Rowan's World Et Cetera

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Cached Redirects Considered Harmful (and how browsers can fix them)

9 October, 2011 / / 13 Comments

There are a lot of URLs out there on the Web; and a pretty big number of those URLs are either alternative names for something, or old locations that have been superseded. So “redirects” from one URL to another are a common feature of the web, and have been for many years. But recently, the way these redirects behave has been changing, because performance-conscious browser developers have started caching redirects, rather than re-requesting them from the server every time.

In theory, this makes perfect sense, but in practice, it causes web developers like me a lot of pain, because nothing “permanent” is actually that permanent. I’m not saying no browser should ever cache a redirect, but I do have a few suggestions of ways they could be a little more helpful about it.
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Why I Hate Shopping

17 June, 2011 / / 5 Comments

I’ve never been very good at spending money. I’m lucky enough to have always had money to spend, but it often ends up sitting in the bank, unused. It’s not that I don’t know what I want or need to spend it on – for a geek, I have remarkably few shiny gadgets – but simply that I don’t like shopping.

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Top 10 Things Not To Do with Links

12 June, 2011 / / 3 Comments

“Hyperlinks” are probably the single most important thing on the World Wide Web. They are, after all, what the “web” is woven from; they are what makes it something more than the document retrieval systems that came before.

And yet, some people seem to do their utmost to make all the hyperlinks in their documents entirely useless. Here are my Top 10 Things Not To Do with Links…

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“A Permanent Cleggocracy” – Or Not: Dissecting an Anti-AV Cartoon

9 April, 2011 / / 0 Comments

This week, the first campaign leaflets started coming through for the Borough Council Elections, and, more interestingly, the voting system referendum. One of the Conservative “newsletters” featured this eye-catching cartoon, headlined “A.V. = A Permanent Cleggocracy”. I was immediately sceptical, but the more I looked at it, the more I realised how utterly wrong this cartoon is.

A.V. = A Permanent Cleggocracy cartoon from Conservative Election leaflet
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Goodbye Burgess Hill!

28 January, 2011 / / 1 Comment

After 5 years of the slow and often stressful commute, my office finally moves from Burgess Hill to Brighton this weekend. (( In fact, what with POETS day and me being on holiday, this is a bit late – but 17:30 on the Friday seems an appropriate moment to say goodbye )).

So, it’s Goodbye Burgess Hill!

  • Goodbye to the 07:57 Southern Service to London Victoria — and goodbye to the crowded 08:18 when I missed it!
  • Goodbye to “the delayed 18:09 service” home, and the confusing service to Seaford, Eastbourne, and Ore (( “Eastbourne and/or what?” ))
  • Goodbye “customers for Glynde, Berwick, Cooksbridge, or Plumpton”, who weren’t always travelling in the correct part of the train.
  • Goodbye to Wivelsfield station, and the steep walk into town.
  • Goodbye to the young families of Noel Rise, who greeted me each morning — and who grew up before my eyes!
  • Goodbye to the headless eagle, the milk depot, and the dewy spider-webs on the fence — but goodbye too to the constant digging of the road!
  • Goodbye to the Martletts, and Market Place
  • Goodbye to the sandwich shops, the greengrocer’s stall, and the 50p bookshop
  • Goodbye to the Post Office, and churchyard
  • Goodbye to the park, with its abstract modern sculpture, its muddy fields, and its basketball hoop
  • Goodbye to the Railway, the Jacob’s, & the Potter’s
  • Goodbye Disco Carpets, and hairdressers downstairs
  • Goodbye to you all – maybe I’ll come and visit someday. But then again, maybe not. ;)

Internet Splinternet – an Optimist’s IPv6 Daydream

14 January, 2011 / / 0 Comments

I was reading an article recently ((where “recently” is relative to when I started writing this, not when I actually published it…)) about the challenges in getting IPv6 up and running – before we finally run out of IPv4 addresses, and can’t plug anything else into the internet. One big change would be the end of address sharing – NAT – since there’ll be enough IPv6 addresses for every computer in your house to have a globally unique address. NAT is annoying, and in general we’ll be better off without it, but if every device is visible to the whole internet, there are some interesting implications which will only be advantages if we work out how to harness them. So here is my optimist’s guide to next year’s internet…

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Wherefore does nobody know what wherefore means?

21 September, 2010 / / 2 Comments

O Romeo, Romeo!
Wherefore art thou Romeo?

Undoubtedly one of the most quoted lines of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. But what’s the right answer? If you said “I’m over here!” then you’re wrong – not because of where Romeo may or may not be right now, but because that’s quite simply not what “wherefore” means.

wherefore (interrogaive adverb) – for what reason
– The Concise Oxford English Dictionary

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Why object references are confusing, and what to do about it

15 August, 2010 / / 3 Comments

A recent blog post from my old friend Phil ((well, vaguely recent: I really should get with this whole RSS thing!)) discussed some of the gotchas of parameter passing in object-oriented languages – or I suppose specifically in partially OO languages, since the problem in this case was a combination of objects and structs in C#.

It seems to me there is a genuine problem here, beyond programmer fallibility – the old distinction between “pass by value” and “pass by reference” is no longer a useful distinction in such languages, and someone needs to design something better.

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