Technical notes

Technical notes and general waffle my computer and homepage

Hardware and Operating Systems

"Ah! I see you have the machine that goes bing!"

LINUX Penguin The hardware I'm using started off life as a Dan, however since I've replaced the motherboard, processor, graphics card, disk controller and memory and added a new hard disk, CD-ROM drive, modem and sound card there isn't a huge amount left of the original. Never mind, I must say I was impressed with what I got when I first bought it, so I suppose a plug for Dan is well deserved.

The main operating system I use is Windows NT 4.0 - at least as far as useful work is concerned. I've also recently installed Linux, and this seems to take up the vast mjority of the time I actually spend on the computer. I also still have my original DOS/Windows 3.11 partition lurking in the shadows of my hard disk, though the few programs which weren't compatible with Windows NT have been long since replaced so this is really only for historical interest now.

WWW Browsers

I'm currently using Netscape 4 but when I've remembered I've also checked the pages with Internet Explorer, so no "You MUST download 10 Megs of Netscape before viewing this page" messages. Well, not until they offer to pay me, anyway. The HTML has also been checked against one or other of the official HTML standards, so the tiny minority (according to the stats) using anything else should also be Ok. I've tried not to forget that the whole purpose of HTML is to ensure a good result which is independent of the hardware or software on the other end.

The only time you're likely to have a problem is if you're using a browser that doesn't support tables. I've tried to remember to put a <BR> at the end of every line, but it'll still be a bit of a mess I'm afraid.

My Homepages

My pages tend to have a traditional feel to them and one of the reasons for this is that I don't use an HTML editor, I just use an ASCII editor and put the HTML in by hand. I don't find this a problem as I grew up in the days where you had to include 'raw' escape codes in text if you wanted effects such as bold or italics on your printer (let alone get them to show up on the screen). The editor I use for this is the Programmer's File Editor. This is an excellent editor, even without taking the price into consideration (it's free).

My experience with HTML editors is poor, to say the least. Every one I've tried so far had ideas about HTML source formating that were radically different from mine. They all seem to insist on reformating the entire page, even if you're only using them as a spell checker. I'm probably not using them as the makers intended, but even then, I don't expect them to muck around with bits of code I've put in when they're nothing to do with the bit I was editing. I especially don't expect then to delete my comments and replace them with their own, like Netscapes' editor did.

Some pages are lightly Java enhanced in places, however this isn't anything fundamental and should (hopefully) be invisible to those browsers that don't support this. Netscape v.2, Internet Explorer v.3 and Opera v.3 should all produce almost indistinguishable results.

There aren't too many pictures on my pages, mainly because I can't draw and haven't got around to stealing any good ones, but even when I do there won't be too many - I have to pay for my on-line time so if I find a page overloaded with pictures I tend to just go somewhere else altogether, so I haven't assumed everybody else is any different. [Ok. So I've just stuck a 57Kb picture on this very page. So sue me.]

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