its example code (which is here in the mean time). it’s filling out with features but i have a ton more planned for it. i haven’t written a gui in years and the ones i have written weren’t much cop. i have paid attention to user interface design since. besides this is a simpler concept than my old attempts.

uh oh. perhaps a bank holiday weekend isn’t such a good idea after all.

people planning a relaxing august bank holiday at home could be lucky to make it safely through the weekend, according to research published last week.

apparently the strains of the weekend always make them the worst time for heart attacks and the british chiropractic association says the lie-in is one of the riskiest holiday activities!

it looks like your boss intruding into your private life could be illegal in britain.

ringing staff at home to discuss work matters could, under uk human rights legislation, be construed as an invasion of privacy, the institute of management has said.

this also applies to your employer opening your private email. i’m really glad to see that we have a law that reads:

everyone has the right to respect for their private and family life, their home and their correspondence.

hurray! it’s national slacker day. i could do with more initiatives like this!

i know bashing microsoft is easy but i still can’t think how they managed to put together a gallery of css examples this bad. not even in 1996. not even with the caveat that they are designed for ie 3.01 on win95. the let’s show off comic sans page looks awful, i haven’t got comic sans but i reckon it would look even worse if i did. i feel ill. [postscript: actually it looks ok with the right font. but they've still missed the whole concept of graceful degradation. don't do drop shadows with css please.]

a few really clever css only layouts are available for you to ‘borrow’ at the layout reservoir. horizontal centering has been eluding me since i started trying to do everything css style. i found the answer here.

they’re protecting the sea life off the delaware coast by building up the reef. they’re doing it by dumping used new york city subway cars into the water for the blue mussels and black sea bass to colonise.

the uk has run out of space in its current vehicle licensing scheme. this is because the powers that be speeded up the issue of new prefix letters a couple of years ago because they wanted to bring in a new scheme. we’re just coming to the end of the Y’s and since they don’t do a Z prefix we’re getting a new registration format.

in the new scheme it’s the numbers that indicate the age of the vehicle. all plates issued from this september until next march will be ‘51′, and next march they will flip to using ‘02′. this gives them enough numbers to keep this registration format until march 2050.

currently the last two letters of a registration can tell you where the vehicle was first registered but it’s only people with not enough to do with their memory banks who can match these suffixes up with places. the new scheme is a bit more transparent. for example, all plates starting with N originate in the north east with A-O coming from the newcastle area and P-Y coming from the stockton area. i find it interesting that DL through to DY have all been assigned to the shrewsbury area as in the soon to be defunct scheme shropshire has just four suffixes.