All posts by Alistair Lattimore

About Alistair Lattimore

My name is Alistair Lattimore, I'm in my very early 30's and live on the sunny Gold Coast in Australia. I married my high school sweet heart & we've been together for longer than I can remember. Claire and I started our family in September 2008 when Hugo was born and added a gorgeous little girl named Evie in May 2010. You can find me online in the typical hangouts, Google+, Twitter & facebook. .

XmlHttpRequest Object

Internet, Programming

With all the press that the XmlHttpRequest object has received lately, I thought I would check out what all the fuss was for myself.

I did a little research online, as you do and scoped out what it could and couldn’t do. From here, I started trying to do anything with it that made sense. Initially, this failed as I was trying to hit an RSS feed on this site from my home machine. This might seem like a logical thing to do, however the object is restricted to opening URL’s from the same domain. In my failed example, that would have been http://localhost/. You could get around that by mirroring a remote feed onto your particular domain using your favourite server side language.

Once I established that I could instance the objects and access a URL, it was time to start interacting with the content. The first attempt involved trying to access the information returned from the open method of the XML object. However, if you’re actually accessing XML data and not randomly formed SGML, you need to hit the responseXML property to return you an object you can interact with through the DOM. After assigning responseXML to a variable, you can now interact with it through the standard DOM methods, such as getElementById() and getElementsByTagName().

With that in mind, I set about creating something semi useful – an archive page for WordPress enhanced using XmlHttpRequest that would degrade gracefully should the XmlHttpRequest object not be available. To accomplish this, I utilised the existing feeds that WordPress provides, which are accessed through http://domain.com/<something>/feed/.

As soon as I get a little spare time, I’ll wrap it into a plugin and release it here.

Farewell HostCentral, Hello McGooHQ

General, Internet

My domain and hosting came up for renewal just the other day, so I took the opportunity to have a look around for a new host. I have had nothing but excellent service from HostCentral for the last three years, however with the wedding pending, saving money was more of a concern.

I ended up going with McGooHQ, who are hosted in Canberra and powered by Internode/Agile bandwidth; who just happen to be my ISP as well.

If the site is temporarily unavailable in the near future, you know why. In case you’d like to know if your name servers are returning you the new or old IP address of the server, my current one is 203.209.x.y while the new one is 150.101.x.y.

Happy DNS propogation!

[Edit]: If you are seeing this addition, you are viewing the new site!

Submarines And Suits

General

Whilst getting ready for work on Thursday morning, there was an atricle on the morning news show Sunrise about dress suits being back in fashion for work clothes. At the time, I passed it off as just another morning news article and attributed the content of the article to changing fashions this year.

They had a fellow on there saying that “casual Friday’s” are on the down turn and that the “casual” nature of the clothing reflects in staff performance. He also went on to say that, paraphrasing here, “you don’t want people coming to work in thongs and a singlet”. Now, you would assume that he is referring to the typical plugger thongs and a jacki how singlet from yester-year. The reality is though, that on the Gold Coast, the majority of females do in fact wear strapped shoes of some sort, a denim skirt and a singlet of some form. Does he infer that they shoudln’t be allowed to come to work in that attire, when that is what they are happy to be seen wearing in public, knowing full well females are always critical of what they wear?

Back to the submarines.

Tonight, I thought I would check back to some of my ‘not as frequently visited sites’. One such site was Paul Graham’s, of which I make a point of reading his excellent essays. Pauls latest essay entitled The Submarine is, in short about the role that Public Relations companies play in main stream news.

Once you read through the essay, which is dated this month, you’ll notice that he also talks about the phrase “The Suit is Back”. Given that, we are in the same month and Sunrise even had an “expert” in toe, you have to wonder whether or not this is in fact the work of the wonderful PR machines. The one thing that I don’t recall hearing in the article, was the name of any particular company that they were pitching for; in Pauls case that was The Men’s Wearhouse.

I thought Paul made some great comments about picking up PR in the news, this one in particular:

Remember the exercises in critical reading you did in school, where you had to look at a piece of writing and step back and ask whether the author was telling the whole truth? If you really want to be a critical reader, it turns out you have to step back one step further, and ask not just whether the author is telling the truth, but why he’s writing about this subject at all.

The mind begins to wonder.

IE7, Beta 1

Internet, Software

Quite some time ago, Microsoft announced renewed interest in updating their flagship browser, Internet Explorer. It is a widely known fact that Internet Explorer has some serious deficiencies in terms of compliance with the web standards. The deficiencies I talk of, are a major pain in the arse for most web developers who choose to develop sites according to the web standards.

On Friday just passed, the IE7 team annouced some new features which will definitely be included in the next release of IE. In case you don’t feel like clicking the link, the couple that have been confirmed are:

  • support for per pixel alpha channel filtering in PNG images (this can be used for transparency)
  • addressing major inconsistency problems in the CSS engine, including fixes for the peekabo & guillotine bugs.

I really did have some serious reservations about what the new IE7 would come to the table with. To be honest, I thought it was going to be more of a security release with very minor improvements to the rendering engine. If this release ends up fixing some/most of the major issues that web developers face battling IE and the standards, it will be a glorious day.

Go Microsoft, I mean, go Team IE!
Did I just say that aloud?