@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document domain("google.com"), domain("google.co.uk") {

    body {

        font-family: "Lucida Grande", sans-serif !important;

    }

}

If this isn’t a reason to use Firefox over IE/Safari, I don’t know what is. Now go, install Stylish, and fix that butt-ugly website. Oh, and if you’re a Windows user, use Lucida Sans Unicode instead.

But but but. More importantly than all that, we also went and saw Stomp. Now, for those of you that haven’t seen Stomp, there’s a post on my music tumblelog, Noise and Ruckus. Those of you that have will understand just how unbelievably epic the entire show is, and how much I loved seeing it again. Sense of rhythm is one thing, but the ability to create a performance out of whatever you have to hand at that level is pure genius.

Those of you that still haven’t watched that video, you’re idiots. Go now, and redeem yourselves.

See that? That’s hardcore. Let it be known that students will stop at nothing in order to save all the cash they can - even if it involves digging out 16″ CRTs from the depths of my wardrobe and filling my desk space with them.

And yes, that’s Vista. On that piece of crap. I had a spare copy, so I thought, “Why not?” The results were… catastrophic. It can just about render wallpaper without falling over. But it’s so pretty… even if one monitor displays slightly different colours to the other (and that’s after tweaking the output with the ATi Catalyst Control Centre).

As a comparison, here’s my new(ish) setup, over at Home 2.0:

Now, you tell me: which one is more awesome?

That’s today, as in the sixth of April, 2008 A.D. Whatever happened to global warming, people?

I went to see Jonathan Coulton (yes, that Jonathan Coulton) perform in London a few weeks back. He was as amazing as you think (Andy has the full details) - go see him, like, now.

No, not right now, jackass. Read the rest of this post first.

Anyway, his last song was entitled First of May, and I hadn’t heard it before. It’s an absolute genius song about spring coming around (NSFW though - careful) and I loved every minute of it. One thing grated on me though: first of May? What the hell, man? Spring starts in March, I swear.

Lies, apparently. See above for proof. JoCo was right and is my new God. All hail.

So tell me, venerable JoCo, how exactly can I convince Al Gore to shut the hell up? I want some damn sunshine, and if that comes at the expense of the planet’s ecosystem, so be it.

This got me thinking: why haven’t more people watched this? There’s more than one reason: lack of time, dislike of cartoons, the difficulty in obtaining copies of Japanese work… I’m sure the list is endless. But the main reason hit me a little while later (and it seems bloody obvious now): there’s too much crap on TV. Now, this wouldn’t be a problem in itself, but you insist on watching it like you have nothing better to do. You turn it on, sit down for an hour or three and let the magic box tell them what they want to experience.

Unfortunately, the magic box is stupid.

I’m going to use my flatmate, Andrew, as a prime example. Now Andy, I love you, but for fuck’s sake, if Judge Judy is the only thing on, turn the fucking TV off and do something else. Read a book, do some revision, fix that damned computer that’s been unusable without an Ubuntu live CD for a month now… hell, do the dishes - they’ve been piling up for ages.

I should sort out those dishes. And probably take the rubbish out too.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that you don’t like most of what’s on TV. You realise that, but you persist in watching whatever jumps out at you from the damned TV Guide because it’s easier than getting off your arse and doing something useful… like learning to juggle. Instead of even popping a DVD in when nothing’s on, you insist on watching repeats of crap dramas on uktv Gold. Now stop it.

There is another way. Get a TiVo or Sky Plus, or hell, download BBC iPlayer. Actually, screw that: ask your mates for a recommendation of a good TV show you haven’t seen every episode of a hundred and thirty-one times and download it off BitTorrent (side note: piracy is bad - it wasn’t me what told you to do it). Your friends are the best spam-filter you’ll ever find: make them do the hard work of finding decent shows. If you’re doing it right, you’ll be recommending stuff to them constantly too. Because here’s the secret: there are loads of awesome shows on TV. And if you stop watching the first thing you see, you might just find them.

Now go grab a torrent of Cowboy Bebop and let the awesomeness commence.

In August, I had nothing to do. I hadn’t started my job and I was bored. I thought about the Interwebs for a while and realised the reason I wasn’t using my blog or my tumblelog is because actually thinking up content seemed like too much work. However, linking to music videos on YouTube was something I was doing constantly over IM, so I figured, why the hell not make everyone suffer, not just the one?

Noise and Ruckus is not a music review site. Every now and again (it used to be every day, but who needs that kind of commitment?) I shall update it with a new song I’m particularly fond of. I chose Tumblr for this task for two reasons: it’s incredibly simple to post YouTube videos and there are no comments.

No comments? Well, there’s a reason for that. I’m not interested. It’s a very simple project: I put up links to music and you decide whether you like said music enough to continue visiting or subscribing to the site. If you don’t feel like it, no worries - you’ll still be forced to endure it through that sidebar over there. You won’t get updates on it through your feed reader unless you ask, though - I promise.

Head on over to the Noise and Ruckus site for more information and, of course, lots more music.

OK, there are basically five steps to inner peace (and outer, but that’s less important). If you achieve peace at any time, immediately stop following the steps - you’re done. And as a bonus, people will think twice about destroying your peace next time.

Here we go:

1. Shout at it.
2. Ignore it.
3. Poke it.
4. Kick it.
5. Stab it.

And thus, you are enlightened. Now go, my son, and spread the wisdom.

So, let’s go through them all. There’s some big ones and some tiny ones, but I figure I should get them all out. I’ve just been using Coda for several hours, so hopefully they’re pretty fresh in my mind.

1. PHP breaks syntax highlighting. First and foremost, Coda will expect PHP file to start with PHP, and starts it off in PHP-highlighting mode, despite the fact that PHP (for the web at least; I’m not sure about PHP-CLI) always starts in printing mode. This means any HTML up to a <?php opening statement will be highlighted as if it were PHP. In addition, any PHP code in a highlighted area of HTML (for example, in a tag attribute: <a href="<?= $link ?>">) will reset the HTML highlighting and screw it up. Interestingly enough, it also thinks a // comment continues until the end of the line; actually, if there’s a closing PHP tag (?>) it stops there.
2. Coda has a very annoying bug where it thinks a self-closing XML tag (for example, <br />) is actually an opening XML tag (<br>). This makes the Close Tag function close it, and will also break Close Tag tag blocks it’s nested in, no matter how far you go.
3. There is no prettyprinter. Now, I realise, this is more of a feature request than a complaint, but I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve downloaded or been passed a horribly-formatted HTML, XML or JavaScript page and needed to understand why line 326 is breaking so I can fix it. What am I supposed to do: buy BBEdit as well? C’mon… if you can do tag-matching, this is just one more step.
4. The folder tree forgets. If I close Coda and come back to it, or accidentally double-click on a folder and have to hit Back, I shouldn’t have to navigate (waiting for my slow web server to load each folder) through that mangled mess of directories that Joomla forces upon you. It should remember where I last was, damnit.
5. Bracket matching doesn’t extend to tags. If I want to find the opening partner to a closing brace, Coda is awesome. If I want to find the opening partner to a closing </div> tag, it’s not.
6. CSS mode doesn’t support rule indentation. CSS, despite the CSS creators’ apparent efforts to the contrary, is implicitly a hierarchical language, as it is essentially a set of rules defining presentation of HTML. Therefore, indentation of rules according to their equivalent HTML tag blocks is very useful to visually separate groups of rules. In my CSS, I like to indent a rule if the one before it refers to a parent HTML tag, but CSS mode in Coda doesn’t support creating these indents or any markers separating groups of rules. It does, however, preserve them if they’re inserted in Edit mode, which is a definite benefit. And this brings me onto another point:
7. CSS mode has its flaws. Edit mode has fantastic autocompletion capabilities for CSS, but they’re nowhere to be seen in CSS mode. I’d expect that with the comparatively rigid layout, you could even do things like highlight potentially invalid code. And interestingly enough, if your CSS file doesn’t end with a newline, any rule you create and move will join its ending brace to the start of the next selector - probably just a bug, but definitely an annoying one when you discover it.
8. The books are useless. Outdated, hard to read, irritatingly structured and only available when you’re connected to the Internet… what’s the point? Just link me to the specs online, thanks.
   Actually, there’s a point…
9. It needs a global and site-specific bookmarks menu. Coda has a web browser built in. I don’t like typing long URLs constantly. The mathematics is simple.
   This is one of a few reasons I don’t use Coda’s Preview mode - I just use Firefox. The others include the Google search box and the Web Developer toolbar.

That’s it. I realise that’s a fairly long list, but I think it speaks highly of an application that I can use it for up to sixteen hours a day, seven days a week at times and I can only name nine things that are wrong with it. I spent ten minutes racking my brains for a number ten and couldn’t think of a single thing. In contrast, I can think of several dozen things, off the top of the my head, that are right with it.

I believe Coda is a solid product - in fact, I was so impressed with it that bought it within a day of trialing it. I’m a student: that 40 quid could buy me twenty beers. That’s a lot. I just think it’s nine steps short of perfect.

Shush. I’m going to bed.

If you’re reading this, you probably know me personally, but I suppose there’s a miniscule chance I’ve become famous and you’re reading through the backlog in search of witty repertoire to memorise and wow your friends with at your next social gathering. In which case, shame on you. Don’t you have better things to do?

Apparently not. It seems that neither do I - hence this blog when I should be sleeping. Don’t let that fool you though - eventually this will become useful.

I won’t bother with an introduction, as you no doubt already know who I am. I do have a website-related thingy on this very site - just snip off the “blog/” bit and you’ll see it. It’s very informative and quite dull, so I would personally avoid it, but I guess I’m biased.

Well, you’re here: to keep updated with my life (I’m not sure why, but the technology’s there so we might as well use it), add the feed to your magic notification device and Bob’s your uncle.

Actually, I highly doubt Bob’s your uncle. But we’re getting sidetracked again.

This blog will no doubt be updated a maximum of six times. However, every post will be as witty as an Edmund Blackadder concocting a story about a cunning fox. So stay tuned.

– Samir Talwar.