Thought: Cadburys Chocolate

Am I alone in thinking that Cadburys Milk Chocolate tastes better than even the most expensive 99.3456 percent cocoa solid varietys that come from top chocolatiers?

That is all.

TV: The Mighty Boosh - BBC Three

Having recently reviewed a huge US TV show (Lost)
I thought I must address the balance by documenting a UK based TV show that is of equal calibre.

The Mighty Boosh is to be praised not only for being great entertainment, but because the second series was initially aired online via the bbc website.

To describe the show is pretty difficult. It is a comedy that much I can say. But how do you accurately portray in words a show that involves a shaman, his familiar (which happens to be a talking ape) and two guys that should, in any other circumstance, hate each other but somehow have a fantastic chemistry on screen?

Series one followed our main characters Vince Noir (A South London cheeky chappy who looks like he belongs in deepest Shoreditch) and Harold Moon (A moustache donning supposed Poet and Jazz musician) working in a magical Zoo aptly named "Zooniverse".

Along the way there are fights with killer kangaroo’s in boxing rings, a rescue of the previous zoo owner whose love of cheese has made his head turn square and cheesy and even a trip to monkey hell where Harold has been accidentally taken by monkey death.

To watch this programme for the first time, you would be forgiven for thinking its a dope smoking students dream show and nothing more. Persevere however, and you will realise that although the show is sometimes very silly, it is also very well written with some great music and cracking one liners.

I applaud BBC Three for airing this masterpiece. It makes a real change from the usual garbage that airs on the UK's main terrestrial channels.

Although both series have now finished. The show can still be watched on BBC Three on Tuesdays at 12:30am. There is also a DVD of series one and as Xmas is around the corner I am sure series two will not be far away.

Verdict: Jazzy. 9/10

TV: Lost Series Two - Initial thoughts

Lost came to UK shores around 3 months ago. I quickly became totally engrossed in it. So much so that when an American friend informed me that the entire first series had already aired in the US, I begged and pleaded with them to bring back the first series on dvd.

Without giving away too much to UK readers, it is well worth watching all of series one. I always assumed it would end on the cliff hanger of cliff hangers and my spidey senses didn’t let me down. Keeping the viewer wanting for more is what good writing is all about and the Lost Series one finale does not disappoint.

US viewers are now up to episode 7 of series two and I am fortunate enough to have been able to watch them. Well fortunate until around episode four at least...

Rumours (and they could be exactly that) say that there will be three Lost series that will finish off on a feature film ala X-files. At the end of series one I got to thinking that if these rumours are true then the pace is going to have to slow down a smidge.

I am afraid to say that "slow down" is probably a bit of an understatement. I can almost see the writers working out ways to string it out whilst I sit down and watch it. The last episode I viewed simply didn’t need to exist. It was bassically a summary of preceding events so obvious, even my 10 month old son was rolling his eyes!

I sincerely hope that some of the suspense of series one comes back soon. Lost is “lost” sounds so much worse than Lost is f**king amazing!

CSS: IE 6 image rendering bug

I am currently developing a property website and I came accross a bug that I have neither seen or heard about. The page structure is as follows:-



In #main I have added a repeat-y style background like so:-



This works fine in every modern browser but as I uploaded it I noticed that the image wasn't always rendering correctly in IE. Infact, most of the time I saw only about 4px of it near the bottom of the div.

Scratching my head I tried all kinds of things to fix it. Changing the id to a class, using a jpg instead of a gif and even making the image far larger to see if the 767bytes file size was tripping it up.

An hour later and no further on I decided to look at the html again. Had I done something stupid such as miss a closing tag?

Infact I sorted it shortly afterwards... How? Well I removed the comment above the div ofcourse!!! Changing this:-




And there you have it. Add comments around your code to help you, and you may well stop IE rendering pages properly.... :|

Update:

Many thanks to Gary for pointing me to this IE Duplicate Characters Bug article. It seems very likely that this could be the cause. I will post some examples of my own in the next few days.

MAC VS PC – Part 1: The Myths

Being both a web developer and web designer, I have used both Macintosh and PC machines for many years. Due to this fact, I have both types of machines at home in case I need to continue working out of normal hours.

The reason I have decided to write this article is because I have worked with many evangelists of both camps for as long as I can remember. Some of the things that they believe to be true about their “rival machine” are often totally unfounded and sometimes, ludicrous.

In the first part of this series, I intend to dispel some of the myths that people take as gospel, in the hope that at least one person will come away with a better understanding (and tolerance) of each machine.

Myth 1: PC’s crash all the time.

A common thought in the Mac community is that PC’s are totally unreliable beasts that frequently blue screen. If we go back ten or so years, to when Windows 95 had just been released. It would be true to say, that unless you were very knowledgeable about PC hardware and drivers; you would at the very least have a few crashes a month. However, with the advent of Windows 2000 this completely changed.

Contrary to popular belief Windows 2000 was, on a whole, a very stable operating system. At the time I was using Windows 2000 on PC and OS 8 on Mac. Out of the two, I have to say that Windows totally outclassed OS 8. On the technical side of things, Windows had full pre-emptive multitasking, meaning that it could dynamically assign its resources between applications. An example of this working would be burning a CD. On windows this could be done in the background while you worked in another program. On OS 8 you could not do anything while burning a CD and had to just watch the progress bar in toast. Windows also managed system memory for applications, allocating more to them when needed, paging virtual memory from the harddrive on the fly. On OS 8 you had to decide what memory to give each application. Ironically, our office macs crashed far more frequently than the PC’s!

The main problem with PC’s is the sheer amount of different hardware that can be bought for them. Macs have set hardware which logically leads to an OS designed to work on a small range of motherboards and devices. PC’s have thousands of different boards. Know what your doing and you can put together a PC that will run happily for months on one boot. Buy a 400 buck, off the shelf PC and it’s safe to say that it will have inferior hardware that could possibly lead to the system failure that we all dread.

For me personally now running Tiger and Windows XP side by side, I have to say that the windows machine is a bit more stable. For this I do not blame the OS but the software. Do not forget that like it or not, PC’s have the majority share of the market. This means that there are more developers coding software for it. Some of this software is ported to the Mac and possibly this is the reason that some apps do not behave quite as well.

To summarize, both machines are now at a level where stability is not really an issue (unless you are running Windows 95 on a 400 bucks machine that is…)