I’v wanted to add photos to this website for some time now. I saw this on the make blog and thought it was a fantastic way to use flickr. So from now on expect more photos.

Yes thats toas, in a toaster oven, mmmm. It’s a reference to “Ed, Edd n Eddy”, if you don’t watch you wont get it.

Well at least the Caymanian Compass got it right. They were last to the web but their page is valid XHTML and valid CSS, bravo! The site is based on tables not CSS but thats a small nit pick compared to other sites like Cayman Net News and gov.ky where the errors number in the hundreds.

They had an off island firm (cyber-dynamics.com) code the site for them. It’s a proper news site with articles on their own pages etc. They still don’t pepper articles with the classifieds but perhaps that will come in the future.

To my dismay I discovered that the Cayman Islands Government home page uses a very broken version of a java-script popup function, probably stolen from some 1998, 4 inch thick, ‘The Web For Beginners’ guide to HTML. It makes incorrect use of the DOM, this is either an error or was never tested by the developers. In any case the usability of the site is horrid and the code is sloppy at best. I sent them a bug report to the purported webmasters e-mail address two weeks ago. It detailed the problem and its solutions, as yet I have received no response.

I wont bother to regale you with a description of how livid it makes me as a technology professional to see my country misrepresented in this way. I will defer to Mr. Aaron Boodman, who already keeps a hit list for people who deserve execution for their negligence. His article details the problem and its very simple solution.

I have also found a way to make www.gov.ky your own personal bitch by rewriting their broken java-script on the fly using the fantastic greasemonkey plugin for Firefox (You do have Firefox, don’t you?).

…on modern video cards is pretty bad. I have a (admittedly aging) GeForce 4 4400 with a Philips TV chip. It can do TV out at 600×800. It doesn’t support custom resolutions, its doesn’t support overscan.

Up until recently I thought it could only output video to one monitor at a time, even with the monitors cloned. Turns out I was wrong about that. Enabling the second display, the TV in this case, to show full screen overlay video gets you an ideal setup. Video shows on both monitors, not just the designated one. The video is always full screen on the designated monitor even when the displaying app is minimized. So I can type this blog post on my primary monitor and watch The Transporter ride rough shod over Paris on the TV, very nice indeed.

My next video card will have to do a lot better. I don’t like this overscan/underscan business, I want a straight digital path from the vid card to the display. In a couple of years that display might be a high-def TV of some sort with component or DVI/HDMI inputs. That means the card will probably have HDMI out, no such card exists yet. If the industry wants to get into my living room they need to make the tools to make it happen. Perhaps Tivo should get into the video card business with one of the big vendors and create a card that accepts a cable card and does HDMI output to multiple HDTV sets and a monitor. That would be ideal.