The Oscar ceremony begins in 24 hours — excellent, just time for me to make some wild and incomplete predictions about films of which I've only seen some. So, without further ado, I'm going to open the envelope...

A mad, half awake conversation with Morgan, showing the wonderful logic of a 4 1/2 year old.

Because I'm working away from home at client site much of the time, and un-snooped access to my home email is A Good Thing™ to have, setting up secure webmail was a priority for me when I moved to hosting my own email setup.

I've been using SquirrelMail for pretty much all that time - having a system that I can keep up to date using Debian's apt-get management tools is a strong incentive.

But I never really liked it - the interface is extremely clunky, and uses frames, which is a particular hate of mine. Recently though, improved Open Source webmail interfaces have been coming along like buses, no doubt inspired by the success of Gmail.

One's so good, I installed it for a test, and liked it so much, I repointed my webmail domain at it within 5 minutes.

My new site design is joining the cool kids by using LiveSearch. But I wanted to go one step cooler - with a few wee HTML extensions, Safari replaces the boring square search box with a curvy one that anti-aliases beautifully into the background.

Without Field Focus

With Field Focus

Here's how you do it: you add non-standard attributes to the input field:

But how to enable this for other browsers, without messing up the Safari rendering..? Read on to find out how.

I liked the general style of thisthe previous design (assume past tense from here - Ed: 24 Feb 06) - it's clean and curvy, and a big step forward from what went before. I'm not entirely convinced about the layout though. It doesn't quite fit on my laptop screen (maybe because you've forgotten how the box model works - Ed), and it doesn't quite feel solid and rational enough.

So I'm rebuilding the layout from scratch, and I'm using a very smart development technique for when you're using a fixed vertical grid - Khoi Vinh’s idea of using an image of the grid as a background image while you're developing.

So now I'm most of the way there with the updated layout - I still wanted to use Golden Sections as the basis, so it's an irregular grid that's more like a log-log scale. I've not yet applied the presentation styling, but have a look and see how it's going.

Somewhat lost in recent events over Smoking Bans, ID Cards and Glorifying Terrorism, a couple of wee announcements that didn't hit the front pages: apparently we're abolishing Parliament and cancelling elections.

Nothing to worry about then...

Well knock me down with a feather, Parliament has actually passed something that:

1. I agree with
2. Most of the rest of the country agrees with

What!? I hear you exclaim. Yes, it's true. In the midst of ignoring the country at large and taking away a large number of freedoms (not least, the freedom to leave the country without paying several hundred quid to deposit vast amounts of your information onto a honeypot for identity fraudsters), Parliament has agreed to bring Englandshire into line with the rest of these islands (and increasing areas of Europe) and ban smoking in public places.