DougWeb – Doug's home on the Web

I spent yesterday at the Novotel West for my organisation’s annual event, which on the whole was a fairly dull (but complicated) event.

However the evening’s party more than made up for it.

P.S. Note to self: Mimosas are deceptively alcoholic

For the next week I get to share my office building with Ofsted, who will be spending a week checking up on the training side of the charity I work for. As long as they don’t want to talk to the web guy, I’m sure we’ll get along just fine…

The identity card scheme will become a “great British institution” on a par with the railways in the 19th Century, Home Office minister Liam Byrne says.

Bollocks they will.

(source BBC News)

As I write this, the visitor counter (not pages, not hits – visits) is displaying 2000724. That’s two million seven hundred and twenty four visitors visits to my site in the past 3years 3 months.

That’s quite a lot.

So thanks to you all.

There was a letter from ‘Electoral Reform Services‘ waiting for me when I got home earlier. Confused as to why they were writing to me I opened the letter and discovered that because I am a member of T&G (joined recently) I apparently get a vote for Labour’s deputy leader.

Here’s the thing. In order for my vote to count, I have to tick a box agreeing to the following.

I support the policies and principles of the Labour Party, and am not a member or supporter of any organisation opposed to it and pay a political subscription to the body that issued this ballot paper.

I feel dirty for just typing out the words ‘I support the policies and principles of the Labour Party’, so I certainly won’t be ticking the box! (I support the Conservative Party)

I’ve gained many a useful tip from blog posts, so it’s only fair that I share the results of an afternoon’s frustration.

If you’re having problems getting the awesome PHP/Java Bridge to work under Tomcat, make sure you’re using version 5.5 of Tomcat and not version 6. I had all of my problems go away instantly when I tried the older version (a final act of desperation). I assume it’s got something to do with the confusing table of servlet specifications outlined on the Tomcat homepage, but that’s just a guess since I try to keep as far away from Java as I can (I dislike strongly typed languages).

Anyway, that’s what worked for me. Hopefully it helps someone else out there.

As practiced by someone who obviously knows a lot more than I do…

Nice idea, but until it stops fucking up fonts with its ‘font smoothing’ technology (is that supposed to be a feature?) I will not be using it. At all. I don’t care if it makes the fonts look like they do on a Mac, they look shite. Part of running on Windows is the ability to take advantage of ClearType (Microsoft’s font-smoothing technology which actually works). Applications don’t even have to do anything – Windows takes care of it. So why the fuck have Apple ported the fucking shite Mac font smoothing over to Windows??!

Also, note to the Apple guys: when on Windows, act like a Windows application and ditch the fucking brushed metal look. It just looks sad and pathetic…

Tee hee

Nicked from xkcd

So I’ve just spent 2 days at @media (at @ ??!).

Highlights

• Thursday night’s free bar
• Joe Clark telling us that it’s not our job to compensate for the fact that screen readers are shockingly bad at their jobs
• The London 2012 logo being used whenever a speaker wanted to highlight a bad design
• Mark Boulton’s tips on improving typography
• Jason Santa Maria referring to London’s street layout as a ‘clusterfuck’
• Toupeepal – Dan Cederholm is a genius for many reasons, but that was a particular stroke of genius
• Håkon Wium Lie brought an OLPC ($100 laptop). And let people play with it. It’s so small!
• Jeremy Keith’s Ajax talk – didn’t teach me anything new, but it’s incredibly reassuring to know that thing’s I’ve worked out independently match his ideas.

Lowlights/WTF moments

• Missing out on lots of interesting sessions, because I was sitting in another interesting session taking place at the same time.
• Fucktards asking the world-class, top-of-their-field speakers absolutely stupid questions. Some people were blatantly at the wrong conference
• Apparently Gill Sans is a ‘quintessentially British font’. Eh?
• The Business and Design Centre is laid out really badly
• Getting somewhat lost on my way home Thursday night. My journey was supposed to be ‘come out of pub, turn right, keep walking until you hit King’s Cross’. However the pub was on the corner of a crossroads, and the entrance to the pub was on a different street than the map indicated. So when I exited and turned right, I apparently went south, not west. Instead of retracing my very drunken steps, I decided to ‘keep walking, you’ll hit a tube station / bus stop eventually’. Probably not the wisest move I ever made, but it all worked out in the end (I found King’s Cross!). The blue in the map below shows the direct route, red shows the route I think I took…

Overall it was immensely educational, whilst being extremely fun and I am very, very glad I went.

It frightens me how funny I find this… (needs sound)

Via Emmie, who appears to finding all of the good stuff this week!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/other_sports/olympics_2012/6718243.stm

Via Emmie, a collection of classic strips from UserFriendly.

See here

I’ve finally succumbed to the Facebook craze that seems to be sweeping that nation. In my defence as a geek, I did check it out back when it was all new and shiny, but registration was limited to US college students back then, so I didn’t get any further than the front page.

Now to track down some more people to add to my friends list…

Rachel (one of my colleagues, and a genuinely nice person) is getting married next Saturday and today was her last day in the office before the big day, so we went out tonight to celebrate/wish her well/etc.

Not only did everyone have a great time (great people, great conversation), I have also committed to going into business with a friend of hers. She’s got a great idea for a website (including the name/domain), but needs a web developer – me! Commercial sensitivity (and plain being-nice) mean I can’t share specifics, but I think it’s got the potential for going far.