New Scientist has an article on an interactive pool table designed to improve your game.
An interactive pool table with a laser that points out exactly where the best shots lie has been created by Danish scientists. With the help of a virtual coach called James, it can also lead you through a practice session designed to improve your play.
Pretty cool.
I didn’t think much of the articles title though: “Magic pool table creates wizard potters”. Groan!
I got some weird stuff turned up in yesterdays Apache log.
x.x.x.x - www.circlesofhope [02/Nov/2002:20:43:07] "GET /b2/index.php?p=28... x.x.x.x - www.madeleine.bunting [02/Nov/2002:20:52:53] "GET /b2/index.php?p=12... x.x.x.x - www.circlesofhope [02/Nov/2002:20:53:46] "GET /b2/index.php?p=19... x.x.x.x - www.circlesofhope [02/Nov/2002:20:54:45] "GET /b2/index.php?cat=2... x.x.x.x - www.madeleine.bunting [02/Nov/2002:20:55:31] "GET /b2/index.php?p=31...
Note that there is what looks like (but isn’t) a hostname in the authorised user column.
A google search found me Valley Brook Botanicals and Design note the url on that actually does use a username of www.circlesofhope. I also found Circles of Hope a charity crochet page at the same domain.
There is also a Councilling Service, and St Camillus Catholic Center for Pastoral Care. None of which look like they could be referer spammers (and it’s not the referer field either). So what is that doing in my logs?
Meanwhile, Madeleine Bunting is a columnist at Guardian Unlimited.
Strange.
Les Orchard over at 0xdecafbad has a good summary of the semantic web
There are some other great references at the World Wid Web Consortium, the Semantic Web Community Portal, and at infomesh.
There is also an article in the May 2001 issue of Scientific American by Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila.
Thanks to Michel V for the link.
We’ve been listening to fireworks going off all night. Some of them very loud. I can’t help think that it would be quicker and quieter to just burn the money instead.
Bah humbug 🙁
You will have noticed that the site has gone back to it’s old style now that Halloween is over. If you use Mozilla or Netscape 7 you can still see the Halloween style by selecting View -> Use style -> Halloween.
Internet Explorer users cannot: IE doesn’t support the standard as this article at A List Apart describes 🙁
But then we encounter a problem. A major one. Mozilla provides a menu to select the style sheet we want to use under the view menu item. But Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) provides no such menu. So we have several style sheets, and no way to access them in MSIE.
I’ll implement the JavaScript solution proposed in the article at some point.
Here’s a very funny (if you’re geeky that way) Halloween Cartoon! 🙂
Thanks to Dom S for the link.
This is what the previous posts looks like rendered correctly in a decent browser; in this case Mozilla 1.2b.
Do you see what you’re missing out on? Upgrade now, you know it makes sense!
It turns out that people using IE 5.x or 6.0 couldn’t see my pumpkin image. I think I now know what the bug is in Internet Explorer.
There should be an image on the left of this text positioned using the align=”left” attribute. I think this makes IE render the image on the layer with z-index: 1, i.e the background, instead of the containing block which has z-index: 3. To prove it, I’m repeating the image below without the align attribute. So apologies to those with correctly behaving browsers for the double image. Of course Internet Explorer didn’t render the fixed ghosts correctly either!
I’ve not managed to find this documented anywhere!
Fix found!: A user of my theme found a cure for the problem. If you add the style attribute
position:relative
to the object (it also happens to divs) that is hidden, it will reappear in it’s correct location.
