Where’s the content in this page?

Ever since I moved into my house six years ago, I’ve casually noticed the occasional smell of gas outside my front door. Sometimes I believed I could smell gas in my downstairs toilet which is adjacent to the inlet pipe. However, it’s not been frequent or predictable enough to convince me to call out Transco to investigate.

But today I could clearly smell gas in the toilet, so I decided to get the engineers in.

They quickly discovered that the initial installation performed when my house was built 11 years ago hadn’t been completed correctly. This was fixed by screwing on the ‘top’ of the inlet pipe which was loose.

The staggering thing was that their equipment didn’t register a leak into the house as it was less than one part per million, but I could clearly smell it.

Over the past couple of months I’ve frequently encountered little chunks of CSS wrapped in weird little comments, like this:

<!--[if IE 5]>
<p>Welcome to Internet Explorer 5.</p>
<![endif]-->

I always thought they were just notes for readers. Yesterday I had cause to implement my first Internet Explorer CSS specific code – exploiting the well known ‘star HTML’ bug. However, it’s rumoured that this bug will be fixed in Internet Explorer 7.

But I then discovered that the above code is part of Internet Explorer 5 and above. MSDN has a page about Conditional Comments.

Kathy Sierra’s recent post Manager 2.0 suggests a relationship between Web 2.0 applications and the organisations that develop them.

Web 2.0 is about Sharing, Interactivity and Community. It’s not about solving the problems of distributed computing. A Manager 2.0 operates using these same three principles.

Prior to starting up our business, I worked for large and small organisations. Every one of them operated the ‘old’ way – Kathy calls it Manager 1.0. The project and software management training I received, and the actions I took, all came from Kathy’s Manager 1.0 list. When I founded Junctionbox Media and employed Mark, I still operated that way. It’s not a nice way to work. Mark clued me in first when he reviewed our hilarious Terms of Employment.

It wasn’t until we started working on our first couple of web sites using Ruby on Rails, that I realised that Web 2.0 was causing us to change our behaviour. Indeed, Web 2.0 requires it. And it adds another point to my list of reasons for never wanting to work for someone else. This is why coffee is important, why pens matter and why I can blog during work time.

This morning I received a spam (unsolicited) HTML e-mail from a government and industry sponsored initiative Get Safe Online. It’s purpose is to ‘protect yourself against internet threats’. Such as unsolicited HTML e-mails, I presume?

The expert advice falls into three numbered categories:

1. Protect your PC
2. Protect yourself
3. Protect your business

Why does protecting your PC appear more important than the other two? Malicious software and scams are ultimately actioned by people not computers. Educating people is surely the most effective way of stopping this, complimented by setting up users as users rather than administrators and disabling their ability to install applications.

I cannot avoid commenting on the Protect Your Mac page, which starts with the assertion that ‘Macs need to be used properly to be safe’ (advice that should be emblazoned across the Protect your PC section, and isn’t!)

Judging by the following – contained in the Protect Your Mac page – the writers were a little short of things to write about – I particularly like points 1 and 3 (it’s the same thing, and if you follow point 2, there is no need for the other three points):

1. Check for updates by going to the System Preferences application and selecting Software Update and clicking Check Now.
2. Make sure Check for updates is ticked and Daily is selected in the drop-down menu. This will ensure that your computer automatically checks every day for new updates. However, this only works if you are logged in as an administrator.
3. To check manually for updates, go to the Apple menu and select Software Update. This check should be performed regularly.
4. You can download additional upgrades and patches from Apple.

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