Thursday, 15th August 2002
Fun with FOLDOC
The Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing does exactly what it says on the tin. It is available under the GNU Free Documentation License so I grabbed a copy of the archive (which expands to a 4MB text file) and had a go at dumping it in to a mySQL database. I haven’t done anything with it yet (apart from putting together a rudimentary interface) but I have a few ideas for interesting ways of reusing the data.
CSS Trickery
New CSS Experiment: Trickery with Floats and Negative Margins, inspired by this message on css-discuss. By applying both position: relative and a negative margin to a floated element it is possible to pull it out of the flow of text in to the margin of the document. I have used a variant of this technique in the third revision of my SitePoint in CSS demonstration.
Hacking Las Vegas
Hacking Las Vegas (via Kryogenix)—the story of how a bunch of wizz kids from MIT devised the perfect card counting technique and took the casinos for the ride of their lives. Edge-of-your-seat stuff.
Patented IMBots
I wonder if these muppets have heard of eggdrop (created 1993). Something tells me prior art for this one won’t be too hard to find.
PHP numbered code listings
Michael V has written a couple of functions to apply my CSS numbered code listing technique to PHP’s built in syntax highlighting.