Ian's blog

Its Snowing!!!!!!
Now the important quesiton what the hell am I doing up at 8:55 on a saturday

Geek Stuff
This looks interesting. I have a vision. The vision is having a universal connection that allows all devices to know about each other and be able to talk indipendantly to each other. For example you have a DVD and a TV. You plug both into a network and they automatically find each other. One cable. I then add another TV upstairs to the network. It automatically finds the DVD player and allows you watch and control the DVD player remotely. I then add speakers to the network and they can be fed audio from any device on the network. You then Add a tivo. Any TV on the network can watch and control the Tivo. You can then add a computer and watch video from your dvd player.

I already have bits of this set up. I have a Tivo down stairs and a TV card in my computer so I can watch either the Tivo or live TV. Once I get some spare money i am going to add a serial cable connection from my TIVO a computer so I can remotely control the TIVO and also connect the TIVO out visa my cable modem so it doesn’t have to use my telephone line. This computer will also be an MP3 player for music downstairs. I have also played with real server and real encoder so I can take the output from my tivo and watch it on any computer on my network, but I wasn’t very happy with the quality of the image it produced. Using Obsequiuiem it would be possible to stream the audio across my internal network so I can play and control music in any room with a cheap computer and speakers. I have been thinkings about getting a bare bones PC with CDROM for about 200 dollars that I boot off a CD for the audio stations.

I am now remembering why I normally code in very plane html. I started playing with CSS since i wanted to change the font on a web page. CSS seems like a great way to be able to play with styles with out having to rewrite large chunks of code. I have 3 web browsers open (ie 5.5, mozilla 0.9.6 and Opera 6) and the page looks different on every single on of them. IE seems to accept almost anything. Mozzila and opera seem to be a lot more strict. Some things in CSS just don’t work the way I think they should, for example in Netscape and Opera and IE if you define BODY to be color red and 40 point text it works fine up until you open a “td” element then it forgets the font size but the color is still red. Annoying.
For those interested here is a before and after
If anyone can tell me why the underline disappears when you go over the donation link at the bottom in Opera please let me know

This made me laugh. From the Beeb,

They are talking about the new actor who is taking over the lead of Taggart, a crime show set in Scotland.

He [norton] played a butcher suspected of murder and putting his victims in his meat pies. Norton does not consider this a problem. After all, he says, he is probably the only Scottish actor to have been in the series just the once.