September 2005 – Page 2

Palm OS RIP?

I’ve read a disturbing blog today while trying to find something totally different on the internet. The PhysOrg.com Science Technology Blog
has an article outlining that the next Palm Treo will be running a Windows mobile platform rather than the traditional Palm OS.

A joint venture between the two no less.

So what does that mean for the Palm OS? Who knows. As a Palm T3 owner, I’ve found the Palm OS to be fast and slick. The interface was designed with the intention of being used in your palm, not by following Windows UI guidelines.

Let’s just hope the Palm OS will continue in some form.

Sky+ Engineer Menu

I’ve recently been getting various failed messages recording on my Sky+ box.

Annoyingly, this is simply a shortcoming of the box’s ability to manage the hard disk drive that’s inside.

To that end (and before I forget again), I thought I’d better post the remote command to access the engineer’s menu which I found on an Overclockers blog this time round.

While watching the TV normally, press the following combination on the remote (don’t worry about what happens on screen as you do so):

Services
4
0
1
Select

Once in the menu, select Sky+ Planner Rebuild. The Sky+ Box will go off-line as the planner is rebuilt, you will have to turn it back on when the process is complete. It’s a hairy few moments, but solves the issues of failed recordings and reported low disk space.

Turning the Pages™, the British Library

I’ve recently been checking out Turning the Pages™, the British Library after reading about it on bbc.co.uk.

There is a fascinating collection of books, most recently including what was called “Alice’s Adeventure’s Underground”.

The concept is that you have turn ‘virtual pages’ and read the original scanned documents, as well as reading the text in plaint-text form, have having audio commentaries of sorts.

It seems quite ironic that this has been up and running for a number of years when Google is having so many difficulties with it’s online library service. Although, with the British Museum add about 3 books per year, I don’t see that being too much competition yet!

Controversial Issue

I’ve downloaded the new FireFox Beta (1.5) to give a spin. The good news is that the developer toolbar and Open in IE plugins still work. As far as I’m concerned – these are the two critical plugins for me.

I decided to tackle an issue that has been nagging me for some time now. The disappearing scrollbar!

If you have a high resolution monitor, you may have noticed that this site shifts along to the left or right. The problem is that the pages are centre aligned. So is the Centaur Systems website.

Naturally, there is a fix (or at least a workaround) that works quite well. html By putting the following code into your css:

html { height: 100%; margin-bottom: 1px; }

If forces the page height to be 1 pixel greater than the window size. Even better is that Internet Explorer’s greyed-out scrollbar remains that – grey.

I wondered if this was an oversight on the Mozilla team’s part. No – apparently only IE has a constant scrollbar. That’s consistent with the Microsoft UI guidelines. The W3C guidelines are somewhat vague on the matter.

From a design viewpoint, it’s a pain in the rear, yet there are many passionate posts on the Mozilla Forums for and against.

I don’t suppose that this is an issue that will be effectively answered in the future. But hey, at least I have a centred website now.

Centaur Goes National

Monday saw a drive from Ramsgate to Hexham. Centaur’s farthest client to date.

It gave me a good opportunity to listen to some CDs that I haven’t had the chance to listen to in a long while, and also enjoy a period of quiet when I was in the car alone.

So the question is: “Where next?”

I hear that Caerphilly’s nice.