When I was a student I took a lot of photographs, and I really do mean a lot. I have boxes overflowing with photos from my university days.

Today I got two films developed. I took some photos at the Horniman Museum last week - I finished one film and used most of another which I then finished in West Norwood Cemetery yesterday. Anyway, the photos at the start of the first film were from Ben and Mojo’s wedding, which was June 2003. I’m not sure my undergraduate self would ever believe that the day would come when I’d have the same film in my camera for fifteen months.

Anyway, with luck I’ll get some of the photos scanned and post the best shortly. But hey, it may take me until next year…

Everyone should read the following about the British National Party.

Oh yes, I’m working for the government. Making the web site of one of the main government departments accessible. Well, more accessible than it is at present. Full accessibility will wait until a new site is launched sometime next year.

Yesterday someone came in to say hello and saw a sketch of many nested rectangles I’d made on paper.

“Is that our template?”

“That’s part of your template.”

Then I showed him what I’d been working on - Firefox with the Web Developer extension and the “Outline Table Cells” option enabled. In one tab I had a page from the live site and in another tab I had a copy of the same page that I had been working one. One was almost totally red the other wasn’t.

The brief is accessibility, and the nested tables, although excessive, did linearise acceptably and were mostly sized with percentages. So why did I bother? Accessibility it not just about users with disabilities. It’s about users who, for any reason, have problems accessing the site. Any user on dialup will see the difference - the page has gone from 51kb to 36kb already and I’m sure that I’ll be making further reductions.

And there’s more: the div version looks better (both tidier and truer to the design) in Netscape 4.x than the table version did. Backwards compatability by using more modern code.

Your tax money = my beer money + a faster, more compatible, more accessible web site.

I don’t know whether I should be telling you this. These are only my initial thoughts, more evidence may be forthcoming.

Hixie (towards the end of the post) went to see I, Robot and is largely of the same opinion as me that this isn’t the travesty against Asimov that some people would like to make it.

But then he notes that the means by which the ultimate villain causes the robots to act as they do has a real world counterpart in Windows Update.

Meanwhile…

Eric Meyer reports on a nasty bug whereby some CSS can crash IE. He wonders why this bug has only come to light in recent weeks when the CSS in question has been in use on his site for some months. Comments on a later post point to the culprit possibly being a recent patch (and we thought that right now IE patches were only concerned with plugging security holes.) How would most people have gotten said patch? Oh.

Is it a coincidence that these two experts post in the same week?

(Um, posting about things that are bad with Windows/Internet Explorer? Better include most of the Internet in the conspiracy then.)

Maybe there’s something going on in the depths of Microsoft; something out of the ordinary. Have the programmers there accidentally created an AI that is planning to take over the world? Do a small number of learned souls know the truth but are too terrified to tell the world except via cryptic hints?

A friend, Justin Frishberg, is in Athens as part of the GB wheelchair rugby at the Paralympics. They got off to a good start yesterday by beating Belgium and today they beat Canada (who are apparantly a bit good) in extra time.

Whoops. I wanted the celebratory colour scheme to return for Jour de la Révolution. But I screwed up and put the 20th into my code instead of the 21st. So you’ll get an extra day of the lovely red scheme.

As I pointed out in a comment over on the Virtual Stoa, the 21st is only the leap day under the mathematical calendar. Under the astronomical one the next Jour de la Révolution will be September 22nd 2006.

People interested in the astronomical version of the calendar can use the converter at Din Timelines. For the mathematical version there is, of course, my converter.

Sunday 19th is Talk Like A Pirate Day. Arrrr! I’ll probably celebrate by playing Puzzle Pirates - that charming chap on the left is Etienne. Say “Ahoy” to him if you meet him on the Midnight Ocean.

And Tuesday 21st is Jour de la Révolution, the leap day of the French Revolutionary Calendar and celebrations should be held.

Had a scare. Thought that Word Press had totally screwed up my password. But, of course, this had happened to other people and the solution was documented.

It’s just turned midnight, so it’s my birthday. Happy Birthday to me.

This is a fine opportunity to play with an alternative colour scheme for the site, with luck the first of serveral. My colour sense isn’t brilliant so I expect that this may take some time to perfect.

Hmm, colour scheme isn’t showing up. Ah, it’s ‘cos I’ve written the date detection script in GMT and we’re still on BST.

[Update] I see that I screwed up and left the page background white, making the page even uglier and harder to use for users with images turned off. Sorry. Fixed now.

So Saturday went according to predictions. There was a gas leak at Birmingham New Street which led to predicatable chaos. We arrived at Chester an hour and a half late, but still in time for the wedding (despite the efforts of our taxi driver who had to stop to ask for directions twice).