Well since I tend to use Firefox here at work I figured I could install IE7 without too much risk. And I must say it’s actually quite good.

Initial impressions

The most obvious feature is thye really minimalist chrome. The back and forward buttons are a little smaller and now to the left of the address bar; refresh and stop are to the right and then underneath that are tabs. By default there is no application menu (File, Edit, View etc). which strikes me as odd. But to the right of the tabs are other buttons to do common things that you’d normally use the menu for. Speaking of opening new tabs, there is a special thin blank tab to the right of the others that you click to open a new one.

Conditional tags

IE has a special feature called conditional tags that let you specif markup just for IE that other browsers ignore. This doesn’t seem to work in IE7. Unfortuantely this means a 1px rendering error is present on my blog. The irony being I’m assuming it’s been taken out because they think they don’t need it anymore…

Zooming

The zoom feature is snazzy and most of all, actually works. It scales everything properly and still renders text as vectors. Even better is that the tab preview (thumbnails of all the tabs) just use zoomed out versions of the page. This means the thumbnails are completely live. Well almost. It seems you get snapshots of plugins (although they work fine when viewing a normal zoomed page, not the overview thingy).

It also works with the dev bar add on I installed.

Tabbed browsing

New to IE and probably the most requested feature (beyond standards compliance :P). And it works. There are some subtle differences between it and Firefox which will take a little geting used to. For example IE puts the cross to close a tab on the tab itself instead of on the right. And newly opened tab appears immediately to the right of the currently opened one instead of at the end of the list.

Acid2

The acid test was invented to test a web browsers CSS standards compliance. Acid2 is it’s sequel. Well IE7 fails the Acid2 test miserably. I mean it’s truly awful. In Firefox and Opera you can at lest tell what you’re supposed to be looking at.

Computers work in powers of two. This is because everything in a computer (well possibly not quite everything) is stored as 1s and 0s. As a result, any large numbers used in computers were generally expressed as powers of 2, the most notable is 210 = 1,024. This was close to 1,000 so it gained the metric prefix for 1000, kilo. This allowed people to think of 1 kilobyte as “about 1000 bytes” - The difference was only 2.4% Of course as the prefixes got bigger, the differences got bigger. 1 megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes, off by 4.9%. Go all the way to a terabyte and you’re off by almost 10%.

10% is noticeable. The place you’ll notice is when you buy a hard drive. Hard drive manufacturers advertising using true metric prefixes (so 1 megabyte is 1,000,000 bytes). Windows on the other hand still reports in binary meaning the number on the box is smaller than the number you get. In fact Iomega used to put a warning saying so on their Zip drives: “1 megabyte = 1,000,000 bytes. The amount reported by your operating system may differ”.

A solution was found, although it has own problems. Amendment 2 to IEC 60027-2 was published that standardised the metric prefixes to have whole metric meanings when referring to computer data. The binary versions would be given new names with “bi” in the middle for “binary”.

This meant 1024 bytes would become a kibibyte - kilo binary byte. Well my first reaction is they sound awful. There is another problem that 1024 bits is a kibibit - kilo binary bit. This is ridiculous since a bit is binary digit (kilo binary binary digit?). Aesthetics aside they would solve the problems and I think would be a good thing for the average consumer since k not meaning 1000 is just confusing. Except of course their use is wildly inconsistent - so much so to render the exercise pointless.

Windows doesn’t not use the new notation for binary prefixes, memory manufacturers (RAM) don’t use it. Storage manufacturers use the new notation for metric prefixes. Random people on the internet occasionally use the new notation for binary but most don’t.

There are other issues with the system overall that add to the confusion. Metric prefixes are in lower cases for small magnitudes and capitals for large magnitudes. Except for k* which has mysteriously stayed lowercase. You should use kg, not Kg for kilogram for instance. Except they’ve decided the symbol for kibibyte should be KiB.

And then there are floppy disks. How much data can a floppy disk hold? 1.44Mb of course. But what kind of megabytes? If you said a binary one thinking that they’re old, you’d be wrong. If you said a metric one thinking they want to overquote their size, you’d also mysteriously be wrong. The truth is the 1.44Mb on a floppy disk is to prefixes what “television” is to classicists.** The actual capacity of a HD floppy is 1,474,560 bytes. Using “official” notation this is 1.474560 MB or 1.40625 MiB. So where did they get 1.44 from? Well 1,474,560 is actually equal to 1440 KiB (1,440 old kilobytes). In case that confuses you too much that means they used both style of prefixes, at once.** It almost makes sense. You could use the odd notation of 1.44 kKiB (1.44 * 1000 * 1024 bytes) but they just figured that two ks make an M. Well they do, but a k and a Ki don’t.

* Okay, technically hecto (h) and deca (da) are also in lower case but don’t think of using them in computers. daB = 8 bytes? hB = 128 bytes?

** A classicist is someone who studies “the classics”. That would be ancient Greece and Rome (and therefore ancient Greek and Latin). Television is made of two words, “tele” meaning “far” and “visus” meaning “vision”. The problem is that “tele” is Greek and “visus” is Latin. Incidentally, a pure Greek for “far seeing” could be “telescope” and “ultravision” is fairly close for Latin.

Since my new computer is working again (and is quite a lot better now), I figured I’d start playing Civilization IV again. I also decided to give CivFanatics a quick browse to see if there were any cool mods.

The one that caught my eye is called Regiments. It changes the graphics (and the graphics only) to include more people (so you’re infantry for example consists of 11 people) as well as rescaling them appropriately. Since it only changes graphics you don’t risk starting an unbalanced game and you should even be able to load an existing game without a problem.

So if you have Civ IV, go get it now :P

To counteract the fact that I’m using Kubrick, the single most common Wordpress theme (by virtue of being the default) I’ve started to develop different themes for different categories. The first I’ve implemented is PHP which now has a different colour scheme and a different header image.

Lloyd’s TSB are current offering “over 150 more days of Interest”. The will you pay you interest from the day money goes in until the day it goes out. Since most banks don’t do this sounds like a good deal, but a lot people won’t gain from this.

It only applies to current accounts you see. The Lloyd’s TSB Classic current account offers 0.1% AER. If you pay in more than £1000 a month you can get the Classic Plus current account which offers 4% AER but that requires you to use online banking. And even then that rate is only on balances up to £5,000 (back to 0.1% after that). If you get an ISA or high interest savings account with an AER of 4%, 4 days interest is more than 150 days interest at 0.1%.

Bottom line, don’t change to Lloyd’s TSB for this reason alone. PS - Banking isn’t exactly common on this blog but I walk past the damn advert every day.

I should have a category for “odd things I’ve found out” perhaps.

To all you non=British people, this post may make little sense.

When is Boxing Day? The popular answer is December 26th. Which is usually true. What most people don’t realise is that Boxing Day is a mobile holiday. Technically it occurs on the first weekday after Christmas Day. Boxing Day could conceivably fall on December 27th or 28th then.

It gets better though. If a bank holiday falls on a non-working day (another holiday or a weekend) the next day becomes a bank holiday. This is why most people don’t realise Boxing Day moves, they think it’s just the bank holiday status that moves. But it also leads to a peculiar situation. If Christmas is on a Saturday or Sunday, the Monday afterwards is Boxing Day and therefore a bank holiday. The Tuesday is then also a bank holiday because of the lost holiday of Christmas Day - after Boxing Day. How strange.

Sky offers movies and sport content to subscribers with a service they call Sky by Broadband (clever name). The downloaded content is DRMed and you can only keep it for 28 days but it’s good quality. The interesting thing is it uses a private peer-to-peer to distribute it.

It’s a smart move by Sky since it saves them lots of bandwidth. I was worried about whether TalkTalk would limit Sky by Broadband. It all depends on their reasons. If they truly have bandwidth problems then they should since it’s quite a large consistent bandwidth hog (since even after downloading it can continue uploading). If they actually just want to limit illegal behaviour with P2P file sharing then they’ll leave it alone since it’s legit.

Well yesterday I left my computer on all day (I wanted to try Orb from work). I didn’t realise that closing the Sky program didn’t actually stop it downloading. When I came home all the movies had downloaded (my bandwidth usage was up to 5 gigabytes for the day). Not only that but my download speed had stayed consistently at about 250 kb/s. Since my router is reporting my connection as 2.2Mbits/s that’s almost full speed. In the middle of the day.

So it seems TalkTalk don’t (yet) limit Sky by Broadband traffic. Of course it would be easy to reach their 40GB a month limit doing that every day…

Windows Live is the name for the new set of technologies software and computery goodness Microsoft is developing.

A lot of the components aren’t especially related, it’s just a brand name of sorts. Part of it is Windows Live Mail, designed to ultimately replace Hotmail. As of this morning, it doesn’t work on Firefox. You are greeted with the normal Hotmail interface and a message saying due to various problems they’ve rolled back to a previous version meaning Firefox users have to use Hotmail Classic. Well it is beta (and they’ve said it’s beta instead of releasing it and then finding these problems) so I’ll let them off.

Following my theme of silliness, 2L is a programming language with only two operators. And since these operators act on a virtual data store without accepting any operands, it only allows three characters (the two operators and space).

You could argue it has five operators since the first one is overloaded four times…

Ever heard of Internationalised Domain Names? They allow you to register domains with non-Latin characters (i.e. Unicode). They actually do a bit of cheating but I’ll let you find that out. In the meantime check out these interesting addresses showing that just using Chinese or Arabic characters is not the limit IDNs.

• http://www.®.com/
• http://www.©.com/
• http://www.€.net/
• http://www.☎.com/
• http://www.♬♬.com/

Quick warning, they don’t work in IE without a plugin and to see them in their true glory you need Opera…

browsers, Unicode, Punycode