The climate change hoax

Published 3 months ago under Miscellanous

I recently posted this status update on facebook:

i'm starting to think this climate change stuff is actually all scare-tactics and bullshit. theres too much circumstantial evidence, and analysing stats over a 20 year period is ridiculous given the span of existence of this planet. its human nature to think worse-case scenarios and drama, ...simply because its more interesting and sells more papers than saying 'everythings fine actually'.

It sparked quite a bit of debate, some for and some against - however, I think my friend Alex Round's argument covers all bases. Alex is quite a cynic on this subject, but what's different about his views is that not only does he question the science, but he also expands on the consequences if indeed the Earth is warming up. Enjoy.

1) The climate is millions of years old and moves in cycles, some short i.e. 11 year cycles (like some solar cycles) and some 100s of years long. The earth has warmed and cooled naturally for reasons so far beyond our comprehension and influence it is ignorant and arrogant of us to assume that a) we have influenced it and b) we can do something about it

2) What's wrong with warmer climates? Historically, economic boom times have been characterized by warmer weather and busts with harsh winters. Warmer weather increases the rate and growth of forested areas, improves crops and food yields and saves live. There are more cold-related deaths a year than heat-related deaths a year by a ratio of more than 10:1.

3) C02 only counts for about 1% of gasses in the air and the percentage of that CO2 which is man made, once you account for all the natural CO2 in the air, is about 0.001%. Not only that but higher levels of CO2 don't lead to higher temperatures, higher temperatures lead to higher levels of CO2, and this relationship has a lag of about 800 years.

4) 1000 years ago there were vineyards in the north of England - it was hotter then than it is now... Result of burning fossil fuels? I don't think so.

5) Even if the planet is warming, do you not think human beings can adapt? We have flourishing societies in climates as diverse as Helsinki and Singapore - the fact that almost 7 billion humans inhabit this earth is testiment to the truely awesome nature of human beings as a species - we have found ways to combat and adapt to problems for thousands and thousands of years and now with more money and technology than ever, you'd have thought we'd be able to adapt to warmer weather.

6) Acting on global warming is not moral. The reason the developed west aren't dying everyday from malaria, AIDs, malnutrition, dirty water etc, is because our economies made a transition from agricultural to industrial economies and we are now rich enough to combat these sorts of simple but fatal problems. What about developing nations? Brazil China and India make up almost a third of the global population but are still subject to crippling levels of poverty, not to mention the continent of Africa and others. Who are we to tell them that they have to halt their economic growth i.e. curb their industries which rely almost solely on fossil fuels because we think we might be warming up the planet. If I was the PM of an industrialising and developing country, and some fuck from europe said we had curb our economic growth so that we couldn't reach the same economic levels as the west I'd say FUCK OFF

7) The environment is a totally politicized issue. Too many vested interests, on both sides tbf. It sells papers, it keeps people in a state of fear, it will be justified to tax the shit out of us. It is no longer science, it has become a religion. When somebody starts saying 'we don't need to debate the science, it's settled' that isn't science any more - it's ideology - it's religious fanaticism, and it has no place in the policy making arenas of a democracy

Dynamic charts and graphs for web developers

Published 3 months ago under XHTML & CSS, Javascript & AJAX, PHP

Check out this great blog post - 25 Graph and Chart Solutions for Web Developers

Charts and graphs can really help bring stats to life, and make visualising and analysing data a lot easier. I can't wait to use some of these techniques in future projects.

Internet explorer 7 is uber cool...

Published 4 months ago under Miscellanous

My latest site goes live

Published 4 months ago under Design & Graphics

I've been working rather hard at Artlines Media on a couple of SME e-commerce projects. The latest to go live is Tropical Fresh, however, the checkout functionality hasn't gone live just yet.

A beautiful organic e-commerce web design

Published 4 months ago under Inspiration

Splendid. I'm not too au fait with foreign languages but I think the site content is Italian, the design is still beautiful though. http://www.operamage.com

Whitelisting alpha-numerical characters to create friendly URL strings (slugs)

Published 4 months ago under PHP, Regular Expressions

You may have noticed the tidy URLs on this site used to link to each article. This is done by  turning each article title into a URL-friendly string, which is then used a unique key in my articles database. Many blogging systems do this as standard, but what if (like me) you prefer to build your own solutions?

What we want to do is turn this article title:
Whitelisting alpha-numerical characters to create friendly URL strings (slugs)
into a URL-friendly string:
whitelisting-alpha-numerical-characters-to-create-friendly-url-strings-slugs

And here's my function:

1: function strSEO($str) {
2:
3:    $str = preg_replace("/&#x[a-z0-9]{4};/i", "", $str);
4:    $str = html_entity_decode($str, ENT_QUOTES);
5:    $str = strtolower($str);
6:    $str = preg_replace("/[^a-z0-9\s]/i", "", $str);
7:    $str = (ereg_replace(" +", "-", trim($str));    
8:    return $str;
9:
10: };

Line 3: removes any unicode entity names.
Line 4: converts any HTML entities into their characters - for example & becomes &.
Line 5: turns string to lower-case.
Line 6: removes any character which isn't alpha-numeric or a space.
Line 7: trims the beginning and end of string, and replaces spaces with hyphens. Note that multiple consecutive spaces are only replaced with one hyphen.

Finally, the blog is ready to launch.

Published 4 months ago under Miscellanous

My gosh, it's taken me long enough but I've finally decided to commit to a design and get my blog site up and running - thanks for checking it out :)

I'll be blogging about various topics and issues I come across as a web designer, developer and general human-being. I'll also be updating my showcase works and photography section quite regularly.

The functionality of the site is still in progress, and coming soon will be RSS feeds, commenting, rating and search functionality, to name a few.

The Winter Sessions

Published 4 months ago under Sport & Leisure

This is the first video I've made for Gro, a short 1 minute edit for the first of The Winter Sessions.
Click here to watch it on youtube

Lights and generator on their way!

Published 4 months ago under Sport & Leisure, Miscellanous

I am rather excited - today I ordered a 850 watt 2 stroke petrol generator, a 500 watt self-standing halogen light and a 150 watt halogen floor light. I can't wait to see how powerful the lights are (and how loud the generator is).

With no day-light hour restrictions, skateboarding and filming will be happening anywhere and anytime this Winter!

Maintaining the query string with mod_rewrite URLs.

Published 4 months ago under Server Config, Regular Expressions

Mod_rewrite is a very handy tool for the SEO and UX conscious web developer. It allows us to map pretty and legible web addresses onto not-so-pretty ones, and allows us to construct the query string using regular expressions.

For example:

http://www.example.com/films/horror/2008
can map to:
http://www.example.com/view.php?media=films&genre=horror&year=2008

with this mod_rewrite rule in the .htaccess:

1: RewriteRule ^([a-z0-9]+)/([a-z0-9]+)/([a-z0-9]+)/?$ view.php?media=$1&genre=$2&year=$3

My problem has always been that once I'd used mod_rewrite on a URL, I couldn't add extra query string variables onto it, as they wouldn't be passed through the rule:

http://www.example.com/films/horror/2008?orderby=price
(the variable $_GET['orderby'] is not available on the view.php page)

My inelegant solution was to use $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] and split the URL with ? as the delimiter, thereby accessing whatever preceeded it.

The actual solution to the problem is extremely simple though. All that is needed is to add &%{QUERY_STRING} to the end of the mod_rewrite rule, and any extra query string variables are handled correctly:

1: RewriteRule ^([a-z0-9]+)/([a-z0-9]+)/([a-z0-9]+)/?$ view.php?media=$1&genre=$2&year=$3&%{QUERY_STRING}