Dan Rooke’s Blog

Last weekend we had a long weekend away staying in Studley Castle just south of Birmingham. The Castle was something quite different and we really enjoyed our stay.

We visited my Auntie and Uncle, Norma and Alan, and my two cousins Rob and Pete, Pete’s girlfriend Sadie and daughter Mollie. We had a great time catching up, eating copious amounts of Chinese take away food and lots of alcohol was drunk! It was a really good evening and went on into the small hours.

On Saturday, we visited Stratford Upon Avon where we had a walk around and managed to get a sizeable chunk of our Christmas shopping done. We then visited Rugby where we used to live in Bilton and the town centre itself. It was surprising how quickly things change! In the evening we met up with Adam and another friend from College, Matt, who have just moved into a flat together in Dunchurch. Adam and Matt are currently working on a business idea of their’s so we got up to speed on their plans while having an excellent meal at the Dun Cow pub.

On the Sunday morning, we headed back up north to sunny Huddersfield. To our surprise though, the clocks had changed in the night and we had forgotten! So we were robbed of our extra hour lie in! We had a great weekend though, we’ll have to do it more often!

As you may, or may not, be aware both Mozilla and Microsoft have launched new versions of the popular web browser Firefox and Internet Explorer late in October. As a web developer, this has quite an important impact on how I develop web applications.

I personally use Mozilla’s Firefox for my browsing and primary development needs. It better conforms to web standards than its rival Internet Explorer. But the majority of web users stay with Internet Explorer, for the most part because it is conveniently installed on a PC running a Microsoft Windows operating system by default. Internet Explorer however is known to have lower levels of conformance to web standards than Firefox and does have a reputation of particularly fussy. Internet Explorer 7, the latest version of the browser, does go some way to better conforming to web standards however it does still trails its competition.

As a web developer, having various levels of conformance to standards in browsers and particular requirements for each browser causes a plethora of problems and complicates the development process massively. To combat this, I feel that standards should be taken to the next level. I believe that all web browsers should use, here comes the technical bit, a common rendering engine. The rendering engine takes the code and converts it into a human friendly interface known as a web page. Having a common rendering engine will greatly reduce the complexity of supporting different browsers for us web developers. It will encourage better standards conformance which in the end will help the web site/application user. It should also, in theory, reduce development costs of web browsers.

By all means have different web browsers providing different features and functionality, but have a common rendering engine at the core of each. This idea is not meant to discourage competition, merely make the web a better place for us all.

Yesterday’s news that two British motorists were taking a test case to the European Court of Human Rights in which they are challenging the fact that motorists should not have the incriminate themselves, and that they have the right to silence, raised the issue of speed cameras in the UK once again.

My feelings on the issue are quite simple. Yes we need to catch speeding motorists as indeed speed does play a big factor in motoring accidents, but we also need to combat the rapidly falling standards of driving on the roads today we equally if not more so contribute to accidents.

Police forces over the past few years have reduced the number of traffic enforcement cars and rapidly increased the number of speed camera devices on the UK road network. A recent Auto Express survey discovered the true facts about how the UK Police forces are policing roads in their area. The survey reveals the number of traffic enforcement cars and the number of speed cameras used for each of the UK Police forces. The figures show the ratio of traffic enforcement cars to speed cameras for the area of jurisdiction, with speed cameras have much greater numbers than traffic enforcement cars.

While catching speeders is a priority, so should be tackling the other traffic laws which are broken everyday. In my daily commute to work along the M62 corridor, I see all manner of traffic law violations and discourteous driving. This puts all motorists in danger as well as pedestrians and other road users. There are no static speed cameras on my route, and I very rarely see a traffic enforcement car either. As a result of this, it seems that other motorists feel they can do as they please in order to arrive at their destination just a few minutes earlier than if they had obeyed traffic law.

I feel strongly that speed cameras are a ‘one trick pony’ and that Britain’s roads should not be enforced primarily by these devices. I am not saying that they do not have their place, I am saying that they should be used as an aid by Police forces and not as a replacement for traffic enforcement cars. I’m sorry to say that with the current Government attitude, I don’t see anything changing in the short term.

We have made a push to recycle more over the last couple of months in our house. It has resulted in a full / overflowing green bin to be put out every month. So much so that we ran out of room and had to use the normal bin toward the end of the month. The black bin has generally only been half full. So all in all quite good going.

After being in the Lake District on honeymoon and having zero light pollution at night, coming back to an urban area involves quite an adjustment in that sense. Thinking about it I came up with the idea of turning all, or a number of, the street lights off after a certain time at night where they are barely utilised. This is quite similar to the French way of doing things where only a small number of lights are left on after a certain time at night. The idea being to cut down on light pollution and also reduce energy wastage and costs. Let me know what your thoughts are! If I get a good response, I may even write into the local council proposing a trial.

It’s been a while since my last update, sorry about that!

The last month has seen many things: Becca starting her job at Greenacre School, us collecting a van load (yes, literally) of mine and my Dad’s belongings, collecting wedding photos and going quad biking for Becca’s birthday, buying Becca a bike and getting out on them (occasionally), passing my probation period at work and getting a contract, Becca’s brother Kieran and his girlfriend Becca (yes, it gets confusing!) are starting at Uni this month at Newcastle and Huddersfield respectively and … I think that’s enough in one sentence!!

Another highlight was visiting the Black Sheep Brewery at Masham and enjoying a very nice lunch accompanied by a very clean pint of Emmerdale. With a tour of the village after, I found an excellent sweet shop selling home made fudge off the block, I had to get some!! They even had black sheep ale fudge! I went for more conservative choices and very enjoyable it was too.
On a more geeky angle, I’ve moved our home broadband over to Zen Internet and we are now enjoying a reasonably priced service with good support to back it up. I’m also in the middle of migrating my websites over to a new UK based server, Chris‘ server Baldrick that is. My blog is already on the new server and I hope that you will have noticed a speed improvement!

Work is going well with a large project I’ve been working on almost since my start date nearly out of the door. I have recently been researching dedicated servers as we are looking at consolidating out hosting onto one machine as well as working and experimenting further with PHP5’s exception handling, the Zend Framework, SOAP as well as various other little tasks. I would quite like to start an engineering type of blog for the company to keep a track of various technical discoveries I make / solutions I find. It could be useful for somebody!