In a nutshell I’d grown tired of the last version of DBR, I liked the images but they were slow to load and made things difficult to read at times, plus the site was overly sparse and the mobile version was terrible (it had been an afterthought) – this new version fixes that. It’s faster to load, there’s a bit more going on without being distracting (I hope) and it’s nice and responsive as it was designed and built with that in mind.

There’s still a few bits to-do: I’d like to create an actual portfolio page instead of the page I have at the moment which is jus a few pictures and a paragraph of text, I also need to do some thorough testing on IE (though quick looks suggest all is well, fingers crossed).

So any way, please take a look around and I welcome all constructive feedback!

Today I purchased Steve Job’s rather meaty biography for some reading material whilst I travel back on forth to work on The Tube and, as I often do, I posted this to Twitter and what I got in response was a few asinine comments slating either Steve Jobs or Apple and it’s products in general. My question is why?

I’d like to state, before I get going, that I know the difference between winding each other up (something I do regularly with a friend of mine who uses an Android phone, and he does with me, the die hard iPhone user) and just being unnecessarily opinionated when your opinion is not wanted. Any way, onwards…

Presumably you don’t believe you have a chance of changing my opinion of Mr. Jobs, his creations or his company, especially by being kind of a douche? Surely you aren’t so arrogant as to assume that my opinion of Apple, which has been informed by using Apple products for many years, as well as it’s competitors offerings, would be swayed by a misinformed or just plain stupid retort? No, it can’t be that.

Maybe you think it makes you look big and clever? It doesn’t, it makes you look the opposite.

Being critical of someone’s technology preference is completely pointless and unnecessary – I don’t walk around telling Blackberry users their phones are useless because RIM are incompetent (they aren’t useless, they’re often the backbone of business and BBM was inspired), I don’t make fun of Android users because a bug in the OS gave out people’s personal data (we all make mistakes). I don’t make fun of Windows Phone 7 because Microsoft made it (I think WP7 is pretty damn good). Each phone has it’s own merits, and everyone has their own opinion of which phone is better, and here’s the kicker: no one is wrong. All of the various smartphone manufacturers got to where they are because they make quality products that users love.

How about instead of being critical, nit picking and petty we strive for improvement? Innovation is what bought us smartphones (devices we can hold in our hands that perform as well as desktop computers!) and innovation is what will make them better and better.

Besides, variety is the spice of life.

I admit my understanding of Quantitive Easing is minimal (read: essentially non-existent) but ultimately the banks get more money, so, to put it another way, the people who hold the majority of responsibility for getting us in this mess get given more money to help jump start the economy (in theory, as let’s face it: they’ve already been given masses of our money and it hasn’t worked so far).

Brilliant.

But as a thought experiment let’s take that £75,000,000,000 and consider a different use for it. What if, instead of giving the banks more money (to pay their ridiculous bonuses and salaries) we were given that money? £75,000,000,000 split evenly amongst the population of the UK (~63,000,000 people) gives every person ~£1190, pre-tax. What do you think would give the UK’s economy the biggest boost? Everyone having a good chunk of extra spending money or the banks having a large chunk of money to lose?

Dan for PM 2014.

I was gutted to hear the news that Steve Jobs died today. He has massively influenced my work, my career and my life, like he has done with most people in my line of work.

I wanted to share a fond memory of mine, which can be directly attributed to Steve Jobs. Just a few weeks ago my family visited and I gave my Grandfather (AKA Baggy) my iPad to have a look at. Baggy is a complete technophobe, if I asked him to send a text he probably wouldn’t know that he’d do that on his mobile phone and yet he could use the iPad right away. Within a matter of minutes he was watching videos of cats doing stupid things on YouTube, flicking pages around, navigating through the related videos and finding old TV recordings of country songs he used to listen to as a young man. Steve Jobs not only bought technology forward in leaps and bounds but he made it accessible to everyone. It’s a tragedy that he was taken away so young.

I had hoped to one day watch Steve Jobs give another Apple keynote with my geeky unborn child, obviously that will now not happen but I will teach him or her about Steve and how much he has contributed to everyday life. Just imagine where we’d be if he had never come around.

David Cameron once said “We’re all in this together“. He was referring to the current financial mess the country, Europe and indeed the World is in. He was, of course, spouting out crap to placate the masses for 10 minutes while he was busy making sure that a certain group of people (i.e. “the rich”) suffer less during the current financial crisis than the Middle and Lower classes (AKA “The Peasants”).

Let’s look at some figures, most off the top of my head: VAT is now at 20% (up from 17.5%), the cost of fuel has sky rocketing (despite the oh-so-generous 1p per litre reduction from the government) the NHS is gradually being killed off, energy bills are going up (despite energy companies making billions of pounds of profit every quarter), unemployment is still very very high and no one’s had a pay rise in donkey’s years.

The rich, however, keep getting richer. Any one with a brain can see the people taking the strain in this current mess are the people who can’t afford to, the people who will feel the pain of an extra 2.5% on their food shopping and will notice that their car now takes £70 to fill up instead of £50.

The government lets the people who provide us with the resources we need to survive to raise prices when there is no justification to do so – sure profits might be hit if British Gas don’t bump up their gas prices by 18% but let’s not be naive here – even if they didn’t they’d still see profits in the billions.

Politicians are letting this happen – when was the last time they stuck up for us? We elect them, we pay their salaries and the mortgages on their second homes, they are supposed to be our servants and yet they put their interests, and the interests of multi-national businesses who turn profits so big they could pay for thousands of people to retire in comfort and security ahead of us.

We, as those that work hard and don’t earn £100,000s a year, are second rate citizens. What we need is second to what the rich need, the rich who exploit our natural resources and then take money from us to use them not to cover costs but to turn massive profits.

I’m not so stupid as to say big business is bad because we clearly need it to put fuel in our cars and power our machines but big business should help us – we made them rich, why not help us out whilst we’re struggling and out off the price hikes for a few years until we’re all back on our feet? The simple answer to that is greed, the driving force in modern society. People can never have enough, even when they have more than they could spend in a decade of lifetimes they strive for more so they can be richer than there neighbour and better than their “friends”.

And this is why I think we’re going to see more riots, more strikes and more public outcry: with it becoming increasingly apparent that the government serves the rich and everything else is secondary the lower paid, lower class citizens will shout louder to get their voices heard. We are not stupid, we know how “fair” our country is, we know that we are not in this together and we’ve had enough of bearing the brunt of the troubles and hardships caused by those getting richer.

Please note: In no way do I condone the riots, thievery and arson are not ways to be heard. Peaceful protests and loud voices are enough to make a difference. The pen is mightier than the sword and all that.

I’d also like to say that while I refer to the police as the government’s enforcers this does not mean that they should be chastised for what the government are doing – the Police are doing their job and the Tories and Co. are doing their best to make the Police’s lives harder with big budget cuts and demoralising speeches.

1. Bankers would not be able to receive bonuses when they’ve done a crap job and their bonuses would be capped at a reasonable percentage of their annual salary – no more 26x the total annual salary as a bonus payment!
2. Lane hoggers would be fined the same amount as people who speed, repeat offenders will have their car and driving license taken away and will have to travel everywhere on rollerskates
3. People who claim they are unable to work in order to receive free money will be fired from a cannon into a volcano
4. The Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday would be removed from history and disbanded; the reporters who have demonstrated how low humanity can sink will be sent to the moon with only each other as company
5. Dub Step would no longer be classed as a form of music, instead it will be referred to as “A Collection Random Noises”
6. Jedward and Louis Walsh will be sent away and banned from having any involvement in the music industry
7. It will be illegal to call yourself an Entrepreneur when in reality you’re just an unemployed 20-something who can’t be assed to get a job
8. The Murdochs will have all their assets seized and used to put on a country-wide party and then be forced to watch nothing but Be Kind Rewind until they expire (assuming they can expire, I still personally think they’re demons and therefore will be unable to die from old age)
9. Nick Clegg will be shaved every 2 weeks, his hair will then be used to make a fur coat for him which he will wear whilst living with the Queen’s Corgis like the useless lap dog he is
10. The English flag will be changed to Godzilla chewing on a Boeing 747 whilst punching David Cameron in the face for being a knobber.

I’ve been working for Causeway for 9 months now, give or take, and although it’s been short it’s also been awesome working with Ed, Jutta and Darrell. Much time shall be spent down the pub with them in the future.

I’m looking forward to starting at Bite, working with their team and their clients; it’s gonna be great fun!

I’ve always found that WordPress runs slow compared to other CMSs and, given the huge image files being used as the background images of my pages I don’t want to increase load times anymore so i’ve spent a fair bit of time optimising my WordPress install to make it as fast as possible.

I’ve outlined what I’ve done here but I’m still playing around so there may be stuff I’ve missed or even methods of optimisation that I’ve duplicated – please feel free to post your own methods in the comments below.

mod_pagespeed

My server runs mod_pagespeed to minify everything before it’s served to the user’s browser. It definitely makes a big difference to load times.

Plugins

Better WordPress Minify
This one automatically minifies CSS and JS files to reduce download times and the number of requests the browser has to send to the server.

WP CSS
Gzips CSS files to make them as small as possible.

DB Cache Reloaded Fix
Caches databases queries to reduce the number of MySQL queries a page requires – always a good way to increase load times.

Removing plugins
Removing unused plugins completely, and minimising the number I use, has also improved things.

Changing Link Structure

This is one I found out about because of Chris Coyier’s post “So really, don’t use just /%postname%/ as your permalink structure” – my old URL structure was category/postname but it turns out that this dramatically increases page load time – changing the links to be postID/postname fixes this. For a detailed explanation on why see here.

First a disclaimer: this post concentrates on iPhones as I do not have an Android, WP7 or Blackberry to test with however I’d imagine that the code is applicable regardless.

My site is pretty image heavy so when viewing it on a mobile browser it’s slow to load; the solution to this was simple: Media Queries. That sped things up a lot but there was still something making load times too long – the Javascript.

The only Javascript I use is Cufon (yes, I know I should be using FontDeck or similar)  - on the desktop version of the site it’s not a big issue however on a 3G or worse connection it’s a slog to download the Javascript files for no real gain.

I decided to find a way to only load the Javascript on bigger screens where it would have a bigger affect and more likely be a desktop based computer. There are no Javascript Media Queries so I came up with a simple bit of code to emulate them.

<script>
	function addJS(file){
		var scriptTag=document.createElement('script');
		scriptTag.setAttribute('src',file);
		document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(scriptTag);
	} //addJS()

	if(screen.width > 480){
		addJS('path/to/js.js');
		addJS('path/to/another/js.js');

		window.onload=function(){
			alert('Watch out for creepers.');
		}
	} //if
</script>

The code works pretty simply – it checks the user’s screen width and if it’s greater than 480px (which is a non-retina iphone display in landscape mode) it adds the Javascript files dynamically to the head tag, I’ve also put an onload event in the if statement so the Javascript doesn’t try to call functions that won’t exist on smaller screens.

You can change the width to whatever you fancy but 480px served my purposes.

I’ve just looked to see how long it’ll take to get from my place to Dover, now, I’m in the UK so most likely I want to go to the Dover with all the boats in the UK, right? Google Maps, however, tries to give me directions to Dover in the US. It seems unlikely that I’m going to want to drive from the countryside just outside of London, across the rather wide Atlantic Ocean (which has a very poor road network) to one of the various Dovers in The States so why doesn’t Google implement a bit of logic that looks for destinations closer to you rather than far away? Bings Maps seems to do that; it at least got the right Dover when I looked at route information.

You Only See Reflections of the Past

Most of us have heard of Einstein’s famous equation that equates energy and matter.

In this equation the term ‘c’ represents the speed of light travelling in a vacuum (which is thought to be a constant throughout the universe, although there is some evidence to the contrary), this speed is approximately 30,000,000,000m/s or 671,080,888mph. This is the universal speed limit – nothing can travel faster than this, and nothing with mass can even get close.

This is important – it means light travels at a certain speed and thus the things we see have already happened before we have seen them happen.

On Earth this is imperceptible by humans. Light takes less than 0.14 seconds to travel the circumference of the earth at the equator so what you are really seeing is a light echo of the very recent past, though it’s so recent your brain can not perceive it as the past at all.

When we start factoring in larger distances, say for instance the distance between the Earth and the Sun, the length of time taken for the light to reach your eye becomes more noticeable – if the sun were to vanish right now you wouldn’t know about it for 8 minutes.

Our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 4 light years away (1 Light Year being the distance light travels in 1 Earth year and not a measurement of time) and so we would not know if something happened to our neighbour until 4 years after the event.

The Andromeda Galaxy is 2,000,000 light years away so when you peer at it through a telescope what you’re seeing is how it looked over 1,000,000 years before humans had mastered fire (which is believed to be between 400,000 and 790,000 years ago).

And that’s nothing – recently we viewed the most distant object ever observed by mankind and the electromagnetic radiation we detected form it had been travelling from it’s source, a massive GMB from an exploding star 30 times the size of our sun, to us for 13.1billion years meaning the Gamma rays were emitted a mere 250million years after the Big Bang.

You’ve Never Touched Anything

One of the fundamental laws of Physics, as postulated by Newton, is as follows:

To every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction: or the forces of two bodies on each other are always equal and are directed in opposite directions.

This is Newton’s Third Law of Motion and is the reason why, in real life, if you shoot someone they will not fly 20 feet backwards (as for that to happen you would have to have experienced a similar force meaning you, as the gunman, would also be thrown back 20 feet). It also has some pretty practical uses – it’s stopping you falling through the Earth right now.

Think about it – gravity is pulling you toward the earth. What’s stopping you from being pulled right to the core and incinerated? The ground presumably, but to stop you from being BBQ’d and crushed by the intense heat and pressure a few miles below your feet the ground must provide a force opposite and equal to the force gravity is exacting on you (if the force it provided was greater than gravity you’d fly upwards).

The force providing this service is electromagnetism, specifically the Pauli Exclusion Principal which states that no two identical Fermions (e.g. Electrons) in a single atom can occupy the same quantum state simultaneously (see the link for a more in-depth explanation of this).

So how does this keep us from falling through the Earth (not that the Earth could exist without this but for argument’s sake let’s pretend it could)?

To understand you need to imagine your feet on the atomic level and for the ease of imagining what’s going on let’s just use a single atom in your foot and in the floor – both the floor and foot atom have a nucleus of Protons and Neutrons surrounded by a cloud of electrons. As we’ve stated, 2 electrons in a single atom can not have the same quantum state but 2 electrons in separate electron clouds around different atoms can (in this case our foot and floor atom).

When gravity pulls our foot atom toward the floor atom there are electrons in both of their respective clouds that have the same quantum state so the 2 electron clouds repulse one another rather than combine. This is what stops us falling through the floor, the Earth’s crust, it’s Mantle and all the way down into it’s core.

It is possible to overcome this repulsive force however the amount of force required to do so would break the floor’s structure before you were able to slip between the individual atoms, not to mention destroy your body and cause so much heat to be produced you’d be nothing more than a pile of dust on the floor.

To go on a strange tangent here (which is kind of the point of this post), this means that when you are standing you’re technically levitating – you are floating on 2 clouds of electrons that repulse each other and when you try to touch something you are prevented from doing something by the opposing Electrons in the object you’re trying to touch – what you feel is that repulsive force, not the object itself.

Of course the distances involved are so tiny you’ll never really notice this, just as the time scales involved in light bouncing around are, over human distances at least, so tiny they won’t make any difference to you however this is what I believe to be the most awesome part of Physics – as we perceive the universe it all seems pretty straight forward but if we start working with the smallest distances, or the biggest, this Universe we inhabit becomes a whole lot more weird and mind blowing.

It seems pointless to take an interest in it or to care because ultimately when all is said and done it makes no difference – most voters will vote based on who they like (I’d wager the AV vote was lost because most people don’t like Nick Clegg – 2/3 people I know who voted against it voted so for that reason) and the majority of people are largely uneducated as to the beliefs and values of the political parties.

Not that any education into the voting parties is really necessary – there’s only 3 major parties that stand a chance of winning overall (at least for the foreseeable future) and they’re all as bad as each other – The Tories only care about “The Boys” (i.e. The Rich), the Lib Dems are basically Tories but without spines, and Labour helped get us into the economic mess we’re in now, so unless you’re personally wealthy you’re pretty much fucked.

Voting for other parties is pointless as they won’t win so you have to vote for one of the main 3 to even stand a chance of being represented – this is how the Lib Dems became part of the current government; those that didn’t want to vote for the Tories or Labour voted Lib Dem (as they pretended to be different with promises of a better future): this is tactical voting – something AV would have put an end to; thanks for that, voters.

So – no more will I get pissed off by the people that govern us, no more will I care who wins the elections because whoever wins will look out for their interests and not ours – I’ll stay blissfully ignorant like I once was; there’s little point in getting worked up over a bunch of boring old men and women in Westminster.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist (there are a lot of clever civilians out there that can, and do, disprove all of these pseudo-science theories). I do not read this website to prepare myself for TPTB (The Powers That Be – an acronym that refers to the shady NWO (New World Order), the government, lizard men (seriously), the aliens, a sub-terreanean race of dwarves (again – seriously) or the Illuminati, typically) I read it because it’s like a huge crazy (in many cases literally crazy) sci-fi story book.

The people that make posts on this forum believe with all their hearts that what they post is true, that their end of days predictions will come to pass (despite the fact there there is pretty much one for every other day), that there are aliens visiting us, that there are shape-shifting lizard people infiltrating our government, that President Obama is a Human/Alien hybrid, that Lady GaGa is growing horns and that Paul (the recent Simon Pegg film) was a grey (a word that refers to grey aliens) psy-op to get us all used to them (the aliens) so we don’t resist their enslavement of mankind.

My favourite has to be the whole 2012 story though – in 2012 (specifically 21st December 2012) is the date when the Mayan calendar ends it’s 5,125 year cycle in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar.

So – that must be the end of the world, right? No, of course not – it’s like when the Gregorian calendar enters a new millennium: entirely insignificant until we as human’s put a value on it.

The conspiracy theorists have taken this, though, and run with it; it’s got a lot of offshoots now but the best is about an object called Nibiru.

Nibiru is, depending on what branch of the theory you subscribe to, a comet (often thought to be Comet Elenin), a planet orbiting in the exact orbit of the earth but directly opposite the sun so we can never see it, a planet coming in from deep space to hit us (which is a popular one despite the fact that scientists have said on numerous occasions that if this was the case you could see it with the naked eye; but there’s a conspiracy theory about that too), a giant alien spacecraft, some kind of heavenly transport and a few other various theories which, like all of them, hold no scientific precedence).

The theory itself was, quite literally, made up by a woman called Nancy Lieder who claimed the greys, whom she called Zetas, came to visit her, implanted a communication device in her and so on.

Despite the fact her warning has changed dramatically since it’s initial release people cling on to this idea and genuinely believe TSHTF (The Shit Hits The Fan – these guys love their acronyms more than us web developers!) next year. You can not disuade them with any well thought out scientific argument , they can not be reasoned with, you can not have a discussion with them. Any one who discredits the idea or who argues against it is a dis-information agent, a sceptic or sent by TPTB to hide it from the masses so that they can hide with the lizard people in the hollow earth.

I often find myself wondering why people buy into this stuff; I’ve often thought it’s due to lack of education in science but I’m not so sure any more – some of the stuff that comes out of this web site is so absurd any person could read it and realise what a load of rubbish it is.

I wonder if, what with the huge amount of joblessness in the world at the moment if people just need something to hold on to and believe in; “knowing” what is coming helps them feel in control where they are otherwise at the mercy of big banks and incompetent governments.

This post isn’t written to mock – everyone is entitled to their own opinion and belief; it’s more of a trail of thought and me pondering out loud wondering why such outrageous, bizarre and massively mis-informed theories can hold so many people to such strong beliefs.

However, when all is said and done – there are some incredibly imaginative people on Above Top Secret – I bet if they could channel their energies into writing a book it could be a cult favourite.

This walk-through (at time of writing) installs Python v2.7.

Grab ActiveState’s version of Python and extract it on your Linux box to wherever.

In the extracted folder do a

sudo ./install.sh

You will be asked for an install directory – hit enter to use the default (again – at time of writing this is /opt/ActivePython-2.7).

Once this is installed successfully follow the mod_pagespeed install instructions as normal until this point (for the stable version):

gclient config http://modpagespeed.googlecode.com/svn/branches/latest-beta/src
gclient sync —force # this will download all source code

Replace the above Terminal commands with the following (assumes you kept the default ActivePython install path, but if not just edit accordingly).

sudo /opt/ActivePython-2.7/bin/python /bin/depot_tools/gclient.py config

http://modpagespeed.googlecode.com/svn/branches/latest-beta/src

sudo /opt/ActivePython-2.7/bin/python /bin/depot_tools/gclient.py sync —force

After that just follow the instructions as normal!

For the purpose of the code you’ll see below the array looks like this:

 Array(
     [0] => (
          'title' => 'string',
          'timestamp' => 0123456789,
          'other_fields' => 'blah'
     )
)

The array will be sorted by the timestamp element of the array’s nodes.

function sortByTimestamp($posts) {
	/* Sorts the array by timestamp with the most recent first. */

        $sorted = array();
	$count = count($posts);

 	while(count($sorted) < $count) {
 		foreach($posts as $key=>$page)
			if(!isset($smallest) ||
                           page['timestamp'] < $posts[$smallest]['timestamp'])
                              $smallest = $key;

                        $sorted[] = $posts[$smallest];
		unset($posts[$smallest], $smallest);
	} //while

	return array_reverse($sorted);
} //sortByTimestamp()

The function works pretty simply;

1. Create a blank array (this will contain the sorted array)
2. Loop through the $posts array and find the one with the smallest timestamp.
3. Add this element of the array to the array we created at step 1 and remove the element from the unsorted array.
4. Repeat steps 2 & 3 until all elements have been sorted into the array created into step 1.
5. Return the new array.
6. The sorting loop will run the same number of times as there are elements in the array that is to be sorted.