One of the pleasures I had from the late 80s and early 90s, before I moved to the States, was watching Inspector Morse on the telly. The episodes were longer than the average TV cop show and had a leisurely pace which perfectly suited the Oxford setting. It also helped that the title role was sympathetically played by John Thaw – leaving you with a slight disturbing thought that Morse was perhaps an older gentler Jack Regan – with his sidekick, Sergeant Lewis, by Kevin Whatley. Undoubtedly, one factor in the success of the series was due to the chemistry between these two characters and their evolving relationship as well and the interactions with the other permanent characters in the show (one of which was undeniably Morse’s red Mark 2 Jag). The end-titles music was incredibly memorable and poignant, being derived from the Morse code for ‘Morse’. […]
READ MOREFor the longest time now (I see it’s getting on for five years), I’ve owned IMetJulian.com. It’s a handy website for those times I’m talking to someone I don’t know and I don’t have any business cards on me, yet I want to exchange contact details. I just say, remember “I met Julian” the next time you’re at a PC. Works pretty well. For fun, I even self-host it here at home, using an old Dell XPS something-or-other and Windows Web Server 2008. […]
READ MOREI had some issues today with the Windows 8 WiFi connection on my Dell XPS 12. Short story (the long one is tedious): I was using the machine at my local Acura dealer while waiting for the service on my wife’s car to be completed. I closed the lid once I could pay and get the car, yet when I opened it again at home, all Windows 8 wanted to do was to reconnect to the Acura dealers WiFi. It wouldn’t show my home WiFi at all. Even funnier (in hindsight), running the Troubleshooter resulted in a request to activate a ‘manual’ WiFi profile for an older wireless network for somewhere else. […]
READ MORESo I had an occasion to peruse someone else’s CSS today, when I came across this peculiar construct: […]
READ MORERecently I was playing around and added drop caps to the blog posts on boyet.com/. I decided to go for a pure CSS3 version (so, you’ll have to view this site in a reasonably fresh browser to see the effect) rather than a hacky <span> version that mixes presentation “hints” in the content. (For a brief discussion on the two possible methods, see Chris Coyier’s blog post here.) I certainly didn’t want to change all my posts to include spans on the first letter of the first paragraph. […]
The call came though the batphone from Mehul Harry: he was seeing an issue displaying blog posts from this site on an iPad. It was a new one on me and I quickly checked on my iPad using Safari: no problem. […]
READ MOREMy new XPS 12
is a pretty nice machine. Small (0.8” × 12.5” × 8.5”) and light (3.35 lbs), despite the intricacies of the flip screen and the touch capability. The top and bottom are covered in some kind of black matt surface that’s easy to grip and doesn’t seem to mark that easily. Yet, I’d prefer having something to protect it. Unfortunately it’s not such a bestseller like, say, the 13” MacBook Air that a whole accessories industry has grown around it. […]
We’re getting close to the conference season at work: in June I’m going to both TechEd US in New Orleans and //build/ in San Francisco. Rather than cart around my very unloved Surface RT (haven’t used it in possibly two months), I’ve been dithering about buying an Intel Windows 8 machine, a touch device, say a convertible.I’ve had my eye on two possibilities, the Surface Pro and the Dell XPS 12. Since none of the touch machines available right now just aren’t powerful or expansive enough to be my main PC, I’ve been thinking of upgrading that too. […]
READ MOREWe were vacationing in Paris last week in a hotel in the 16eme arrondissement, just outside the boundary of the 8eme. We’d stayed there before, but I noticed this time that several streets in the vicinity has names commemorating scientists and mathematicians. I thought it would be fun to take pictures of the ones I could find that were close and put them in a collage: […]
READ MOREI don’t know about you, but one of my favorite commands in the browser is “View Page Source”, especially on a site that’s modern, visually attractive, or shows off some clever interactions. After all, I’m a developer: I like to find out how things work so I can, if I want to, replicate on my own web sites. […]
READ MORE