www.nickhodge.com

How would you answer this question?

Which of these terms is not used to describe the speed of data trans­mis­sion between computers?

1. Baud rate
2. Cycles per second
3. Bits per second
4. Bytes per second

Inter­net Explorer 8 beta 2 has been released. The night before a big PR thing in Mel­bourne (Premier of Vic­toria, etc) and I decided to install it on my demo laptop. Brave, yet safe move.

What about this website?

Not so good. Some­thing is broken some­where. In the week before TechEd 2008 I don’t have time to com­pletely dia­gnose and fix the word­press tem­plate. So, sort of like weld­ing it together for a few weeks until things die down — it is time for a simple fix.

How can you tell? See the “broken doc­u­ment” icon on the right of the URL: this indic­ates that the site has been designed for older browsers.

 

There are two poten­tial fixes. One is to click on the broken icon, and Inter­net Explorer will revert to Inter­net Explorer 7 mode.

A smarter fix for this web site is a one-line change to my tem­plate (in my case, header.php for this template)

<meta http-equiv=“X-UA-Compatible” con­tent=“IE=EmulateIE7” />

 

 

Refresh­ing the site, and magic­ally it renders cor­rectly, and there is no “broken” doc­u­ment icon.

Some­time in 1986/7 I went to a doc­tor for what I found out was a sebaceous cyst on my left shoulder blade. Not going into detail, but I was left with a per­man­ent reminder of this cyst. That is, the bulk of the scar­ring remained.

Yes­ter­day, after an inflam­ma­tion and a 6 week battle of with anti-biotics, I could finally get the beastie removed. Under the care­ful assist­ance of Avril, I had the cyst pro­fes­sion­ally removed. The size of a grape, the sur­gical excision took 45 minutes under local. Now I have a 4cm scar with 5 stitches. Strangely, apart from the pain of a deep skin wound; my body seems to be relieved that the nas­ti­ness has gone.

The left hand side of my body is a war zone. Scars, infec­tions, palsies. LOL

Update 28^th August 2008: Stitches removed. No nas­ties found in the biopsy.

Pop over to http://www.trypython.org/ and Python away.

Using Iron­Py­thon and the Sil­ver­light 2.0 plu­gin, being CloudPy­thonic has never been so easy.

This Week on C9: ASP.NET Maps, Apache, Sphere, War­craft, and more

Dan Fernan­dez invited me to the super-secret build­ing 20 monaco stu­dios for the weekly show “This Week on Chan­nel 9”

LOLCATS, Angus­lo­gan and other top­ics of dis­cus­sion. Fueled thanks to copi­ous amounts of caf­feine and some ran­dom birth­day cake.

Big shout out thanks to Dan for let­ting me loose in his patch.

If you are a Pro­fes­sional Developer: you will want to attend PDC2008.

Yes, even if you are a web developer.

A day after the Apache Found­a­tion OSCON announce­ment, Sam Ramji presen­ted to us Microsoft-ees in Seattle.

PHP, ADONET etc. The world is a dif­fer­ent place. All a part of Microsoft real­iz­ing that Open source is not going to go away, and the means of engage­ment is work­ing with the com­munity: not against it.

Phew.

I’ve landed at Microsoft at the cor­rect time.

Best in the world: Team SOAK from Vic­toria, Aus­tralia have won the world­wide Ima­gine Cup 2008.

SOAK stands for “Smart Oper­a­tional Agri­cul­tural toolKit”. I saw this demon­strated in the pre­lim­in­ary finals prior to ReMIX finals for the Aus­tralian Ima­gine Cup con­tenders. As a farmer’s son, I instantly saw the applic­a­tion. Meas­ur­ing water, includ­ing rain­fall, is a con­stant man­age­ment pro­cess. From memory, the farm I grew up on had daily rain­fall meas­ure­ment from 1972.

The enthu­si­asm of the team, the way they col­lab­or­ated across 4 dif­fer­ent uni­ver­sit­ies and the applic­a­tion of their inven­tion all con­trib­uted to their well deserved award.