Mr Speaker

mrspeaker's head in a monitor You find yourself at the entrance to the Hompage of Mr Speaker. In a darkened corner sits a trunk containing HTML5 games and some JavaScript tidbits. Next to it you spy a mastodon account. Exits are North, East, and .

Happy 51th Post!

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It started out in August of 2004 as an idea - To jump on the band wagon and start a blog. So many one years later, Mr Speaker clocks up the historic 51st post. Oh what a time it's been - the tears, the sadness, the happiness. Let us now take a retrospective tour of the magic that has made up the 51 posts of 'Mr Speaker'...ray of sunshine

In the beginning...
On a grey morning in August of 2004 it appeared... Sydney Ferries Change Their Tune - undoubtably the most indepth journalistic account of the infamous "change of ferry messages" incident of 2004 and certainly a sign of the quality, and indeed quantity, that would ensue. A meteoric rise to the top seemed inevitable...
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A Still Tongue Makes A Good Citizen


The man or woman who spreads rumours helps the enemy. Rumours are often started by enemy agents who know that weaklings will repeat them. Is it too much to ask you, for Australia's sake, to refrain from passing on these rumours? Battles can be lost and ships sunk through thoughtless chatter. Keep a still tongue in a wise head.


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Tacky DHTML web tricks #1

Magic trickIt's been a while since we've had some DHTML (Sorry, I mean, DOM scripting) action here, so I thought I'd get us back on track with some stupid DHTML tricks for your web page. Today I'll be showing you the Strongbad-esque technique I've been employing around these parts: hidden popup images.

Have a browse at some of the more recent articles around here. Scan your mouse over all the words. If you find them, pretty images spring to life - adding form and colour to the page. Then, seconds later, they are gone. Leaving you - the reader - intrigued and amused.

So how do you do it?

Well, first some considerations to make popup images practical:

  1. It's got to be easy to add new images. Otherwises it's not gunna happen.
  2. It must provide a method of varying parameters on each image, for added wackiness.
  3. It has to "gracefully degrade" if viewed on browsers that don't support javascript.

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Hello? Anybody? – A WordPress plugin

Businesses realised it in 1999. Bloggers realised it in 2004 - If you put something - anything - on the intraweb, gazillions of people will stream to it every day - drawn uncontrollably by some mystical intraweb force. This converts to MASSIVE ANNUAL SALES for business and MASSIVE INTERNET SUPERSTARDOM for bloggers.

helpful mailbox diagramThe logic is simple - there are currently 957,753,672 people using the Internet. At any one time at least 1% of those users have to be reading my blog don't they? That's 9,577,536.72 people reading my blog - RIGHT NOW!

Well that was the logic behind the dot com boom anyhoo. But dot-com-crash hardened bloggers are much more realistic. They look at their stats - Not 9 million, but, you know - still like, 3000 page views a day or something...

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Where the HTML4.0 did they come from?

disk driveOn some days you learn something new every day. For me, today was like 20 of those every days.

Being a particularly delightful Sunday morning, I decided to look up the HTML4.01 specs on W3C. My findings shocked and amazed me.

Now, I'm not claiming to be some kind of know-everything-about-html guy... But I mean, I first learned HTML in like, 1993. I've outlived the BLINK tag; I was there during the days when tables where only used to display tabular data - before they weren't, then were again; and it was oh-so-long-ago since I learned about TH, TBODY and TFOOT tags. Surely by now I would have somehow and somewhere seen everything? Surely!

Not even close. Running through the Index Of Elements of the specs turned handfulls of non-deprecated tags I ain't ever heard of. I'll list them from the most boring, to the the most interesting ones I found.

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Shocking news – oil prices up!

Peak ThroatWell, oil is up another US$10 a barrel to OVER US$70 (60% higher than one year ago) - That means another Peak-oil update. Wooo!

Yes, yes, oil prices are up, yes, yes, we are going to run out. Pfft. These updates are getting a little on the predictable side. So I thought we'd spice it up with a little conspiracy theory - Nothing like a conspiracy theory to spice up stories of global oil production, that's for sure. This conspiracy comes via an undisclosed source of mine. We shall call him/her "PeakThroat". Because that's what Tom, I mean - him/her - suggested:

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Recipes for the handy-man.

The Nu-KookaWell, things have been pretty quiet around here... I blame it on the troubles in the world today: bad TV reception with rabbit-ears; little choice in salt brands; the unreasonably slow development of meat-growing machines... It can really get you down.

In times of crisis it's good to turn to the sage advice of The Nu-Kooka: 2nd Edition - Containing the best Jewish and Continental dishes, cocktails, savouries, confectionery: Revised and re-edited and including the latest American recipes.

All for the low, low price of 5/-. Whatever the heck that is. Five slash-dashes. Five forward-slash-dashes. It cost me $1 though. The recipe we will be following today comes from page 17, under the section titled Miscellaneous:

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Jolly Good Cricket: Methods of Dismissal

cricket ballCricket - Its a funny old game. Some might say its a very stupid old game. Some say much worse. It is unfortunate, unfortunately, that a great deal of the detestment (or desterisation, if that is not a word) stems from a lack of understanding of the finer points of this great game. Given time and careful study, cricket can be appreciated and enjoyed like a good bottle of $12 wine.

A thorough study of cricket could be likened to the study of any great art - The basics require a short time to acquire, but only after a lifetime of dedication and learning can one expect to fully comprehend its nature and beauty. Of course, thanks to the internet you can learn a lifetime of stuff in a couple of hours - and that's what we're going to be doing here. Let's begin now.

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Compiling interop dlls for SMTP sinks

Microsoft developmentBefore a few months ago I knew little of Microsoft Exchange. Now I know a moderate amount. Which is alot more than I'd ever want to know. The most interesting aspect of developing for Exchange is the abundance of not information about it - Look all over the internet and you will find tonnes of information not about Exchange.

This huge amount of not documentation, and not example code has shortened my life by many many years. At least a few of these years went in to attempting to follow the Microsoft knowledge base article Writing Managed Sinks for SMTP and Transport Events.

The rest of this article is for those who are currently suffering the same fate of an inability to compile the 2 dll files: Microsoft.Exchange.Transport.EventInterop.dll and Microsoft.Exchange.Transport.EventWrappers.dll

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