Accurate Postcode data for the UK and Northern Ireland
by Mike on Jun.06, 2011, under Knowledge Base, Technology
Getting accurate postcode data for use in my programs has proved to be an interesting technical challenge, despite the availability of free services such as those from Google. I needed a UK postcode to Latitude/Longitude conversion tool that would work offline, which made the Google API’s completely useless. A freely available dataset was made available [...]
Generating HTML5 using XSLT
by Mike on Jan.28, 2011, under Technology, Tutorials
Recently, I have been updating some of my HTML generation tools to output valid HTML5, rather than the XHTML 1.0 standard I have been using for the last few years. The main advantage from my perspective is the ability to use the more semantic block elements, such as the nav, section and article elements. In [...]
Setting up a web project environment in Visual Studio 2010 to allow debugging using both IIS7 and the development Web server
by Mike on Jan.13, 2011, under Knowledge Base, Technology, Tutorials
We have run into an issue recently when importing a number of our legacy web projects into Visual Studio 2010. It seems that some projects don’t provide the options to allow us to run and debug them on the local version of IIS. For some reason, when a project is initially configured in VS2010 it [...]
HTML5 Audio and pre-loading
by Mike on Dec.30, 2010, under Knowledge Base, News
I’ve had to remove the in-page audio player temporarily, as it seems that some browsers don’t respect the autobuffer=”false” attribute on the HTML5 audio element. What this means is that everyone who visits my site has been downloading ALL the music I have been giving away, simultaneously, whether they listen to it or not – [...]
Application of graph theory to real-world social interaction
by Mike on Dec.10, 2010, under Knowledge Base
A paper I wrote a while back but never really got around to tidying up, I found it recently whilst doing some research and thought it has some merit. Abstract: A social graph defines the relationships between individuals in a system and typically is employed to provide targeted content to an individual based on the interaction [...]