Real quick post because there isnt a great deal to comment on, but for the first time since 2001, Internet Explorer (ie5.5 + ie6 + ie7) market share has dropped below 80%, whilst Firefox continues to rise.

We all know that IE is crap so its nice to see that it’s market share is falling, but its nicer to see Firefox gaining even more ground.

Since i use a MacBook I have been getting a bit annoyed at not being able to test my sites in IE6 or IE7 unless i go home and turn on the pc. Sure i can run IE6 in X11 but its slow and a little buggy, plus IE7 doesn’t run at all.

Since i am running Leopard i thought that i would try and install boot camp and then run Windows XP on a new partition on the hard drive. There are tons of tutorials about how to do this and the process is simple but you may have tried doing it only to find Boot Camp crashed whilst making the partition and you end up having to do a hard reset… this will happen time and time again until you do a little bit of tricky.

So here is a quick step by step guide to getting boot camp to work 100%, the guide assumes that you have already tried using boot camp and that it crashed whilst creating a partition…

1) Boot camp has just crashed…

2) Place your Leopard install disk 1 into the CD drive and turn off the computer

3) Whilst booting up keep your finger pressed on the C key, this forces your mac boot from the dvd drive

4) Wait ages until OSX installation gets going and the on the menu bar find Disk Utility

5) Select your hard drive in Disk Utility (DU) and click repair…
What we are doing here is rebuilding the partition because when Boot Camp crashed it was half way through creating a new one, thus you will have less space available if you don’t repair the disk

6) Wait for repair to finish and then reboot the machine, again holding C to load the OSX install disk

7) Now we are going to go back into Disk Utility and create the partition that boot camp was supposed too.
The reason boot camp is crashing is caused by it trying to move files from the space that it was going to partition. Since Boot Camp was running in OSX it could not move the files and sent the kernel into a panic. Now we are booting from a CD so by creating the partition we are forcing it to move the files into a different area.

8 ) You will see something similar to the image below, but you will probably only have 1 partition. Simply click on the + arrow at the bottom right (my image doesnt show this) and it will add a new partition. You should resize this to be about 1gb larger than you was planning to use for boot camp

9) Apply the changes and let DU do its work, once it has finished exit out and then reboot, again holding C to boot from the install disk

10) After the disk has loaded again, go back into DU, and select your new partition, click the - button and it will throw up a warning to say that the partition will be deleted but all information on the original partition will be ok. For the love of God make sure you selected the partition that you wanted to delete and triple read the wording to make sure you are removing the new, smaller partition.

10a) You now need to resize the original mac partition so it fills the entire disk, simply grab and drag the partition to fill the space.
Thanks go to Sergio in the comments for pointing out this step i had missed

11) Wait for it to finish, exit out of DU and reboot, DON’T hold C this time, we want to boot into native OSX

12) Go back into Boot Camp and go through the process, now that we have a clean section on the drive it can partition the disk without any issue.

13) Wait until the partition has been made and you should see…

14) Put your Windows XP or Vista (ha) disk in, and wait for an icon to appear on your desktop, once it does hit start installation, and wait for the machine to reboot.

15) You will now reboot into Windows installer mode, go through the yadda yadda and you should see something like…

16) Make sure you install on the new partition that was created, the screen shot doesnt show it but OSX will have labelled this partition [BOOTCAMP] [FAT32] - hit enter to install on that partition.

17) When asked how to format i chose Fat 32 as it allows Leopard to actually write files back to a windows disk, you could then say edit a txt file from both within Leopard and XP. Its your choice but make sure you reformat it and dont select the option which says “Leave it how it is”

17) Go through the boring windows setup and wait for it to complete, once Windows runs you will need to pop your Leopard install disk into the machine to install all the windows drivers, this is thankfully painless.

18) Marvel at XP on a Mac, and pat yourself on the back, its been a hell of a ride.

Bonus tip:
If you want to select which operating system to use during boot up simply keep the option (alt) key pressed and you will get the following screen…

If this has helped you, please leave a comment :o)

With all the shouting that goes about whether Google really do stick to their “Do no evil” slogan its nice to see that the power house is teaming up with the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to utilise the technology it created in filtering copyright material on YouTube to help catch scumbags who create child porn and exploit children.

The program uses pattern recognition to enable analysts to sort and identify files containing child sex abuse.

“The program uses pattern recognition and will work even if the pattern has been modified,” explained technology analyst Larry Magid.

“So if police can identify a pattern such as a calendar on the wall or a t-shirt logo, they have a much better chance of finding the exploited child and catching the suspect.”

Google engineers and scientists were able to work on the project on what the company calls “20% time”, which allows all employees to dedicate that amount of time to projects they initiate.

This is a great step forward in trying to protect children from exploitation on the Internet and hopefully the technology can be further developed to be even more effective.

This is just so awesome it defies belief, some guy called CupBoy has managed to create world 1-1 of the original super mario brothers in Javascript.

If that wasnt impressive enough he has also managed to squeeze it all down into an ity bity 14kb javascript file.

The sprites are stored in custom encoded strings in a format that only allows 4 colors for each sprite but in turn only takes up around 40-60 bytes per sprite.

We also have MIDI music embedded as base64-encoded data: URI’s. No music for IE, though, and it seems all the other browsers each have different, minor problems with it, but it sort of works.

Go check it out now!

It’s election time to find a new mayor for London soon, and what better way to get people to vote than by providing all the information about if you are eligible, how to register, or where you can vote by commissioning a nice shiny website that is available in nearly every language imaginable?

The answers is there isn’t :o)

Now imagine that you have a tv campaign to promote the existence of this website running across various local channels in London, you would have thought that some one, somewhere would notice that if you do not include the www. in http://www.londonelects.co.uk then you get a 400 - Bad Request http header.

If you are like me then you would probably cursor focus your address bar, then hit cmd + A to select the current url and just type in londonelects.co.uk, the browser would then add the http:// and send you onto http://londonelects.co.uk

As i already stated when you get there you will get a Bad Request error which seems pretty silly to me since i can imagine that a hell of a lot of people wont be typing the www. when typing in the domain.

Shouldn’t it be obvious to websites that are trying to promote themselves, to at least check if the non www version actually resolves to the website? Well you would of thought so.

It amazes me that these official websites can’t even get the basics down, so what should they do to fix it?

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.londonelects.co.uk$
RewriteRule ^(.*)   http://www.londonelects.co.uk/$1  [QSA,L,R=301]

That simple piece of code can be placed in a .htaccess file and will redirect anyone who types the url without www to the url that includes the www, easy peasy :o)

On what marks a surely glorious day in the web developer world, Microsoft have done a complete U-Turn  on their decision to force developers to use tags which make IE8 render in standards mode. Apparently the browser will now render in standards mode via default.

Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager of Internet Explorer stated…

“We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously. Microsoft recently published a set of Interoperability Principles. Thinking about IE8’s behaviour with these principles in mind, interpreting web content in the most standards compliant way possible is a better thing to do.”

So from this we can see that Microsoft are actually starting to take standards seriously which is good news for everyone since IE has been a pain to develop for.

You can find out more on the official Microsoft blog

I am rather suprised at how quickly MS have managed to get IE8 beta out the door, but i received news today that it is available to download now. I am currently on my MacBook so can’t test the beta just yet, but intend to get home this evening and give it a whirl.

You may or may not know this but to get IE8 to actually render pages correctly developers will have to do a whole hosts of user-agent sniffing or style sheet selectors, you can find example code of this below…

function getInternetExplorerVersion()
// Returns the version of Internet Explorer or a -1
// (indicating the use of another browser)
{
var rv = -1; // Return value assumes failure
if (navigator.appName == 'Microsoft Internet Explorer')
{
var ua = navigator.userAgent;
var re  = new RegExp("MSIE ([0-9]{1,}[\.0-9]{0,})");
if (re.exec(ua) != null)
rv = parseFloat( RegExp.$1 );
}
return rv;
}

function checkVersion()
{
var msg = "You're not using Internet Explorer.";
var ver = getInternetExplorerVersion();
if ( ver > -1 )
{
if ( ver >= 7.0 )
msg = "You're using Internet Explorer 7 or Internet Explorer 8.
I should send a quirks or strict mode document."
else
msg = "You should upgrade your copy of Internet Explorer.";
}
alert( msg );
}

It seems to me that every time MS do something good they end up shooting themselves in the foot by insisting that every page on the net needs to be supported to IE6 standards. I see it like this, make users upgrade so us developers don’t have to code for ie6, 7, 8 and then proper standards compliant browsers such as Firefox, Opera and Safari.

You can get the beta from http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/Install.htm

So I logged into Google Analytics this morning to check on some of my sites and i was greeted by a little message asking me if i wanted to share my Analytics data between Adsense, Ad Words and Analytics. I thought great, this will allow me to gain much more information when doing other campaigns.

The next tick box down asked if i would allow Google to use my analytics data for anonymous bench marking. I’m a bit weary when a big company like Google asks for users data, but would very much like to see what information (if any) they make available to Joe Public. Will this mean that we can start getting a lot more information about certain verticals when researching Adwords? Or will Google make the information available in Google Trends.

I also wonder how many webmasters are weary about allowing Google to view their site data, and if Google will do the old switcheroo at a later time and start to use Analytics data to factor in SERPS results. I know they do don’t this at the moment as i specifically remember Matt Cutts stating that the spam team does not have any access to the Analytics data.

Anyway, something’s to think about before you click yes, or no.

So I was looking into whether I need a new passport to travel into America when I came across this error on the Visa Waiver website…

Good job guys :o)

So i have had this domain for as long as I can remember and i decided that since i am now going to be working for an external SEO agency i should really start blogging about things that i am up to and ideas that might help other people. I think we’ll open with an introduction to Facebook applications once we have got this design sorted.