Here's my latest article on SitePoint: Give Floats the Flick in CSS Layouts. This time I'm sticking to the mentality of always using floats to align block elements in CSS layouts.

An article of mine was published today on sitepoint.com. It's called " Crimes Against WordPress: How to Be a Real Jerk if You Make WordPress Themes and Plugins" and it goes out to all WordPress site owners everywhere. I feel your pain my brothers and sisters.

Wahey! I started a new project called: Awesome But Useless. I noticed that there were lots of cool experiments with web tech hidden away in the blogs of developers and designers. These little projects were often insightful, creative, and fun, but entirely impractical. And that's the thing I loved the most. And I thought, someone should catalogue them.

Although at first I couldn't express that succinctly. One evening, over a beer, I was relating my idea to the other tech editor at SitePoint, Louis. Who said to me "So, these things are awesome, but useless." I replied "Exactly." And he then said that if I didn't register awesomebutuseless.com, he would. Tada! A new site is born.

The important point is that the title is really a piss-take. These experiments are always clever, and although not immediately practical, they often inform design and development a few years down the line. I also wanted to highlight technology and people, so I make tags for every piece of web tech involved and the name of the designers or developer.

If you find cool shit on the web that should go on the site email: coolshit@awesomebutuseless.com.

My son Matthew has started his own blog called " One More Die". It's a gaming blog. Check it out.

I have a special place in my heart for the first blog I ever started. It was back back in 1998, I was really into Quake 2, and we formed a Quake 2 CTF clan called Evil Empire after the Rage Against The Machine album. Our clan moniker was [EvEm]. I've written about it before when I made the claim I still stand by that blogging got a kick start because of Quake and not Dave Winer.

Now it's back! It's been existing as a static archive for ages, but I've installed Wordpress and made it live again. I've trawled through all the archive CDs I had and even pestered Adrian to see what he had.

The biggest lesson learned from restoring all these archives: closed binary formats are BAD. Adrian had loads of archives... all in Retrospect format which rendered them useless. But he did have some CDs of saved files and one of those was a missing version of the site... as a Lotus Notes database ( .nsf) file.

At first this seemed like a barrier. I have a running copy of the Lotus Notes client in a VM, but the database couldn't be opened because of it's ACL. I was ready to give up because it'd be impossible to recreate the Notes ID files that would allow access. Then came Jake Howlett to the rescue. Apparently, if you open the file in a hex editor and zero the bits between offset 0x16c and 0x1a7, it leaves a blank ACL: default access level of Manager.

While I haven't been able to get a static archive of the whole site (in a Lotus Notes database all your site design and templates are stored in the same file as your data), I've been able to extract all the images. To get the whole site I'd need to get a Lotus Notes Domino server running. Boy, that sounds like fun.

So the history of Evil Empire is now available in the Evil Archives, and also in the Gallery O' Gibbage. In the gallery I've restored 2000+ game screen shots, photos and other images from all the old versions of the site.

Ever imagine in your wildest dreams that we'd have 5 awesome CSS 2.1 lovin' browsers with terrific JavaScript performance to choose from?

I was amused, and not really surprised, to discover that 'ear candles' are a load of bollocks and do absolutely nothing to remove wax from your ear. The goop at the end of the candle is simply the residue of the candle itself. Worse though is the fact that ear candles have caused serious injury due to hot wax entering the ear canal.

But that's not actually the point of this post. The problem, as I see it, is that this is really important information that people really need to be aware of. How often do you come across information like the above, that is readily available to the general public? You don't.

I came across it via the Young Australian Skeptics, who happen to mention a paper called " Ear candles: a triumph of ignorance over science" which appears in various medical journals. I found a few references to it (and links to buy it) on various abstract search websites like these:

• PubMed
• Cambridge Journals
• CAT.INIST

I found information warning people about ear candles on WebMD and Wikipedia. Both of those pages reference the paper as well. But I can't get free access to it.

When so much nonsense is published about "alternative therapies" and distributed widely, it's no wonder people are taken for a ride by these charlatans when useful, factual information is locked up behind academic firewalls.

The blatant emotional manipulation is the one reason why I can't stand traditional news and current affairs, regardless of whether it's on TV, in a newspaper or online. Emotions are always rocked, morals are always outraged, trends are always skyrocketing, and the effects are always devastating.

You consume that crap only if you want to break your brain.

Just came back from the film Knowing. Here's a quote from one of the "scientists" early on in the film:

My scientific mind is telling me to have nothing more to do with this...

And that ridiculous line is, for me, representative of how utterly stupid this film was. Margret and David, whose opinions I respect, gave this film 4 stars and 3.5 stars respectively. And that is why I shall never listen to their reviews again.

I'd try to explain this laughable and confused movie but FlickFilosopher does it so well:

It's like this: Imagine that the nitwits who wrote those preposterous Left Behind apocalyptic end-times fantasies decided to try their pens at something X-Files-y... or what they thought would be X-Files-y. It might look a lot like this alternately dull and unintentionally hilarious blend of self-important tripe: half science fiction as people who don't understand science fiction see it, and half pseudo-religious nonsense that thinks it's comforting and doesn't realize how downright creepy it is. Not creepy in a good way, of course: accidentally and inadvertently creepy by way of people who think the ideas that We Are Being Watched Over and Everything Happens For A Reason are reassuring and soothing.

–FlickFilosopher reviews Knowing

How dissappointing was the discussion of the proposed Australian internet blacklist on the Q and A show the other night?

The senator was on the spot, ready to be taken to task, but the discussion barely pierced the surface level issues. The following inane question from an audience member is representative of the quality of the whole discussion:

Senator Conroy, don't you realise that 1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual?

–Q and A transcript

At the deepest point of the discussion all we heard was trivial rubbish about morality. In fact, if you took the most tepid, trivial coverage of this topic, mixed it in a large bucket of water, and then use that single bucket to paint a skin over an industrial size shed -- a thin smear of liquid -- it would still have been impervious to the amount of piercing accomplished by the Q and A questions.

I wish someone like Russel Blackford had been in the audience. Actually I would have preferred anyone with half a clue.