It sounds nuts but for a limited time only Royal Mail are giving away copies of the full UK Postcode Database for free to those wishing to use it for the “Show Us a Better Way” competition currently being run by The Cabinet Office.

The Royal Mail has now kindly agreed to make the full PAF data sets available to those who want to use it for the purposes of this competition, but you will need to contact Royal Mail to discuss licensing.

Regardless of the fact that this data should be in the public domain anyway, this is pretty exciting. I’ve certainly put in a claim for my free copy. I’m sure it will arrive with all sorts of legal threats though, but nevermind.

Find out how to get your copy here

Below, I share with you an excerpt from quite possibly the most pointless thing i’ve ever wathed on TV. These guys are real hustlers for sure. They certainly know what’s up.

And there was me using BitTorrent and Rapidshare to download installerz, keygenz and serialz. If only i’d known that I could just drag desktop shortcuts to a massively oversized USB mass storage device.

I think i’m gonna go LOL in the direction of this Marc Rogers guy. He’s Technical Threat Intelligence Manager for Vodafone. He says…

Most recently I have worked as technical advisor and on screen security guru for BBC’s “The Real Hustle”.

So by his own admission we can assume this guy has never SEEN the internet let alone USED it. Glad i don’t use Vodafone. I dread to think what his concept of “Technical Threat” is. It probably involves a 14.4K modem and a copy of HyperTerminal.

n00b

IE7, don’t you just love it? What they gave us with one had in terms of CSS actually sort of working they took away with some of the stupidest niggly little bugs ever. Here’s another potentially large one i’m stumbled right into recently.

If your user agent string is more than 260 characters in length then your user agent string suddenly and almost magically becomes “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0)”

Not what you’d expect to happen. Now, I know what your thinking. Why on god’s earth would your user agent string BE that long. The answer is simple. Toolbars and Spyware.

Read more »

There currently an inconsistency between the jQuery UI tabs plugin and the CSS generated by Themeroller

The CSS includes rules for “.ui-tabs-nav-item” but these classes are never added to the list items by the plugin. Because they are unnecessary.

Simply changing the rules to “.ui-tabs-nav li” they way they should be brings it all into line again. Except the extra specificity overrides the “.ui-tabs-selected” rules. These need changing to “.ui-tabs-nav li.ui-tabs-selected” and Bob’s your monkey’s uncle.

There doesn’t appear to be a whole lot of consistency (or good CSS) rolling around the JQuery UI project at the moment. Hopefully this will improve. I was of the belief that a theme could be “dropped onto” a jQuery UI app to simply re-skin it. This isn’t the case. Not yet at least.

For the time being I think i’ll be sticking to good old fashioned hand written CSS

It occurred to me today that when using jQuery’s handy little .getScript method that each script request is appended by a timestamp appended to the querystring. This is great. A lot of the time this is exactly what you want as it ensures that no browser will ever serve up it’s own cache in preference of the actual script from the actual server.

But what if you just want to use .getScript to programatically include parts of your application logic only where necessary (aka Lazy Loading), or you simply want to defer the execution of a non-essential plugin or two until a couple of seconds after the DOM becomes available. You’d want those scripts cached as if you’d hard-coded them into script tags right? I guess.

Can’t Cache, Won’t Cache (with Ainsley Harriott)

There’s no way you can send cache control options into getScript. It simply doesn’t accept any. getScript is merely a wrapper around .get which itself does not provide options for controlling caching. I’m not sure whether or not this is an oversight on the part of the developers. Feel free to shoot me down in flames if i’m spectacularly missing some glaringly obvious point here.

It’s not a problem though. .get is itslef just a simple wrapper around .ajax which publicly exposes all of jQuery’s AJAXy goodness. As such there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t just redefine JQuery.getScript to accept an optional boolean argument for cache control. That’s the beauty of jQuery.

jQuery.getScript Redefined

$.getScript = function(url, callback, cache){
$.ajax({
type: "GET",
url: url,
success: callback,
dataType: "script",
cache: cache
});
};


This won’t break any existing code which references the function as omitting the cache argument defaults caching to false as per the original functionality. But if you want to allow caching you now have that option.