23rd December 2001

So, just slipping through in time for the Lazy Journalism Awards 2001, this staggering entry on Lord of the Rings, from Jon Dennis in the Guardian. It’s amazing that such an ill-conceived, poorly-written rant as this could make it past a professional editor and into print. Every nerd-bashing cliché is present and correct, plus a hilariously contrived ‘terrorism’ reference for your edification.

This sort of writing is normally termed “trolling”, of course, but I’d hesitate to use the term since I wouldn’t want to experience Mr. Dennis’s deadly-sharp wit. (“You said trolling! Like a troll!! Like in Tolkein!! Ha, ha, you’re really sad!!!!”)

Myself, I don’t normally have much time for the Fantasy genre, but I found the film pretty engaging. Worth seeing — if you like grottos, natch. [What? —Ed.]

Oh yeah, and this is an updates listing, not a blog, FYI. So what I really meant to say was that the parasite script now detects another bug, namely BDE. Hope that clears things up. yes.

12th December 2001

While I was in England last week I did another exciting edition of Losertown (if you’re easily excited, anyway). I’ve just sampled it in (vickysponge propz inna house to the man Stu Presnell for recording it) so you can hear it now through the magic of the Cyber-Web. Yes.

Oh, and also while I was away the company I work for went bust. How super!

22nd November 2001

Ho hum, another update to event.js and another new script module, this time for that old favourite, DHTML menus. It’s good though. Honest.

13th November 2001

I’ve added a new bug to the parasite script. Also there’s an update to event.js, which adds compatibility with Konqueror.

23rd October 2001

My browser contracted an infestation of parasites the other day. One of them, VX2, is utterly horrific. I know from fixing other people’s computers how easily these critters get installed, and I’ve had enough of it. Time to do something about it.

At the top of this text box I’ve included a link to parasite.js, a new JavaScript component that can check for VX2 and other nasties. If you are a webmaster you may want to consider doing the same thing — see the new Browser parasites section to find out how. Protect your users and your site!

If you don’t see anything unusual, then good! You aren’t infected, or at least not by any of the things my script knows how to detect. If you do see warnings... well, you might want to check them out.

Oh, yeah... on a more pleasant note, the FBI have given me some more Pokey strips.

20th September 2001

Updated JavaScript modules. In particular, added the fab new event module, which should make cross-browser event handling a lot nicer.

Everything should be pretty much working now, the DNS should finally have propagated to everyone and the pages are all there, so I can start working on some new stuff. Hooray.

10th September 2001

Blimey! I’ve finally got myself a personal site together. Well who’d have thought I’d ever get around to it, eh?

Most of the random stuff I had in arbitrary places should end up here now. The Losertown pages and samples and bits are finally up again, and some of the software projects I’ve been working on have gained a permanent home. Well permanent until the money runs out, anyway. For the next few days there’ll probably be broken links and pages not formatted properly while I pull everything together.

Hope this layout works for you. It’s 100% CSS (sans tables) and seems to work on the browsers I’ve tried. Do let me know if it causes problems for you. I’ve withheld the styles from Netscape 4, since it makes an terrible hash of them. I think Mozilla looks pretty nice around now, but if you won’t/can’t upgrade or you’re using another non-CSS browser (hello RISC OS folk!) you are of course free to continue looking at the site in glorious boring-o-vision. Hooray!

and@doxdesk.com