Did you ever get one of those days when no matter what you do or try, nothing seems to work for you?

Well I had one of those days today – a site we are currently working on was giving all of us heartache, so I decided to get my hands dirty and give the lads a dig out.

It was a strange one, we use the Son of Suckerfish method for most of our websites that use drop down menus. Suckerfish is a great way to have a dropdown menu work purely with CSS alone. The only javascript required is approximately 8 lines of code and it’s only there to support non-standard compliant browsers such as Internet Explorer.

All was well and good with this new site until of course it was tested in Internet Explorer 6. For some odd reason the drop down menus were appearing behind other divs on the page and therefore you couldn’t see them. After hours of trying many different things from the z-index to positioning, we couldn’t find a suitable solution. Most solutions would have meant rewriting the HTML code to suit. This was something we didn’t really want to think about as it was only happening in one browser… IE6.

Thankfully I found a great little solution to the issue on a blog (sorry the blog address escaped me now) – it was another few lines of code:

function reIndex(){
forms = document.forms
zi = 2000;
cn = document.getElementsByTagName(’div’);

for (n=0;n<cn.length;n++){
cn[n].style.zIndex=zi–;
}
}

You just need to call the function from the body tag onload and voila.

This basically reindexes all the divs on your page so that IE6 doesn’t fall on it’s face when you give it something to do that it’s not capable of doing!

It’s no wonder the RIAA continue to their shameless strategy of targeting small-time illegal filesharers.

When they are making $1.92m from a mother of four who was caught sharing sharing files to a firm working on behalf of the RIAA, there’s certainly no other way of making this sort of money, that easily.

More here – http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/19/copyright_victory_rich/

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Since March, forums that discuss information related to the so called “dodgy boxes” have been a hive of activity as desperate “dodgy box” users search anxiously for a fix for their defunct boxes. In March, NTL released a new encryption on it’s network in Ireland that effectively rendered all of these boxes useless. That new encryption is now known to be Nagravision 2.

However, it wasn’t long before the elite hackers for the Kryptview box were able to release a patch to bypass this new encryption and get their boxes back up and running. Other boxes, such as the IT Gate, Eurovox and Starview weren’t as fortunate. So far, three months on, there has only been fixes released for the IT Gate and the Starview 4 (The Box Super USB). For the owners of other, older versions of these boxes, the chance of getting a fix looks slim.

The hackers don’t seem that interested in helping the “old” customers in Ireland, but will gladly help you if you purchase one of their latest and greatest machines. That makes total sense from a business perspective. This is the best opportunity they have to get people to upgrade their boxes.

This has definitely been a huge success for NTL who were determined to remove these boxes from circulation – or were they? Think of it like this, apparently they’ve only scrambled the premium channels with the new encryption. Channels such as Sky Sports, Setanta and the Adult channels were the first to go. Yet, they seem to have left other channels only available to their digital subscribers. There’s clear evidence that NTL’s subscriptions greatly improved when the dodgy boxes were in full flow. Nearly everyone you spoke to had heard of these boxes and had jumped ship or cancelled their Sky subscription. Obviously Sky and Setanta weren’t too happy about this and let NTL know.

Now though, where are they going? Are they going to roll out Nagravision 3 that will most likely kill all of these boxes for a very long time (there has yet to be a crack for Nagra 3) or will they just continue with Nagravision 2? No-one seems to know the answer to this and only time will tell.

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• UPC / NTL launch new encryption to beat the hackers (tomdoyletalk.com)

The system itself searches the big hotel sites such as booking.com, hotels.com, lastminute.com and expedia.com, etc etc.

So if you are looking for a hotel (that’s not in New York – use www.visitnewyork.ie for that ) use www.hotelscombined.com

For the first time in over a year, this blogs most “found for” search for term has been ousted by a new one…

Yes, it’s true – this blog is found most by people searching on Google for… wait for it… “Listen to Tom Doyles Songs”.

Although I must admit that I dreamed as a kid (and well into my adulthood) of becoming a rockstar and selling millions of records, it unfortunately never happened for me. The truth was, we were just never good enough.

So for those visitors coming in their masses to hear the latest tune from Tom Doyle (whoever he is) – I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not the Tom Doyle you are looking for.

But please feel free to listen to the unmixed, non-mastered and very old recordings from my teenage years – I’m sure you won’t be back for more!

1. Believe In Me – Gryn (Bass Guitar)
Go get Adobe Flash Player!

2. Foreign Bed – Gryn (Bass Guitar & Drums)
Go get Adobe Flash Player!

3. Breaking The Line – Gryn (Bass Guitar)
Go get Adobe Flash Player!

4. Revolution – SandBush (Drums – 15 at the time…)
Go get Adobe Flash Player!

5. Walk – SandBush (Drums)
Go get Adobe Flash Player!

6. I Never Wanted To Live – SandBush (Drums)
Go get Adobe Flash Player!

Ah bliss… Childhood Dreams huh?

Excellent design with clever use of graphics and simplistic effects.

For more information visit http://www.rte.ie/news/2009/0603/exams.html

The poor buggers, as if they needed any more stress at this time of the year!!!

Obviously due to the phenomenal success of the Nintendo Wii, Sony have decided to released a prototype of their next generation motion controller, aptly named the PlayStation Motion Controller. The PlayStation Motion Controller is due to be released as a peripheral to the PS3 and isn’t planned solely to be released with a new console. It’s due to be released in 2010. Here’s the demo video of the controller in action.

Of course, Nintendo are due to release an add on for their Wii controller that will make it more sensitive later this month.

In the meantime, Microsoft who also claimed the Nintendo Wii was a fad, have been working hard on the so called “Project Natal” controller for the XBOX 360.

So far it looks “way out there”, maybe they are just using it to sow up all the patents before someone else does!

Here’s their demo video for Project Natal:

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The full search service as described in their launch video doesn’t seem to be live yet (certainly not in Ireland) – You can view their demo video by clicking here.

Some features look great, like how you can search for holidays from within the search engine itself, which means you don’t have to visit loads of different websites. The shopping system is very similar to Google’s Froogle, but more integrated.

I’m not sure that we really need another search engine, but this is certainly an improvement on their last attempt at making an improvement. I just fail to see the innovation from Microsoft, but maybe they simply can’t be innovative anymore?

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Within minutes of Microsoft launching their new search system that is set to revolutionise the way we search, Google announced one of the most innovative applications yet to grace the World Wide Web.

Microsoft must have been so disappointed when all the web and blog headlines were NOT about their new search engine strangely named Bing. No, what caught every web enthusiasts eye was the launch of Google Wave.

Google Wave is Google’s attempt to rid the World of our archaic emailing system. They began their presentation with the notion of how old email has become in its 40 years of existence. It’s something that was designed and developed in a time when instant messaging, cloud computing, Facebook, Bebo and other social networking sites didn’t exist. They believe that now is the time to make the change to a new more advanced system that will incorporate all the “real-time” functionality that most of us live and breathe today.

Although I have to admit some of the functionality is mind-blowing and in places hugely innovative -  albeit that the system is developed with the yet to be fully HTML 5 standard – I’m yet to be convinced that it will actually replace people’s use of email.I just can’t see the normal joe soap trying to get to grips with this system when they hardly understand how to cc a number of people in a simple email.

Google plan to release a lot of this innovative code as part of their Google Web ToolKit which is an absolute dream for any web developer. They will also provide a fully open API which will allow developers to use the power of the system for their own applications, whether it be web, mobile or desktop!

One side of me is so excited about the release of Google Wave. That is the programmer side of me, the one that lives and breathes web innovation – we haven’t had anything like this in years! The other side – I’m kind of like, “so what?”. I personally see it as being the final string in Google’s stealth approach to building the World’s largest social network.

What do you think? Have a look at the launch here:

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