Blog | Kyan

Gavin Shinfield
December 19, 2007

Size matters (again!)

Well it must be Christmas because the parcels are flowing thick and fast through Kyan Towers. Our nice postie left a particularly sweet little package on my desk the other day
in the shape of the tiny new sub-notebook from Asus, dubbed somewhat peculiarly the eeePC.

Phil Balchin
December 04, 2007

HTML 5

Interesting insight into the future of web markup. A List Apart have produced a useful preview of the newest version of HTML. The current version of HTML, version 4, has been with us since the mid 90s, and quite honestly its looking really dated. In the mid 90s, flash had only just been launched (and was only capable of really simple animation), embeding sound onto a web page was almost impossible (remember using a dialup modem?) and knowbody had even thought of streaming video? Well, we take all these things for granted now, but i order to get them all to work, we have to hack HTML to do things that it was never designed to do. HTML did get a minor bump with the introduction of XHTML, but that only reinforced what we already knew, it didn’t bring any new features with it.

So why HTML5? well, with this new version, HTML will be the centre of a complete web publishing API, with built-in support for flash, sound, video and next-greneration javascript. The core language of HTML also gets loads of new semantic markup tags, bringing improved support for mobile devices and users with disabilities.

When can we expect this HTML5 thing then? well, its not been approved yet by the W3C, and support in Internet Explorer is almost non-existent, but other browsers like Safari, Firefox and Opera are all slowly adding support. It may not be here now, but it is going to be the future of Internet

Phil Balchin
October 03, 2007

Swings and roundabouts. The Big Mystery Kyan day out ...

Thursday started like any other day, except that particular we were told to bring to work some ‘out-door clothing’, which we all thought to meant we were going paint-balling or go-carting, but, we were totally wrong. As we came discover, the big Kyan mystery day out, was a short trip to Frensham woods and the afternoon on the goape high ropes course, which involves a lot of swinging around in trees, negotiating high wire rope obstacles, and ultimately, jumping out of the trees whilst attached to a zip-line.

Thankfully we were warned in advance to bring outdoor clothing, and we all arrived to work in morning wearing our finest baggy jeans and tough boots.

The High Wire Course

Resembling the Ewok village from Starwars, the course is a series of platforms built around the tall thin trees, with rope ladders to ascend. Once your on the course, you have various wire and rope bridges to cross to get to the next tree. At the end of each section of the course, you hook your safety lines to the zip-line and slide ~~gracefully~~ backwards/upsidedown to the forest floor.

All in all, it took about 3 hours to complete the course spread over five sections.

More photos of the Mystery day out do exist on Flickr

Paul Sturgess
September 12, 2007

How to price your web application

A great article on Vitamin gives some sound advice for any budding web entrepreneurs out there.

Gareth Adams
August 16, 2007

Vanity and Volcanoes

I guess every geek goes through a phase of wondering just how geeky they are.

I recently got an email from my new landlord, whose surname is Maltby. They’d cleverly managed to buy ltby.com, which meant their email addresses were all in the form …m@ltby .com

This got me thinking about other kinds of domain hack, and to cut a long story short I now own the rethada.ms domain

It means I now have the very concise email address “g@rethada.ms” and eventually a site at http://ga.rethada.ms

All of this is made possible thanks to the sparsely populated, volcanic-ash-covered Caribbean island Montserrat. Since their population of just over 4000 don’t make use of the territory’s TLD they offer it out to non-residents without restriction, much like other vanity TLDs like .tv (Tuvalu) and .tk (Tokelau)

Needless to say, I’m pretty confident about my geekuality now.

Paul Sturgess
August 13, 2007

Ever wondered what to do with Moo cards?

Are they business cards? Are they pointless? Not any more they’re not!

Paul Sturgess
August 07, 2007

The Importance of Web Standards & Jeffrey Zeldman

BusinessWeek have just published an article on one of the most influential web professionals in the history of the Internet – Jeffrey Zeldman: King of Web Standards.