You should check out the Games Breaking out amusements link to the right (thank you to FHM for the best laugh I've had for months (plus I felt really smug that it happened to them)).

I know I said that there would be an update to the site recently but I haven't had the time to work on it at all. I've already written and tested the Pingback code so it will be good to have that (unless it gets spammed which i doubt seeing as this site doesn't show up on anyones radar). Posts will have much friendlier urls (in the form of /archive/{year}/{month}/{day}/{post-name}/) which was easier to implement than I thought although I'm already thinking of a different way of doing it. Pretty much all that's left to do is the RSS code which shouldn't take long. I recently noticed that the site doesn't render correctly in IE5.5 which I intend to fix with the new release as well as modifying the CSS to make the site easier to read and look a bit better.

After all that it will be time to finish off my webPod which has been stagnant for the past few months. Then it will be onto my ambitious SVG rendering project. It's a big thing to do and I doubt that the first version will be all that great but I'm hoping to learn from it especially from the planning/design aspect.

The idea is that images can be used on a site that are SVG but are converted into a PNG file (or another image type) so that any browser can view them. The demand for this kind of thing will hardly be huge but I imagine it just being a handy wee tool.

For example if you have a menu bar on your site that has a gradient you would want to control that via CSS so you would do your usual background: red url(/images/gradient.png) repeat-y; kind of thing to use your red/black gradient. But what if you could do: background: red url(/my-svg/gradient.svg?start=red&end=black) repeat-y;. The idea being that an ASP.NET HttpHandler interface would intercept any SVG file under "/my-svg/" and create an image out of it using the file and the querystring parameters. That's the easy part. Writing the rendering engine is going to be difficult if not impossible for a programmer like me.

Another example might be that you have <input type="image"/> elements that submit a form updating the image can be time consuming. What if you just wanted to change the text? Why don't you point the image to an SVG file? <input type="image" src="/my-svg/submit-button.svg" /> would work exactly as above. Easy to update and fast if the generated image is cached on the server.

Anyways that's just an idea and haven't even started coding yet although I'm thinking a lot about it and the design. The biggest challenge will be to have it render quickly enough. I'm not sure how it could work multi-threaded because everything has to be rendered in order one at a time. Hmm anyways enough of that. Now that I've mentioned it there will be mroe incentive to get it working.

Oh and if you have PSP you should get Colin Mcrae Rally 05. I'm loving it. And here I was beginning to think the PSP was a waste of money. I'm getting into it.

As you can tell by the title I've gone and double booked myself (those of you who know me will be wondering how the hell I could do this). There is a work night out planned on Friday and there is a night out on Saturday up north in Inverness with my old work mates and I've gone and said yes to them both.

The only way to get to both of them is to get a train up north on saturday morning so that I arrive around lunch and then head out for 4-5pm. Not only does all that sound a little hectic it sounds fucking expensive too! Two nights out and a return train ticket in the space of two days.

I agreed to go on the work night out this Friday so I feel I should go to that, not just because I said I'd go but because I should really be socialising with them more.

Version 2.0 of this site will hopefully go up in the next 7 days so don't be surprised if you see a holding page at some point. You shouldn't notice any difference. The major change is just the code behind being re-written in .NET 2.0. There will also be a few CSS bug fixes.

I'm hoping to upload a new Music page too where you can browse through all the music I have on my computer. In brief it will just be an export of my iTunes library which will br transformed by XSL into a smaller file which can then be transformed itself by the website as and when it's needed. That's how it should work anyway.

There will also be some logging with the new version which will be available for all to see if they wish. I'm planning on saving the log file as xml which will be transformed into SVG when a request is made and there will be lovely graphs and such for Firefox users. Whether that will happen or not I do not know.

I was going to write quite a political post earlier but decided not to. Touching on political subjects can never be good and I'm no expert in politics. I'm entitled to my opinion yes but there is expressing your opinion for a reason and there is expressing just for the sake of it. My reason was that I was plain pissed off.