Simon Toon

This is my second blog post for Salmon... "Ghost users" driving up traffic using Facebook mobile ads This was an interesting by-product of a change that Facebook made on their end...

Petition The premise seems to be that Berko needs more parking spaces, and that the traffic infrastructure is able to accommodate extra traffic. However, according to the council's own report , our largest car park only gets 73% full, and the Lower Kings Road already gets 93% congested at the weekday evening peak - so the traffic congestion problem is already worse than the car park utilisation, and they predict the traffic queues on Lower Kings Road will increase by about 30%. If you want to know the detail... Let's start with that first part: that Berko needs more parking spaces. Looking at the council's own Transport Assessment that they have submitted to support this planning application, it says that the railway car park gets only 73% full at its busiest hour in the week. So there are already a significant number of free spaces in Berko just a few minutes walk from the centre. And as for the Lower Kings Road car park, the report tells us this can get up to 97% ...

My first blog post on the Salmon website: Facebook blackout - It's not always due to peaks in traffic I hope you find it interesting...

My new favourite website is http://www.joeje.co.uk - for all your online betting needs! Not really, just a joke.

Well, I've got CheckPoint VPN-1 SecureClient for Mac OS X Lion 10.7 and it's working just fine. I find it faintly ridiculous that they are restricting access to the download so if anyone is without and desperately wants it, talk to me.

User was having problems printing from Microsoft Word X on her Mac (latest Snow Leopard). Printing to PDF produced blank PDFs. Printing to the printer resulting in blank pieces of paper. Yet creating a new test document from scratch (just typed a few words into the page) was able to produce a valid PDF. A quick review of the Console log showed the following: 05/03/2011 21:51:07 [0x0-0x17017].com.microsoft.Word[176] WARNING: Font "Arial" with style 1 can't be handled by the imaging system. This document can't be drawn/printed with this font. Turns out there were two copies of Arial on her Mac: one in the central Library folder and one in her personal Library folder. I removed the copy from her personal Library folder, restarted Word, and all was then working fine.

I wanted a secure way to access and edit text notes on my iOS devices (iPhone and iPad) and also on my 'desktop' devices (Macs and Windows), with the notes synchronised across all of those devices, so that any amendments on one device would show up swiftly on all of the others. I was already using the excellent Dropbox in conjunction with PlainText (on my iOS devices), TextWrangler (Mac), and WordPad (Windows) to work with clear text. Using these tools I can read or edit these text files on any of these devices. I also use Dropbox to sync other document types, including Office/iWork files, but only read access on the iOS devices (although I know there are Dropbox-enabled 'Office' apps available) — but as long as I could edit my text files from my iPhone, the Office files could wait until I got back to my Mac. This setup was so useful to me that I started wanting to put sensitive information in there. Work stuff: Unix commands, reports, IP addresses, usernames, even pa...

I've been using my Apple Magic Mouse this evening and it does not disappoint, though I feel now like the whole Mac OS needs to be updated to take advantage of the subtleties of the mouse/large trackpads on modern MacBooks. (I'm also hoping for an update to the MacBook trackpad software to incorporate the marvellous momentum scrolling feature from the iPhone and Magic Mouse.) The additional quality now endowed on these touch interfaces is great and enhances the efficiency of interacting with the existing O/S's (both iPhone and Mac OS X), but I feel there are further enhancements to be made and I'm sure Apple have these in mind. Snow Leopard gets us ready for something radical to come. Coverflow makes much more sense with Magic Mouse, and is probably indicative of the future of all file navigation. - Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Today, for the first time in my life, I had my daughter open the front door to let me into the house.

I can't believe the BBC are scapegoating the bankers . Looks like the UK Government is trying to pull the wool over everyone's eyes by making it seem like the fault of the greedy bankers and their excessive profiteering and bonus-awards, taking advantage of the public outrage at the bankers being awarded such large bonuses using tax-payer bail-out money. Okay, so the bankers are not going to be popular folk heroes, but the Government shouldn't be allowed to make it look like it's not actually the Government's fault. It is the Government's fault . Face it, bankers are employed by corporations to make as much profit as possible in the next reporting period (a year, a quarter, whatever). They are not incentivised to look after the long term interests of the bank that employs them, or the nation as a whole. So of course they behaved in the way that they did. Unless they did something illegal then there is nothing for them to apologise for! It's like blaming the ...

Emilia doing some more walking on 27-Sep-2008

Later that same day, we captured this footage of Emilia walking unaided, and managing more than just 2 steps!

Well, she only really has the confidence to walk for more than one step if she is holding onto someone with at least one hand.

If you haven't checked it out yet, please go on over to http://nippernews.co.uk/ and have a look at the new blog my wife is doing on there. There's a iPhone-optimised page too, which you can see here: Nipper News . Some of the most important stuff she's posting on there is about safety issues , and of course some great bargains for parents , whether you have a baby or teenagers or something in-between. And you can subscribe to it as an email newsletter, too!

I've been working on a web page formatted for iPhone, and in this context the width of the page and the content on the page, is very important. First of all you don't want the page to be too wide, because then the text might be too small to read. But you also want the entire page to fit within the width of the screen, because no-one wants to have to scroll from side to side when reading lines of text. So, of course, you can use a table and specify the width of cells and table, but this actually sets the minimum width - if the content is wider than the specified width, then the cell or table will expand to suit. In my case it is a long string of continuous text without spaces in, specifically a long URL. I'm sure the wiser ones of you reading this will already be thinking CSS. Indeed, it gave me the answer. Specifically, CSS version 3, which is not supported on all browsers. Luckily iPhone's Safari browser is one of the few browsers that does support CSS3. The answer cam...

So, now that that's working , the next question is what is the minimum? Can you get away with just having the first 5 words in your posting being in bold, or do you really need to have a mixture of italics in there too? This one just has the first 5 words in bold. We will see...

Well, something seems to have inserted unintended carriage-returns into my last post, so that proves, I guess, something . Maybe if I include some italics in this post, and some bold , then the richness of this text will prevail...?

So, that is good news. Sending a rich text email from gMail does not prompt those spurious carriage-returns to be added. So, what about Apple's Mail program on the Mac? I have just set up my gMail account on my Mac's Mail program, just so I can test this, and the email I am writing is rich text, in the sense that if I go to the Format menu at the top of the screen it gives me the option to "Make Plain Text" -- which implies that it must already be in rich text form. But so far I have not included any italics or bold or any other formatting, so maybe it will make an executive decision when I hit 'Send' and will unilaterally send it in plain text form only...

Well, there we are, the plain text email from gMail seems to have put in those unwanted carriage-returns. Annoying. Okay, well this time I am going to try with a Rich Text email within gMail. This sentence should be in italics. All the text so far is all on one line, so we'll see what happens this time...

What is it with spurious carriage-returns, or line-feeds, or whatever is the correct name for them? First we had some problems at work because some Javascript Include files were being exported from our repository on a Windows PC and therefore included Windows-friendly line-feed characters at the end of every line, and therefore made the file itself slightly larger than it was in Unix format, and this then caused the Javascript compilation limit to be reached, breaking the page. Not good. Just goes to show another reason why Unix is better than Windows. And then with this email posting to Blogger shenanigans! It seems that somehow in the email to blog post process, some additional line-feeds or carriage-returns appear. Why is that? Anyway, this is a plain text email written in gMail. I wonder whether it will be affected...