Whomwah.com

It’s not often you will hear me say this, but I read with interest on the IE blog .. that they have already fixed a few bugs in the next version of IE. The PNG alpha channel problem that creates big design restrictions has been addressed. They have also sorted the peekaboo and guillotine bugs. They’ve still a few more to fix though.

Now I think these fixes are great, but I hope that they’re going to be doing more that just fixing stuff. In my opinion IE fixes should be addressed in the same way they address the many security fixes that people have had to apply to IE in the past. While I appreciate the fact that they are being open and telling us what is going on in the development of IE7, it still concerns me that they will not be addressing the main problem us developers have and that is the lack of full standards support, the fact that IE currently doesn’t fully support CSS2 which has been a W3C Recommendation since 1998.

In the mean time, I do welcome these snippets of information about current development but I will not be happy until I see some forward thinking steps by the IE team that make me feel happy that MS are not just palming us of with sweeteners.

The University of Southampton has launched a new semantic web interface, called mSpace, that it says will make searching for information online, and learning about a subject, much easier. mSpace is a framework that gathers information sources and presents them to the user in a single window. It can potentially be applied to any subject, provided the basic information is available. The researchers say this means users will no longer have to wade through lists of undifferentiated data when researching a subject.

I would assume this is the project that Tim Berners Lee has come to southhampton to run.

A work collegue of mine Matt Biddulph has written another great ‘toy’. This uses the Porter Stemming Algorithm to search through your del.icio.us tags and find words with the same English word stem. This proved highly useful for me and I’m sure will be to others that are terribel typers and spellers. Thanks.

I see that Microsoft has unveiled the finished version of its home-grown search engine.

I’m sure when I last looked at it in beta the results were a little iffy to say the least (if you typed in office guess what came up first). It appears though that this is fixed even to the point were if you typed in word in google you get MS Word as the first result where is in the new msn search engine, word magazine comes up.

To generate its mass of data, Microsoft has indexed 5 billion webpages and claims to update its document index every two days – more often than rivals. I guess we’ll wait and see if it takes off. I would imagine every new PC with windon’t on it will have this as it’s homepage by default.

Sorry Bill, I don’t care how good it is there is always an alternative thats not MS.

It seems google has another trick up it’s sleeves. I had never seen google video(still in beta) before but much like all the other services they provide it does what it says on the tin. Google Video enables you to search a growing archive of televised content. They have been indexing stuff since Dec ’04 and are gradually adding new channels all the time. We’ll wait and see how useful this proves.

I’m on a two day event starting tommorrow bringing together leading international figures to review the emerging fields of locative and pervasive media.

The event launches a new international network (PLAN), bringing together artists, activists, hardware hackers, bloggers, game programmers, free network people, semantic web coders, economists, architects, and university and industry researchers.

I’m not 100% sure what that means but in layman’s terms, it’s about what cool things people can do with mobile and wireless technologies in the future. Looks like there will be some experimental music going on too afterwards.

I have just read this great article by Arve Bersvendsen about the early history of CSS, something I actually did not know a lot about. I makes great reading and well worth a look yourselves.

A friend of mine Mike at Do Not Remove had a link to this great JavaScript photo gallery on his site. It seems a lot of hard work has gone into this by Scott Upton and Travis Beckham. But blimey it’s paid off, it just works so smoothly.

Good work guys.

UPDATE: Due to a re-design and no BBC archiving *tut tut* you can see it in Web Archive

Hurrah. I have just finished my first large public facing project since joining the BBC. The DAB digital radio station 6music has been ongoing for many months now and I’ll glad to say we finally went live with it the other night.

Featuring a new clean look, I am really happy with the build and I hope you like it too. Stage II of the build will be coming soon.

Tim Berners-Lee has been appointed a professor at Southampton University, England. He’ll become chair of computer science at the university’s School of Electronics and Computer Science.

Southampton University in England, the first university to award him an honorary degree (in 1996) is going to be the new base for Sir Tim Berners-Lee, “Father of the World Wide Web.”

Although born in London, Sir Tim will now become chair of computer science at the university’s School of Electronics and Computer Science.

He will remain director of W3C, and will use his new position as the springboard for further development of the Semantic Web, his vision for the next-generation Internet.

“Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee” – what next, a peerage? (Lord Berner-Lee has a ring to it, wouldn’t you say?)