Experimental Pages

This is where I'll be putting things on a trial basis, to see if they work for me.

If you like something I put here, please let me know, and I'll consider moving it into the main heirarchy. Conversely, if you loathe something, I'd like to know that, as well. Comments to the usual address, please.


This should show the current weather in London - I got the URL from a friend at work (thanks, Dave!). It only works on a live connection, so I can't see this as I type.

Weather Report Graphic

Except that it doesn't - Netscape shows the graphic box, with nothing inside it. The link works, and gives a forecast for London, but the graphic doesn't, possibly due to Intermute, and it's slightly over-enthusiastic filtering. I'll check and report back.

With Intermute filtering off, it works - you get an animated GIF with temperature, cloud cover and  humidity data, plus a visible link to the forecast site. The page you get is fixed formatted 800 pixels wide. I'll change the link so that the forecast page opens in a new window, so that you don't have to scroll.

The Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence at Home


I've been looking at time and clocks of late. I found a Java applet here that will display current time in a variety of formats - UTC, your local time, and a couple of decimal time formats, including the astronomers' Julian date. Fair warning, the site seems to be advocating a reform of the clock, to one which is more logical, and doesn't require arcane knowledge of the number of minutes in an hour, or hours in a day, not to mention significant mental arithmetic capability.

There's one problem with such advocacy - the number of seconds in a day is not a nice multiple of 10. They can't change the day - are they going to try to change the second? Or go away from the second, as defined at present, to something completely new, like Swatch Internet Time, with it's "beats" and a defining meridian at Zurich?

Be that as it may, the download is here and here it is, running

Or it should - locally in Netscape I get an error, and AOLPress can't see it either. And yet it works at the home site.

Much later: And the reason it doesn't is that I haven't posted the Java applet.

Later still: That Java (which still doesn't work) should give a decimal analogue clockface - the multiple digital clock version is Javascript, which I have yet to unravel.

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