Recently, a bright orange book, with a beanied man on the front cover, arrived on my front verandah. I'm referring, of course, to Jeffrey Zeldman's new book, Designing With Web Standards, and the beanied man is none other than Zeldman himself. Forthwith, my mini-review of his book: I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this book – all I knew was that it had sold out it's first printing, before I could get my hands on a copy.

I've recently been playing around with RSS – first by trying a few readers, then by setting up my own feed. I wasn't entirely happy with any of the readers I tried, so I've been building my own to more closely match my own needs, and to learn about RSS issues along the way. It's pretty clear that everybody has a different idea about the semantics of any given version of RSS.

In putting the finishing touches on an RSS 2.0 feed for martinkenny.com, I’ve come up against a couple of issues surrounding the contents of the individual posts’ <description> elements. It seems to be pretty common practice to include entity-encoded HTML in the description. Not everyone likes this. So far, in trying out various desktop and web-based readers, I’ve enjoyed the HTML, although Mark Pilgrim’s recent highlighting of security issues has me thinking a bit.

Now that I have a camera I carry everywhere, I'm more likely to catch a photo of something incidental. Here's a photo of raindrops on a small iris outside the front door. Click it for the original high-resolution image (my current desktop image).

OK, there, I've said it. O'Reilly's Safari Bookshelf is great. I'd been thinking about giving Safari a go for a while, but it wasn't until Slashdot ran a review of it that I gave in and signed up for a 14-day trial. I had some intial misgivings. I'm an avid technical book reader; I have a large library that dates back to the days of 8-bit microprocessors. I read myself to sleep every night with a book, often an O'Reilly one.

On Easter Monday, we went for a picnic in the Beechwood Heritage Garden. Beechwood was a private garden that is now managed by the Mount Lofty Botanic Gardens, and is only open to the public for six weeks in spring and again in autumn. It's well worth a trip in both seasons, and is definitely an excuse for a few photos.

Last weekend we went to the Adelaide Zoo for the closing event of the children’s festival known as “Come Out”. We watched a number of musical events with an environmental or animal theme, put on by primary school children, but the highlight of the visit was an appearance by the “KneeHIGH Puppets”. From their name we imagined these would be puppets that were, well, knee-high. We couldn’t have been more wrong.

It seems nearly every day brings news of some new software patent that is pretty damn obvious and for which there should be easily locatable prior art. Today it's browser cookies, a few days ago it was web advertising. It's so common that Slashdot has a whole category for it ! As someone who, as a youth, applied for a patent with a friend (for a non-software idea), I can sort of relate to patents, but as a software developer I'm just plain scared and annoyed by most (all) software patents.

I was reminded, yesterday, of an old rule of mine; “don't do important things when you're feeling sick or tired”. My rule dates back to some time in my mid-teens when I spent an evening soldering up a kit for what was then known as a VDU (in this case a single board that acted as the display part of a dumb terminal). Unfortunately I was already tired and excited (I'd been waiting for this thing for a couple of months).

Having discovered that while everything was working quite well for MPEG content in ‘film mode’, like the feature film on a DVD, I hadn’t really tried things with stuff in interlaced mode. Things like the ‘making of’ programmes on DVDs tend to have been made for television, and contain frames made up of two fields that may have movement between them. The end result was a horrible juddering, where the fields were sometimes being played in reverse order.