wibble

OK, as a ‘game’, I will be changing the banner of the blog to a snippet of a lyric. The song has been in the charts or is very popular, so there won’t be any obscure songs - saying that there’s almost 32,000 songs to choose from!! As you guess them I’ll think of another one, so start thinking. Just add a comment to this post and I’ll let you know if you’re correct… So - an easy one to start with! NOTE: I’ve now moved these to a page, so that I can carry on posting normally. You can make any guesses on this page.

Well, after 6 years of number crunching SETI units, I’ve finally made it into the top 1% of all users. You can see the full stats on my SETI page. Overall, out of 5.4 million other people I think it’s quite an achievement - especially since the first thousand were done on an old computer which took about 80 hours a unit, rather than the 8-10 hours the current computers manage.

This article appeared on the BBC website today, and I had to have a little chuckle. It was obviously put out by Firefox to get some publicity for their browser, by moaning that some websites don’t work with their browser.

Before I even started reading the article I was wondering about the share of the market between the two browsers, and I think this gives it away:

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While most people still use Microsoft’s browser, Firefox is slowly making inroads.
Its share of the browser market grew to 8% in May, up from 5.59% at the beginning of the year, according to US-based analysts NetApplications.
Microsoft IE’s share of the market dropped to 87.23% in May, compared to 90.31% in January.

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Quite a bit of ground to make up then….

I know that Internet Explorer comes with Windows, but until Firefox releases stable code that will not change for years, (like IE6 for example), I think people will stick with IE. Also people are used to IE being in Windows all ready to use, and won’t go out of their way to download and install a piece of software. In that respect, Firefox will probably be the browser of choice for techie people, and not your user who just knows enough to surf, and do their online banking.

Needless to say, polyhex.com and this blog work perfectly fine with Firefox

Just found this - shows how many countries in the world I’ve visited - not very many…

create your own visited country map

It doesn’t seem that long ago, but I’ve worked out that I’ve been putting up web pages for about 10 years now. Early attempts were simple, but that was mainly because the technology was simple. HTML was still fairly young - we actually started out with Compuserve which used their own proprietary format - so the fanciest you could get was a few tables here and there.

Times moved on and things got fancier as more and more was added to HTML and Shockwave, Java and Javascript were introduced and used on websites. Nowadays there’s PHP, ASP, ASP.net and Coldfusion to choose from - all adding that extra level of complexity and code that can display different content based on conditions, but able to make much better websites than were originally available.

One thing that has stayed throughout all the different variations of web sites that I have been putting up, is the name - polyhex. Polyhex started out as a third choice with the Demon ISP, but is still fairly unique (even though someone in America is also using polyhex, and even has a livejournal and hotmail address!) polyhex.com is still mine though Sections have come and gone on the site - ice hockey, lottery results, Eurovision results, until now I mainly concentrate on music charts.

And who knows what the future will bring? No doubt HTML will continue to develop and other languages developed which will allow better pages and applications to be created. We’ll just have to wait and see what comes along…

For a laugh, you can see my earlier attempts here (polyhex.com) here (polyhex.co.uk) and here (polyhex.demon.co.uk).

While listening to one of the Daily Source Code Podcasts, I heard a song that sounded rather funny. I then went to the website and found an even better song - London Underground.

What makes it good, is that although it is meant to be funny, it’s made even funnier when you know that it’s all true. Those that have had the dubious pleasure of having to commute into London by tube every day will find much merriment in the lyrics!

Have a look around the website and click on Listen to hear some more of their songs. Be warned, they are not work or child friendly songs

:: how jedi are you? ::

I’ve been messing about with the blog, and think I have it the way I want it. Only time will tell when I start getting spam comments. The layout will probably stay as it is as well. Lesson: no messing or else you break it!

Hello and welcome to this, my new blog!

I don’t intend this to be a post a day type blog, but rather what is on my mind whenever I feel like writing. I will also let you know what I’m currently reading, the last film I saw, the current game I’m playing etc….