artiss.blog

Blog

  • CSS Compression

    I am happy to announce the first of my, of what I hope will be many, online tools.

    I’ve used various tools over the years for compressing CSS, but many miss a trick here or there. Or will simply be so over-eager that they break the nicely validated code. In the end I would manually compress it using a search & replace tool.

    Of course, it’s a lot easier to get a script to do it all for you so step forward my new CSS Compressor.

    Simply upload the file and decide whether you want to remove comments or not (this can sometimes cause some browser compatibility “tweaks” to stop working, hence the option) and that’s it. The output is displayed and you just need to cut and paste it.

    Enjoy!

  • iPhone and being rumbled

    Ha. After my story the other day that the iPhone advert has been banned, PC Pro have an excellent video showing you EXACTLY how quick the iPhone would be doing what they advertised.

    Meantime,  my other story about a software retailer not lowering their prices has been revealed by PC Pro, and they’ve mentioned their name, which I decided not to do. Yes, stand up McAfee. The PC Pro article was also reported by an affiliate, who remained anonymous, but their words reflected my own. It doesn’t help that before this story broke, PC Pro has also published an article about how PC retailers were planning on dropping their prices to reflect the VAT change.

    However, no sooner had they revealed the story about the VAT put McAfee decided to back down. Hurrah for common sense.

    Some choice comments from their forums…

    Do you really want to buy software as complex as a security suite from a company who cannot easily update the VAT rate in their own selling software?

    I think McAfee has a very good candidate for “Most Pathetic Excuse of the Year”

  • VAT rate change. Should we expect anything different?

    Many people thought that retailers WOULDN’T drop their prices to accomodate the drop in VAT rate from Monday. Today, I received an email from a company that I’m affiliated with. I’ve changed the text to hide the guilty parties identity:

    Further to the announcement that UK VAT will be temporarily reduced from 17.5% to 15%, [we] will not be making any changes to the recommended retail pricing of [our products].

    The cost to [our company] of updating its internal systems to reflect the change in UK VAT is such that the company would have been forced to increase the prices.

    What a load of cock. It doesn’t cost anything to drop the prices of your products – just change a figure in database somewhere. It’s just that the VAT rate changes isn’t a huge amount, so companies simply can’t be arsed.

    Strange then that the retailer I work for is currently busting a gut to get the changes out. This is a brick-and-mortar business which will have huge problems getting an entire estate of stores changing the physical labels in time, let alone anything else. But it’s being done because they don’t want to be seen fiddling the customer. In comparison the business above sells software – online or in shops. It doesn’t run any shops and the amount they’d have to do would be minimal.

    It really is pathetic.

  • Steps removed and sequence shortened

    If you’d caught the recent iPhone adverts on TV, you’d have seen them demonstrated just how quick it is to go online and downloads new apps. It really is rapid.

    However, it all ends with a small disclaimer stating “Steps removed and sequence shortened. Network speeds may vary.”

    In other words “look how quick it is, except it isn’t really.”

    My prediction that something as blatantly false as this would get pulled. And the ASA have. Good (Okay, I’ll admit that I’m not a big fan of Apple. Their products are more style over substance and I don’t like the way they lock in their products and manage to get away with the kind of anti-competitive practices that get Microsoft in so much trouble).

    Apple say that the speeds being demonstrated were “relative rather than absolute in nature”. Basically, that the new iPhone is faster than the old version. But that isn’t what came over. In fact I can’t remember any text or voice over stating that it was a comparison of “old vs new”. Odd that.

  • It's a barcode Jim

    Ahh, the new Star Trek movie. I’m really looking forward to what JJ Abrams makes of it. And the new trailer looks pretty damn good too…

    [wp_youtube]lmJO3ppLBsk[/wp_youtube]

    Anyway, after thumbing through some still images from the film, I came across this one showing, I assume, the bridge of the Enterprise (that’s Chekov at the helm)…

    But, hold on, look at the middle of the navigation console. Isn’t that a role of duct-tape surrounded by a couple of Symbol Cyclone scanners? Sad and geeky I know, but I work in Point of Sale, so I recognise these things.

    So, here’s my take on converting your work desk to look like the bridge of the Enterprise (I didn’t have a thick role of duct-tape so I used an almost empty role of parcel tape)…

    Pretty realistic I think you’ll find.