From the Orient

Italy, desparate for a winning goal against Bulgaria finally start playing in injury time and pressurise the Bulgarian goal. It’s 1-1 and Italy need to win. The only way they won’t go through if they win is if Sweden and Denmark draw 2-2. It’s 2-1 to Denmark and time is running out.

Sweden score in the 89th minute, and the Italians are out.

Then this happens :-

bq.:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/euro_2004/3787405.stm 90 mins 4: GOAL - Bulgaria 1-2 Italy: Cassano fires home and celebrates joyously before the Italian bench tell him it is to no avail. He looks close to tears and the Italians are broken.

The moment where he discovers the Sweden Denmark result is one of pure schadenfreude.

Let it not be said that “it was a fix”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/euro_2004/3825969.stm because both teams played to win, and I have both a Dane and a Swede in my team and there is a very friendly rivaly between then.

This is a victory for attacking play, Italy went out because they failed to attack and score enough goals when it mattered. Stop boring us with your defensive play and start attacking, you have the talent. You’re defensive nature knocked you out. Sweden and Denmark both went for the win and ended up with a very entertaining 2-2 all draw. Great for the competition.

Well, I hadn’t raised my hopes too high, what with the English tendancy to throw away good positions and certain players not performing, but we won 4-2 and are into the quarter-finals to meet the hosts, Portugal.

Rooney, what a tornarment he has had so far. I have just two concerns, Rooney gets booked again or Ronaldo does Ashley Cole again (last time they met Cole was left on his backside by the swift footed boy-wonder) and puts us out.

As soon as Croatia scored tonight I felt safe. Time and time again, teams sit on 1-0 leads or the draw they need to qualify and fail. Italy and Spain from this week alone, and this year is the year of the attack. We can win it, but so can many other teams. Fingers crossed Beckham and Owen raise their games because if they do, with Rooney and a great defence (set pieces aside) we can win it.

p.s. drunken posts are not counted in the tempting fate department
p.p.s.

A new version of Firefox is “now out (Mozillazine announcement and discussion with some interesting comments about configuration and some less interesting comments about themes)”:http://mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=4843.

On my system it is a lot quicker at loading pages. Maybe it was just cruft build up on my system, but the new import tool made this the first upgrade that was painless and almost effortless. The new Extension Manager means I’ve still got to add in all my extensions again but hopefully this will be the last time I have to do that.

To be clear on this, the import tool is brilliant. My profile, my cookies, my configuration and my setup were all imported without fuss into the new browser. This is an important step towards a mainstream browser.

I’m not sure I care for the new default theme, but I’m not going to comment futher as “the argument about that (This is the sanest link I could find that described the reason for the new theme in a calm and informative way)”:http://www.actsofvolition.com/archives/2004/june/newdefaulttheme is almost as pointless and divisive as the “Mass Syndication Debate (Sam Ruby called for detente and started off another round)”:http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2004/05/28/detente.

Further reading

* “A big list of weblogs talking about 0.9″:http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/005714.html
* “Burning Edge”:http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/archives/000466.html

If Heskey is Six, then Zidane is Seven

He ain’t no god, anyone can take a penalty. Oh, actually …

Anyway, it is all Heskey’s fault, and we shall say no more on the subject, except for see you in the final and I hope you’ve used all your luck up.

Simon Willison points to the WHAT WG, a group aiming to help HTML develop and progress.

bq.:http://www.sitepoint.com/blog-post-view.php?id=174066 It’s hard to under-state the importance of all this. If you’ve been frustrated by the slow rate of innovation in the modern web, you need to check these guys out. It’s an open process so there’s nothing to stop you from getting involved, and with support from three out of four of the major browser manufacturers (and acknowledgement from Tantek Çelik of Microsoft) your input could lead to real features in future browsers. Exciting stuff.

Current progress is limited because HTML stopped being worked on, and all effort is now being put into new technologies which the most popular browser (IE for those on another planet or too excited about “Euro2004″:www.euro2004.com/ to concentrate) does not support. We’re stuck with what we’ve got. The goal of WHAT WG is to extent HTML4 without breaking backwards compatibility.

Read more :-

* “Ian Hickson at the W3C webapps workshop”:http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1086387609&count=1 (and whilst there read the rest of his marvellous travelog)
* “The WHAT WG website”:http://whatwg.org/
* “The future of HTML and the Web”:http://webperso.easyconnect.fr/danielglazman/weblog/dotclear/?2004/06/08/362-future-of-html-and-the-web
* “The non-world non-wide non-web”:http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/005632.html
* “Dave Shea”:http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2004/06/09/whats_next/index.php

I seem to have fallen off the weblogging horse and I’m having trouble getting back on. However, with a bizarre “free period” at work (lets see if this lasts until the end of this entry) and no next actions (GTD, I’m waiting for other people on a number of projects), I’ll attempt to kick start the process.

Two linked links. Tom Coates on search engine optimisers and Anil Dash on “Nigritude Ultramarine”:http://www.dashes.com/anil/2004/06/04/nigritude_ultra. I couldn’t muster the energy to write about “Nigritude Ultramarine”:http://www.dashes.com/anil/2004/06/04/nigritude_ultra which was about gaming a game and in the end utterly pointless. However, Tom is the one talking a lot of sense.

bq.:http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2003/06/against_search_engine_optimisers.shtml Search optimisation isn’t really about optimising for a search engine at all. It’s about making good quality, cleanly designed, semantically-constructed sites that people want to read, that people can link to and which people can get the gist of in a few seconds.

And search engine optimisation companies are not really about making a site better, but about making money.