http://blog.lemongarden.co.uk No lemons and no garden Sat, 28 Jun 2008 06:44:38 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Gordon Brown, Member of Parliament for Dunfermline East, is now Prime Minister of England. As this post carries with it responsibility for some few matters applying to the rest of the UK, he will be known formally as Prime Minister of the UK. Upon entering No 10, Brown said: I have ... http://blog.lemongarden.co.uk/2007/06/27/brown-england/ It happened as I watched BBC News 24 showing a wobbly aerial view of the train crash in Cumbria. The screen flickered and changed to show a different report, with presenters unfamiliar to me. A headline scrolled across the bottom of the screen: Elderly woman dies in road accident The camera ... http://blog.lemongarden.co.uk/2007/02/25/news-from-an-alternative-reality/ I bought a power meter recently. It's an excellent device. You plug it into the mains power supply, then plug an electrical device into the meter and it shows you the power consumption of that device. Using this meter, I've discovered that a single wash at 40°C in my washing machine ... http://blog.lemongarden.co.uk/2007/02/20/wasted-leccy/ The Hubble space telescope recently photographed a beautiful planetary nebula. The European Space Agency have taken this, and a series of other images from Hubble, and produced a wonderful video. You begin with a view of the night sky pretty much as seen from Earth, then zoom in on the ... http://blog.lemongarden.co.uk/2007/02/15/set-the-controls-for-the-heart-of-the-sun/ Am I the only man in the UK who thinks Valentine's Day has become a disreputable orgy of capitalist excess that's about as romantic as being hit in the face with a wet herring? Oh. Just me then. http://blog.lemongarden.co.uk/2007/02/15/yesterday/ Being in touch with the spirit of the times, as I am, I created an online petition at 10 Downing Street's website (you may have heard about another, far less important, petition in the news of late). I am petitioning the Prime Minister to do something about the light pollution ... http://blog.lemongarden.co.uk/2007/02/15/light-pollution/ I am increasingly of the opinion that Wikipedia has rather undermined Google's usefulness as a search engine. Once upon a time, you could rely upon Google to have the most relevant and useful results appear right at the very top of your search results. I can remember the feeling of ... http://blog.lemongarden.co.uk/2006/11/14/wikipedia-considered-harmful/ Taken from an occasional series of amusing google searches: site:*.gov.uk "strictly private and confidential" It's nice to see that open government is proceeding apace in the UK. http://blog.lemongarden.co.uk/2006/09/22/open-government/ Today I received a call from the people at Computing magazine. This magazine is quite a good read and, rather splendidly, they send it to me for nowt because I work in IT. Unfortunately, to continue getting the freebie, I have to put up with a regular conversation with a ... http://blog.lemongarden.co.uk/2006/09/05/free-magazines-and-identity-theft/ For those interested in building accessible web applications, there is an interesting article over on Juicy Studio describing how screen readers cope with ajax applications. I lot of my development work makes extensive use of javascript and XML, so it is interesting to read detailed descriptions of how screen readers handle ... http://blog.lemongarden.co.uk/2006/09/01/accessible-ajax/