I’ve just completed an online consultation/questionnaire for the BBC Trust about the proposed upcoming BBC video-on-demand service, and there’s quite an important question posed if, like me, you want open standards and not to be locked in to Microsoft technology.

How important is it that the proposed seven-day catch-up service over the internet is available to consumers who are not using Microsoft software?

It’s vitally important that if you live in the UK (or otherwise pay the licence fee) and you don’t want MS lock-in, to go onto this questionnaire and submit your views. We need everyone possible to tell the BBC to not do it in a Microsoft locked-in way, so please go and complete this.

The more people that do this, the better chance of getting our way!

Take the consulation/questionnaire

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Sorry, everyone. My last post was published with a more link in the feed version instead of having the full content in the feed.

Apparently it’s a new ‘feature’ in WordPress 2.1 – thankfully there’s a plugin that can fix it that’s now installed. It shouldn’t happen again.

Sorry for the lack of postings recently, I’ve just got back online following a nasty period of ISP downtime. Sucks, huh.

You’ve undoubtedly read this all over the place already as I’m so late to pointing this out, but Apple have released some UK-centric versions of their now famous (and much spoofed) Mac guy and PC guy ads.

While I think the formula is getting a bit tired, the UK audience for the most part haven’t been exposed to these ads, so I think they actually work really well. Actually, I’m quite surprised that most of the ads are virtually word-for-word the same as their US counterparts in places, except for one unique one (Tentacle) and liberally sprinkled British colloquialisms.

Interesting to watch, anyway, though – if only just to see how they differ from the US versions. Watch them here.

On a completely unrelated note – how is it that when you come back from a couple of days and you get almost literally drowned in feeds? I think I’ve just about caught up…

Finished the upgrade. Nice and easy as usual, just copying the new files over and running the upgrade script!

We had site downtime of only two minutes or so while the files were copying over to the server. If anyone notices any issues or anything broken on the site, let me know!

WordPress 2.1 has been released – w00t!

I haven’t upgraded just yet, I’m going to do a bit of testing with WP 2.1 to make sure nothing breaks on my personal mirrored copy of the site first, and do a couple of other things too, but I will be upgrading to WordPress 2.1 in the very near future.

WPGet 0.6 is not guaranteed to work with WordPress 2.1 – I have not tried it and I won’t provide support for it, so your mileage may vary. The next version of WPGet, 0.7, which is currently in development, will have WordPress 2.0.x and 2.1 support and I will be answering support questions for both versions of WordPress on that. The release isn’t too far away either, it’s just getting the styles done and testing it.

I haven’t mentioned this yet publicly, but I’ve decided that I’m not going to wait for Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) to come out before I buy a Mac.

The signs seem to point to a bit of a later release of it anyway, and I’m itching to try stuff out; I just can’t wait that long!

The bottom line is – within two months, I should be triple platform. And it’s going to be so cool.

Plus, Apple’s educational discounts mean that I will be able to afford the Leopard upgrade anyway, with the money I save for being a student. Can’t wait.

One more footnote – I’m getting 2 GB of RAM (the max the MacBook can take) and with any luck, a hard drive upgrade too.

No, 0.7 is not released yet (believe me it is far too difficult to implement at the moment and only one feature is written), but I’ve put one of its new features into my WPGet installation here.

If you click on the comments link on any post (in the left-hand pane on the main site), you will get a little window containing the comments. You can click the close button on the left, which, obviously, closes the window and the expand button on the right to view the comments on the actual blog post.

Please note – this does not currently work properly in any version of Internet Explorer. IE6 panics and doesn’t render any style (it appears inline and very broken) and IE7 ‘features’ this annoying z-index bug, so the window appears ‘underneath’ the central content layer. Grrr. I’ve spent upwards of an hour attempting to debug and fix it just for IE, to no avail. I will endeavour to get it working soon, but not right now.

Ouch. I hate IE. Seriously, Microsoft should ditch the Trident rendering engine and rebuild it from scratch for IE 8. IE is broken.

I’ve tested it and it works in Firefox 2.0.0.1, Konqueror 3.5.5, Opera 9.10, Epiphany 2.6.12 (that should also cover all Gecko browsers). Confirmation for Safari support would be appreciated from anyone with a Mac (works in KHTML, though, so I imagine it will be fine).

Just upgraded to WordPress 2.0.6, and all seems to have gone well!

As ever, it was as simple as merging the new files over the old ones and running the upgrade script! Well, and applying my custom error message hack (if anything goes wrong you see a friendlier message than the default), but that’s my hack and not part of WordPress.

If anyone does notice any problems though, let me know somehow.

Since it’s now 2007, I’ve made a couple of changes to the main site and my homepage. I’ve updated a lot of information, changed some wording here and there to make it a bit more coherent and relevant.

Unfortunately for you, the worst change is you now have to look at a picture of me on the homepage. 😛

Also, I just want to reiterate – the blog content (everything in the /blog folder) is licensed under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.0 UK licence. That means you can republish my stuff under certain conditions. Click through on that link to see what you’re allowed and not allowed to do (it’s reasonably permissive). If you want to use any of my blog content in a way that doesn’t fall under this licence, I’d appreciate it if you’d get in contact. In most cases I’ll let you do what you want without charge, so it’s definitely worth asking!

All the content on the main site (i.e. everything not in the /blog folder) is not affected by this licence and you’re not generally allowed to republish it. In fact, most of it would be pretty useless on another site. If, however, you want to use this anywhere (apart from fair use and all that), then contact me and we’ll work something out. Content made available under the /files folder might be subject to other licences, like the GPL, LGPL or the BSD Licence, so check that too.

Sorry to have to put you through that, but I need to just keep everyone informed as to what the situation is.

Anyway, Happy New Year everybody!

Quick disclaimer – I am not a lawyer. I have to say this.

On a slightly more upbeat note than my last post, here’s another blog-wide celebration for tomorrow – when all the numbers tick over and it’s 2007.

So, Happy New Year everyone!

More PHP OOP tutorials will be coming in the next few weeks when I have time to do them.