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You've arrived at the homepage of Stephen Stewart. The archive is available here for those who want it. This site is happily hosted by Dreamhost. Click for more?

Recent Comments

• Cybez on One's too many an' a hundred's not enough
• Nelly on One's too many an' a hundred's not enough
• adele on And the sky was made black with unescaped entities
• adele on And the sky was made black with unescaped entities
• sharon on Fifteens
• Nelly on Mother is it just a waste of time?
• Stephen on Mother is it just a waste of time?

links to other people's sites

Recommended Viewing

• 300†
  Does exactly what it says on the (comic book) tin. Loved it.
• Little Miss Sunshine†
  Very funny, disturbing (the beauty pageant) and completely messed up -- but in a good way.
• Laputa: Castle in the Sky†
  Story great, characterization a little on the weak side -- though the big robots are cool.
• Porco Rosso†
  Stylish, funny, exciting.
• Grave of the Fireflies†
  Very sad, which was a little unexpected since I didn't know much about it before watching it. Can be a little too slow in places though, otherwise it's very good.
• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind†
  The story can get a little dense at times what with the various factions, but still really enjoyable, inventive and engaging.
• X-Men: The Last Stand†
  Opportunity, talent, money - all blown. Over 3 films X-Men has hinted of something great that could have been, this last one says "No, sorry - not going to happen". Bah.

flickr.com

2003 access stats (analog)

   month: #reqs: #pages: 
--------: -----: ------: 
Jan 2003: 11585:   2586: 
Feb 2003:  7260:   2549: 
Mar 2003: 12654:   4679: 
Apr 2003: 20212:   5320: 
May 2003: 23423:   5698: 
Jun 2003: 23670:   5838: 
Jul 2003: 22787:   4488: 
Aug 2003: 36986:   6815: 
Sep 2003: 42248:   7036: 
Oct 2003: 44229:   7640: 
Nov 2003: 40258:   6852: 
Dec 2003: 37607:  12822: 

The spike in December is largely down to the iloveNI wiki, which appears to be quite popular. Hopefully we'll turn it into something pretty special in the New Year, I have the perfect editors in Andy J and StrayToaster.

Top 3 searches (by far) were: red hand of ulster, elbow independent woman and Belfast Telegraph Jobfinder Site (apologies to the Belfast Telegraph for such a loud complaint about how your site is so broken), with 'red hand of ulster' doing about twice the business of it's nearest neighbour.

The browser war is won by Microsoft Explorer, though more in a death-by-a-thousand-cuts sort of way, Firebird is the browser of choice for regular readers.

Peak viewing times are 1pm, 5pm and 11pm, and in the entire year green.carisenda.com used 1GB of bandwidth, well within my allotted 25GB. HTTP Status Codes 200 and 304 are de rigeur, http servers have been up for 99.97% of 2003 (2.4 hours of downtime).

iTunes has only been running for a month or so, but it says... I have terrible taste in music, the statistics of which should not be published here.

0 CommentsDecember 31, 2003

31st December, 2003

New Year's Eve, not my favourite night of the year. It's always such an anti-climax, or worse. This time last year I was preparing to go off to Argentina (most likely), this year I'm not going anywhere but who knows what the future holds? Live each day as it comes to you I say.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never thought upon,
The flames of love extinguished,
And freely past and gone?
Is thy kind heart now grown so cold
In that loving breast of thine,
That thou canst never once reflect
On old-lang-syne?

-- Sir Robert Ayton (1570-1638)

3 CommentsDecember 31, 2003

Bam

"The death toll from Friday's earthquake in the Iranian city of Bam could rise to 50,000, national and regional officials said on Tuesday."
BBCi NEWS

Kinda puts your nut allergy into perspective.

0 CommentsDecember 30, 2003

Gale

The Lifeboat cannon has just gone off, you can hear it pretty clearly for miles around Donaghadee. It's a wet, cold stormy night and somebody somewhere is in a spot of difficulty...

0 CommentsDecember 28, 2003

Traditional Christmas Fayre

...oh baby, you're the only thing in this whole world that's pure
and good and right
and wherever you are and wherever you go
there's always gonna be some light
but I gotta get out
I gotta break it out now
before the final crack of dawn
so we gotta make the most of our one night together
when it's over you know
we'll both be so alone...

but when the day is done
and the sun goes down
and moonlight's shining through
then like a sinner before the gates of heaven
I'll come crawling on back to you...

3 CommentsDecember 24, 2003

I Love Northern Ireland Wiki

Visit the iloveNI wiki and say what you love or even just like (for not all are so free with their passion) about the place. Myself and a couple of others have already started on some stuff.

3 CommentsDecember 19, 2003

darkness on the edge of town

Everybody's got a secret, sonny;
Something that they just can't face.
Some folks spend their whole lives trying to keep it,
They carry it with them every step that they take
'Til someday they just cut it loose,
Cut it loose or let it drag 'em down
Where no one asks any questions,
Or looks too long in your face -
In the darkness on the edge of town.

0 CommentsDecember 18, 2003

ADSL Donaghadee III

I have ADSL. Yes me. It's so fast I don't hardly know what to do with myself. And it's on all the time, and I can use my phone line for voice calls too. The things they can do these days, why when I were a lad...

I put up a couple of Bruce Springstein songs on blue, Land Of Hope And Dreams was playing on my iTunes and I thought it should go up.

Tomorrow is lunch with StryToast and Carrie day. I expect to say something stupid as per usual. Ah well. I'll also go see The Return of the King hopefully, and maybe finish off the Christmas shopping.

0 CommentsDecember 17, 2003

The West Wing

The West Wing rules. That is all.

3 CommentsDecember 16, 2003

Black Star Site Ranking

Alexa, who are owned by Amazon (this may, or may not be relevant) have an interesting screen shot of the BlackStar site. If it's all back to normal by the time you see this you can ask me for a screen shot.

I had heard the rumours, didn't believe them of course, but now...

0 CommentsDecember 15, 2003

Attention Businesses of Northern Ireland!!!

It appears you have been tricked into believing JavaScript is a good thing, that popups windows are acceptable and that Microsoft's Interner Explorer is the only viable browsing software. Pretty images tacked onto an HTML set that wouldn't light fires in 1996 are key features of this scam.

Web sites are like race cars, a programmer builds the engine, a designer builds the shell and they both collaborate on the chasis. Leaving the designer out of the chasis design is like locking Adrian Newey out of the McLaren garage.

(I name no names this time, I must be more responsible with my Google rank after last time...)

0 CommentsDecember 15, 2003

Merry Christmas, One And All

5 CommentsDecember 13, 2003

Windows Charmap

In windows, if you want to find a character within a font (you know, these ‰§®ªing things) hit that wee 'Run' icon under the 'Start' button and type charmap. This will/should load the Windows Character Map.

Check the 'Advance View' box, then select 'Group by Unicode Subrange' - what you're looking for will be in one of those groups.

0 CommentsDecember 13, 2003

The value of a box

I've been shaping up to buy a new ADSL modem/router for myself for Christmas. All the online stores I tried bar 2 charge over £20 to ship to Northern Ireland. The 2 exceptions are Dabs (£5) and Amazon†(free).

The reason? Both Amazon and Dabs have packaging designed to survive Royal Mail, thus avoiding over priced couriers.

†Amazon don't actually have the item listed, though it isn't released until January so maybe they will do.

0 CommentsDecember 13, 2003

Movable Type Spam Vulnerability and the poker

"The "Email this to a friend" functionality in the mt-send-entry.cgi script is vulnerable to being used by spammers to send spam messages."
-- Movable Type

So delete mt-send-entry.cgi. None of you use it anyway.

I played Omaha Poker (or something) today. I was a unknown quantity introduced into established, mature population and faired well because of it. The non-scientific term is beginner's luck. I intend to at least once more partake, hopefully in the main Thursday night game. If for no other reason than apparently they serve free pizza at these gigs.

0 CommentsDecember 12, 2003

CSS Hover State Image Preload

Today's piece of invaluable information has been CSS hover state image preloading, which Google found for me on Zeldman. By assigning the hover image to the containing element as well as the hover state the image loads in the first instance, instead of waiting for the hover state.

.menuitem, menuitem a:hover
{
background: url(/img/hoverstate.gif) no-repeat;
}

The element with class .menuitem contains the intial image which is the 'unhovered' state, and sits on top of the .menuitem background hiding it 'til it's needed for hovering.

Also know that Mac IE5.5 doesn't like <br clear="both" />, it wants <br clear="all" /> or nothing.

And this little colour scheme widget is your friend, so it is.

3 CommentsDecember 11, 2003

Little Comment Icons

Using MTEntryIfComments plugin I have created little comment icons which tell you how many comments there are on each post. Here's how, each condition examined in turn 'til a match is found:
<MTEntryIfComments count_equals="0"> "gray icon" </MTEntryIfComments>
<MTEntryIfComments count_greater_than="9"> "red +9 icon" </MTEntryIfComments>
<MTEntryIfComments count_greater_than="0"> "<MTEntryCommentCount>_red icon" </MTEntryIfComments>

I hope this makes sense!

Never try a smart answer when a simple one will do - <$MTEntryCommentCount$>.gif

12 CommentsDecember 10, 2003

IFA: Front Page Mock

Here's a mock up of my unofficial IFA design. Too you it won't look as good as it could because it's not finished, not a complete page. In my head though it looks better. I don't like finishing mocks completely, I like to take ideas far enough to see if they'll work and then leave it. If I finish mock designs right up then it's very boring to do the actual final thing. This all makes sense in my head, but you may be looking at me as if I just sprouted a puffin from my ear.

The image of Billy Hamilton is about the only image I could find big enough, a more modern image would be better I think. Any further suggestions welcome.

3 CommentsDecember 9, 2003

IFA: Player Details

I'm trying to build this IFA page in Movable Type as much as possible, that's the cheapest and easiest option I feel. However I can't see MT doing player details very well, I'd like to try for something that provides depth of detail, biographical data obviously but then information like position, number, intl. appearances, goals, assists, disciplinary record with the same for domestic club appearances, domestic club history and so on.

It would be nice to have this as a plugin to MT, categorised by squad, but any method would do as I will probably build the front page from templates created by MT (each blog creates a .inc file as it's main index, or as well as it's main index, at anyrate MT doesn't actually build the front page itself it builds the components of the front page).

If anyone would like to do something like this in what little free time they have available, that'd be most excellent. And if my description above needs fleshed out (which I imagine it does) post a comment, ask questions, mock me mercilessly...

2 CommentsDecember 7, 2003

Pink and The Irish FA Website

My HTML colour is pink. Clearly the thing is broke. Anyone caught sniggering will get a fat lip and their lunch money stolen.

I have nothing to work on for the next few days so I thought I'd take a punt at doing a redesign for the Irish FA, hopefully they won't be too insulted but their website logos are a bit tatty and it is in Frames (boo!) - a sprucing up wouldn't hurt. They don't have to accept my offering anyway, it's just something for me to do. If anyone has a suggestion post it here. Here are some comparisons: The English FA, The Welsh FA, The Scottish FA and The Football Association of Ireland.

2 CommentsDecember 6, 2003

Belshaw's Quarry

One of my old lecturers at QUB has a web site with a virtual tour of Belshaw's Quarry (it's in power point though). I think I went for field trips to Belshaw's about 5 times or something, twice while at Regent and 3 times while at Queens. It always rained, in fact I think it rained on every field trip I ever went on, except Cyprus, it didn't rain there. At Horn Head the rain was coming at us horizontally, we were taking notes on notebooks that had long since turned to mush. And Tristan cursing something or other, that happened alot too.

0 CommentsDecember 4, 2003

Shameless Wishlist Plug

Well Christmas is nearly here and I know you want to buy me something, so here it is, my Amazon Wishlist. It's not quite the monster that is MWK's but a Dyson is of more practical use to me than a volume of mathematical journals.

0 CommentsDecember 4, 2003

Déjà Vu

I liked the previous design less than I liked the one before that, so here we are again with another try. Yes, that is a bag of cookies you can see on the left, artfully rendered in monochrome.
Karen has a new look to her blog, it's not bad I suppose. I wonder what effect a hurricane in Ohio has on a butterfly in Okinawa? Mind boggling.
Winter is here and I have bought me a new pair of gloves for cycling, Lobster Gloves! Freaky. And my roubaix knee warmers are super, though I get laughed at by everyone I know for wearing them. Heathens.

Rattlesnakes, gotta get me a gun on account of those rattlesnakes.

3 CommentsDecember 4, 2003