Chomsky chat bot … ‘the most intelligent bot in the world’ – when I challenged it that it was ‘thick’ – it replied “I might be thick, but I know how to spell you’re ” – I had left out the apostrophe

Duncan’s latest pics … ah Abdul’s – when I go to heaven it will be a giant Abduls in the sky … or maybe a huge city in the sky with lots of little Abduls spread around just like Manchester … cheers Duncan

A look at the hinterland surrounding Aire Street where I work, where rising rents are forcing out the older less business orientated companies, and inner city residences are being built for a new breed of noughties yuppie.

Jonny sez – for design textbook:

Meggs’ History of Graphic Design
Philip B. Meggs, Alston W. Purvis

Design Writing Research
Ellen Lupton, Abbott Miller

Dotnetnuke … thought I’d take a look at what seems to be the only major .net open source content management.

First impressions – installed pretty easily with no snags. A few changes to web.config and away.

Then logging at finding my way around the user levels – took a bit but not too bad.

Then the fun began. First goal to get a web page with editable content. Without wishing to read the 1000 page of pdfs, I missed the fact that you have to download modules to do pretty much anything in the CMS, including adding editable text regions. Once
I figured this, though I was able to setup the first page.

Styling the page was a battle though, needing to work out how collections and skins worked was not too obvious, and things I take for granted with other CMSs seemed quite tricky. My overall impression was just to create a basic site that had the required HTML output was difficult.

The fact that the modules are all written by different people and seem to have little consistency is not so good. They seem to have interesting features but really need someone to make sure they work in the same way.

The major drawback I came up against was styling the modules. They output their own code, such as for the module to edit HTML outputs buttons to open and close regions and print regions. Similarly I couldn’t find a way to remove graphics on the menu. I didn’t want these, but couldn’t find an easy way to get rid of them without editing the source.

The second major drawback is that these guys don’t seem to have heard of w3 compliance … the modules were especially bad for this.

6 hours to setup a 6 page test site … roll on version 3

Regular expressions help

.NET framework help

http://www.dotnetbooks.com for books on all topics .NET

The Paddingtons … how come when I tell people that I’m going to see a punk band called the Paddingtons they all snigger?

But sniggering withstanding … the Paddingtons were good … smashed but good. They had about 6 really good songs and the rest. The singer appeared to be on some drug that rendered his speech monosylabic (spell?) but he could sing … in a kind of throaty bellow. The guitars could have had a bit more edge for me, but they suited the sound, and maybe turned up a bit. The guitarist seemed to be incapable of standing and was leaning against other band members like boxers against each other at the end of a gruelling fight. They all seemed to be having a angry rebellious time, except the guitarist with the berret who thought he was in a different band and was smiling and playing up for the crowd … the crowd, very little hysteria, but seemed generally to like the band, a big cheer for the well known singles. The singer just magicked up a reluctant smile for the encore.