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Well with some heavy preparations going on for my final year project (due in a little over a month) I’ve not been putting in too much work on the website (this update should have been posted a few days ago infact!), although I’ve hatched a few plans for when I’m not so busy. My spare time has been filled in playing Unreal Tournament, and downloading obscure browsers. One of these browsers is x-smiles 0.5, this is an XML browser for more obscure devices. It makes a passible rendering of XHTML pages, messy HTML dies though. It also supports the mobile media type specified by the w3c web standards group.
I still think I need a few more browsers to add to my collection. I would really like an audio browser so I can experiment with aural style sheets, speaking of which SpeakThis.com seems to be quite cool demo, although incorporating it on my website would be a little expensive.
This Page seems to be evolving into a weblog style format, hmmmm time for some organisation I think, I’ll probably start a rolling archive of the stuff I write here to my personal section, it’ll probably motivate me to write more as I won’t be so concerned about clogging up my home page, with lots of stuff.

As you start browsing the site you should notice a little bit of a breadcrumb trail appear at the top of the page to help you locate where you are in my website (Because I’m sure you’re going to get lost in the five pages of content I have!).
Yes I’m finally going to start justifying my use of the .com at the end of my site address and start selling some books and stuff (well not really, I’m just linking to pages on amazon.com to get a modest commission.) Before you think I’ve turned into a commercial monster though, I’m not going to start putting up banner ads, or any of that nonsense. It’s quite small at the moment but will be categorised into sections dealing with different web design topics, like CSS, along with mini reviews for those books that I have actually read.

Things are pretty hectic for me at the moment, I’m trying to keep on top of my ever increasing amount of work I’ve got to do at University, I think I work better under a little stress though so it’s not all bad. I’m currently working on a new section for the site, no hints as to what it is going to be but I’m aiming to put it on-line in 1 weeks time (early March) so come back to check it out. I’ve been getting a bit of traffic from Jim’s Web Accessibility Weblog recently, his site discusses accessibility issues and has some interesting ideas.

I’ve just updated my latest version of my stylesheet template (version 1.3). It addresses a few minor issues with the original and is a little more elegant in it’s implementation of the alternative horizontal menus (alternative stylesheet aware browser required e.g. NS6/Mozilla etc).

I’m fairly busy with my thinking at the moment. My third year project a “personal financial portfolio management” application means that I’ve been getting my head around covariance functions and Risk Metrics™. As well as all this I’ve been exploring SVG and XSLT recently. Adobe have an excellent example of this technology in action, using XSLT to transform a CMLdocument into an SVG representation, to view the demo you’ll need an SVG capable browser or a plugin such as adobes. I’ve also been working on a few prototypes to my CSS template and hope to put up a new Netscape 4 friendlier version in the next week or so.

Well a new year and a new semester. Anyway now I’ve finished revising for the last of my exams (today) I’ve been able to add a little bit to my site. I’ve updated my CSS template again (version 1.2) after a little feedback on it. This Version now offers alternate stylesheets for those browsers that support them.

Barcelona: I’ve added some pages about my trip to Barcelona on the site.

I have just returned from Barcelona Spain this last week. It is a vibrant city with plenty of attractions if your in any way intrested in architecture or art. Coupled with these are the vibrant street artists populating the famous Las Ramblas walk. There’s also plenty of opportunity to be fleeced of you’re Spanish money if you’re slightly gullible to the street “entertainment” of little balls under matchboxes.

If you’re thinking anbout buying an FC Barcelona Football shirt don’t be embarrassed about hagling a little in the shops on Las Ramblas. The first full day I was in Barcelona I took the opportunity of exploring the Camp Nou, FC Barcelona’s stadium (an excellent tour in my opinion). In the Nike store there replica shirts were selling for about 9995 ptas. On Las Ramblas the shirts were marked up at 14000 ptas. Hmm the official Nike store charging less for replica shirts than the small operators, was this believable, I think not! I’m sure they’ve sold a few shirts at that price to British and American tourists who were, how shall I say this, suckers. It was fairly easy to haggle down to around 8000 ptas and if you were prepared to spend a little more time bargaining you could probably get it lower, but hey I had a holiday to get on and experience!

I’m planning on getting a new PC this week so when I have that up and running and my photos get back from development I’ll put up a few pictures or the trip. There is some crazy architecture in Barca that’s for sure.